note: project gutenberg also has an html version of this file which includes the original illustrations. see -h.htm or -h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h/ -h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/ / / / / / -h.zip) the rise of the democracy by joseph clayton author of "leaders of the people" "bishops as legislators," etc. etc. with eight full-page plates cassell and company, ltd. london, new york, toronto and melbourne all rights reserved [illustration: king john granting magna charta from the fresco in the royal exchange, by ernest normand. _by permission of messrs. s. hildesheimer & co., ltd._] preface this short account of the rise of political democracy is necessarily but an outline of the matter, and while it is not easy to define the exact limits, there is no difficulty in noting omissions. for instance, there is scarcely any reference to the work of poets or pamphleteers. john ball's rhyming letters are quoted, but not the poems of langland, and the political songs of the middle ages are hardly mentioned. the host of political pamphleteers in the seventeenth century are excluded, with the exception of lilburne and winstanley, whose work deserves better treatment from posterity than it received from contemporaries. defoe's vigorous services for the whigs are unnoticed, and the democratic note in much of the poetry of burns, blake, byron and shelley is left unconsidered, and the influence of these poets undiscussed. the anti-corn law rhymes of ebenezer eliot, and the chartist songs of ernest jones were notable inspirations in their day, and in our own times walt whitman and mr. edward carpenter have been the chief singers of democracy. but a whole volume at least might be written on the part the pen has played in the struggle towards democracy. again, there is no mention of ireland in this short sketch. a nationalist movement is not necessarily a democratic movement, and the irish nationalist party includes men of very various political opinions, whose single point of agreement is the demand for home rule. in india and egypt the agitation is for representative institutions. ireland might, or might not, become a democracy under home rule--who can say? the aim of the present writer has been to trace the travelled road of the english people towards democracy, and to point out certain landmarks on that road, in the hope that readers may be turned to examine more closely for themselves the journey taken. for the long march teems with adventure and spirited enterprise; and, noting mistakes and failures in the past, we may surely and wisely, and yet with greater daring and finer courage, pursue the road, not unmindful of the charge committed to us in the centuries left behind. j.c. hampstead, _september, ._ contents introduction the british influence--"government of the people, by the people, for the people"--the foundations of democracy--british democracy experimental not doctrinaire--education to democracy chapter i the early struggles against the absolutism of the crown the great churchmen--archbishop anselm and norman autocracy--thomas à becket and henry ii.--stephen langton and john--the great charter chapter ii the beginning of parliamentary representation democracy and representative government--representative theory first found in ecclesiastical assemblies--the misrule of henry iii.--simon of montfort, leader of the national party--edward i.'s model parliament, --the nobility predominant in parliament--the medieval national assemblies--the electors of the middle ages--payment of parliamentary representatives--the political position of women in the middle ages--no theory of democracy in the middle ages chapter iii popular insurrection in england general results of popular risings--william fitzosbert, --the peasant revolt and its leaders, --jack cade, captain of kent, --the norfolk rising under ket, chapter iv the struggle renewed against the crown parliament under the tudors--victory of parliament over the stuarts--the democratic protest: lilburne--winstanley and "the diggers"--the restoration chapter v constitutional government--aristocracy triumphant government by aristocrats--civil and religious liberty--growth of cabinet rule--walpole's rule--the change in the house of lords--"wilkes and liberty" chapter vi the rise of the democratic idea the witness of the middle ages--the "social contract" theory--thomas hobbes--john locke--rousseau and french revolution--american independence--thomas paine--major cartwright and the "radical reformers"--thomas spence--practical politics and democratic ideals chapter vii parliamentary reform and the enfranchisement of the people the industrial revolution--the need for parliamentary reform--manufacturing centres unrepresented in parliament--the passage of the great reform bill--the working class still unrepresented--chartism--the hyde park railings, --household suffrage--working-class representation in parliament--removal of religious disabilities: catholics, jews and freethinkers--the enfranchisement of women chapter viii democracy at work local government--the workman in the house of commons--working-class leaders in parliament--the present position of the house of lords--the popularity of the crown--the democratic ideals: socialism and social reform--land reform and the single tax chapter ix the world-wide movement: its strength and weakness east and west--tyranny under democratic forms--the obvious dangers--party government--bureaucracy--working-class ascendancy--on behalf of democracy list of plates king john granting magna charta magna charta--a facsimile of the original in the british museum sir john eliot john hampden the gordon riots the right hon. john burns, m.p. the right hon. d. lloyd george, m.p. the passing of the parliament bill in the house of lords the rise of the democracy introduction the british influence our business here is to give some plain account of the movement towards democracy in england, only touching incidentally on the progress of that movement in other parts of the world. mainly through british influences the movement has become world wide; and the desire for national self-government, and the adoption of the political instruments of democracy--popular enfranchisement and the rule of elected representatives--are still the aspirations of civilised man in east and west. the knowledge that these forms of democratic government have by no means at all times and in all places proved successful does not check the movement. as the british parliament and the british constitution have in the past been accepted as a model in countries seeking free political institutions, so to-day our parliament and our constitutional government are still quoted with approval and admiration in those lands where these institutions are yet to be tried. the rise of democracy, then, is a matter in which britain is largely concerned; and this in spite of the fact that in england little respect and less attention has been paid to the expounders of democracy and their constructive theories of popular government. the notion that philosophers are the right persons to manage affairs of state and hold the reins of government has always been repugnant to the english people, and, with us, to call a man "a political theorist" is to contemn him. the english have not moved towards democracy with any conscious desire for that particular form of government, and no vision of a perfect state or an ideal commonwealth has sustained them on the march. our boast has been that we are a "practical" people, and so our politics are, as they ever have been, experimental. reforms have been accomplished not out of deference to some moral or political principle, but because the abuse to be remedied had become intolerable. dissatisfaction with the government and the conviction that only by enfranchisement and the free election of representatives can parliament remove the grounds of dissatisfaction, have carried us towards democracy. government of the people, by the people, for the people we have been brought to accept abraham lincoln's famous phrase, "government of the people, by the people, for the people," as a definition of democracy; but in that acceptance there is no harking back to the early democracies of greece or rome, so beloved by the french democrats of the eighteenth century, who, however, knew very little about those ancient states--or any vain notion of restoring primitive teutonic democracy. the sovereign assemblies of greece--the ecclesia of athens, and the apella of sparta--the comitia centuriata of rome, have no more resemblance to democracy in the twentieth century than the witenagemot has to the british parliament; and the democracy which has arisen in modern times is neither to be traced for its origin to greece or rome, nor found to be evolved from anglo-saxon times. the early democracies of athens and sparta were confined to small states, and were based on a slave population without civic rights. there was not even a conception that slaves might or should take part in politics, and the slaves vastly outnumbered the citizens. modern democracy does not tolerate slavery, it will not admit the permanent exclusion of any body of people from enfranchisement; though it finds it hard to ignore differences of race and colour, it is always enlarging the borders of citizenship. so that already in the australian commonwealth, in new zealand, in certain of the american states, in norway, and in finland, we have the complete enfranchisement of all men and women who are of age to vote. apart from this vital difference between a slave-holding democracy and a democracy of free citizens--a difference that rent the united states in civil war, and was only settled in america by democracy ending slavery--ancient democracy was government by popular assembly, and modern democracy is government through elected representatives. the former is only possible in small communities with very limited responsibilities--a parish meeting can decide questions of no more than strictly local interest; for our huge empires of to-day nothing better than representative government has been devised for carrying out the general will of the majority. as for the early english witenagemot, it was simply an assembly of the chiefs, and, though crowds sometimes attended, all but the great men were the merest spectators. doubtless the folk-moot of the tribe was democratic, for all free men attended it, and the english were a nation of freeholders, and the slaves were few--except in the west--and might become free men.[ ] the shire-moot, too, with its delegates from the hundred-moots, was equally democratic. but with feudalism and the welding of the nation, tribal democracies passed away, leaving, however, in many places a valuable tradition of local self-government. the foundations of democracy a steady and invincible belief that those who maintain the defence of the country and pay for the cost of government should have a voice in the great council of the nation, and the conviction that effective utterance can be found for that voice in duly chosen representatives, are the foundations on which democracy has built. democracy itself comes in ( ) when it is seen that all are being taxed for national purposes; and ( ) the opinion finds acceptance that responsibilities of citizenship should be borne by all who have reached the age of manhood and are of sound mind. to sketch the rise of democracy in england is to trace the steady resistance to kings who would govern without the advice of counsellors, and to note the growing determination that these counsellors must be elected representatives. only when the absolutism of the crown is ended and a parliament of elected members has become the real centre of government, is it possible, without a revolution, for democracy to be established. much of this book is given up, then, to the old stories of kingly rule checked and slowly superseded by aristocracy. and all the old attempts at revolution by popular insurrection are again retold, not only because of the witness they bear to the impossibility in england of achieving democracy by the violent overthrow of government, but because they also bear witness to the heroic resolution of the english people to take up arms and plunge into a sea of troubles rather than bear patiently ills that were unseemly for men to endure in silence. popular insurrection failed, but over and over again violence has been resorted to in the resistance to tyranny, and has been justified by its victory. if wat tyler, jack cade, and robert ket are known as beaten revolutionaries, stephen langton, simon of montfort, and john hampden are acclaimed as patriots for not disdaining the use of armed resistance. the conclusion is that a democratic revolution was not to be accomplished in england by a rising of the people, but that forcible resistance even to the point of civil war was necessary to guard liberties already won, or to save the land from gross misgovernment. but always the forcible resistance, when successful, has been made not by revolutionaries but by the strong champions of constitutional government. the fruit of the resistance to john was the great charter; of simon of montfort's war against henry iii., the beginning of a representative parliament; of the war against charles, the establishment of parliamentary government. lilburne and his friends hoped that the civil war and the abolition of monarchy would bring in democracy, though democracy was never in the mind of men like hampden, who made the war, and was utterly uncongenial to cromwell and the commonwealth men. but the sanctity of monarchy received its death-blow from cromwell, and perished with the deposing of james ii.; and there has been no resurrection. to the whig rule we owe the transference of political power from the crown to parliament. once it is manifest that parliament is the instrument of authority, that the prime minister and his colleagues rule only by the permission and with the approval of the house of commons, and that the house of commons itself is chosen by a certain number of electors to represent the nation, then it is plain that the real sovereignty is in the electors who choose the house of commons. as long as the electors are few and consist of the great landowners and their satellites, then the constitutional government is aristocracy, and democracy is still to come. and just as discontent with monarchy, and its obvious failure as a satisfactory form of government, brought in aristocracy, so at the beginning of the nineteenth century discontent with aristocracy was rife, and a new industrial middle-class looked for "parliamentary reform," to improve the condition of england. british democracy experimental, not doctrinaire resistance to royal absolutism, culminating in the acknowledged ascendancy of parliament and the triumphant aristocracy of , was never based on abstract principles of the rights of barons and landowners, but sprang from the positive, definite conviction that those who furnished arms and men for the king, or who paid certain moneys in taxation, were entitled to be heard in the councils of the king; and the charters given in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--from henry i. to henry iii.--confirmed this conviction. the resistance to the stuarts was still based on the conviction that direct taxation conferred political privileges, but now the claim to speak in the great council of the realm had become a request to be listened to by the king, and passed rapidly from that to a resolution that the king should have no money from parliament if he refused to listen. the practical inconvenience of a king altogether at variance with parliament was held to be sufficient justification for getting rid of james ii., and for hobbling all future kings with the bill of rights. the dethronement of aristocracy in favour of democracy has proceeded on very similar lines. the mass of english people were far too wretched and far too ignorant at the end of the eighteenth century to care anything about abstract "rights of man," and only political philosophers and a few artisans hoped for improvement in their condition by parliamentary reform. agricultural england accepted the rule of landowners as an arrangement by providence. it was the industrial revolution that shattered the feudal notions of society, and created a manufacturing population which knew nothing of lowly submission to pastors and masters. a middle-class emerged from the very ranks of the working people. the factory system brought fortunes to men who a few years earlier had been artisans, and to these new capitalists in the nineteenth century the aristocracy in power was as irksome as the stuarts had been to the whigs. if, as the whigs taught, those who paid the taxes were entitled to a voice in the government, then the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to parliament. it seemed monstrous that places like manchester, leeds, and birmingham had no one in the house of commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants. the manufacturer wanted parliamentary representation because he hoped through parliament to secure the abolition of the political disabilities of nonconformists, and to get financial changes made that would make the conditions of trade more profitable. and he felt that it would be better for the country if he and the class he represented could speak freely in parliament. the workman wanted the vote because he had been brought to believe that, possessing the vote, he could make parliament enact laws that would lighten the hardships of his life. the whole of the manufacturing class--capitalist and workman alike--could see by that the house of commons was the instrument of the electorate, and that to get power they must become electors. (yet probably not one per cent. of them could express clearly any theory of popular sovereignty.) the old whig families, kept out of office by the tories whom george iii. had placed in power, and who now controlled the house of commons, supported reform and the enfranchisement of the middle class because they saw no way of getting back into power except by a new electorate and a redistribution of parliamentary seats. at the beginning of the twentieth century the landowner, still whig, though now, as a general rule enrolled with the unionist party, has not been excluded from political power, but the representatives of the middle-class and of the working people are predominant in the house of commons. the claim of the house of lords to reject the bills of the commons has been, in our time, subjected to the criticism formerly extended to the royal prerogative, and an act--the parliament act--has now been passed which formally requires the lords to accept, without serious amendment, every bill sent up from the commons in three successive sessions. the transition from monarchy to aristocracy in england was brought about at the price of civil war. in many countries democracy has been born in revolution, and the birth pains have been hard and bitter. but in england in the nineteenth century democracy was allowed to come into being by permission of the aristocracy, and has not yet reached its full stature. it is true that violence, bloodshed, loss of life, and destruction of property marked the passage of the great reform bill; that more than once riots and defiance of law and order have been the expression of industrial discontent; but on the whole the average englishman is content to wait for the redress of wrongs by parliamentary action. women have quite recently defied the law, refused to pay taxes, and made use of "militant methods" in their agitation for enfranchisement. but the women's plea has been that, as they are voteless, these methods have been necessary to call attention to their demands. democratic advance has often been hindered and delayed by government, and by a national disinclination from rapid political change; but as the character of government has changed with the changed character of the electorate and the house of commons, so resistance to democracy has always been abandoned when the advance was widely supported, and further delay seemed dangerous to the public order. the house of lords is thus seen to yield to the popular representatives in the house of commons, and the government, dependent on the house of commons, to listen to the demand of women for enfranchisement. while the house of commons completes its assertion of political supremacy, and insists on the absolute responsibility of the chosen representatives of the electorate, the agitation for the enfranchisement of women is the reminder that democracy has yet to widen its borders. progress to democracy in the last one hundred years is visible not only in the enlarged number of enfranchised citizens, but in the general admission that every extension of the franchise has been to the public good; not only in the fact that men of all classes and trades now have their representatives in parliament, but in the very wide acknowledgment that women without votes cannot get that attention by members of the house of commons that is given to male electors. that the majority of electors have expressed a decided opinion that the power of the house of lords should be curtailed, as the power of the monarchy has been curtailed, and that the decisions of the house of commons are only to be corrected by the house of commons, is evidence that under our obviously imperfect parliamentary system the will of the electors does get registered on the statute book. education to democracy apart from the direct political education to democracy, it is well to note the other agencies that have been at work, preparing men and women for the responsible task of national self-government. in the middle ages the religious guilds and the trade guilds, managed by their own members, gave men and women a training in democratic government. the parish, too, was a commune, and its affairs and finances were administered by duly elected officers.[ ] but the guilds, with their numerous almshouses and hospitals, were all suppressed early in edward vi.'s reign, and their funds confiscated. as for the parish, it was shorn of all its property, save the parish church, in the same reign, and its old self-governing life dwindled away to the election of churchwardens. it was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century that the working classes, by the formation of trade unions, once more took up the task of education in self-government. from that time onward, through trade unions, co-operative societies, and friendly societies, with their annual conferences and congresses, a steady training in democracy has been achieved; and our labour party of to-day, with its members of parliament, its members of county and district councils, and its justices of the peace, would hardly have been possible but for this training. other agencies may be mentioned. the temperance movement, the organisation of working-men's clubs, and the local preaching of the nonconformist churches--particularly the primitive methodist denomination--have all helped to educate workmen in the conduct of affairs, and to create that sense of personal responsibility which is the only guarantee of an honest democracy. * * * * * chapter i the early struggles against the absolutism of the crown the great churchmen we are far from any thoughts of democracy in the early struggles against the absolutism of the crown. the old love of personal liberty that is said to have characterised the anglo-saxon had no political outlet under norman feudalism. what we note is that three archbishops of canterbury were strong enough and brave enough to stand up against the unchecked rule of kings, and the names of these great archbishops--anselm, thomas à becket, and stephen langton--are to be honoured for all time for the services they rendered in the making of english liberties. not one of the three was in any sense a democrat. it is not till the latter part of the fourteenth century that we find john ball, a wandering, revolutionary priest, uttering for the first time in england a democratic doctrine. anselm, becket, and langton did their work, as simon of montfort, and as eliot and hampden worked later, not for the sake of a democracy, but for the restriction of an intolerable autocracy. all along in english history liberties have been gained and enlarged by this process of restriction, and it was only when the powers of the crown had been made subject to parliament that it was possible, at the close of the nineteenth century, for parliament itself to become converted from an assembly of aristocrats to a governing body that really represented the nation. but in considering the rise of democracy we can no more omit the early struggles against the absolutism of the crown than we can pass over simon of montfort's parliament, or the unsuccessful popular revolts, or the war with charles i., or the whig revolution of . they are all incidents of pre-democratic days, but they are all events of significance. democracy is no new order of society, conceived in the fertile mind of man; it has been slowly evolved and brought to birth after centuries of struggle, to be tried as a form of government only when other forms are outgrown, and cease to be acceptable. all the great men--heroic and faulty--who withstood the tyranny of their day, not only wrested charters from kings, they left a tradition of resistance; and this tradition has been of incalculable service to a nation seeking self-government. it is easy to dismiss the work of anselm and becket as mere disputes between monarch and churchman, to treat lightly the battle for the great charter as a strife between king and barons. just as easy is it to regard the peasant revolt of the fourteenth century and jack cade's rebellion in the fifteenth century as the tumults of a riotous mob. the great point is to see clearly in all these contests, successful and unsuccessful, the movement for liberty, for greater security and expansion of life in england, and to note that only by a stern endurance and a willingness not to bear an irksome oppression have our liberties been won. in the winning of these liberties we have proved our fitness for democracy, for a government that will allow the fullest measure of self-development. now, what was it that anselm contended for, first with william ii. and then with henry i.? archbishop anselm and norman autocracy anselm was sixty when, in , william ii. named him for the archbishopric of canterbury. in vain anselm, who was abbot of the famous monastery of bec, in normandy, protested that he was too old, and that his business was not with high place and power in this world. the king seemed to be dying, and the bishops gathered round the sick bed would not hear of any refusal on anselm's part. they pushed the pastoral staff into his hands, and carried him off to a neighbouring church, while the people shouted "long live the bishop!" what everybody felt was that with anselm as archbishop things might be better in england, for anselm's reputation stood very high. he had been the friend of lanfranc, the late archbishop; he had been an honoured guest at the court of william the conqueror; and he was known for his deep learning, his sanctity of life, and simple, disinterested devotion to duty. it was hoped that with a man of such holiness at canterbury some restraint might be placed on the lawless tyranny of the red king. lanfranc had been the trusted counsellor and right hand of the red king's father: why should not anselm bring back the son to the paths of decency--at least? the archbishop of canterbury was the chief man in the realm next to the king, and for three years since lanfranc's death the see had been kept vacant that william rufus might enjoy its revenues for his own pleasure. it was not unreasonable that men should look to the appointment of anselm as the beginning of an amendment in church and state. the trouble was that william stuck to his evil courses. the rule of william the conqueror had been stern and harsh, and his hand had been heavy on the english people. but there had been law and justice in the rule; religion and morality had been respected, and peace and security obtained. the rule of the red king was not only grievous, it was arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and without semblance of law. the austerity of the conqueror had been conspicuous; equally conspicuous was the debauchery of his son. the conqueror had been faithful and conscientious in seeing that vacancies in the church were filled up quickly and wisely. the red king preferred to leave bishoprics and churches empty so that he might annex the profits. lanfranc, a wise and just man, had been the minister of the conqueror; the red king made ranulf (nicknamed the torch or firebrand)--a clever, unprincipled clerk--bishop of durham and justiciar. it was ranulf who did the king's business in keeping churches and bishoprics vacant, in violation of law and custom; it was ranulf who plundered the king's vassals and the people at large by every kind of extortion, thwarted the protests of anselm, and encouraged william in his savage profligacies. meek and gentle as anselm was, he had all the courage that comes of a lofty sense of responsibility to god, and he stood before kings as the hebrew prophets of old had stood, calm and fearless. at christmas, , three months before his nomination to the see of canterbury, anselm was in england over the affairs of his monastery, and william invited him to court and treated him with great display of honour. then some private talk took place between the two, and anselm said plainly that "things were spoken daily of the king, openly or secretly, by nearly all the men of his realm, which were not seemly for the king's dignity." from that time anselm stayed in england, for william refused to give him leave to return to normandy. then in march, came the king's sickness, which most men expected to be mortal. anselm was summoned, and on his arrival bade the king "make a clean confession of all that he knows that he has done against god, and promise that, should he recover, he will without pretence amend in all things. the king at once agreed to this, and with sorrow of heart engaged to do all that anselm required and to keep justice and mercy all his life long. to this he pledged his faith, and made his bishops witness between himself and god, sending persons in his stead to promise his word to god on the altar. an edict was written and sealed with the king's seal that all prisoners should be set free in all his dominions, all debts forgiven, all offences heretofore committed pardoned and forgotten for ever. further, good and holy laws were promised to the whole people, and the sacred upholding of right and such solemn inquest into wrongdoing as may deter others."[ ] william did not die, and his repentance was short-lived; but the one act of grace he did before leaving his sick bed was to fill up the empty throne at canterbury by the appointment of anselm--anselm's protests of unfitness notwithstanding. then, on the king's recovery, as though to make up for the penitence displayed, all the royal promises of amendment were broken without shame, and "all the evil which the king had wrought before he was sick seemed good by the side of the wrong which he did when he was returned to health." the prisoners who had been pardoned were sent back to prison, the debts which had been cancelled were re-claimed, and all legal actions which had been dropped were resumed. anselm was now enthroned at canterbury, and his appointment could not be revoked; but the king was quick to show his displeasure at the new archbishop. the first point raised by william was that those lands belonging to the see of canterbury, which had been made over to military vassals of the crown while the archbishopric was vacant, should remain with their holders. anselm said at once that this was impossible. he was responsible for the administration of all the estates of canterbury, and to allow these lands to be alienated to the crown was to rob the poor and needy who, it was held, had a just claim on the property of the church. besides, anselm saw that the lands would never be restored once an archbishop confirmed their appropriation by the king's military tenants. there was no one in all england save anselm who dared withstand the crown, and had he yielded on this matter resistance to the tyranny of the red king would only have been harder on the next occasion. then came the question of a present of money to the king, the customary offering. anselm brought five hundred marks (£ ), a very considerable sum in those days, and william, persuaded by some of his courtiers that twice the amount ought to have been given, curtly declined the present. anselm, who disliked the whole business of these gifts to the crown, for he knew that many a churchman bought his office by promising a "free" gift after institution, solemnly warned william that money given freely as his was given was better than a forced tribute, and to this william answered that he wanted neither the archbishop's money nor his preaching or company. thereupon anselm retired and gave the money to the poor, determined that he, for his part, would make no attempt to purchase william's goodwill. henceforth william was equally determined that anselm should have no peace in england. it was hateful to the king that there should be anyone in the realm who acknowledged a higher authority than the crown, and anselm made it too plain that the archbishop rested his authority not on the favour of the crown, but on the discipline of the christian religion. william was king of england indisputably, but there was a higher power than the king, and that was the pope. william himself never dreamed of denying the divine authority of the pope in spiritual matters; no one in all christendom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries questioned that at rome was a court of appeal higher than the courts of kings. strong rulers like william the conqueror might decline to submit to rome on a personal question of marriage, but rome was the recognised centre of religion, the headquarters of the christian church, and the supreme court of appeal. apart from rome there was no power that could curb the fierce unbridled tyranny of the kings of the earth, and the power of rome was a spiritual weapon, for the pope had no army to enforce his decisions. so anselm, conscious of this spiritual authority, refused to bow to the lawless rule of the red king; and his very attitude, while it encouraged men to lift up their hearts who erstwhile had felt that it was hopeless and useless to strive against william,[ ] enraged the red king to fury. the things he wanted to forget were that the chief representative of the christian religion was a greater person than the king of england, and that the archbishop of canterbury could be a christian minister rather than a king's man.[ ] and anselm was the constant witness to the christian religion, and, by his very presence, a rebuke to the crimes and cruelties of the court of the red king. william actually wrote to the pope, naturally without any success, praying him to depose anselm, and promising a large annual tribute to rome if the request was granted. for years the uneven contest was waged. the bishops generally avoided anselm, and were only anxious to be accepted by the king as good servants of the crown, with the result that william despised them for their servility. but the barons began to declare their respect for the brave old man at canterbury. at last, when anselm was summoned to appear before the king's court, to "do the king right," on a trumped-up charge of having failed to send an adequate supply of troops for the king's service, he felt the position was hopeless. anselm's longing had been to labour with the king, as lanfranc had laboured, to promote religion in the country, and he had been frustrated at every turn. the summons to the king's court was the last straw, for the defendant in this court was entirely at the mercy of the crown. "when, in anglo-norman times you speak of the king's court, it is only a phrase for the king's despotism."[ ] anselm took no notice of the king's summons, and decided to appeal to rome. for a time william refused permission for any departure from england, but he yielded in , and anselm set out for rome. he stayed at rome and at lyons till william was dead, for the pope would not let him resign canterbury, and could do nothing to bring the king to a better mind. then, on the urgent request of henry i., he returned to england, and for a time all went well. henry was in earnest for the restoration of law and religion in england, and his declaration, at the very beginning of his reign--the oft-quoted "charter" of henry i.--to stop the old scandals of selling and farming out church lands, and to put down all unrighteousness that had been in his brother's time, was hailed with rejoicing. anselm stood loyally by henry over the question of his marriage with edith (who claimed release from vows taken under compulsion in a convent at romsey), and his fidelity at the critical time when robert of normandy and the discontented nobles threatened the safety of the crown was invaluable. but henry was an absolutist, anxious for all the threads of power to be in his own hands; and just when a great church council at the lateran had decided that bishops must not be invested by kings with the ring and staff of their office, because by such investiture they were the king's vassals, henry decided to invite anselm to receive the archbishopric afresh from the king's hands by a new act of investiture. to anselm the abject submission of the bishops to the red king had been a painful spectacle; and now henry was making a demand that would emphasise the royal supremacy, and the demand was intolerable and impossible. again anselm stood practically alone in his resistance to the royal will, and again the question in dispute was whether there was any power in england higher than the crown. the papal supremacy was no more under discussion than it had been under william. all that henry wanted was that the archbishops and bishops should acknowledge that their authority came from the crown; and at henry's request anselm, then years old, again journeyed to rome to lay the matter before the pope. pope paschal was fully alive to the mischief of making the bishops and clergy mere officers of kings, and it was soon seen there could be no dispensations from rome even for henry. all that the pope would allow was that bishops might do homage to the crown for their temporal rights, and with this henry had to be content. it was three years later before anselm returned, and his course was now nearly run. he died at peace on april st, , having wrought to no small purpose for religious liberty and the independence of the clergy. (the demand for political and social independence always follows the struggle for independence in religion.) anselm spent the greater part of his life after his enthronement at canterbury in battling for independence of the crown; a century later archbishop stephen was to carry the battle still further, and win wider liberties for england from the crown. of anselm's general love of liberty and hatred of all tyranny many stories are told. one fact may be recalled. the church synod, which met at westminster in , at anselm's request, attacked the slave trade as a "wicked trade used hitherto in england, by which men are sold like brute animals," and framed a church rule against its continuance. in spite of this decree, serfdom lingered in england for centuries, but hiring superseded open buying and selling of men. (the african slave trade was the work of the elizabethan seamen, and was excused, as slavery in the united states was excused, by the protestant churches on the ground of the racial inferiority of the negro.) thomas À becket and henry ii. resistance to autocracy is often more needed against a strong and just king than it is against an unprincipled profligate. henry ii.'s love of order and peace, the strength and energy he spent in curtailing the power of the barons, and in making firm the foundations of our national system of petty sessions and assize courts have made for him an enduring fame. henry ii. was a great lawyer; he was "the flower of the princes of his world," in contemporary eyes; but it was as an autocrat he would rule. against this autocracy thomas à becket, archbishop of canterbury, protested, and the protest cost him five years of exile, and finally his life. the manner of his death earned for the archbishop the title of martyr, and popular acclamation required him to be canonised as a saint,[ ] and his name to be long cherished with deep devotion by the english people. both henry and thomas stand out honourably, but the former would have brought all england under one great centralised authority, with the crown not only predominant but absolute in its supremacy, and the archbishop contended for the great mass of poor and needy people to mitigate the harshness of the law, and to maintain the liberties of the church against the encroachments of sovereignty. "nothing is more certain," as the old writer put it, "than that both strove earnestly to do the will of god, one for the sake of his realm, the other on behalf of his church. but whether of the two was zealous in wisdom is not plain to man, who is so easily mistaken, but to the lord, who will judge between them at the last day." becket was the first english-born archbishop of canterbury since the norman conquest. henry, on his accession, clove to him in friendship, made him lord chancellor in , and on archbishop theobald's death, the monks of canterbury at once accepted henry's advice and elected him to the vacant see. becket himself knew the king too well to desire the appointment, and warned henry not to press the matter, and prophesied that their friendship would be turned to bitter enmity. but henry's mind was made up. as chancellor, becket had shown no ecclesiastical bias. he had taxed clergy and laity with due impartiality, and his legal decisions had been given without fear or favour. henry counted on becket to act with the same indifference as archbishop, to be the king's vicegerent during the royal absence in france. and here henry, wise as he was in many things, mistook his man. as chancellor of england becket conceived his business to be the administration of the laws: as archbishop he was first and foremost the champion of the christian religion, the protector of the poor, and the defender of the liberties of the church. all unwilling, like his great predecessor, st. anselm, to become archbishop, from the hour of his consecration to the see of canterbury, in , becket was as firm as anselm had been in resisting the absolutism of the king. to the king's extreme annoyance the chancellorship was at once given up--the only instance known of the voluntary resignation of the chancellorship by layman or ecclesiastic,[ ] and all the amusements of the court and the business of the world were laid aside by the new archbishop. the care of his diocese, the relief of the poor and the sick, and attendance at the sacred offices of the church were henceforth the work of the man who had been henry's best-loved companion, and within a year of his enthronement friendship with the king was broken. the first point at issue was whether there should be one common jurisdiction in all the land, or whether the church courts should still exist. these church courts had been set up by william the conqueror and lanfranc, in order that the clergy should not be mixed up in ordinary law matters, and should be excluded strictly from the common courts. no penalty involving bloodshed could be inflicted in the church courts, and all the savage barbarities of mutilation, common enough as punishments in the king's court, were forbidden. henry ii., apart from his strong desire for centralisation in government, wanted these church courts abolished, because every clerk who offended against the law escaped ordinary punishment, no matter what the charge might be. archbishop thomas saw that in the church courts there was some protection, not only for the clergy, but for all minor ecclesiastics, and for widows and orphans, against the horrible legal cruelties of the age. "it must be held in mind that the archbishop had on his side the church or _canon law_, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those of the church on that of foolish pity towards evil doers."[ ] before this dispute had reached its climax thomas had boldly taken measures against some of the king's courtiers who were defrauding the see of canterbury; and he had successfully withstood henry's plan for turning the old dane-geld shire tax, which was paid to the sheriff for the defence of the country and the up-keep of roads, into a tax to be collected by the crown as part of the royal revenue. thomas told the king plainly that this tax was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only "so long as they shall serve as fitly and maintain and defend our defendants," and said point blank that he would not suffer a penny to be taken off his lands for the king's purposes. henry was obliged to yield, and this is the first case known of resistance to the royal will in the matter of taxation. the case of clerical offenders, and the jurisdiction of the courts came before a great council at westminster in . henry declared that criminous clerks should be deprived of their office in the church courts, and then handed over to the king's courts for punishment. thomas replied that the proposal was contrary to the religious liberties of the land, but he met with little support from the rest of the bishops. "better the liberties of the church perish than that we perish ourselves," they cried in fear of the king. henry followed up his proposal by calling on the bishops to abide by the old customs of the realm, as settled by his grandfather, henry i., and to this they all agreed, adding "saving the rights of our order." a list of the old customs was drawn up, and sixteen _constitutions_, or articles, were presented to the bishops at the great council of clarendon, in january, . to many of these constitutions thomas objected; notably ( ) that clerks were to be tried in the king's courts for offences of common law. ( ) that neither archbishops, bishops, nor beneficed clerks were to leave the kingdom without royal permission. (this would not only stop appeals to rome, it would make pilgrimages or attendance at general councils impossible without the king's consent.) ( ) that no member of the king's household was to be excommunicated without the king's permission. ( ) that no appeals should be taken beyond the archbishop's court, except to be brought before the king. (this definite prohibition of appeals to rome left the king absolute master in england.) the last article declared that neither serfs nor the sons of villeins were to be ordained without the consent of the lord on whose land they were born. against his own judgment thomas yielded to the entreaties of the bishops, and agreed to accept the constitutions of clarendon, but no sooner had he done so than he bitterly repented, and wrote off to the pope acknowledging his mistake. pope alexander iii. was mainly anxious to prevent open hostilities between henry and the archbishop, and wrote calmly that he was absolved, without suggesting any blame to the king. henry now saw that the archbishop, and only the archbishop, stood in the way of the royal will, and when another council met at northampton, in october, , the king was ready to drive thomas out of office. before this council thomas was charged with having refused justice to john, the treasury-marshall, and with contempt of the king's court, and was heavily fined. it was difficult to get sentence pronounced, for the barons declined to sit as judges on an archbishop; but at length, henry, bishop of winchester, on the king's order, declared the sentence. henry followed up the attack next day by calling upon thomas to account for , marks spent by him while chancellor. in vain he proved that the justiciar had declared him free of all claims when he laid down the chancellorship, that the charge was totally unexpected; the king refused to stay the proceedings unless thomas would sign the constitutions of clarendon. consultation with the bishops brought no help. "the king has declared, so it is said, that he and you cannot both remain in england as king and archbishop. it would be much safer to resign everything and submit to his mercy"; thus spake hilary, of chichester, and his fellow-bishops all urged resignation or submission. two days later the archbishop came into the council in full robes with the cross in his hand. earl robert, of leicester, rose to pass sentence upon him and at once the archbishop refused to hear him. "neither law nor reason permit children to pass sentence on their father," he declared. "i will not hear this sentence of the king, or any judgment of yours. for, under god, i will be judged by the pope alone, to whom before you all here i appeal, placing the church of canterbury under god's protection and the protection of the pope." there were shouts of anger at these words, and some tore rushes from the floor and flung at him, but no one dared to stop the archbishop's passage as he passed from the hall. it was useless to look for help or justice in england, and that very night thomas left england for flanders to appeal to rome. but pope alexander could do no more for thomas than his predecessor had done for anselm; only he would not allow any resignation from canterbury. henry himself appealed to the pope in , fearing excommunication by the archbishop; "thus by a strange fate it happened that the king, while striving for those 'ancient customs' by which he endeavoured to prevent any right of appeal (to the pope), was doomed to confirm the right of appeal for his own safety." the pope did what he could to arrange a reconciliation, but it was not till that the king, seriously alarmed that thomas would place england under an interdict, agreed to a reconciliation. on december st the exile was over, and thomas landed at sandwich, and went at once to canterbury. there were many who doubted whether there could be lasting peace between the king and the archbishop, and while the bishops generally hated the primate's return, the nobles spoke openly of him as a traitor to the king. the end was near. thomas, asked to withdraw the sentence of excommunication he had passed against the archbishop of york and the bishop of london and salisbury for violating the privileges of canterbury, answered that the matter must go before the pope. the bishops, instead of going to rome, hastened to henry, who was keeping his court at bur, in france. henry, at the complaint of the bishops, broke out into one of those terrible fits of anger which overcame him from time to time, and four knights left the court saying, "all this trouble will be at an end when thomas is dead, and not before." on december th these knights were at canterbury, and at nightfall, just when vespers had begun, they slew archbishop thomas by the great pillar in the cathedral. so died this great archbishop for the liberties of the church, and, as it seemed to him, for the welfare of the people. henry was horrified at the news of the archbishop's death, and hastened to beg absolution from rome for the rash words that had provoked the murder. in the presence of the papal legate he promised to give up the constitutions of clarendon, nor in the remaining eighteen years of his reign did henry make any fresh attempt to bring the church under the subjection of the crown. to the great bulk of english people thomas was a saint and martyr, and numerous churches were dedicated in his name. more than three hundred years later henry viii. decided that st. thomas was an enemy of princes, that his shrine at canterbury must be destroyed, and his festival unhallowed. but the fame of thomas à becket has survived the censure of henry viii., and his name shines clearly across the centuries. democracy has been made possible by the willingness of brave men in earlier centuries to resist, to the death, an absolutism that would have left england bound and chained to the king's throne. stephen langton and john stephen langton was consecrated archbishop of canterbury in june, , on the nomination of pope innocent iii.; the monks of canterbury, who had proposed their own superior, consenting to the appointment, for langton had a high reputation for learning and was known to be of exalted character. but king john, who had wanted a man of his own heart for the archbishopric--john of gray, bishop of norwich, commonly spoken of as "a servant of mammon, and an evil shepherd that devoured his own sheep"--was enraged, and refusing to acknowledge langton, defied the pope, drove the monks out of the country, and declared that anyone who acknowledged stephen langton as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. so it came about that the great english statesman who broke down the foulest and worst tyranny the land had known, and won for england the great charter of its liberties, was a nominee of the pope, and was to find himself under the displeasure of the papal legate when the charter had been signed! for six years john kept stephen out of canterbury, while england lay under an interdict, with its king excommunicate and outside the pale of the church. most of the bishops fled abroad, "fearing the king, but afraid to obey him for dread of the pope," and john laid hands on church property and filled the royal treasury with the spoils of churchmen and jews. but in john's position had become precarious, for the northern barons were plotting his overthrow, and the pope had absolved all his subjects from allegiance, and given sentence that "john should be thrust from his throne and another worthier than he should reign in his stead," naming philip of france as his successor. john was aware that he could not count on the support of the barons in a war with france, and a prophecy of peter, the wakefield hermit, that the crown would be lost before ascension day, made him afraid of dying excommunicate. accordingly john decided to get the pope on his side. he agreed to receive pandulf, the papal legate; to acknowledge stephen; make good the damage done to the church, and, in addition, voluntarily ("of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons") surrendered "to god and to the holy mother church of rome, and to pope innocent and his catholic successors," the whole realm of england and ireland, "with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatory of god and the roman church." he swore fealty to the pope for both realms, and promised a yearly tribute of , marks. this abject submission to the pope was a matter of policy. john cared nothing for any appearance of personal or national humiliation, and as he had broken faith with all in england, so, if it should suit his purpose, would he as readily break faith with rome. but the immediate advantage of having the pope for his protector seemed considerable. "for when once he had put himself under apostolical protection and made his realms a part of the patrimony of st. peter, there was not in the roman world a sovereign who durst attack him or would invade his lands, in such awe was pope innocent held above all his predecessors for many years past."[ ] stephen landed in june, , and at winchester john was formally absolved and the coronation oaths were renewed. it was very soon seen what manner of man the archbishop was. in august a great gathering of the barons took place in st. paul's, and there langton recited the coronation charter of henry i., and told all those assembled that these rights and liberties were to be recovered; and "the barons swore they would fight for these liberties, even unto death if it were needful, and the archbishop promised that he would help with all his might." the weakness of the barons hitherto had been their want of cohesion, their endless personal feuds, and the lack of any feeling of national responsibility. langton laboured to create a national party and to win recognition of law and justice for all in england; and the great charter was the issue of his work. the state of things was intolerable. the whole administration of justice was corrupt. the decisions of the king's courts were as arbitrary as the methods employed to enforce sentence. free men were arrested, evicted, exiled, and outlawed without even legal warrant or the semblance of a fair trial. all the machinery of government set up by the norman kings, and developed under henry ii., had, in john's hands, become a mere instrument of despotic extortion, to be used against anybody and everybody, from earl to villein, who could be fleeced by the king's servants. john saw the tide rising against him, and endeavoured to divide barons from churchmen by proclaiming that the latter should have free and undisturbed right of election when bishoprics and other ecclesiastical offices were vacant. but the attempt failed. langton was too resolute a statesman, and his conception of the primacy of canterbury was too high for any turning back from the work he had set himself to accomplish. the rights of election in the church were important, but the restoration of justice and order and the ending of tyranny were, in his eyes, hardly less important. john, who had been at war in france, returned defeated from his last attempt to recover for the crown the lost angevin provinces, to face a discontent that was both wide and general. the people, and in especial the barons and knights whom for fourteen years john had robbed, insulted, and spurned, and whose liberties he had trampled upon, were ready at last under wise leadership to end the oppression. in november, , the archbishop saw that the time was come for action, and again the barons met in council. before the high altar in the abbey church of st. edmundsbury they swore that if the king sought to evade their demand for the laws and liberties of henry i.'s charter, they would make war upon him until he pledged himself to confirm their rights in a charter under royal seal. "they also agreed that after christmas they would go all together to the king and ask him for a confirmation of these liberties, and that meanwhile they would so provide themselves with horses and arms that if the king should seek to break his oath, they might, by seizing his castles, compel him to make satisfaction. and when these things were done every man returned to his own home."[ ] john now asked for time to consider these requests, and for the next six months worked hard to break up the barons' confederacy, to gain friends and supporters, and to get mercenaries from poitou. it was all to no purpose. as a last resource he took the cross, expecting to be saved as a crusader from attack, and at the same time he wrote to the pope to help his faithful vassal. the pope's letters rebuking the barons for conspiracy against the king were unheeded, and the mercenaries were inadequate when john was confronted by the whole baronage in arms. the great charter in may a list of articles to be signed was sent to john; and on his refusal the barons formally renounced their homage and fealty and flew to arms. john was forced to surrender before this host. on june th he met the barons at runnymede, between staines and windsor, and there, in the presence of archbishop stephen and "a multitude of most illustrious knights," sealed the great charter of the liberties of england. this great charter was in the main a renewal of the old rights and liberties promised by henry i. it set up no new rights, conferred no new privileges, and sanctioned no changes in the constitution. its real and lasting importance is due to its being a written document--for the first time in england it was down in black and white, for all to read, what the several rights and duties of king and people were, and in what the chief points of the constitution consisted. [illustration: magna charta a facsimile of the original in the british museum.] the great charter is a great table of laws. it marks the beginning of written legislation, and anticipates acts of parliament. unwritten laws and traditions were not abolished: they remain with us to this day; but the written law had become a necessity when "the bonds of unwritten custom" failed to restrain kings and barons. the great charter also took into account the rights of free men, and of the tenants of the king's vassals. if the barons and knights had their grievances to be redressed, the commons and the freeholding peasants needed protection against the lawless exactions of their overlords.[ ] sixty-three clauses make up magna charta, and we may summarise them as follows:-- ( ) the full rights and liberties of the church are acknowledged; bishops shall be freely elected, so that the church of england shall be free.[ ] ( - ) the king's tenants are to have their feudal rights secured against abuse. widows--in the wardship of the crown--are to be protected against robbery and against compulsion to a second marriage. ( - ) the harsh rules for securing the payment of debts to the crown and to the jews (in whose debts the crown had an interest) are to be relaxed. ( - ) no scutage or aid (save for the three regular feudal aids--the ransom of the king, the knighting of his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter) is to be imposed except by the common council of the nation; and to this council archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons are to be called by special writ, while all who held their land directly from the king, and were of lesser rank, were to be summoned by a general writ addressed to the sheriff of the county. forty days' notice of the meeting was to be given, and also the cause of the assembly. the action of those who obeyed the summons was to be taken to represent the action of all.[ ] (this last clause is never repeated in later confirmations of the great charter.) ( - ) the powers of lords over their tenants are limited and defined. ( - ) a court of common pleas is to be held in some fixed place so that suitors are not obliged to follow the king's curia. cases touching the ownership of land are to be tried in the counties by visiting justices, and by four knights chosen by the county. ( - ) no freeman is to be fined beyond his offence, and the penalty is to be fixed by a local jury. earls and barons to be fined by their peers; and clerks only according to the amount of their lay property. ( - ) the powers of sheriffs, constables, coroners, and bailiffs of the king are strictly defined. no sheriff is to be a justice in his own county. royal officers are to pay for all the goods taken by requisition; money is not to be taken in lieu of service from those who are willing to perform the service. the horses and carts of freemen are not to be seized for royal work without consent. the weirs in the thames, medway, and other rivers in england are to be removed. ( - ) uniformity of weights and measures is directed. inquests are to be granted freely. the sole wardship of minors who have other lords will not be claimed by the king, except in special cases. no bailiff may force a man to ordeal without witnesses. ( - ) no free man is to be taken, imprisoned, ousted of his land, outlawed, banished, or hurt in any way save by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land. the king is not to sell, delay, or deny right or justice to anyone. ( - ) merchants may go out or come in without paying exorbitant customs. all "lawful" men are to have a free right to pass in and out of england in time of peace. ( - ) an inquiry into the forest laws and a reform of the forest abuses are promised. all forests made in present reign to be disforested, and all fences in rivers thrown down. ( - ) the foreign mercenaries of the king, all the detested gang that came with horses and arms to the hurt of the realm, are to be sent out of the country. the welsh princes and the king of scots (who had sided with the barons) are to have justice done. a general amnesty for all political offences arising from the struggle is made. the last three articles appointed twenty-five barons, chosen out of the whole baronage, to watch over the keeping of the charter. they were empowered to demand that any breach of the articles should at once be put right, and, in default to make war on the king till the matter was settled to their satisfaction. finally there was the oath to be taken on the part of the king, and on the part of the barons that the articles of the charter should be observed in good faith according to their plain meaning. the great charter was signed, and then in a wild burst of rage john shouted to his foreign supporters, "they have given me five-and-twenty over-kings!" within a week of runnymede the great charter was published throughout england, but neither king nor barons looked for peace. john was ready to break all oaths, and while he set about increasing his army of mercenaries, he also appealed to the pope, as his overlord, protesting that the charter had been wrested from him by force. langton and the bishops left for rome to attend a general council. pope innocent declared the charter annulled on the ground that both king and barons had made the pope overlord of england, and that consequently nothing in the government could be changed without his consent. but with langton, the bishops, and the papal legate all away at rome, there was no one to publish the papal repudiation of the charter, and the king and barons were already at civil war. pope innocent iii. was dead in the spring of , and john's wretched reign was over when the king lay dying at newark in october. stephen langton was back again at canterbury in , and for eleven more years worked with william the marshall and hubert of burgh to maintain public peace and order during henry iii.'s boyhood. at oxford, in , the charter was confirmed afresh, and two years later it was solemnly proclaimed again when the king wanted a new subsidy. as long as the great statesmen were in office henry iii. was saved from the weakness that cursed his rule in england for nearly forty years. but william the marshall died in , archbishop stephen in , and hubert was dismissed from the justiciarship in . a horde of greedy aliens from poitou fed at the court of henry and devoured the substance of england, until men arose, as langton had arisen, to demand the enforcement of charters and a just administration of the laws. again a national party arises under the leadership of simon of montfort, and in their victory over the king we get the beginnings of parliamentary government and popular representation. every step forward is followed by reaction, but the ground lost is recovered, and the next step taken marks always a steady advance. over and over again it has seemed that all the liberties won in the past were lost, but looking back we can see that there has been no lasting defeat of liberty. only for a time have the forces of oppression triumphed; it is soon found impossible in england to rest under tyranny, or to govern without the consent of the governed. and every fresh campaign for the restriction of kingly power brings us nearer the day of democratic government. * * * * * chapter ii the beginning of parliamentary representation democracy and representative government to-day democracy takes the form of representative government in civilised countries; and for representative government contend the nations and peoples seeking democracy. the weak spots in all popular electoral systems are obvious, and the election of representatives is always a subject for jokes and satire. it could hardly be otherwise. for the best machinery in the world needs some sort of sympathetic intelligence in the person who manipulates it, and the machinery of popular elections can only be worked successfully with a large measure of sincerity and good will. in the hands of the ambitious, the self-seeking, and the unscrupulous, democratic politics are a machine for frustrating popular representation, and as this state of things is always prevalent somewhere, the humorist and the satirist naturally treat politics without respect. but in spite of all its faults and failings--glaring as these are--mankind can at present devise nothing better than representative government, and the abuse of power, the cunning, roguery, and corruption that too often accompany popular elections and democratic administration, rather stir honest men to action than make them incline to dictatorship and absolutism. the present notion about representative government is that it makes possible the expression of popular will, and can ensure the fulfilment of that will. in the thirteenth century, when we get the beginnings of representative government, there is no question of the people making positive proposals in legislation, but there is a distinct belief that the consent of the governed ought to be obtained by the ruling power. the mere legal maxim from the code of justinian, that "that which touches all shall be approved by all,"[ ] "becomes transmuted by edward i. into a great political and constitutional principle."[ ] representative theory first found in ecclesiastical assemblies more than a century earlier the first recorded appearances of town representatives are found in the spanish cortes of aragon and castile.[ ] st. dominic makes a representative form of government the rule in his order of preaching friars, each priory sending two representatives to its provincial chapter, and each province sending two representatives to the general chapter of the order. in england, simon of montfort, the son of simon, the great warrior of the albigensian wars and the warm friend of dominic, was in close association with the friars. hence there was nothing so very remarkable in earl simon issuing writs for the full parliament of for the return of two burgesses from each city and borough. he had seen representative government at work among the friars in their chapters. why should the plan be not equally useful in the government of the country?[ ] there is no evidence that the summons to the burgesses was regarded as a revolutionary proposal--so lightly comes political change in england. the name of simon of montfort, earl of leicester, must always be associated with the beginning of representative government in england. let us recall how it was the great earl came to be in power in . the misrule of henry iii. henry iii. was always in want of money, and his crew of royal parasites from poitou drained the exchequer. over and over again the barons called on the king to get rid of his favourites, and to end the misrule that afflicted the country; and the king from time to time gave promises of amendment. but the promises were always broken. as long as henry could get money he was averse from all constitutional reform. in the barons were determined that a change must be made. "if the king can't do without us in war, he must listen to us in peace," they declared. "and what sort of peace is this when the king is led astray by bad counsellors, and the land is filled with foreign tyrants who grind down native-born englishmen?" william of rishanger, a contemporary writer, expressed the popular feeling in well-known verses: "the king that tries without advice to seek his country's weal must often fail; he cannot know the wants and woes they feel. the parliament must tell the king how he may serve them best, and he must see their wants fulfilled and injuries redressed. a king should seek his people's good and not his own sweet will. nor think himself a slave because men hold him back from ill." "the king's mistakes call for special treatment," said richard, earl of gloucester. simon of montfort, leader of the national party so that year a parliament met in oxford, in the dominican priory. it was called the "mad parliament," because the barons all came to it fully armed, and civil war seemed imminent. but earl simon and richard of gloucester carried the barons with them in demanding reform. henry was left without supporters, and civil war was put off for five years. the work done at this parliament of oxford was an attempt to make the king abide loyally by the great charter; and the provisions of oxford, as they were called, set up a standing council of fifteen, by whom the king was to be guided, and ordered that parliament was to meet three times a year: at candlemas (february nd), on june st, and at michaelmas. four knights were to be chosen by the king's lesser freeholders in each county to attend this parliament, and the baronage was to be represented by twelve commissioners. it was an oligarchy that the provisions of oxford established, "intended rather to fetter the king than to extend or develop the action of the community at large. the baronial council clearly regards itself as competent to act on behalf of all the estates of the realm, and the expedient of reducing the national deliberations to three sessions of select committees betrays a desire to abridge the frequent and somewhat irksome duty of attendance in parliament rather than to share the central legislative and deliberative power with the whole body of the people. it must, however, be remembered that the scheme makes a very indistinct claim to the character of a final arrangement."[ ] for a time things went better in england. the aliens at henry's court fled over-seas, and their posts were filled by englishmen. parliament also promised that the vassals of the nobles should have better treatment, and that the sheriffs should be chosen by the shire-moots, the county freeholders. but henry's promises were quickly broken, and war broke out on the welsh borders between simon of montfort's friend llewellyn and mortimer and the marchers. edward, prince of wales, stood by the provisions of oxford for a few years, but supported his father when the latter refused to re-confirm the provisions in . as a last resource to prevent civil war, simon and henry agreed to appeal to king louis of france to arbitrate on the fulfilment of the provisions. the pope had already absolved henry from obedience to the provisions, and the award of louis, given at amiens and called the _mise of amiens_, was entirely in henry's favour. it annulled the provisions of oxford, left the king free to appoint his own ministers, council, and sheriffs, to employ aliens, and to enjoy power uncontrolled. but the former charters of the realm were declared inviolate, and no reprisals were to take place. to simon and most of the barons the award was intolerable, and when henry returned from france with a large force ready to take the vengeance which the award had forbidden, civil war could not be prevented. london rallied to simon, and oxford, the cinque ports, and the friars were all on the side of the barons against the king. on may th, , a pitched battle at lewes ended in complete victory for simon, and found the king, prince edward, and the kinsmen and chief supporters of the crown prisoners in his hands. peace was made, and a treaty--the _mise of lewes_--drawn up and signed. once more the king promised to keep the provisions and charters, and to dismiss the aliens. he also agreed to live thriftily till his debts were paid, and to leave his sons as hostages with earl simon. simon at once set about the work of reform. the king's standing, or privy, council was reconstituted, and the parliamentary commissioners were abolished, "for simon held it as much a man's duty to think and work for his country as to fight for it." a marked difference is seen between simon's policy at oxford and the policy after lewes. the provisions of were restrictive. the constitution of deliberately extended the limits of parliament. "either simon's views of a constitution had rapidly developed, or the influences which had checked them in were removed. anyhow, he had genius to interpret the mind of the nation, and to anticipate the line which was taken by later progress."[ ] what simon wanted was the approval of all classes of the community for his plans, and to that end he issued writs for the parliament--the _full parliament_--of . the great feature of this parliament was that for the first time the burgesses of each city and borough were summoned to send two representatives. in addition, two knights were to come from each shire, and clergy and barons as usual--though in the case of the earls and barons only twenty-three were invited, for simon had no desire for the presence of those who were his enemies. the full parliament sat till march, and then two months later war had once more blazed out. earl gilbert of gloucester broke away from simon, prince edward escaped from custody, and these two joined lord mortimer and the welsh marchers. on august th edward surprised and routed the army of the younger simon near kenilworth, and then advanced to crush the great earl, who was encamped at evesham, waiting to join forces with his son. all hope of escape for earl simon was lost, and he was outnumbered by seven to two. but fly he would not. one by one the barons who stood by simon were cut down, but though wounded and dismounted, the great earl "fought on to the last like a giant for the freedom of england, till a foot soldier stabbed him in the back under the mail, and he was borne down and slain." for three hours the unequal fight lasted in the midst of storm and darkness, and when it was over the grey friars carried the mangled body of the dead earl into the priory at evesham, and laid it before the high altar, for the poorer clergy and the common people all counted simon of montfort for a saint. "those who knew simon praise his piety, admire his learning, and extol his prowess as a knight and skill as a general. they tell of his simple fare and plain russet dress, bear witness to his kindly speech and firm friendship to all good men, describe his angry scorn for liars and unjust men, and marvel at his zeal for truth and right, which was such that neither pleasure nor threats nor promises could turn him aside from keeping the oath he swore at oxford; for he held up the good cause 'like a pillar that cannot be moved, and, like a second josiah, esteemed righteousness the very healing of his soul.' as a statesman he wished to bind the king to rule according to law, and to make the king's ministers responsible to a full parliament; and though he did not live to see the success of his policy, he had pointed out the way by which future statesmen might bring it about."[ ] in the hour of simon's death it might seem that the cause of good government was utterly lost, and for a time henry triumphed with a fierce reaction. but the very barons who had turned against simon were quite determined that the charters should be observed, and edward was to show, on his coming to the throne, that he had grasped even more fully than simon the notion of a national representative assembly, and that he accepted the principle, "that which touches all shall be approved by all." henry iii. died in , and it was not till two years later that edward i. was back in england from the crusades to take up the crown. it was an age of great lawgivers; an age that saw st. louis ruling in france, alfonso the wise in castile, the emperor frederick ii.--the wonder of the world--in sicily. in england edward shaped the constitution and settled for future times the lines of parliamentary representative government. edward i.'s model parliament, for the first twenty years edward's parliaments were great assemblies of barons and knights, and it was not till that the famous model parliament was summoned. "it is very evident that common dangers must be met by measures concerted in common," ran the writ to the bishops. every sheriff was to cause two knights to be elected from each shire, two citizens from each city, two burgesses from each borough. the clergy were to be fully represented from each cathedral and each diocese. hitherto parliament, save in , had been little else than a feudal court, a council of the king's tenants; it became, after , a national assembly. edward's plan was that the three estates--clergy, barons, and commons: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work--should be represented. but the clergy always stood aloof, preferring to meet in their own houses of convocation; and the archbishops, bishops, and greater abbots only attended because they were great holders of land and important feudal lords. although the knights of the shire were of much the same class as the barons, the latter received personal summons to attend, and the knights joined with the representatives of the cities and boroughs. so the two houses of parliament consisted of barons and bishops--lords spiritual and lords temporal--and knights and commons; and we have to-day the house of lords and the house of commons; the former, as in the thirteenth century, lords spiritual and temporal, the latter, representatives from counties and boroughs. the admission of elected representatives was to move, in course of time, the centre of government from the crown to the house of commons; but in edward i.'s reign parliament was just a larger growth of the king's council--the council that norman and plantagenet kings relied on for assistance in the administration of justice and the collection of revenue. the judges of the supreme court were always summoned to parliament, as the law lords sit in the upper house to-day. money, or rather the raising of money, was the main cause for calling a parliament. the clergy at first voted their own grants to the crown in convocation, but came to agree to pay the taxes voted by lords and commons, and lords and commons, instead of making separate grants, joined in a common grant. "and, as the bulk of the burden fell upon the commons, they adopted a formula which placed the commons in the foreground. the grant was made by the commons, with the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal. this formula appeared in , and became the rule. in , eight years after henry iv. came to the throne, he assented to the important principle that money grants were to be initiated by the house of commons, were not to be reported to the king until both houses were agreed, and were to be reported by the speaker of the commons' house. this rule is strictly observed at the present day. when a money bill, such as the finance bill for the year or the appropriation bill, has been passed by the house of commons and agreed to by the house of lords, it is, unlike all other bills, returned to the house of commons."[ ] the speaker, with his own hand, delivers all money bills to the clerk of parliaments, the officer whose business it is to signify the royal assent. in addition to voting money, the commons, on the assembly of parliament, would petition for the redress of grievances. in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they were not legislators, but petitioners for legislation; and as it often happened that their petitions were not granted in the form they asked, it became a matter of bitter complaint that the laws did not correspond with the petitions. henry v. in granted the request that "nothing should be enacted to the petition of the commons contrary to their asking, whereby they should be bound without their assent"; and from that time it became customary for bills to be sent up to the crown instead of petitions, leaving the king the alternative of assent or reaction. the nobility predominant in parliament in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the power of parliament was strong enough to force the abdication of two kings--edward ii. and richard ii.--but not strong enough to free the land of the turbulent authority of the nobles. this authority went down in the struggles of the lancastrians and yorkists. "the bloody faction fights known as the wars of the roses brought the plantagenet dynasty to a close, weeded out the older nobility, and cleared the way for a new form of monarchy."[ ] "the high nobility killed itself out. the great barons who adhered to the 'red rose' or the 'white rose,' or who fluctuated from one to the other, became poorer, fewer, and less potent every year. when the great struggle ended at bosworth, a large part of the greatest combatants were gone. the restless, aspiring, rich barons, who made the civil war, were broken by it. henry vii. attained a kingdom in which there was a parliament to advise, but scarcely a parliament to control."[ ] it is important to note the ascendancy of the barons in the medieval parliaments, and their self-destruction in the wars of the roses. unless we realise how very largely the barons were the parliament, it is difficult to understand how it came about that parliament was so utterly impotent under the tudors. the wars of the roses killed off the mighty parliamentarians, and it took a hundred years to raise the country landowners into a party which, under eliot, hampden, and pym, was to make the house of commons supreme. "the civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if i might so say): that is, destroyed three parts of the greater nobility, who were its most potent members, tired the small nobility and gentry, and overthrew the aristocratic organisation on which all previous effectual resistance to the sovereign had been based."[ ] to get an idea of the weakness of parliament when the tudors ruled, we have but to suppose at the present day a parliament deprived of all front-bench men on both sides of the house, and of the leaders of the irish and labour parties, and a house of lords deprived of all ministers and ex-ministers. the medieval national assemblies before passing to the parliamentary revival of the seventeenth century, there still remain one or two points to be considered relating to the early national assemblies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. ( ) _who were the electors in the middle ages?_--in the counties, all who were entitled to attend and take part in the proceedings of the county court had the right of electing the knight of the shire; and "it is most probable, on the evidence of records, on the analogies of representative usage, and on the testimony of later facts, that the knights of the shire were elected by the full county court."[ ] the county court or shire-moot not only elected knights for parliament; it often enough elected them for local purposes as well. the county coroner was elected in similar fashion by the county. all the chief tenants and small freeholders were therefore the county electors; but the tenants-in-chief (who held their lands from the crown) and the knights of the county had naturally considerably more influence than the smaller men. "the chief lord of a great manor would have authority with his tenants, freeholders as they might be, which would make their theoretical equality a mere shadow, and would, moreover, be exercised all the more easily because the right which it usurped was one which the tenant neither understood nor cared for."[ ] it is difficult to decide to what extent the smaller freeholders could take an active interest in the affairs of the county. as for the office of knight of the shire, there was no competition in the thirteenth or fourteenth century for the honour of going to parliament, and it is likely enough that the sheriff, upon whom rested the responsibility for the elections, would in some counties be obliged to nominate and compel the attendance of an unwilling candidate. ( ) _payment of parliamentary representatives._--the fact that members of parliament were paid by their constituents in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries[ ] made certain small freeholders as anxious not to be included in the electorate as others were anxious not to be elected to parliament. it was recognised as "fair that those persons who were excluded from the election should be exempt from contribution to the wages. and to many of the smaller freeholders the exemption from payment would be far more valuable than the privilege of voting."[ ] but the commons generally petitioned for payment to be made by all classes of freeholders, and when all allowance has been made for varying customs and for local diversities and territorial influence, it is safe to take it that the freeholders were the body of electors. in , the eighth year of henry vi., an act was passed ordering that electors must be resident in the country, and must have free land or tenement to the value of s. a year at least; and this act was in operation till . the county franchise was a simple and straightforward matter compared with the methods of electing representatives from the boroughs. all that the sheriff was ordered to do by writ was to provide for the return of two members for each city or borough in his county; the places that were to be considered as boroughs were not named. in the middle ages a town might have no wish to be taxed for the wages of its parliamentary representative, and in that case would do its best to come to an arrangement with the sheriff. (it was not till the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that a considerable increase of boroughs took place. the tudors created "pocket" and "rotten" boroughs in order to have the nominees of the crown in parliament.) the size of the borough bore no relation to its membership till the reform act of the nineteenth century, and as the selection of towns to be represented was arbitrary, so the franchise in the towns was equally unsettled. one or two places had a wide franchise, others confined the vote to freemen and corporation members. but in spite of the extraordinary vagaries of the borough franchise, and the arbitrary selection of towns to be represented, these early medieval parliaments really did in an imperfect way represent the nation--all but the peasants and artisans. "our english parliaments were _un_symmetrical realities. they were elected anyhow. the sheriff had a considerable licence in sending writs to boroughs, that is, he could in part pick its constituencies; and in each borough there was a rush and scramble for the franchise, so that the strongest local party got it whether few or many. but in england at that time there was a great and distinct desire to know the opinion of the nation, because there was a real and close necessity. the nation was wanted to do something--to assist the sovereign in some war, to pay some old debt, to contribute its force and aid in the critical juncture of the time. it would not have suited the ante-tudor kings to have had a fictitious assembly; they would have lost their sole _feeler_, their only instrument for discovering national opinion. nor could they have manufactured such an assembly if they wished. looking at the mode of election, a theorist would say that these parliaments were but 'chance' collections of influential englishmen. there would be many corrections and limitations to add to that statement if it were wanted to make it accurate, but the statement itself hits exactly the principal excellence of these parliaments. if not 'chance' collections of englishmen, they were 'undesigned' collections; no administrations made them, or could make them. they were bona fide counsellors, whose opinion might be wise or unwise, but was anyhow of paramount importance, because their co-operation was wanted for what was in hand."[ ] ( ) _the political position of women in the middle ages._--abbesses were summoned to the convocations of clergy in edward i.'s reign. peeresses were permitted to be represented by proxy in parliament. the offices of sheriff, high constable, governor of a royal castle, and justice of the peace have all been held by women. in fact, the lady of the manor had the same rights as the lord of the manor, and joined with men who were freeholders in electing knights of the shire without question of sex disability.[ ] (a survival of the medieval rights of women may be seen in the power of women to present clergy to benefices in the church of england.) in the towns women were members of various guilds and companies equally with men, and were burgesses and freewomen. not till was the word "male" inserted before "persons" in the charters of boroughs. "never before has the phrase 'male persons' appeared in any statute of the realm. by this act (the reform bill), therefore, women were technically disfranchised for the first time in the history of the english constitution. the privilege of abstention was converted into the penalty of exclusion." no theory of democracy in the middle ages the years of simon of montfort and edward i., which saw the beginnings of a representative national assembly, were not a time of theoretical discussion on political rights. the english nation, indeed, has ever been averse from political theories. the notion of a carefully balanced constitution was outside the calculations of medieval statesmen, and the idea of political democracy was not included among their visions. "even the scholastic writers, amid their calculations of all possible combinations of principles in theology and morals, well aware of the difference between the 'rex politicus' who rules according to law, and the tyrant who rules without it, and of the characteristics of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, with their respective corruptions, contented themselves for the most part with balancing the spiritual and secular powers, and never broached the idea of a growth into political enfranchisement. yet, in the long run, this has been the ideal towards which the healthy development of national life in europe has constantly tended, only the steps towards it have not been taken to suit a preconceived theory."[ ] each step towards democracy has been taken "to suit the convenience of party or the necessities of kings, to induce the newly admitted classes to give their money, to produce political contentment." the only two principles that are apparent in the age-long struggles for political freedom in england, that are recognised and acknowledged, are: ( ) that that which touches all shall be approved by all; ( ) that government rests on the consent of the governed. over and over again these two principles may be seen at work. * * * * * chapter iii popular insurrection in england general results of popular risings popular insurrection has never been successful in england; a violent death and a traitor's doom have been the lot of every leader of the common people who took up arms against the government. the civil war that brought charles i. to the scaffold, and the revolution that deposed james ii. and set william of orange on the throne, were the work of country gentlemen and whig statesmen, not of the labouring people. but if england has never seen popular revolution triumphant and democracy set up by force of arms, the earlier centuries witnessed more than one effort to gain by open insurrection some measure of freedom for the working people of the land. no other way than violent resistance seemed possible to peasants and artisans in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, if their wrongs were to be mitigated and their rulers to be called to account. langton and simon of montfort had placed some check on the power of the crown, had laid the foundations of political liberty, and marked the road to be travelled; but the lot of the labouring people remained unheeded and voiceless in the councils of the nation. what could they do but take up arms to end an intolerable oppression? william fitzosbert, called longbeard, the first serious protest came from the london workmen in the reign of richard i.; and fitzosbert, known as longbeard, was the spokesman of the popular discontent. the king wanted money, chiefly for his crusades in palestine. he had no inclination to personal government, and the business of ruling england was in the hands of hubert walter, archbishop of canterbury, the justiciar or king's lieutenant. richard left england for normandy in , and returned no more. england to him was a country where money could be raised, a subject-province to be bled by taxation. archbishop hubert did his best to satisfy the royal demands; and though by his inquisitions "england was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other"--it is estimated that more than £ , , was sent to richard in two years--the king was left unsatisfied. the nation generally came to hate the archbishop's taxation, the church suffered by his neglect, and he was finally compelled to resign the justiciarship. it was the london rising, under fitzosbert's leadership, that directly caused archbishop hubert's retirement, and fitzosbert is notable as the first of the long line of agitators. the political importance of the capital was seen in the reigns of cnut and william the conqueror. it was conspicuous on the arrival of stephen in , and its influence on national politics lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century.[ ] by its charter london had the right of raising taxes for the crown in its own way, and in the method proposed by the corporation provoked the outbreak. "when the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor" (hoveden). the poorer citizens were voteless, and the plan of the aldermen was to levy the tallages per head, and not in proportion to the property of the inhabitants. this meant, practically, that the whole, except a very small fraction of the sum to be raised, must be paid by the working people. thereupon fitzosbert protested, and the people rose in arms against the demand. fitzosbert was an old crusader, and he was something of a lawyer and a powerful speaker. not a rich man by any means, fitzosbert was yet a member of the city council when, "burning with zeal for justice and fair play, he made himself the champion of the poor." to his enemies he was a demagogue and disreputable--so ralph de diceto, dean of st. paul's at that time, described him. to others of more popular sympathies he was heroic and died a martyr's death. across the centuries he is seen as "an agitator"--the first english agitator, the first man to stand up boldly against the oppression of the common people. this palpably unjust taxation of the poor was intolerable to fitzosbert. fifteen thousand men banded themselves together in london under an oath that they would stand by each other and by their leader; and fitzosbert, after a vain journey to normandy to arouse richard's attention to the wrongs of his subjects, bade open defiance to the justiciar and his tax-gatherers. for a time the archbishop's men were powerless, but weakness crept in amongst the citizens, and the aldermen were naturally on the side of constituted authority. fitzosbert's success meant a readjustment of taxation quite unpalatable to the city fathers. in the end fitzosbert was deserted by all but a handful of his followers and fled with them for sanctuary to the church of st. mary-le-bow in cheapside. pursued by the officers of the law, fitzosbert climbed up into the tower of the church, and to fetch him down orders were given to set the church on fire. this was done, and the only chance of life that now remained for the rebels was to get out of the church and cut their way through the ranks of their enemies. at the church door fitzosbert was struck down, and his little company quickly overpowered. heavily chained, and badly wounded, fitzosbert was carried off to the tower, to be tried and sentenced to a traitor's death without delay. a few days later--it was just before easter--fitzosbert was stripped naked, and dragged at the tail of a horse over the rough streets of london to tyburn. he was dead before the place of execution was reached, but the body, broken and mangled, was hung up in chains under the gallows elm all the same; and nine of his companions were hanged with him. the very people who had fallen away from their leader in the day of his need now counted fitzosbert for a saint, and pieces of his gibbet and of the bloodstained earth underneath the tree were carried away and treasured as sacred relics. it was alleged that miracles were performed when these relics were touched--so wide was now the popular reverence for the dead champion of the poor. archbishop hubert put a stop to this devotion by ordering sermons to be preached on fitzosbert's iniquities; and an alleged death-bed confession, containing an account of many evil deeds, was published. it is likely enough that an old crusader had plenty of sins to answer for, but fitzosbert's one crime before the law was that he had taught the people of london to stand up and resist by force of arms the payment of taxes--taxes levied with gross unfairness in popular judgment. the monks of canterbury, to whom the church of st. mary-le-bow in cheapside belonged, had long had their own quarrels with archbishop hubert, and on this firing of their church, and the violation of sanctuary, they appealed to the king and the pope--innocent iii.--that hubert should give up his political work and attend exclusively to his duties as archbishop. both the pope and the great barons were against him, and in archbishop hubert was compelled to resign the judiciarship. the peasant revolt and its leaders, the great uprising of the peasants in was a very different matter from the local insurrection made by fitzosbert. two centuries had passed, and in those centuries the beginnings of representative government had been set up and some recognition of the rights of the peasantry had been admitted in the great charter. the peasant revolt was national. it was carefully prepared and skilfully organised, and its leaders were men of power and ability--men of character. it was not only a definite protest against positive evils, but a vigorous attempt to create a new social order--to substitute a social democracy for feudal government.[ ] the old feudal order had been widely upset by the black death in , and the further ravages of pestilence in and . the heavy mortality left many country districts bereft of labour, and landowners were compelled to offer higher wages if agriculture was to go on. in vain parliament passed statutes of labourers to prevent the peasant from securing an advance. these acts of parliament expressly forbade a rise in wages; the landless man or woman was "to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and take only the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood two years before the pestilence." the scarcity of labour drove landowners to compete for the services of the labourer, in spite of parliament. discontent was rife in those years of social change. the statutes of labourers were ineffectual; but they galled the labourers and kept serfdom alive. the tenants had their grievance because they were obliged to give labour-service to their lords. freehold yeomen, town workmen, and shopkeepers were irritated by heavy taxation, and vexed by excessive market tolls. all the materials were at hand for open rebellion, and leaders were found as the days went by to kindle and direct the revolt. john ball, an itinerant priest, who came from st. mary's, at york, and then made colchester the centre of his wanderings, spent twenty years organising the revolt, and three times was excommunicated and imprisoned by the archbishop of canterbury for teaching social "errors, schisms, and scandals," but was in no wise contrite or cast down. chief of ball's fellow-agitators were john wraw, in suffolk, jack straw, in essex--both priests these--william grindcobbe, in hertford, and geoffrey litster, in norfolk. in kent lived wat tyler, of whom nothing is told till the revolt was actually afire, but who at once was acknowledged leader and captain by the rebel hosts. from village to village went john ball in the years that preceded the rising, organising the peasants into clubs, and stirring the people with revolutionary talk. it was the way of this vagrant priest to preach to the people on village greens, and his discourses were all on the same text--"in the beginning of the world there were no bondmen, all men were created equal."[ ] inequalities of wealth and social position were to be ended: "good people, things will never go well in england, so long as goods be not kept in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. by what right are they whom men call lords greater folk than we? if all come from the same father and mother, adam and eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? "they are clothed in velvet, and are warm in their furs and ermines, while we are covered in rags. they have wine and spices and fair bread, and we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. they have leisure and fine houses; we have pain and labour, the wind and rain in the fields. and yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state. "we are called slaves; and if we do not perform our services, we are beaten, and we have not any sovereign to whom we can complain, or who wishes to hear us and do us justice." the poet, william langland, in "piers plowman," dwelt on the social wrongs of the time; ball was fond of quoting from langland, and of harping on a familiar couplet: "when adam delved and eve span, who was then the gentleman?" besides the sermons, some of the rhymed letters that john ball sent about the country have been preserved: "john ball, priest of st. mary's, greets well all manner of men, and bids them in the name of the trinity, father, son and holy ghost, to stand together manfully in truth. help truth and truth shall help you. "john ball greeteth you all, and doth to understand he hath rung your bell. now with right and might, will and skill, god speed every dell. john the miller asketh help to turn his mill right: he hath ground small, small: the king's son of heaven will pay for it all. look thy mill go right, with its four sails dight. with right and with might, with skill and with will, and let the post stand in steadfastness. let right help might, and skill go before will, then shall our mill go aright; but if might go before right, and will go before skill, then is our mill mis-a-dight." sometimes it is under the signature of john trueman that john ball writes: "beware ere ye be woe; know your friend from your foe; take enough and cry "ho!" and do well and better and flee from sin, and seek out peace and dwell therein-- so biddeth john trueman and all his fellows." a more definite note was struck when it seemed to ball and his colleagues that the time was ripe for revolution, and the word was given that appeal must be made to the boy-king--richard was only eleven years old when he came to the throne in . "let us go to the king, and remonstrate with him, telling him we must have it otherwise, or we ourselves shall find the remedy. he is young. if we wait on him in a body, all those who come under the name of serf, or are held in bondage, will follow us in the hope of being free. when the king shall see us we shall obtain a favourable answer, or we must then ourselves seek to amend our condition." in another letter john ball greets john nameless, john the miller, and john carter, and bids them stand together in god's name, and beware of guile: he bids piers plowman "go to his work and chastise well hob the robber (sir robert hales, the king's treasurer); and take with you john trueman and all his fellows, and look that you choose one head and no more." these letters and the preaching were accepted by willing minds. john ball was in prison--in the jail of archbishop sudbury at maidstone--in the spring of , but the peasants were organised and ready to revolt. if wat tyler is the recognised leader of the rebel forces--"the one head"--john ball's was the work of preparing the uprising. the vagrant priest had rung his bell to some purpose. in every county, from somerset to york, the peasants flocked together, "some armed with clubs, rusty swords, axes, with old bows reddened by the smoke of the chimney corner, and odd arrows with only one feather." at whitsuntide, early in june, , the great uprising began--the hurling time of the peasants--long to be remembered with horror by the governing classes. a badly ordered poll-tax was the match that kindled the fire. the poll-tax was first levied, in , on all over fourteen years of age. two years later it was graduated, every man and woman of the working class being rated at d., and dukes and archbishops at £ s. d. more money was still wanted by the government, and early in , john of gaunt, the chief man in the realm, called parliament together at northampton, and demanded £ , . parliament agreed that £ , should be raised, and the clergy--owning a third of the land--promised £ , . but the only way of raising the £ , that the government could think of was by another poll-tax, and this time everybody over fifteen was required to pay s. of course, the thing was impossible. in many parishes the mere returns of population were not filled in; numbers evaded payment--which spelt ruin--by leaving their homes. £ , was all that came to hand. then a man named john legge came to the assistance of the government, and was appointed chief commissioner, and empowered to collect the tax. the methods of legge and his assistants provoked hostility, and when the villagers of fobbing, corringham, and stanford-le-hope, in essex, were summoned to meet the commissioner at brentwood, their reply was to kill the collectors. the government answered this by sending down chief justice belknap to punish the offenders, but the people drove the chief justice out of the place, and belknap was glad to escape with his life. this was on whit-sunday, june nd, and two days later the revolt had spread to kent; gravesend and dartford were in tumult. in one place sir simon burley, a friend of richard ii., seized a workman, claiming him as a bondservant, and refusing to let him go under a fine of £ ; while at dartford a tax-collector had made trouble by gross indecency to the wife and daughter of one john tyler.[ ] thereupon this john tyler, "being at work in the same town tyling of an house, when he heard thereof, caught his lathing staff in his hand, and ran reaking home; where, reasoning with the collector, who made him so bold, the collector answered with stout words, and strake at the tyler; whereupon the tyler, avoiding the blow, smote the collector with his lathing staff, so that the brains flew out of his head. wherethrough great noise arose in the streets, and the poor people being glad, everyone prepared to support the said john tyler." now, with the fire of revolt in swift blaze, it was for the men of kent to see that it burned under some direction. authority and discipline were essential if the rising was not to become mob rule or mere anarchy, and if positive and intolerable wrongs were to find remedies. at maidstone, on june th--after rochester castle had been stormed, its prisoners set free and sir john newton its governor placed in safe custody--wat tyler was chosen captain of the rebel hosts. history tells us nothing of the antecedents of this remarkable man. for eight days, and eight days only, he plays his part on the stage of national events: commands with authority a vast concourse of men; meets the king face to face, and wrests from sovereignty great promises of reform; orders the execution of the chief ministers of the crown, and then, in what seems to be the hour of triumph, is struck to the ground, and goes to his death. under the accredited leadership of wat tyler the revolt at once took form. five days were spent in kent before the peasant army marched on london. the manor houses were attacked, and all rent rolls, legal documents, lists of tenants and serfs destroyed. the rising was not a ferocious massacre like the rising of the jacquerie in france; there was no general massacre of landlords, or reign of terror. the lawyers who managed the landowners' estates were the enemy, and against them--against the instruments of landlord tyranny--was the anger of the peasants directed. in the same way john of gaunt, and not the youthful king, was recognised as the evil influence in government; and while a vow was taken by the men of kent that no man named "john" should be king of england, the popular cry was "king richard and the commons," and all who joined in this were accounted friends of the insurgent populace. blackheath was reached on the evening of june th, and early the following morning, which was corpus christi day, john ball--released by a thousand hands from his prison at maidstone--preached to the multitude on the work before them: "now is the opportunity given to englishmen, if they do but choose to take it, of casting off the yoke they have borne so long, of winning the freedom they have always desired. wherefore, let us take good courage and behave like the wise husbandman of scripture, who gathered the wheat into his barn, but uprooted and burned the tares that had half-choked the good grain. the tares of england are her oppressive rulers, and the time of harvest has come. ours it is to pluck up these tares and make away with them all--the wicked lords, the unjust judges, the lawyers--every man, indeed, who is dangerous to the common good. then shall we all have peace in our time and security for the future. for when the great ones have been rooted up and cast away, all will enjoy equal freedom and nobility, rank and power shall we have in common." thirty-thousand men--yeomen, craftsmen, villeins, and peasants, were at blackheath, and these were soon joined by thousands more from surrey. john wraw and grindcobbe came to consult with wat tyler, and then returned to suffolk and hertford to announce that the hour had come to strike. the marshalsea and king's bench prisons, and the houses of ill-fame that clustered round london bridge, were destroyed before wat tyler led his army into the city. an attempt to meet the king in conference was frustrated by the royal counsellors. richard came down in the royal barge as far as rotherhithe, but was dissuaded by sir robert hales, and the earls of suffolk, salisbury, and warwick, from "holding speech with the shoeless ruffians." richard rowed back swiftly to the tower, and tyler and his army swept into london. the city was in the hands of the rebel captain, but the citizens welcomed the invaders, and offered bread and ale when tyler proclaimed that death would be the instant punishment for theft. john of gaunt's palace at the savoy, on the river strand, was the first place to be burnt; but henry, earl of derby, john of gaunt's son (eighteen years later to reign as henry iv., in place of richard), was allowed to pass out uninjured, and a wretched man caught in the act of stealing off with a silver cup was promptly executed. the savoy destroyed, the temple--a hive of lawyers--was the next to be burnt, and before nightfall the fleet prison and newgate had been demolished. again tyler demanded conference with the king, and richard, lying in the tower with his counsellors, unable to prevent the work of conference, boldly decided to come out and meet the rebels. mile end was appointed for the conference, and to mile end richard came with a very modest retinue. the king was only fifteen, but he was the son of the black prince, and he had both courage and cunning. he was fully aware that the people did not lay on him responsibility for the sins of the government. "if we measure intellectual power by the greatest exertion it ever displays, rather than by its average results, richard ii. was a man of considerable talents. he possessed along with much dissimulation a decisive promptitude in seizing the critical moment for action."[ ] at mile end tyler stated the grievances of the people. but first he asked that all traitors should be put to death, and to this the king agreed. four positive articles of reform were put forward, and were at once assented to by the king:-- . a free and general pardon to all concerned in the rising. . the total abolition of all villeinage (forced labour) and serfdom. . an end to all tolls and market dues--"freedom to buy and sell in all cities, burghs, mercantile towns, and other places within our kingdom of england." . all customary tenants to become leaseholders at a fixed rental of fourpence an acre for ever. that all doubts might be removed, thirty clerks were set to work on the spot to draw up charters of manumission, and banners were presented to each county. at nightfall thousands returned home convinced that the old order was ended, and that the royal charters were genuine assurances of freedom. but tyler and the bulk of the men of kent and surrey remained in the city. it seemed to wat tyler that better terms still were to be wrung from the king. it looked that night as though the insurrection had triumphed completely. not only were the charters signed and the royal promises given, but several in high office, whom tyler held to be "traitors," had gone to their doom. sir robert hales, the treasurer, archbishop sudbury, the chancellor--a gentle and kindly old man, "lenient to heretics"--john legge, the hated poll-tax commissioner, with appleton, john of gaunt's chaplain, and richard lyons, a thoroughly corrupt contractor of edward iii.'s reign, were all dragged out of the tower and beheaded on tower hill on friday, june th. on tyler's request for another conference with richard on the following day, the king saw he had no choice but to yield. for the second time wat tyler and richard met face to face. the conference was held at smithfield, in the square outside st. bartholomew's priory. the king and two hundred retainers, with walworth the mayor, were on the east side of the square. tyler and his army were on the west side, opposite the priory. in the open space tyler, mounted on a little horse, presented his demands; more sweeping were the reforms now asked for than those of the previous day. "let no law but the law of winchester[ ] prevail throughout the land, and let no man be made an outlaw by the decree of judges and lawyers. grant also that no lord shall henceforth exercise lordship over the commons; and since we are oppressed by so vast a horde of bishops and clerks, let there be but one bishop in england; and let the property and goods of holy church be divided fairly according to the needs of the people in each parish, after in justice making suitable provision for the present clergy and monks. finally, let there be no more villeins in england, but grant us all to be free and of one condition." richard answered that he promised readily all that was asked, "if only it be consistent with the regality of my crown." he then bade the commons return home, since their requests had been granted. nobles and counsellors stood in sullen and silent anger at the king's words, but were powerless to act. tyler, conscious of victory, called for a draught, and when his attendant brought him a mighty tankard of ale, the rebel leader drank good-humouredly to "king richard and the commons." a knight in the royal service, a "valet of kent," was heard to mutter that wat tyler was the greatest thief and robber in all the county, and tyler caught the abusive words, drew his dagger, and made for the man. mayor walworth, as angry as the nobles at the king's surrender, shouted that he would arrest all who drew weapons in the king's presence; and on tyler striking at him impatiently, the mayor drew a cutlass and slashed back, wounding tyler in the neck so that he fell from his horse. before he could recover a footing, two knights plunged their swords into him, and tyler, mortally wounded, could only scramble on to his little horse, ride a yard or two, call on the commons to avenge him, and then drop--a dead man.[ ] and with wat tyler's death the whole rebellion collapsed. confusion fell upon the people at smithfield. some were for immediate attack, but when richard, riding out into the middle of the square, claimed that he and not tyler was their king, and bade them follow him into the fields towards islington, the great mass, convinced that richard was honestly their friend, obeyed. at nightfall they were scattered. wat tyler's body was taken into the priory, and his head placed on london bridge. walworth hastily gathered troops together, and the leader of the rebels being dead, the nobles recovered their courage. the rising was over; the people without leaders were as sheep for the slaughter. jack straw was taken in london and hanged without the formality of a trial; and on june nd tresilian, the new chief justice, went on a special assize to try the rebels, and "showed mercy to none and made great havock." the king's charters and promises were declared null and void when parliament met, and some hundreds of peasants were hanged in various parts of the country. john ball and grindcobbe were hanged at st. albans on july th, john wraw and geoffrey litster suffered the same fate. all that wat tyler and the peasants had striven for was lost; but the rising was not quite in vain. for one thing, the poll-tax was stopped, and the end of villeinage was hastened. the great uprising was the first serious demonstration of the english people for personal liberty. "it taught the king's officers and gentle folks that they must treat the peasants like men if they wished them to behave quietly, and it led most landlords to set free their bondsmen, and to take fixed money payments instead of uncertain services from their customary tenants, so that in a hundred years' time there were very few bondsmen left in england."[ ] jack cade, captain of kent, to understand the character and importance of the rising of the men of kent under jack cade in , the first thing to be done is to clear the mind of shakespeare's travesty in _king henry vi._, part . in the play the name of cade has been handed down in obloquy, and all that he and his followers aimed at caricatured out of recognition. the part that jack cade really played in national affairs has no likeness to the low comedy performance imagined by shakespeare. it was a popular rising in , but it was not a peasant revolt. men of substance in the county rallied to cade's banner, and in many parishes in kent the village constable was employed to enrol willing recruits in the army of disaffection.[ ] the peasant revolt was at bottom a social movement, fostered and fashioned by preachers of a social democracy. cade's rising was provoked by misgovernment and directed at political reform. it was far less revolutionary in purpose than the revolt that preceded it, or the rising under ket a hundred years later. the discontent was general when cade encamped on blackheath with the commons of kent at the end of may, . suffolk, the best hated of henry vi.'s ministers, had already been put to death by the sailors of dover, and lord say-and-sele, the treasurer, was in the tower under impeachment. ayscough, bishop of salisbury, another minister, was hanged by his infuriated flock in wiltshire, and bishop moleyns, of chichester, keeper of the privy seal, was executed in portsmouth by a mob of sailors. piracy prevailed unchecked in the english channel, and the highways inland were haunted by robbers--soldiers back from france and broken in the wars. the ablest statesman of the day, the duke of york, was banished from the royal council, and there was a wide feeling that an improvement in government was impossible until york was recalled. whether cade, who was known popularly as "mortimer," was related to the duke of york, or was merely a country landowner, can never be decided. the charges made against him after his death were not supported by a shred of evidence, but it was necessary then for the government to blacken the character of the captain of kent for the utter discouragement of his followers. all we _know_ of cade is that by the act of attainder he must have been a man of some property in surrey--probably a squire or yeoman. the army that encamped on blackheath numbered over , , and included squires, yeomen, county gentlemen, and at least two notable ecclesiastics from sussex, the abbot of battle and the prior of lewes. the testimony to cade's character is that he was the unquestioned and warmly respected leader of the host. the cade depicted by his enemies--a dissolute, disreputable ruffian--was not the kind of man to have had authority as a chosen captain over country gentlemen and clerical landowners in the fifteenth century. the "complaints" of the commons of kent, drawn up at blackheath and forwarded to the king and his parliament, then sitting at westminster, called attention in fifteen articles to the evils that afflicted the land. these articles dealt with a royal threat to lay waste kent in revenge for the death of the duke of suffolk; the wasting of the royal revenue raised by heavy taxation; the banishment of the duke of york--"to make room for unworthy ministers who would not do justice by law, but demanded bribes and gifts"; purveyance of goods for the royal household without payment; arrest and imprisonment on false charges of treason by persons whose goods and lands were subsequently seized by the king's servants, who then "either compassed their deaths or kept them in prison while they got possession of their property by royal grant"; interference by "the great rulers of the land" with the old right of free election of knights of the shire; the mismanagement of the war in france. a certain number of purely local grievances, chiefly concerned with the maladministration of justice, were also included in the "complaints," and five "requests"--including the abolition of the statutes of labourers--were added. henry and his counsellors dismissed these "complaints" with contempt. "such proud rebels," it was said, "should rather be suppressed and tamed with violence and force than with fair words or amicable answer." but when the royal troops moved into kent to disperse the rising, cade's army cut them to pieces at sevenoaks. henry returned to london; his nobles rode away to their country houses; and after a fruitless attempt at negotiations by the duke of buckingham and the archbishop of canterbury,[ ] the king himself fled to kenilworth--leaving london at the mercy of the captain of kent. on july nd cade crossed london bridge on horseback, followed by all his army. the corporation had already decided to offer no opposition to his entry, and one of its members, thomas cocke, of the drapers' company--later sheriff and m.p.--had gone freely between the camp at blackheath and the city, acting as mutual friend to the rebels and the citizens. all that cade required was that the foreign merchants in london should furnish him with a certain number of arms and horses, "and , marks of ready money"; and this was done. "so that it was found that the captain and kentishmen at their being in the city did no hurt to any stranger."[ ] on the old london stone, in cannon street, cade laid his sword, in the presence of the mayor and a great multitude of people, and declared proudly: "now is mortimer lord of this city." then at nightfall he went back to his headquarters at the white hart inn in southwark. the following day lord say-and-sele, and his son-in-law, crowmer, sheriff of kent, were removed by cade's orders from the tower to the guildhall, tried for "divers treasons" and "certain extortions," and quickly beheaded. popular hatred, not content with this, placed the heads of the fallen minister and his son-in-law on poles, made them kiss in horrible embrace, and then bore them off in triumph to london bridge. a third man, one john bailey, was also hanged for being a necromancer; and as cade had promised death to all in his army convicted of theft, it fell out that certain "lawless men" paid the penalty for disobedience, and were hanged in southwark--where the main body of the army lay. cade's difficulties began directly after lord say-and-sele's execution. london assented willingly to the death of an unpopular statesman, but had no mind to provision an army of , men, and, indeed, had no liking for the proximity of such a host. plunder being forbidden, and strict discipline the rule, the urgent question for the captain of kent was how the army was to be maintained. getting no voluntary help from the city. cade decided that he must help himself. he supped with a worthy citizen named curtis in tower street on july th, and insisted before he left that curtis must contribute money for the support of the kentish men. curtis complied--how much he gave we know not--but he resented bitterly the demand, and he told the tale of his wrongs to his fellow-merchants.[ ] the result was that while cade slept in peace as usual at the white hart, the mayor and corporation took counsel with lord scales, the governor of the tower, and resolved that at all costs the captain of kent and his forces must be kept out of the city. after the treatment of curtis the fear was that disorder and pillage might become common. on the evening of sunday, july th, and all through the night battle waged hotly on london bridge, which had been seized and fortified before cade was awake, and by the morning the rebels, unsuccessful in their attack, were glad to agree to a hasty truce. the truce gave opportunity to cardinal kemp, archbishop of york, the king's chancellor, to suggest a lasting peace to cade. messengers were sent speedily from the tower, where kemp, with archbishop stafford, of canterbury, had stayed in safety, to the white hart, urging a conference "to the end that the civil commotions and disturbances might cease and tranquillity be restored." cade consented, and when the two archbishops, with william waynfleet, bishop of winchester, met the captain of kent in the church of st. margaret, southwark, and promised that parliament should give consideration to the "complaints" and "requests" of the commons, and that a full pardon should be given to all who would straightway return home, the rising was at an end. cade hesitated, and asked for the endorsement of the pardons by parliament; but this was plainly impossible because parliament was not sitting. the bulk of the commons were satisfied with their pardons, and with the promise that parliament would attend to their grievances. there was nothing to be gained, it seemed, by remaining in arms. on july th, the rebel army had broken up, taking the road back to the towns and villages, farms and cottages in kent, sussex, and surrey. cade, with a small band of followers, retreated to rochester, and attempted without success, the capture of queenborough castle. on the news that the commons had dispersed from southwark, the government at once took the offensive. alexander iden was appointed sheriff of kent, and, marrying crowmer's widow, subsequently gained considerable profit. within a week john cade was proclaimed by the king's writ a false traitor throughout the countryside, and sheriff iden was in eager pursuit--for a reward of , marks awaited the person who should take cade, alive or dead. near heathfield, in sussex, cade, broken and famished, was found by iden, and fought his last fight on july th, preferring to die sword in hand than to perish by the hangman. he fell before the overwhelming odds of the sheriff and his troops, and the body was immediately sent off to london for identification. the landlady of the white hart proved the identity of the dead captain, and all that remained was to stick the head on london bridge, and dispatch the quartered body to blackheath, norwich, salisbury and gloucester for public exhibition. iden got the , marks reward and, in addition, the governorship of rochester castle at a salary of £ a year. by special act of attainder all cade's goods, lands and tenements were made forfeit to the crown, and statements were published for the discrediting of cade's life. no allusion was made in parliament to the "complaints" and "requests," and, in spite of cardinal kemp's pardons, a number of men were hanged at canterbury and rochester for their share in the rising, when henry vi. and his justices visited kent in january, . the revolt failed to amend the wretched misrule. it remained for civil war to drive henry vi. from the throne, and make edward iv. of york his successor. the norfolk rising under robert ket, a century after the rising of the commons of kent came the last great popular rebellion--the norfolk rising, led by ket. this insurrection was agrarian and social, concerned neither with the fierce theological differences of the time, nor with the political rivalries of protector somerset and his enemies in edward vi.'s council. at the beginning of the sixteenth century england was in the main a nation of small farmers, but radical changes were taking place, and these changes meant ruin to thousands of yeomen and peasants. the enclosure, by many large landowners, of the fields which for ages past had been cultivated by the country people, the turning of arable land into pasture, were the main causes of the distress.[ ] whole parishes were evicted in some places and dwelling houses destroyed, and contemporary writers are full of the miseries caused by these clearances. acts of parliament were passed in and , prohibiting the "pulling down of towns," and ordering the reversion of pasture lands to tillage, but the legislation was ignored. sir thomas more, in his "utopia" ( ), described very vividly what the enclosures were doing to rural england; and a royal commission, appointed by cardinal wolsey, reported in the following year that more than , acres had been enclosed in seven midland counties. in some cases, waste lands only were enclosed, but landowners were ordered to make restitution within forty days where small occupiers had been dispossessed. royal commissions and royal proclamations were no more effective than acts of parliament. bad harvests drove the norfolk peasantry to riot for food in and . the dissolution of the monasteries in and abolished a great source of charity for the needy, and increased the social disorder. finally, in , came the confiscation by the crown of the property of the guilds and brotherhoods, and the result of this enactment can only be realised by supposing the funds of friendly societies, trade unions, and co-operative societies taken by government to-day without compensation. all that parliament would do in the face of the starvation and unemployment that brooded over many parts of england, was to pass penal legislation for the homeless and workless--so that it seemed to many that government had got rid of papal authority only to bring back slavery. the agrarian misery, the violent changes in the order of church services and social customs, the confiscation of the funds of the guilds, and the wanton spoiling of the parish churches[ ]--all these things drove the people to revolt. early in the men of devon and cornwall took up arms for "the old religion," and were hanged by scores. in norfolk that same year the rising under ket was social, and unconcerned with religion. lesser agrarian disturbances took place in somerset, lincoln, essex, kent, oxford, wilts, and buckingham. but there was no cohesion amongst the insurgents, and no organisation of the peasants such as england had seen under john ball and his companion in . in somerset, the lord protector, made an honest attempt to check the rapacity of the landowners, but his proclamation and royal commission were no more successful than wolsey's had been, and only earned for the protector the hatred of the landowners. the norfolk rising was the one strong movement to turn the current that was sweeping the peasants into destitution. it failed, as all popular insurrection in england has failed, and it brought its leaders to the gallows; but for six weeks hope lifted its head in the rebel camp outside norwich, and many believed that oppression and misery were to end. the rising began at attleborough, on june th, when the people pulled down the fences and hedges set up round the common fields. on july th, at the annual feast in honour of st. thomas of canterbury, at wymondham, a mighty concourse of people broke down the fences at hetherset, and then appealed to robert ket and his brother to help them. both the kets were well-known locally. they were men of old family, craftsmen, and landowners. robert was a tanner by trade, william a butcher. three manors--valued at , marks, with a yearly income of £ --belonged to robert ket: church lands mostly, leased from the earl of warwick. ket saw that only under leadership and guidance could the revolt become a revolution, and he threw himself into the cause of his poorer neighbours with whole-hearted fervour. "i am ready," he said, "and will be ready at all times to do whatever, not only to repress, but to subdue the power of great men. whatsoever lands i have enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own hands shall first perform it. you shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as a fellow, but for a leader, author, and principal." ket's leadership was at once acclaimed with enthusiasm by the thousand men who formed the rebel band at the beginning of the rising. the news spread quickly that ket was leading an army to norwich, and on july th, when a camp was made at eaton wood, every hour brought fresh recruits. it is clear from ket's speeches, and from "the rebels' complaint," issued by him at this time, that the aim of the leaders of the norfolk rising was not merely to stop the enclosures, but to end the ascendancy of the landlord class for all time, and to set up a social democracy. ket's address at eaton wood was revolutionary: "now are ye overtopped and trodden down by gentlemen, and put out of possibility ever to recover foot. rivers of riches run into the coffers of your landlords, while you are par'd to the quick, and fed upon pease and oats like beasts. you are fleeced by these landlords for their private benefit, and as well kept under by the public burdens of state, wherein while the richer sort favour themselves, ye are gnawn to the very bones. your tyrannous masters often implead, arrest, and cast you into prison, so that they may the more terrify and torture you in your minds, and wind your necks more surely under their arms.... harmless counsels are fit for tame fools; for you who have already stirred, there is no hope but in adventuring boldly." "the rebels' complaint" is equally definite and outspoken. it rehearsed the wrongs of a landless peasantry, and called on the people to end these wrongs by open rebellion. the note of social equality is struck by ket throughout the rising. "the present condition of possessing land seemeth miserable and slavish--holding it all at the pleasure of great men; not freely, but by prescription, and, as it were, at the will and pleasure of the lord. for as soon as any man offend any of these gorgeous gentlemen, he is put out, deprived, and thrust from all his goods. "the common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away. "the lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out. "we can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury; neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness, excess, and pride of the nobility. we will rather take arms, and mix heaven and earth together, than endure so great cruelty. "nature hath provided for us, as well as for them; hath given us a body and a soul, and hath not envied us other things. while we have the same form, and the same condition of birth together with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and differ so far from us in calling? "we see that things have now come to extremities, and we will prove the extremity. we will rend down hedges, fill up ditches, and make a way for every man into the common pasture. finally, we will lay all even with the ground, which they, no less wickedly than cruelly and covetously, have enclosed. "we desire liberty and an indifferent (or equal) use of all things. this will we have. otherwise these tumults and our lives shall only be ended together." but though the method was revolution and the goal social democracy, ket was no anarchist. he proved himself a strong, capable leader, able to enforce discipline and maintain law and order in the rebel camp. and with all his passionate hatred against the rule of the landlord, ket would allow neither massacre nor murder. there is no evidence that the life of a single landowner was taken while the rising lasted, though many were brought captive to ket's judgment seat. ket was equally averse from civil war between the citizens of norwich and the peasants. when the mayor of norwich, thomas cod, refused to allow ket's army to cross the city on its way to mousehold heath, where the permanent camp was to be made, ket simply led his forces round by hailsdon and drayton, and so reached mousehold on july th without bloodshed. a week later, and , was the number enrolled under the banner of revolt--for the publication of "the rebels' complaint" and the ringing of bells and firing of beacons roused all the countryside to action. on mousehold heath, robert ket, with his brother william, gave directions and administered justice under a great tree, called the oak of reformation. mayor cod, and two other respected norwich citizens, aldrich, an alderman, and watson, a preacher, joined ket's council, thinking their influence might restrain the rebels from worse doings. twenty-nine "requests and demands," signed by ket, cod, and aldrich, were dispatched to the king from mousehold, and this document gave in full the grievances of the rebels. the chief demands were the cessation of enclosures, the enactment of fair rents, the restoration of common fishing rights, the appointment of resident clergymen to preach and instruct the children, and the free election or appointment of local "commissioners" for the enforcement of the laws. there was also a request "that all bond men may be made free, for god made all free with his precious bloodshedding." the only answer to the "requests and demands" was the arrival of a herald with a promise that parliament would meet in october to consider the grievances, if the people would in the meantime quietly return to their homes. but this ket would by no means agree to, and for the next few weeks his authority was supreme in that part of the country. he established a rough constitution for the prevention of mere disorder, two men being chosen by their fellows from the various hundreds of the eastern half of the county. a royal messenger, bearing commissions of the peace to certain country gentlemen, falling into the hands of ket, was relieved of his documents and dismissed. ket then put in these commissions the names of men who had joined the rising, and declared them magistrates with authority to check all disobedience to orders. to feed the army at mousehold, men were sent out with a warrant from ket for obtaining cattle and corn from the country houses, and "to beware of robbing, spoiling, and other evil demeanours." no violence or injury was to be done to "any honest or poor man." contributions came in from the smaller yeomen "with much private good-will," but the landowners generally were stricken with panic, and let the rebels do what they liked. those who could not escape by flight were, for the most part, brought captive to the oak of reformation, and thence sent to the prisons in norwich and st. leonard's hill. relations between ket and the norwich authorities soon became strained to breaking point. mayor cod was shocked at the imprisonment of county gentlemen, and refused permission for ket's troops to pass through the city on their foraging expeditions. citizens and rebels were in conflict on july st, but "for lack of powder and want of skill in the gunners" few lives were lost, and norwich was in the hands of ket the following day. no reprisals followed; but a week later came william parr, marquis of northampton--henry viii.'s brother-in-law--with , italian mercenaries and a body of country squires, to destroy the rebels. northampton's forces were routed utterly, and lord sheffield was slain, and many houses and gates were burnt in the city. then for three weeks longer robert ket remained in power, still hoping against hope that some attention would be given by the government to his "requests and demands." protector somerset, beset by his own difficulties, could do nothing for rebellious peasants, could not countenance in any way an armed revolt, however great the miseries that provoked insurrection. the earl of warwick was dispatched with , troops to end the rebellion, and arrived on august th. for two days the issue seemed uncertain--half the city only was in warwick's hands. the arrival of , mercenaries--"lanzknechts," germans mostly--and a fatal decision of the rebels to leave their vantage ground at mousehold heath and do battle in the open valley that stretched towards the city, gave complete victory to warwick. the peasants poured into the meadows beyond magdalen and pockthorpe gates, and were cut to pieces by the professional soldiers. when all seemed over ket galloped away to the north, but was taken, worn out, at the village of swannington, eight miles from norwich. more than peasants were hanged by warwick's orders, and their bodies left to swing on mousehold and in the city. robert ket and william ket were sent to london, and after being tried and condemned for high treason, were returned to norwich in december for execution. robert ket was hanged in chains from norwich castle, and william suffered in similar fashion from the parish church at wymondham--to remind all people of the fate that befall those who venture, unsuccessfully, to take up arms against the government in power. so the norfolk rising ended, and with it ended all serious popular insurrection in england. riots and mob violence have been seen even to our own time, but no great, well-organised movement to overthrow authority and establish a social democracy by force of arms has been attempted since . the characters of robert ket and his brother have been vindicated by time, and the rebel leader is now recognised as a disinterested, capable, high-minded man. ket took what seemed to him the only possible course to avert the doom of a ruined peasantry, and failed. but his courage and humaneness are beyond question.[ ] the enclosures did not end with the sixteenth century, and for another one hundred years complaints are heard of the steady depopulation of rural england. in the eighteenth century came the second great series of enclosures--the enclosing of the commons and waste spaces, by acts of parliament. between and no less than , , acres were thus enclosed. to-day the questions of land tenure and land ownership are conspicuous items in the discussion of the whole social question, for the relations of a people to its land are of very first importance in a democratic state. * * * * * chapter iv the struggle renewed against the crown parliament under the tudors the english parliament throughout the sixteenth century was but a servile instrument of the crown. the great barons were dead. henry viii. put to death sir thomas more and all who questioned the royal absolutism. elizabeth, equally despotic, had by good fortune the services of the first generation of professional statesmen that england produced. these statesmen--burleigh, sir nicholas bacon, sir walter mildmay, sir thomas smith, and sir francis walsingham--all died in office. burleigh was minister for forty years, bacon and mildmay for more than twenty, and smith and walsingham for eighteen years.[ ] [illustration: sir john eliot] parliament was not only intimidated by henry viii. and elizabeth, its membership was recruited by nominees of the crown.[ ] and then it is also to be borne in mind that both henry and elizabeth made a point of getting parliament to do their will. they governed through parliament, and ruled triumphantly, for it is only in the later years of elizabeth that any discontent is heard. the stuarts, far less tyrannical, came to grief just because they never understood the importance of parliament in the eyes of englishmen in the middle ranks, and attempted to rule while ignoring the house of commons. elizabeth scolded her parliaments, and more than once called the speaker of the house of commons to account. the business of tudor parliaments was to decree the proposals of the crown. "liberty of speech was granted in respect of the aye or no, but not that everybody should speak what he listed." bacon declared, "the queen hath both enlarging and restraining power; she may set at liberty things restrained by statute and may restrain things which be at liberty." yet elizabeth raised no objection to the theory that parliament was the sovereign power, for her authority controlled parliament; and so we have sir thomas smith writing in that "the most high and absolute power of the realm of england consisteth in the parliament." in his "ecclesiastical polity," book i. ( - ), hooker argues that "laws human, of what kind soever are available by consent," and that "laws they are not which public approbation hath not made so"; deciding explicitly that sovereignty rests ultimately in the people. victory of parliament over the stuarts when he came to the throne in , james i. was prepared to govern with all the tudor absolutism, but he had neither elizabeth's ministers--cecil excepted--nor her knowledge of the english mind. the english parliament and the english people had put up with elizabeth's headstrong, capricious rule, because it had been a strong rule, and the nation had obviously thriven under it.[ ] but it was another matter altogether when james i. was king. "by many steps the slavish parliament of henry viii. grew into the murmuring parliament of queen elizabeth, the mutinous parliament of james i., and the rebellious parliament of charles i." the twenty years of james i.'s reign saw the preaching up of the doctrine of the divine right of kings by the bishops of the established church, and the growing resolution of the commons to revive their earlier rights and privileges. if the stuarts were as unfortunate in their choice of ministers as elizabeth had been successful, the house of commons was equally happy in the remarkable men who became its spokesmen and leaders. in the years that preceded the civil war-- - --three men are conspicuous on the parliamentary side: eliot, hampden, and pym. all three were country gentlemen, of good estate, high principle, and religious convictions[ ]--men of courage and resolution, and of blameless personal character. eliot died in prison, in the cause of good government, in ; hampden fell on chalgrove field in . as in earlier centuries the struggle in the seventeenth century between the king and the commons turned mainly on the questions of taxation. (at the same time an additional cause of dispute can be found in the religious differences between charles i. and the parliamentarians. the latter were mainly puritan, accepting the protestantism of the church of england, but hating catholicism and the high-church views of laud. the king was in full sympathy with high anglicanism, and, like his father, willing to relax the penal laws against catholics.) "by the ancient laws and liberties of england it is the known birthright and inheritance of the subject that no tax, tallage, or other charge shall be levied or imposed but by common consent in england, and that the subsidies of tonnage and poundage are no way due or payable but by a free gift and special act of parliament." in these memorable words began the declaration moved by sir john eliot in the house of commons on march nd, . a royal message ordering the adjournment of the house was disregarded, the speaker was held down in his chair, and the key of the house of commons was turned against intrusion, while eliot's resolutions, declaring that the privileges of the commons must be preserved, were carried with enthusiasm. charles answered these resolutions by dissolving parliament and sending eliot to the tower. for eleven years no parliament was summoned. eliot refused altogether to make any defence for his parliamentary conduct. "i hold that it is against the privilege of parliament to speak of anything which is done in the house," was his reply to the crown lawyers. so sir john eliot was left in prison, for nothing would induce this devoted believer in representative government to yield to the royal pressure, and three years later, at the age of forty-two, he died in the tower. it was for the liberties of the house of commons that eliot gave his life. wasted with sickness, health and freedom were his if he would but acknowledge the right of the crown to restrain the freedom of parliamentary debate; but such an acknowledgment was impossible from sir john eliot. for him the privilege of the house of commons in the matter of free speech was a sacred cause, to be upheld by members of parliament, even to the death--a cause every whit as sacred to eliot as the divine right of kings was to the stuart bishops. charles hoped to govern england through his ministers without interference from the commons, and only the need of money compelled him to summon parliament. john hampden saw that if the king could raise money by forced loans and other exactions, the days of constitutional government were over. hence his memorable resistance to ship-money. london and the seaports were induced to provide supplies for ships in , on the pretext that piracy must be prevented. in the following year the demand was extended to the inland counties, and hampden refused point blank to pay--though the amount was only a matter of s.--falling back, in justification of his refusal, on the petition of right--acknowledged by charles in --which declared that taxes were not to be levied without the consent of parliament. the case was decided in , and five of the twelve judges held that hampden's objection was valid. the arguments in favour of non-payment were circulated far and wide, so that, in spite of the adverse verdict, "the judgment proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to the king's service."[ ] the personal rule of charles and his ministers, laud and strafford, came to an end in the autumn of , when there was no choice left to the king but to summon parliament, if money was to be obtained. earlier in the year the "short parliament" had met, only to be dissolved by the folly of the king after a sitting of three weeks, because of its unwillingness to vote supplies without the redress of grievances. the disasters of the king's campaign against the scots, an empty treasury, and a mutinous army, compelled the calling of parliament. but the temper of the men who came to the house of commons in november was vastly different from the temper of the "short parliament."[ ] for this was the famous "long parliament" that assembled in the dark autumn days of , and it was to sit for thirteen years; to see the impeachment and execution of laud and strafford, the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of monarchy and the house of lords, the establishment of the commonwealth; and was itself to pass away finally only before cromwell's military dictatorship. hampden was the great figure at the beginning of this parliament. "the eyes of all men were fixed upon him, as their _patriæ pater_, and the pilot that must steer the vessel through the tempests and rocks which threatened it. i am persuaded (wrote clarendon) his power and interest at that time were greater to do good or hurt than any man's in the kingdom, or than any man of his rank hath had at any time; for his reputation of honesty was universal, and his affections seemed so publicly guided, that no corrupt or private ends could bias them." politically, neither hampden nor pym was republican. both believed in government by king, lords, and commons; but both were determined that the king's ministers should be answerable to parliament for the policy of the crown, and that the commons, who found the money for government, should have a definite say in the spending of that money. as for the royal claim of "divine right," and the royal view that held passive obedience to be the duty of the king's subjects, and saw in parliament merely a useful instrument for the raising of funds to be spent by the royal pleasure without question or criticism--these things were intolerable to hampden, pym, and the men of the house of commons. the king would not govern through parliament; the house of commons could govern without a king. it was left to the civil war to decide the issue between the crown and parliament, and make the house of commons supreme. things moved quickly in the first year of the long parliament. the star chamber and high commission courts were abolished. strafford was impeached for high treason, and executed on tower hill. archbishop laud lay in prison, to be executed four years later. the grand remonstrance of the house of commons was presented to charles in december, . the demands of the commons in the remonstrance were not revolutionary, but they stated, quite frankly, the case for the parliament. the main points were the need for securities for the administration of justice, and an insistence on the responsibility of the king's ministers to the houses of parliament. the grand remonstrance was only carried by eleven votes in the house of commons, to , after wild scenes. "some waved their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pummels in their hands, setting the lower part on the ground." actual violence was only prevented "by the sagacity and great calmness of mr. hampden, by a short speech." charles promised an answer to the deputation of members who waited upon him with the grand remonstrance, and early in the new year came the reply. the king simply demanded the surrender of five members--pym, hampden, holles, strode, and hazlerig--and their impeachment on the charge of high treason. all constitutional law was set aside by a charge which proceeded personally from the king, which deprived the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned them before a tribunal which had no pretence to a justification over them. on the refusal of the commons to surrender their members, charles came in person to westminster with cavaliers to demand their arrest. but the five members, warned of the king's venture, were well out of the way, and rested safely within the city of london--for the citizens were strongly for the parliament. "it was believed that if the king had found them there (in the house of commons), and called in his guards to have seized them, the members of the house would have endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very unhappy and sad business." as it was, charles could only retire "in a more discontented and angry passion than he came in." the step was utterly ill-advised. parliament was in no mood to favour royal encroachments, and the citizens of london were at hand, with their trained bands, to protect forcibly members of the house of commons. war was now imminent. "the attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of the war. from that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the popular party were beginning to regard the king was turned into hatred and suspicion. from that moment, the parliament was compelled to surround itself with defensive arms. from that moment, the city assumed the appearance of a garrison. "the transaction was illegal from beginning to end. the impeachment was illegal. the process was illegal. the service was illegal. if charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a bill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. that a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the lords at the suit of the crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. that no man can be arrested by the king in person is equally clear. this was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of edward the fourth. 'a subject,' said chief justice markham to that prince, 'may arrest for treason; the king cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy against the king.'"[ ] both king and parliament broke rudely through all constitutional precedents in their preparations for hostilities. the king levied troops by a royal commission, without any advice from parliament, and pym got an ordinance passed, in both houses, appointing the lords-lieutenant of the counties to command the militia without warrant from the crown. a last attempt at negotiations was made at york, in april, when the proposals of parliament--nineteen propositions for curtailing the power of the monarchy in favour of the commons--were rejected by charles with the words: "if i granted your demands, i should be no more than the mere phantom of a king." by august, charles had raised the royal standard at nottingham, and war was begun. five years later and charles was a prisoner, to die in on the scaffold. that same year monarchy and the house of lords were abolished by law; the established church had already fallen before the triumphant arms of the puritans. then, in , the house of commons itself fell--expelled by cromwell; and the task of the lord protector was to fashion a constitution that would work.[ ] what happened was the supremacy of the army. parliament, attenuated and despised, contended in vain against the protector. on cromwell's death, and the failure of his son, richard, the army declared for charles ii., and there was an end to the commonwealth. the democratic protest--lilburne in all these changes the great mass of the people had neither part nor lot; and the famous leaders of the parliamentary party, resolute to curtail the absolutism of the crown, were no more concerned with the welfare of the labouring people than the barons were in the time of john. the labouring people--generally--were equally indifferent to the fortunes of roundheads and cavaliers, though the townsmen in many places held strong enough opinions on the matters of religion that were in dispute.[ ] that the common misery of the people was not in any way lightened by cromwell's rule we have abundant evidence, and it cannot be supposed that the substitution of the presbyterian discipline for episcopacy in the church, and the displacement of presbyterians by independents, was likely to alleviate this misery. taxation was heavier than it had ever been before, and in lancashire, westmorland, and cumberland the distress was appalling. whitelocke, writing in ,[ ] notes "that many families in lancashire were starved." "that many in cumberland and westmorland died in the highways for want of bread, and divers left their habitations, travelling with their wives and children to other parts to get relief, but could find none. that the committees and justices of the peace of cumberland signed a certificate, that there were , families that had neither seed nor bread-corn, nor money to buy either, and they desired a collection for them, which was made, but much too little to relieve so great a multitude." cromwell, occupied with high affairs of state, had neither time nor inclination to attend to social reform. democracy had its witnesses; lilburne and the levellers made their protest against military rule, and were overpowered; winstanley and his diggers endeavoured to persuade the country that the common land should be occupied by dispossessed peasants, and were quickly suppressed. lilburne was concerned with the establishment of a political democracy, winstanley with a social democracy, and in both cases the propaganda was offensive to the protector. had cromwell listened to lilburne, and made concessions towards democracy, the reaction against puritanism and the commonwealth might have been averted.[ ] john lilburne had been a brave soldier in the army of the parliament in the early years of the civil war, and he left the army in with the rank of lieutenant-colonel (and with £ arrears of pay due to him) rather than take the covenant and subscribe to the requirements of the "new model." the monarchy having fallen, lilburne saw the possibilities of tyranny in the parliamentary government, and at once spoke out. with considerable legal knowledge, a passion for liberty, clear views on democracy, an enormous capacity for work, and great skill as a pamphleteer, lilburne was not to be ignored. the government might have had him for a supporter; it unwisely decided to treat him as an enemy, and for ten years he was an unsparing critic, his popularity increasing with every fresh pamphlet he issued--and at every fresh imprisonment. lilburne urged a radical reform of parliament and a general manhood suffrage in , and the "case for the army," published by the levellers in the same year, on the proposal of the presbyterian majority in parliament that the army should be disbanded, demanded the abolition of monopolies, freedom of trade and religion, restoration of enclosed common lands, and abolition of sinecures. both cromwell and ireton were strongly opposed to manhood suffrage, and cromwell--to whom the immediate danger was a royalist reaction--had no patience for men who would embark on democratic experiments at such a season. lilburne and the levellers were equally distrustful of cromwell's new council of state. "we were ruled before by king, lords, and commons, now by a general, court-martial, and commons; and, we pray you, what is the difference?" so they put the question in . to cromwell the one safety for the commonwealth was in the loyalty of the army to the government. to lilburne the one guarantee for good government was in the supremacy of a parliament elected by manhood suffrage. he saw plainly that unless steps were taken to establish democratic institutions there was no future for the commonwealth; and he took no part in the trial of charles i., saying openly that he doubted the wisdom of abolishing monarchy before a new constitution had been drawn up. but lilburne overestimated the strength of the leveller movement in the army, and the corporals who revolted were shot by sentence of courts-martial.[ ] in vain the democratic troopers argued, "the old king's person and the old lords are but removed, and a new king and new lords with the commons are in one house, and so we are under a more absolute arbitrary monarchy than before." the government answered by clapping lilburne in the tower, where, in spite of a petition signed by , for his release, he remained for three months without being brought to trial. released on bail, lilburne, who from prison had issued an "agreement of the free people," calling for annual parliaments elected by manhood suffrage and the free election of unendowed church ministers in every parish, now published an "impeachment for high treason against oliver cromwell and his son-in-law, james ireton," and declared that monarchy was preferable to a military despotism. at last, brought to trial on the charge of "treason," lilburne was acquitted with "a loud and unanimous shout" of popular approval.[ ] "in a revolution where others argued about the respective rights of king and parliament, he spoke always of the rights of the people. his dauntless courage and his power of speech made him the idol of the mob."[ ] lilburne was again brought to trial, in , and again acquitted, with undiminished enthusiasm. but "for the peace of the nation," cromwell refused to allow the irrepressible agitator to be at large, and for two years lilburne, "free-born john," was kept in prison. during those years all power in the house of commons was broken by the rule of the army of the commonwealth, and parliament stood in abject submission before the lord protector. only when his health was shattered, and he had embraced quaker principles, was lilburne released, and granted a pension of s. a week. the following year, at the age of , lilburne died of consumption--brought on by the close confinement he had suffered. a year later, , and cromwell, by whose side lilburne had fought at marston moor, and against whose rule he had contended for so many a year, was dead, and the commonwealth government was doomed. winstanley and "the diggers" the "digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is notable for its social significance. while lilburne strove vigorously for political reforms that are still unaccomplished, gerrard winstanley preached a revolutionary gospel of social reform--as john ball and robert ket had before him. but winstanley's social doctrine allowed no room for violence, and included the non-resistance principles that found exposition in the society of friends. hence the "diggers," preaching agrarian revolution; but denying all right to force of arms, never endangered the commonwealth government as lilburne and the levellers did. free communism was the creed of more than one protestant sect in the sixteenth century, and the anabaptists on the continent had been conspicuous for their experiments in community of goods and anarchist society. winstanley confined his teaching and practice to common ownership of land, pleading for the cultivation of the enclosed common lands, "that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed." there was to be no forcible expropriation of landlords. "if the rich still hold fast to this propriety of mine and thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands. and let the common people, that say the earth is _ours_, not _mine_, let them labour together, and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains, and hills. "for as the enclosures are called such a man's land, and such a man's land, so the commons and heath are called the common people's. and let the world see who labour the earth in righteousness, and those to whom the lord gives the blessing, let them be the people that shall inherit the earth. "none can say that their right is taken from them. for let the rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together by themselves."[ ] with the common ownership and cultivation of land, an end was to be made of all tyranny of man over his fellows. [illustration: john hampden _after the engraving by g. houbraken._] "leave off dominion and lordship one over another; for the whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. leave off imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings of the curse. let those that have hitherto had no land, and have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread with the sweat of his own brow." winstanley's argument was quite simple: "if any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may say, _that is mine_. but if the lord made these for the use of his creation, surely then the earth was made by the lord to be a common treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some." two objections were urged against private property in land: "first, it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. secondly, it hath made laws to hang those that did steal. it tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills them for doing it." it was a prolific age for pamphlets, the seventeenth century; the land teemed with preachers and visionaries, and winstanley's writings never attracted the sympathy that was given to the fierce controversialists on theological and political questions. only when winstanley and his diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of st. george's hill, in surrey, in the spring of , was the attention of the council of state called to the strange proceedings. the matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the diggers were suppressed. a similar attempt to reclaim land near wellingboro' was stopped at once as "seditious and tumultuous." it was quite useless for winstanley to maintain that the english people were dispossessed of their lands by the crown at the norman conquest, and that with the execution of the king the ownership of the crown lands ought to revert to the people; cromwell and the council of state had no more patience with prophets of land nationalisation than with agitators of manhood suffrage. indeed, the commonwealth government never took the trouble to distinguish between the different groups of disaffected people, but set them all down as "levellers," to be punished as disturbers of the peace if they refused to obey authority. winstanley's last pamphlet was "true magistracy restored," an open letter to oliver cromwell, , and after its publication gerrard winstanley and his diggers are heard of no more. to-day both lilburne and winstanley are to be recalled because the agitation for political democracy is always with us, and the question of land tenure is seen to be of profound importance in the discussion of social reform. no democratic statesman in our time can propose an improvement in the social condition of the people without reference to the land question, and no social reformer of the nineteenth century has had more influence or been more widely read and discussed than henry george--the exponent of the single tax on land values. winstanley was very little heeded in his own day, but two hundred and fifty years later the civilised countries of the earth are found in deep debate over the respective rights of landowners and landless, and the relation of poverty to land ownership. state ownership, taxation of land values, peasant proprietorship, co-operative agriculture--all have their advocates to-day, but to winstanley's question whether the earth was made "for to give ease to a few or health to all," only one answer is returned. the restoration under the commonwealth the landowners were as powerful as they had been under the monarchy. enclosures continued. social reform was not contemplated by cromwell nor by councils of state; democracy was equally outside the political vision of government. church of england ministers were dispossessed in favour of nonconformists, puritanism became the established faith, catholicism remained proscribed. the interest in ecclesiastical and theological disputes was considerable, and puritanism was popular with large numbers of the middle-class. but to the mass of the people puritanism was merely the suppression of further liberties, the prohibition of old customs, the stern abolition of christmas revels and may-day games. lilburne did his best to get cromwell to allow the people some responsibility in the choice of its rulers. winstanley proposed a remedy for the social distress. to neither of these men was any concession made, and no consideration was given to their appeals. hence the bulk of the nation, ignored by the commonwealth government, and alienated by puritanism, accepted quite amiably--indeed, with enthusiasm--the restoration of the monarchy on the return of charles ii., and was unmoved by the royalist reaction against parliamentary government that followed on the restoration. the house of commons itself, when monk and his army had gone over to the side of charles, voted, in the convention parliament of , "that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by king, lords, and commons," and charles ii. was received in london with uproarious enthusiasm. the army was disbanded; a royalist house of commons restored the church of england and ordered general acceptance of its prayer book. puritanism, driven from rule, could only remain in power in the heart and conscience of its adherents. to the old commonwealth man it might seem, in the reaction against puritanism, and in the popularity of the king, that all that had been striven for in the civil war had been lost, in the same way as after the death of simon of montfort it might have appeared that "the good cause" had perished with its great leader. in reality the house of commons stood on stronger ground than ever, and was to show its strength when james ii. attempted to override its decisions. in the main the very forms of parliamentary procedure were settled in the seventeenth century, to remain undisturbed till the nineteenth century. "the parliamentary procedure of was essentially the procedure on which the house of commons conducted its business during the long parliament."[ ] with charles ii. on the throne the absolutism of the crown over parliament passed for ever from england. cromwell had set up the supremacy of the army over the commons: this, too, was gone, never to be restored. henceforth government was to be by king, lords, and commons; but sovereignty was to reside in parliament. not till a century later would democracy again be heard of, and its merits urged, as lilburne had urged them under the commonwealth. * * * * * chapter v constitutional government--aristocracy triumphant government by aristocracy for nearly two centuries--from to --england was governed by an aristocracy of landowners. charles ii. kept the throne for twenty-five years, because he had wit enough to avoid an open collision with parliament. james ii. fled the country after three years--understanding no more than his father had understood that tyranny was not possible save by consent of parliament or by military prowess. at the restoration the royal prerogative was dead, and nothing in charles ii.'s reign tended to diminish the power of parliament in favour of the throne. charles was an astute monarch who did not wish to be sent on his travels again, and consequently took care not to outrage the nation by any attempt upon the liberties of parliament. only by the tudor method of using parliament as the instrument of the royal will could james ii. have accomplished the constitutional changes he had set his heart upon. in attempting to set up toleration for the roman catholic religion, and in openly appointing roman catholics to positions of importance, james ii. set parliament at defiance and ranged the forces of the established church against himself. the method was doomed to failure. "none have gone about to break parliaments but in the end parliaments have broken them."[ ] in any case the notion of restoring political liberty to catholics was a bold endeavour in . against the will of parliament the project was folly. to overthrow the rights of corporations and of the universities, and to attempt to bully the church of england, after elizabeth's fashion, at the very beginning of a pro-catholic movement, was to provoke defeat. parliament decided that james ii. had "abdicated," when, deserted by churchill, he fled to france, and william and mary came to the throne at the express invitation of parliament. the revolution completed the work of the long parliament by defining the limits of monarchy, and establishing constitutional government. it was not--this revolution, of --the first time parliament had sanctioned the deposing of the king of england and the appointment of his successor,[ ] but it was the last. never again since the accession of william and mary have the relations of the crown and parliament been strained to breaking point; never has the supremacy of parliament been seriously threatened by the power of the throne. the full effects of the revolution of were seen in the course of the next fifty years. aristocracy, then mainly whig, was triumphant, and under its rule, while large measures of civil and religious liberty were passed, the condition of the mass of labouring people was generally wretched in the extreme. the rule of the aristocracy saw england become a great power among the nations of the world, and the british navy supreme over the navies of europe; but it saw also an industrial population, untaught and uncared for, sink deeper and deeper into savagery and misery. for a time in the eighteenth century the farmer and the peasant were prosperous, but by the close of that century the small farmer was a ruined man, and with the labourer was carried by the industrial revolution into the town. the worst times for the english labourer in town and country since the norman conquest were the reign of edward vi. and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. the development of our political institutions into their present form; the establishment of our party system of government by cabinet, and of the authority of the prime minister; the growth of the supreme power of the commons, not only over the throne but over the lords also: these were the work of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century, and were attained by steps so gradual as to be almost imperceptible. no idea of democracy guided the process; yet our modern democratic system is firm-rooted upon the principles and privileges of the constitution as thus established. social misery deepened, without check from the politicians; and the most enlightened statesmen of the whig regime were very far from our present conceptions of the duties and possibilities of parliament. civil and religious liberty james ii. was tumbled from the throne for his vain attempt to establish toleration for catholics and nonconformists without consent of parliament. yet the whig aristocracy which followed, while it did nothing for catholics, laid broad principles of civil and religious liberty for democracy to build upon.[ ] the declaration of right, presented by parliament to william and mary on their arrival in london, was turned into the bill of rights, and passed into law in . it stands as the last of the great charters of political liberty, and states clearly both what is not permitted to the crown, and what privileges are allowed to the people. under the bill of rights the king was denied the power of suspending or dispensing, of levying money, or maintaining a standing army without consent of parliament. the people were assured of the right of the subject to petition the crown, and of the free election of representatives in parliament, and of full and free debate in parliament. any profession of the catholic religion, or marriage with a catholic, disqualified from inheritance to or possession of the throne. so there was an end to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and four hundred non-juring clergymen--including half-a-dozen bishops--of the church of england were deprived of their ecclesiastical appointments for refusing to accept the accomplished fact, and acknowledge william iii. as the lawful king of england. by making william king, to the exclusion of the children of james ii., parliament destroyed for all future time in england the belief in the sacred character of kingship. the king was henceforth a part of the constitution, and came to the throne by authority of parliament, on conditions laid down by parliament. william resented the decision of parliament not to allow the crown a revenue for life, but to vote an annual supply; but the decision was adhered to, and has remained in force ever since. the mutiny act, passed the same year, placed the army under the control of parliament, and the annual vote for military expenses has, in like manner, remained. the toleration act ( ) gave nonconformists a legal right to worship in their own chapels, but expressly excluded unitarians and roman catholics from this liberty. life was made still harder for roman catholics in england by the act of , which forbade a catholic priest, under penalty of imprisonment for life, to say mass, hear confessions, or exercise any clerical function, and denied the right of the catholic laity to hold, buy or inherit property, or to have their children educated abroad. the objection to roman catholics was that their loyalty to the pope was an allegiance to a "foreign" ruler which prevented their being good citizens at home. against this prejudice it was useless to point to what had been done by englishmen for their country, when all the land was catholic, and all accepted the supremacy of the pope. it was not till that the first catholic relief bill was carried, a bill that "shook the general prejudice against catholics to the centre, and restored to them a thousand indescribable charities in the ordinary intercourse of social life which they had seldom experienced." the last roman catholic to die for conscience' sake was oliver plunket, archbishop of armagh, who was executed at tyburn, when charles ii. was king, in . after the revolution, nonconformists and catholics were no longer hanged or tortured for declining the ministrations of the established church, but still were penalised in many lesser ways. but the spirit of the eighteenth century made for toleration, and the whigs were as unostentatious in their own piety as they were indifferent to the piety of others. the killing of "witches," however, went on in scotland and in england long after toleration had been secured for nonconformists. as late as a woman was executed for witchcraft in england.[ ] growth of cabinet rule william iii. began with a mixed ministry of whigs and tories, which included men like danby and godolphin, who had served under james ii. but the fierce wrangling that went on over the war then being waged on the continent was decidedly inconvenient, and by the whigs had succeeded in driving all the tories--who were against the war--out of office. then for the first time a united ministry was in power, and from a cabinet of men with common political opinions the next step was to secure that the cabinet should represent the party with a majority in the house of commons. our present system of cabinet rule, dependent on the will of the majority of the commons, is found in full operation by the middle of the eighteenth century. the fact that william iii., george i., and george ii. were all foreigners necessitated the king's ministers using considerable powers. but george iii. was english, and effected a revival in the personal power of the king by his determination that the choice of ministers should rest with the crown, and not with the house of commons. he succeeded in breaking up the long whig ascendancy, and so accustomed became the people to the king making and unmaking ministries, that on george iv.'s accession in it was fully expected the new king would turn out the tories and put in whigs. william iv. in did what no sovereign has done since--dissolved parliament against the wish of the government. from to the whigs were in office. then on the death of william and the accession of anne, tory ministers were included in the government, and for seven years the cabinet was composite again. but marlborough and godolphin found that if they were to remain in power it must be by the support of the whigs, who had made the support of the war against france a party question; and from to the ministry was definitely whig. by the war had ceased to be popular, and the general election of that year sent back a strong tory majority to the house of commons, with the result that the tory leaders, harley (earl of oxford) and henry st. john (bolingbroke) took office. the tories fell on the death of anne, because their plot to place james (generally called the chevalier or the old pretender), the queen's half-brother, on the throne was defeated by the readiness of the whig dukes of somerset and argyll to proclaim george, elector of hanover, king of england. by the act of settlement, , parliament had decided that the crown should pass from anne to the heirs of sophia, electress of hanover and daughter of james i.; and the fact that the chevalier was a catholic made his accession impossible according to law, and the policy of bolingbroke highly treasonable. george i. could not speak english, and relied entirely on his whig ministers. bolingbroke fled to the continent, but was permitted to return from exile nine years later. oxford was impeached and sent to the tower. the whigs were left in triumph to rule the country for nearly fifty years--until the restiveness of george iii. broke up their dominion--and for more than twenty years of that period walpole was prime minister. cabinet government--that is, government by a small body of men, agreed upon main questions of policy, and commanding the confidence of the majority of the house of commons--was now in full swing, and in spite of the monarchist revival under george iii., no king henceforth ever refused consent to a bill passed by parliament. the whigs did nothing in those first sixty years of the eighteenth century to make the house of commons more representative of the people. they were content to repeat the old cries of the revolution, and to oppose all proposals of change. but they governed england without oppression, and walpole's commercial and financial measures satisfied the trading classes and kept national credit sound. walpole's rule walpole remained in power from to by sheer corruption--there was no other way open to him. he laughed openly at all talk of honesty and purity, and his influence lowered the whole tone of public life.[ ] but he kept in touch with the middle classes, was honest personally, and had a large amount of tact and good sense. his power in the house of commons endured because he understood the management of parliamentary affairs, and had a genius for discerning the men whose support he could buy, and whose support was valuable. george iii. went to work in much the same way as walpole had done, and only succeeded in breaking down the power of the whig houses by using the same corrupt methods that walpole had employed. the "king's friends," as they were called, acted independently of the party leaders, and in the pay of the king were the chief instrument of george iii.'s will. the change in the house of lords but george iii. not only turned the whigs out of office, he altered permanently the political complexion of the house of lords. from the time of the revolution of to the death of george ii. in , the lords were whiggish, and the majority of english nobles held whig principles. they were, on the whole, men of better education than the average member of the house of commons, who was in most cases a fox-hunting squire, of the squire western type. the house of lords stood in the way of the commons when, in the tory reaction of , the commons proposed to impeach somers, the whig chancellor, a high-minded and skilful lawyer, "courteous and complaisant, humane and benevolent," for his share in the second partition treaty of , and this was the beginning of a bitter contest between the tory commons and the whig lords. an attempt was made by the commons to impeach walpole on his fall in , but the lords threw out a bill proposing to remit the penalties to which his prosecutor might be liable, and the king made walpole a peer. george iii., by an unsparing use of his prerogative, changed the character and politics of the upper house. his creations were country gentlemen of sufficient wealth to own "pocket" boroughs in the house of commons, and lawyers who supported the royal prerogative.[ ] from george iii.'s time onward there has always been a standing and ever-increasing majority of tory peers in the house of lords. and while the actual number of members of the upper house has been enlarged enormously, this majority has became enlarged out of all proportion. liberal and tory prime ministers were busy throughout the nineteenth century adding to the peerage--no less than new peers were created between and ; but comparatively few liberals retained their principles when they became peers, and two of the present chiefs of the unionist party in the house of lords--lords lansdowne and selborne--are the sons of eminent liberals. so it has come about that while the house of commons has been steadily opening its doors to men of all ranks and classes, and in our time has become increasingly democratic in character, the house of lords, confined in the main to men of wealth and social importance, has become an enormous assembly of undistinguished persons, where only a small minority are active politicians, and of this minority at least three-fourths are conservatives. this change in the house of lords began, as we have seen, in the reign of george iii., when the whig ascendancy in parliament had passed. but the whigs did nothing during their long lease of power to bring democracy nearer, and were entirely contemptuous of popular aspirations. at the very time when the democratic idea was the theme of philosophers, and was to be seen expressed in the constitution of the revolted american colonies, and in the french revolution, england remained under an aristocracy, governed first by whigs, and then by tories. it is true democracy was not without its spokesmen in england in the eighteenth century, but there was no popular movement in politics to stir the masses of the people, as the preaching of the methodists stirred their hearts for religion. democratic ideas were as remote from popular discussion in the eighteenth century as they had been made familiar by lilburne for a brief season in the seventeenth century. "wilkes and liberty" a word must be said about john wilkes, a man of disreputable character and considerable ability, who for some ten years-- - --contended for the rights of electors against the whig government. the battle began when george grenville, the whig prime minister, had wilkes arrested on a general warrant for an article attacking the king's speech in no. of the _north briton_, a scurrilous newspaper which belonged to wilkes. chief justice pratt declared the arrest illegal on the ground that the warrant was bad, and that wilkes, being at the time m.p. for aylesbury, enjoyed the privilege of parliament. a jury awarded wilkes heavy damages against the government for false imprisonment, and the result of the trial made wilkes a popular hero. then, in , the government brought a new charge of blasphemy and libel, and wilkes, expelled from the house of commons, and condemned by the king's bench, fled to france, and was promptly declared an outlaw. he returned, however, a year or two later, and while in prison was elected m.p. for middlesex. the house of commons, led by the government, set the election aside, and riots for "wilkes and liberty" broke out in london. the question was: had the house of commons a right to exclude a member duly elected for a constituency?--the same question that was raised over charles bradlaugh, a man of very different character, in the parliament of . again and again in and wilkes was re-elected for middlesex, only to be expelled, and finally the house decided that wilkes' opponent, colonel luttrell, was to sit, although luttrell was manifestly not chosen by the majority of electors. the citizens of london replied to this by choosing wilkes for sheriff and alderman in , and by making him lord mayor four years later. the government gave up the contest at last, and wilkes was allowed to take his seat. besides vindicating the right of constituencies against the claim of parliament to exclude undesirable persons, wilkes did a good deal towards securing that right of parliamentary debating which was practically admitted after . but the "wilkes and liberty" movement was no more than a popular enthusiasm of the london mob for an enemy of the government, and a determination of london citizens and middlesex electors not to be brow-beaten by the government. wilkes himself always denied that he was a "wilkesite," and he had no following in the country or in parliament. * * * * * chapter vi the rise of the democratic idea the witness of the middle ages the idea of constitutional government has its witnesses in the middle ages, democratic theories are common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is not till the eighteenth century that france, aflame to realise a political ideal, proves that democracy has passed from the books of schoolmen and philosophers, and is to be put in practice by a nation in arms. in the thirteenth century the friars rallied to simon of montfort and preached, not democracy, but constitutional liberty.[ ] thomas aquinas, the great dominican doctor, became the chief exponent of political theory, and maintained that sovereignty expressed in legislative power should be exercised for the common good, and that a mixed government of monarch, nobles, and people, with the pope as a final court of appeal, would best attain that end.[ ] a hundred years later, john ball and his fellow agitators preached a gospel of social equality that inspired the peasant revolt. but communism was the goal of the peasant leaders in , and freedom from actual oppression the desire of their followers. no conception of political democracy can be found in the speeches and demands of wat tyler. in the sixteenth century robert ket in norfolk renewed the old cries of social revolution, and roused the countryside to stop the enclosures by armed revolt. and again the popular rising is an agrarian war to end intolerable conditions, not a movement for popular government. the "social contract" theory the theory of a pact or contract between the government and the people became the favourite assumption of political writers from the sixteenth century onward, and it was this theory that rousseau popularised in his "social contract," the theory, too, which triumphed for a season in the french revolution. the theory is, of course, pure assumption, without any basis in history, and resting on no foundation of fact. it assumes that primitive man was born with enlightened views on civil government, and that for the greater well-being of his tribe or nation he deposited the sovereign authority which belonged to himself, in a prince or king--or in some other form of executive government--retaining the right to withdraw his allegiance from the government if the authority is abused, and the contract which conferred sovereignty violated. it was not maintained that the contract was an actually written document; it was supposed to be a tacit agreement. the whole theory seems to have sprung from the study of roman law and the constitutions of athens and sparta. nothing was known of primitive man or of the beginnings of civilisation till the nineteenth century. the bible and the classical literature of greece and rome are all concerned with civilised, not primitive, man, and with slaves and "heathens" who are accounted less than men. the "sovereign people" of athens and sparta became the model of later republican writers, while the choosing of a king by the israelites recorded in the old testament sanctioned the idea, for early protestant writers, that sovereignty was originally in the people. the huguenot languet, in his _vindiciae contra tyrannos_ ( ), maintained on scriptural grounds that kingly power was derived from the will of the people, and that the violation by the king of the mutual compact of king and people to observe the laws absolved the people from all allegiance.[ ] the jesuit writers, bellarmine and mariana, argued for the sovereignty of the people as the basis of kingly rule; and when the english divines of the established church were upholding the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the spanish jesuit, suarez, was amongst those who attacked that doctrine, quoting a great body of legal opinion in support of the contention that "the prince has that power of law giving which the people have given him." suarez, too, insists that all men are born equal, and that "no one has a political jurisdiction over another." milton, in his "tenure of kings and magistrates" ( ), had taken a similar line: the people had vested in kings and magistrates the authority and power of self-defence and preservation. "the power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright." hooker, fifty years earlier ( - ), in his "ecclesiastical polity," book i., had affirmed the sovereignty or legislative power of the people as the ultimate authority, and had also declared for an original social contract, "all public regiment of what kind soever seemeth evidently to have risen from deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful." hobbes made the social contract a justification for royal absolutism, and locke, with a whig ideal of constitutional government, enlarged on the right of a people to change its form of government, and justified the revolution of . the writings of hobbes and locke have had a lasting influence, and locke is really the source of the democratic stream of the eighteenth century. it rises in locke to become the torrent of the french revolution. but huguenots and jesuits, hooker and milton--what influence had their writings on the mass of english people? none whatever, as far as we can see. milton could write of "the power" of "the people" as a "natural birthright," but the power was plainly in cromwell's army, and "the people" had no means of expression concerning its will, and no opportunity for the assertion of sovereignty. lilburne and the levellers held that democracy could be set up on the ruins of charles i.'s government, and the sovereignty of the people become a fact; and with a ready political instinct lilburne proposed the election of popular representatives on a democratic franchise. cromwell rejected all lilburne's proposals; for him affairs of state were too serious for experiments in democracy; and lilburne himself was cast into prison by the commonwealth government. lilburne's pamphlets were exceedingly numerous, and his popularity, in london particularly, enormous. he was the voice of the unrepresented, powerless citizens in whom the republican theorists saw the centre of authority. the one effort to persuade the commonwealth republic to give power to the people was made by john lilburne, and it was defeated. the whig theory that an aristocratic house of commons, elected by a handful of people, and mainly at the dictation of the landowners, was "the people," triumphed. the bulk of the english people were left out of all account in the political struggles of whigs and tories, and democracy was not dreamed of till america was free and france a republic. the industrial revolution compelled the reform of the british house of commons, and democracy has slowly superseded aristocracy, not from any enthusiasm for the "sovereign people," but from the traditional belief that representative government means the rule of the people. precedent, not theory, has been the argument for democracy in england. thomas hobbes ( - ) the writings of hobbes are important, because they state the case for absolute rule, or "a strong government," as we call it to-day. hobbes was frankly rationalist and secular. holding the great end of government to be happiness, he made out that natural man lived in savage ill-will with his fellows. to secure some sort of decency and safety men combined together and surrendered all natural rights to a sovereign--either one man, or an assembly of men--and in return civil rights were guaranteed. but the sovereignty once established was supreme, and to injure it was to injure oneself, since it was composed of "every particular man." the sovereign power was unlimited, and was not to be questioned. whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy was the form of government was unimportant, though hobbes preferred monarchy, because popular assemblies were unstable and apt to need dictators. civil laws were the standard of right and wrong, and obedience to autocracy was better than the resistance which led to civil war or anarchy--the very things that induced men to establish sovereignty. only when the safety of the state was threatened was rebellion justifiable. at bottom, the objection to the theories of hobbes is the same objection that must be taken to the theories of locke and rousseau. all these writers assume not only the fiction of a social contract, but a _static_ view of society. society is the result of growth: it is not a fixed and settled community. mankind proceeds experimentally in forms of government. to hobbes and his followers, security of life and property was the one essential thing for mankind--disorder and social insecurity the things to be prevented at all cost. now, this might be all very well but for evolution. mankind cannot rest quietly under the strongest and most stable government in the world. it will insist on learning new tricks, on thinking new thoughts, and if it is not allowed to teach itself fresh habits, it will break out in revolt, and either the government will be broken or the subjects will wither away under the rule of repression. hobbes may be quoted as a supporter of the rule of the stuarts, and equally of the rule of cromwell. every kind of strong tyranny may be defended by his principles. in the nineteenth century carlyle was the finest exponent of "strong" government, and generally the leaders of the tory party have been its advocates, particularly in the attitude to be taken towards subject races. john locke ( - ) locke, setting out to vindicate the whig revolution of , rejects hobbes' view of the savagery of primitive man, and invents "a state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance and preservation"--equally, as we know to-day, far from the truth. locke's primitive men have a natural right to personal property--"as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property"--but they are as worried and as fearful as hobbes' savages. so they, too, renounce their natural rights in favour of civil liberty, and are happy when they have got "a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected on it." according to hobbes, once having set up a government, there was no possible justification for changing it--save national peril; and a bad government was to be obeyed rather than the danger of civil war incurred. but locke never allows the government to be more than the trustee of the people who placed it in power. it rules by consent of the community, and may be removed or altered when it violates its trust. hobbes saw in the break-up of a particular government the dissolution of society. locke made a great advance on this, for he saw that a change of government could be accomplished without any very serious disturbance in the order of society or the peace of a nation. hobbes did not believe that the people could be trusted to effect a change of government, while locke had to justify the change which had just taken place in . only when we have dropped all locke's theories of primitive man's happiness, and the social-contract fiction, does the real value of his democratic teaching become clear, and the lasting influence of his work become visible. mankind is compelled to adopt some form of government if it is to sleep at nights without fear of being murdered in its bed, or if it wishes to have its letters delivered by the postman in the morning. as the only purpose of government is to secure mutual protection, mankind must obey this government, or the purpose for which government exists will be defeated. but the powers of government must be strictly limited if this necessary consent of the governed is to continue, and if the government has ceased to retain the confidence that gives consent, then its form may be changed to some more appropriate shape. now all this theory of locke's has proved to be true in the progress of modern democracy. it was pointed out that the danger of his doctrine--that a nation had the right to choose its form of government, and to change or adapt its constitution--lay in the sanction it gave to revolution; but locke answered that the natural inertia of man was a safeguard against frequent and violent political changes, and as far as england was concerned locke was right. the average englishman grumbles, but only under great provocation is he moved to violent political activity. as a nation, we have acknowledged the right of the majority to make the political changes that have brought in democracy, and we have accepted the changes loyally. occasionally, since locke, the delay of the government in carrying out the wishes of the majority has induced impatience, but, generally, the principle has been acted upon that government is carried on with the consent of the governed, and that the parliamentary party which has received the largest number of votes has the authority from the people to choose its ministry, and to make laws that all must obey. the power of the people is demonstrated by the free election of members of parliament, and, therefore, democracy requires that its authority be obeyed by all who are represented in parliament. there is no social contract between the voter and the government; but there is a general feeling that it is not so much participation in politics as the quiet enjoyment of the privileges of citizenship that obliges submission to the laws. the extension of the franchise was necessary whenever a body of people excluded from the electorate was conscious of being unrepresented and desired representation. otherwise the consent of the voteless governed was obviously non-existent, and government was carried on in defiance of the absence of that consent. it is not locke's theories that have guided politically the great masses of the people, for locke's writings have had no very considerable popularity in england. but it has happened that these theories have influenced the conduct of statesmen, and with reason, since they offer an explanation of political progress, and constrain politicians to act, experimentally indeed, but with some reasonable anticipation of safety to the nation. british statesmen and politicians have made no parade of locke's opinions; they have done nothing to incur the charge of "theorist," but the influence of locke can be seen all the same--chiefly in the loyal acceptance of political change, in the refusal to be shocked or alarmed at a "leap in the dark," and by a willingness to adjust the machinery of government to the needs of the time. in england locke's influence has been less dynamic than static; it has helped us to preserve a moderation in politics; to be content with piecemeal legislation, because to attempt too much might be to alienate the sympathies of the majority; to keep our political eye, so to speak, on the ebb and flow of public opinion--since it is public opinion that is the final court of appeal; to tolerate abuses until it is quite plain a great number of people are anxious to have the abuse removed; and above all to settle down in easy contentment under political defeat, and make the best of accomplished reforms, not because we like them, but because a parliamentary majority has decreed them. for england, in fact, the essence of locke's teaching has helped to produce a deference almost servile to political majorities and to public opinion, a reluctance to make any reform until public opinion has pronounced loudly and often in favour of reform, and an emphatic assurance that every reform enacted by parliament is the unmistakable expression of the will of the people. locke has discouraged us from hasty legislation and from political panics. rousseau and the french revolution locke's influence in france and in america has been altogether different. voltaire, rousseau, and diderot were all students and admirers of locke, and his political theories were at the base of rousseau's "social contract." a return to nature, a harking back to an imaginary primitive happiness of mankind, the glorification of an ideal of simplicity and innocence,--supposed to have been the ideal of early politics--the restoration of a popular sovereignty built up on natural rights alleged to have been lost: these were the articles of faith rousseau preached with passionate conviction in his "discourses" and in the "social contract." individual man was born naturally "free," and had become debased and enslaved by laws and civilisation. "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," is the opening sentence of the "social contract." this liberty and equality of primitive man was acclaimed as a law of nature by eighteenth century writers in france, and to some extent in england too. pope could write, "the state of nature was the reign of god." instead of a forward movement the business of man was to recover the lost happiness of the childhood of the world, to bring back a golden age of liberty and equality. locke's "state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation" is to be the desire of nations, and with wistful yearning rousseau's disciples gazed on the picture painted by their master. it was all false, all a fiction, all mischievous and misleading, this doctrine of a return to an ideal happiness of the past, and it was the most worthless portion of locke's work. to-day it is easy for us to say this, when we have learnt something of the struggle for existence in nature, something of the habits and customs of primitive man, and something of man's upward growth. but locke and rousseau were born before our limited knowledge of the history of man and his institutions had been learnt; before science, with patient research, had revealed a few incidents in the long story of man's ascent. even the history of greece and rome, as rousseau read it, was hopelessly inaccurate and incomplete. therefore, while we can see the fallacy in all the eighteenth century teaching concerning the natural happiness of uncivilised man, we must at the same time remember it as a doctrine belonging to a pre-scientific era. the excuse in france, too, for its popularity was great. civilisation weighed heavily on the nation. the whole country groaned under a misrule, and commerce and agriculture were crippled by the system of taxation. it seemed that france was impoverished to maintain a civilisation that only a few, and they not the most useful members of the community, could enjoy. how mankind had passed from primitive freedom to civilised slavery neither locke nor rousseau inquired. "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," cries rousseau, in sublime disregard of facts. for man was not born free in the ancient republics of greece and rome that rousseau revered; children were not born free in his day any more than they are in ours; and any assembly or community of people necessarily involves mutual consideration and forbearance which are at once restrictive. the truth is, of course, that man is not born free, but is born with free will to work out political freedom or to consent to servitude. he is not born with "natural" political rights, but born to acquire by law political rights. the fiction of primitive man's happiness and of the natural goodness and freedom of man did little harm in england, for locke was not a popular author, and wesley's religious revival in the eighteenth century laid awful stress on man's imperfections. the sovereign people ruled in an unreformed house of commons, and the "contract" theory was exhibited by ministers holding office on the strength of a majority in the commons. rousseau's writings depicted, with a clearness that fascinated the reader, the contrast between the ideal state that man had lost and the present condition of society with its miseries and corruption; and by its explanation of the doctrines of a contract and the sovereignty of the people, suggested the way to end these miseries and corruptions. the "social contract" became the text-book of the men who made the french revolution, and if the success of the revolution is due to the teaching of rousseau more than to that of any other french philosopher, the crimes and mistakes of the revolution are directly to be traced to his influence, and this in spite of rousseau's deprecation of violence.[ ] as there is a certain tendency in england to-day to attempt the resuscitation of rousseau's theories of popular sovereignty and the natural rights of man, and as so distinguished a writer as mr. hilaire belloc is at pains to invite the english working class to seek illumination from rousseau and to proceed to democracy guided by the speculative political doctrines of the eighteenth century rather than on the tried experimental lines of representative government and an extended franchise, it is necessary to devote to rousseau and his "social contract" more space than the subject deserves. the "social contract" is full of inaccuracies in its references to history; it is often self-contradictory, and it has not even the merit of originality. from hobbes rousseau borrowed the notion of authority in the state; from locke the seat of this authority; the nature of the original pact and of citizenship from spinoza; from the huguenot languet the doctrine of fraternity; and from althusius the doctrine of the inalienability of citizenship. where locke was content to maintain that the people collectively had the right to change the form of government, rousseau would give the community continual exercise in sovereignty, while voting and representation are signs of democratic decadence in rousseau's eyes. the sovereign people governing, not through elected representatives but by public meeting, has only been found possible in small slave-ridden states. at the revolution france had to elect its deputies. but the theory of the sovereignty of the people has over and over again, in france, upset the government, and destroyed the authority of the deputies. in england we accept the rule of parliament, and are satisfied that the election of representatives by an enfranchised people is the most satisfactory form of democracy, though we retain a healthy instinct of criticism of the government in power. in france has happened what locke's critics foretold: the sovereign people never wholeheartedly delegates its powers to its deputies, and indulges in revolution when impatient of government. during the revolution the passionate clamour of the sovereign people overpowered the votes and voices of elected representatives, and revolution and reaction were the rule in france from to . we may be frankly against the government all the time in england; we may resist it actively and passively, for the purpose of calling attention to some political grievance, some disability that needs removal. but we never forget that it is the government, or believe that it can be overturned save by the votes of the electorate. at the time of the european revolutions of , when crowns were falling, and ministers flying before the rage of the sovereign people, chartism never seriously threatened the stability of the british government, and its great demonstrations were no real menace to the existing order. nothing seems able to shake the british confidence in its elected representatives, and in the government that is supported by a majority of those representatives. we have never accepted the gospel of jean jacques rousseau; priestley and price are almost the only names that can be mentioned as disciples of rousseau before the advent of mr. h. belloc. france, still following rousseau, does not associate political sovereignty with representation as england does. it never invests the doings of its cabinet with a sacred importance, and it readily transfers the reins of government from ministry to ministry. france has submitted to the sovereignty of an emperor and to the rule of kings since the great revolution, and though its republic is now forty years old, and at present there are no signs of dictatorship on the horizon, the government of the republic is never safe from a revolutionary rising of the sovereign people, and only by the strength of its army has revolution been kept at bay. if louis xvi. had possessed the army of modern france he too might have kept the revolution at bay. all this revolution and reaction, disbelief in the authority of representative government, and lively conviction that sovereignty is with the citizens, and must be asserted from time to time--to the confusion of deputies and delegates--is rousseau's work, the reaping of the harvest sown by the "social contract." let us sum up the character of rousseau's work, and then leave him and his doctrines for ever behind us. "rousseau's scheme is that of a doctrinaire who is unconscious of the infinite variety and complexity of life, and its apparent simplicity is mainly due to his inability to realise and appreciate the difficulties of his task. he evinced no insight into the political complications of his time; and his total ignorance of affairs, together with his contempt for civilised life, prevented him from framing a theory of any practical utility. indeed, the disastrous attempt of the jacobins to apply his principles proved how valueless and impracticable most of his doctrines were. he never attempted to trace social and political evils to their causes, in order to suggest suitable modifications of existing conditions. he could not see how impossible it was to sweep away all institutions and impose a wholly new social order irrespective of the natures, faculties, and desires of those whom he wished to benefit; on the contrary, he exaggerates the passivity and plasticity of men and circumstances, and dreams that his model legislator, who apparently is to initiate the new society, will be able to repress all anti-social feelings. he aims at order and symmetry, oblivious that human nature does not easily and rapidly bend to such treatment. it is his inability to discover the true mode of investigation that accounts for much of rousseau's sophistry. his truisms and verbal propositions, his dogmatic assertions and unreal demonstrations, savour more of theology than of political science, while his quasi-mathematical method of reasoning from abstract formulæ, assumed to be axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency which is apt to be mistaken for sound logic. he supports glaring paradoxes with an array of ingenious arguments, and with fatal facility and apparent precision he deduces from his unfounded premises a series of inconsequent conclusions, which he regards as authoritative and universally applicable. at times he becomes less rigid, as when (under the influence of montesquieu) he studies the relations between the physical constitution of a nation, its territory, its customs, its form of government, and its deep-rooted opinions, or avows that there has been too much dispute about the forms of government. but such considerations are not prominent. in certain cases his inconsistencies may be due to re-handling, but he is said to have observed that those who boasted of understanding the whole contract were more clever than he."[ ] this may sound very severe, but it is entirely just. the "social contract" consists of four books: ( ) the founding of the civilized state by a social pact. ( ) the theory of the sovereignty of the people. ( ) and ( ). the different forms of government; the indestructible character of the general will of the community; and civil religion. the whole work teems with generalisations, mostly ill-founded, and the details are not in agreement. the one thing of permanent value is the conception that the state represents the "general will" of the community. how that "general will" finds expression and gets its way is of great importance to democracy. even more important is the nature of that "general will." individualist as rousseau was in his views about personal property (following locke in an apparent ideal of peasant proprietorship), he insisted on the subjection of personal rights to the safety of the commonwealth. american independence the resistance of the american colonies to the british government did not commence with any spirit of independence. the tea incident at boston took place in , and it was not till three years later that the declaration of independence was drawn up. the whig principles of are at the foundation of american liberties, and locke's influence is to be seen both in the declaration of independence and in the american constitution. the colonists from the first had in many states a puritanism that was hostile to the prerogatives of governors, and appeals to the british government against the misuse of the prerogative were generally successful. the colonists wanted no more, and no less, than the constitutional rights enjoyed by englishmen in great britain, and while the whigs were in power these rights were fairly secure. george iii., attempting a reversion to monarchist rule, drove the colonists to war and to seek independence; with the aid of france this independence was won. if the french officers who assisted the americans brought the doctrines of rousseau to the revolted colonists, which is possible, it is quite certain that the establishment of the american republic, and the principles of la fayette and paine, who had fought in the american war, were not without effect in france. the american constitution was the work of men who believed in democratic government as locke had defined it, and america has been the biggest experiment in democracy the world has seen. the fact that the president and his cabinet are not members of congress makes the great distinction between the british and american constitution. the college of electors is elected only to elect the president; that done, its work is over. congress, consisting of members elected from each state, and the senate, consisting of representatives from each state, need not contain a majority of the president's party, and the president is in no way responsible to congress as the british prime minister is to the house of commons. the relation of the state governments to the federal government has presented the chief difficulty to democracy in america. the whigs, or republicans, as they came to be called, stood for a strong federal government; the democrats were jealous for the rights of state governments. the issue was not decided till the civil war of - , when the southern slave-holding states, seeing slavery threatened, announced their secession from the united states. abraham lincoln, the newly-elected president, declared that the government could not allow secession, and insisted that the war was to save the union. slavery was abolished and the union saved by the defeat of the secessionists; but for a time the fortunes of the union were more desperate than they had been at any time since the declaration of independence. hamilton was the real founder of the republican party, as jefferson was of the democrats. both these men were prominent in the making of the american constitution in , and jefferson was the responsible author of the declaration of independence. but franklin and paine made large contributions to the democratic independence of america. thomas paine ( - ) edmund randolph, the first attorney-general of the united states, was on washington's staff at the beginning of the war, and he ascribed independence in the first place to george iii., but next to "thomas paine, an englishman by birth."[ ] paine's later controversies with theological opponents have obscured his very considerable services to american independence, to political democracy in england, and to constitutional government in the french revolution; and as mankind is generally, and naturally, more interested in religion than in politics, paine is remembered rather as an "infidel"--though he was a strong theist--than as a gifted writer on behalf of democracy and a political reformer of original powers. paine--who came of a suffolk quaker family--reached america in , on the very threshold of the war. his quaker principles made him attack negro slavery on his arrival, and he endeavoured, without success, to get an anti-slavery clause inserted in the "declaration of independence." he served in the american ranks during the war, and was the friend of washington, who recognised the value of his writings. for paine's "common sense" pamphlet and his publication, "the crisis," had enormous circulation, and were of the greatest value in keeping the spirit of independence alive in the dark years of the war. they were fiercely republican; and though they were not entirely free from contemporary notions of government established on the ruins of a lost innocence, they struck a valiant note of self-reliance, and emphasised the importance of the average honest man. "time makes more converts than reason," wrote paine. of monarchy he could say, "the fate of charles i. hath only made kings more subtle--not more just"; and, "of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of god, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." paine was in england in , busy with scientific inventions, popular in whig circles and respected. the fall of the bastille won his applause, as it did the applause of fox and the whigs, but it was not till the publication of burke's "reflections on the revolution in france," in , that paine again took up his pen on behalf of democracy. burke had been the hero of paine and the americans in the war of independence, and his speeches and writings had justified the republic. and now it was the political philosophy of hobbes that burke seemed to be contending for when he insisted that the english people were bound for ever to royalty by the act of allegiance to william iii. paine replied to burke the following year with the "rights of man" which he wrote in a country inn, the "angel," at islington. it was not so much to demolish burke as to give the english nation a constitution that paine desired; for it seemed to the author of "common sense" that, america having renounced monarchy and set up a republican form of government, safely guarded by a written constitution, england must be anxious to do the same thing, and was only in need of a constitution. the flamboyant rhetoric of the american declaration of independence--"we hold these truths to be self-evident--that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--was not the sort of language that appealed to english whigs (america itself cheerfully admitted the falseness of the statement by keeping the negro in slavery), and the glittering generalities of the "rights of man" made no impression on the whig leaders in parliament. paine was back in the old regions of a social contract, and of a popular sovereignty antecedent to government. it was all beside the mark, this talk of a popular right inherent in the nation, a right that gave the power to make constitutional changes not _through_ elected representatives in parliament, but by a general convention. parliament in the sight of the whigs was the sovereign assembly holding its authority from the people, and only by a majority in the house of commons could the people express its will. what made the "rights of man" popular with the english democrats of the "constitutional society" and the sympathisers with the french revolution was not so much the old pre-historic popular "sovereignty" fiction--though it is true that there were many englishmen, of whom godwin was one, who could see no hope of parliament reforming itself or of granting any measure of enfranchisement to the people, and therefore were willing to fall back on any theory for compelling parliament to move towards a more liberal constitution--as the programme of practical reforms that was unfolded in its pages and the honest defence of the proceedings in paris. that parliament had no right to bind posterity, as burke maintained, and that if the revolution of was authoritative, why should a revolution in be less authoritative? were matters of less interest than the clear statement of events in france, and the proposals for a democratic constitution in england and for social reform. fifty thousand copies of the "rights of man" were quickly sold, and it obtained a large number of readers in america, and was translated into french. the total sales were estimated at , in . paine followed it up with part ii. while he was an elected member of the national convention in paris, and in , when a cheap edition of the "rights of man" was issued, its author was tried for high treason, and in his absence convicted and outlawed. part i. of the "rights of man," while relying on the popular "sovereignty" fiction for getting a national convention, contained a careful definition of representative government. it showed that government by democracy--i.e. by popular meeting, suitable enough for small and primitive societies--must degenerate into hopeless confusion in a large population; that monarchy and aristocracy which sprang from the political confusion of the people must degenerate into incapacity. a representative government was the control of a nation by persons elected by the whole nation, and the rights of man were the rights of all to this representation. as a nation we have never admitted any "natural" political rights to man, but we have steadily insisted on the constitutional right of representation in parliament to those who possess a fixed abode and contribute by taxation to the national revenue. paine attacked all hereditary authority and all titles, but approved a double chamber for parliament. he claimed that the whole nation ought to decide on the question of war with a foreign country, and urged that no member of parliament should be a government pensioner. in part ii. there is a confident announcement that "monarchy and aristocracy will not continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries of europe," so sure was paine that civilised mankind would hasten to follow the examples of france and america, and summon national conventions for the making of republican constitutions. as the old form of government had been hereditary, the new form was to be elective and representative. the money hitherto spent on the crown was to be devoted to a national system of elementary education--all children remaining at school till the age of --and to old-age pensions for all over . it is in these financial proposals and the suggested social reforms that paine is seen as a pioneer of democracy. a progressive income tax is included in this part ii., the tax to be graduated from d. in the £ on incomes between £ to £ ; d. on incomes between £ and £ , ; an additional d. up to £ , ; and then s. on every additional £ , until we get to an income tax of s. in the £ on an income of £ , a year. the popularity of paine's proposals in england and the reign of terror in france frightened the british government into a policy of fierce persecution against all who bought, sold, lent or borrowed the "rights of man." "constitutional societies" were suppressed, and all who dared openly express sympathy with revolutions or republics were promptly arrested. paine, outlawed by the british government, contended in the national convention for a republican constitution for france, did his best to prevent the execution of louis xvi., fell with the girondins, was thrown into prison, and only escaped with his life by an accident. then, under the very shadow of the guillotine paine wrote his "age of reason," to recall france from atheism to a mild humanitarian theism. this book was fatal to paine's reputation. henceforth the violent denunciation of theological opponents pursued him to the grave, and left his name a byword to the orthodox. as paine's contribution to the body of democratic belief in the "rights of man" was submerged in the discussion on his religious opinions, so was his early plea for what he called "agrarian justice." on his release from a prison cell in the luxembourg, in , paine published his "plan for a national fund." this plan was an anticipation of our modern proposals for land reform. paine urged the taxation of land values--the payment to the community of a ground-rent--and argued for death duties as "the least troublesome method" of raising revenue. it was in the preface to this pamphlet on "agrarian justice" that paine replied to bishop watson's sermon on "the wisdom and goodness of god in having made both rich and poor." "it is wrong," wrote paine, "to say god made rich and poor; he made only male and female, and gave them the earth for their inheritance." napoleon organised the plebiscite, which conferred on him the consulate for life, in , and the french revolution and constitution making having yielded to a military dictatorship, paine returned to america, and died in new york in . major cartwright and the "radical reformers" john cartwright, the "father of reform," is notable as the first of the english "radical reformers." his direct influence on politics was small--none of his writings had the success of the "rights of man"--but, like paine, he laboured to turn england by public opinion from aristocracy to democracy, and for more than forty years cartwright was to the fore with his programme of radical reform. the problem for cartwright and the radical reformers was how to get the changes made which would give political power to the people--with whom was the sovereignty, as they had learnt from locke--and make parliament the instrument of democracy. a hundred years and more have not sufficed to get this problem answered to everybody's satisfaction, but in the latter part of the eighteenth century, to the minds of simple, honest men, it seemed enough that the argument should be stated plainly and reasonably; it would follow that all mankind would be speedily convinced; so great was the faith in the power of reason. what neither cartwright nor paine understood was, that it was not the reasonableness of a proposed reform but the strength of the demand that carried the day. the revolt and independence of the american colonies were not due to a political preference for a republic, but were the work of public opinion driven by misgovernment to protest. the difficulty in england was that the mass of people might be in great wretchedness, badly housed, ill-fed, and generally neglected, but they were not conscious of any desire for democracy. they were against the government, doubtless, and willing enough, in london, to shout for "wilkes and liberty," but the time had not yet come for the working class to believe that enfranchisement was a remedy for the ills they endured. major cartwright was an exceedingly fine type of man; conscientious, public spirited, humane, and utterly without personal ambition. he resigned his commission in the navy because he believed it wrong to fight against the american colonies, and he organised a county militia for the sake of national defence. on the pedestal beneath his statue in cartwright gardens, just south of euston road, in london, the virtues of the "father of reform" are described at length, and he is mentioned as "the firm, consistent and persevering advocate of _universal suffrage_, equal representation, vote by ballot, and annual parliaments." it was in that cartwright published his first pamphlet entitled "legislative rights vindicated," and pleaded for "a return to the ancient and constitutional practice of edward iii." and the election of annual parliaments. long parliaments were the root of all social political evil, cartwright argued. war, national debt, distress, depopulation, land out of cultivation, parliamentary debate itself become a mockery--these calamities were all due to long parliaments; and would be cured if once a year--on june st--a fresh parliament was elected by the votes of every man over eighteen--by ballot and without any plural voting--and a payment of two guineas a day was made to members on their attendance. of course, cartwright could not help writing "all are by nature free, all are by nature equal"--no political reformer in the eighteenth century could do otherwise--but, unlike his contemporaries, the major was a stout christian, and insisted that as the whole plan of christianity was founded on the equality of all mankind, political rights must have the same foundation. by the political axiom that "no man shall be taxed but with his own consent, given either by himself or his own representative in parliament," cartwright may be quoted as one who had some perception of what democracy meant in england; but he is off the track again in arguing that personality, and not the possession of property, was the sole foundation of the right of being represented in parliament. it was the possession of property that brought taxation, and with taxation the right to representation. we cannot repeat too often that in england the progress to democracy has never been made on assumptions of an abstract right to vote. we have come to democracy by experience, and this experience has taught us that people who are taxed insist, sooner or later, on having a voice in the administration of the national exchequer. but we have never admitted "personality" as a title to enfranchisement. [illustration: the gordon riots _from the painting by seymour lucas, r.a._] cartwright followed with the multitude of political writers of his time to deduce a right to vote, and his deduction is as worthless as the rest of the _a priori_ reasoning. but the brave old man--he was tried for "sedition" at the age of eighty in the government panic of --was an entirely disinterested champion of the poor and a real lover of liberty. he believed the affairs of government ought to be a matter of common concern, and that they were quite within the capacities of ordinary men. cartwright's life--much more than his writings--kept the democratic ideal unshaken in the handful of "radical reformers" who survived the tory reaction on the war with the french republic in , and his glowing enthusiasm helped to kindle the fire for political enfranchisement that was burning in the hearts of the manufacturing population by . but in the electorate was not anxious for reform, and the unenfranchised gave no thought to their political disabilities. on the very day in that the duke of richmond proposed, in the house of lords, a resolution in favour of manhood suffrage and annual parliaments, the london mob, stirred up by the anti-catholic fanaticism of lord george gordon, marched to westminster with a petition to repeal savile's act of , which allowed catholics to bequeath land and to educate their own children. there was a riot, and in the course of the next six days the mob burnt newgate, sacked catholic chapels, and generally plundered and ravaged the city. in the house of commons pitt made three attempts to get reform considered--in , and --and on each occasion his resolution was defeated by an overwhelming majority. after that pitt made no further effort for reform, and from to the government he led passed the acts of repressive legislation which made all democratic propaganda illegal, and crushed all political agitation. but "the cause" was not dead. sir francis burdett, m.p. for westminster, henry hunt, better known as "orator hunt," and cobbett with his "political register," in various ways renewed the campaign for manhood suffrage, and the growth of the manufacturing districts made a change in the constitution of parliament imperative. burdett was sent to the tower in for contempt of parliament, but lived to see the reform bill of passed into law, and died a tory. cobbett spent two years in prison, and became m.p. for oldham in . what cobbett did with pen--and no man at that day wrote with greater ability for the common people, or with greater acceptance--hunt did on the platform. both strove to arouse the working class to demand enfranchisement. hunt presided at the mass meeting at peterloo, by manchester, in --an entirely peaceful meeting which was broken up by the military with some loss of life--and was sent to prison for two years for doing so. he also was elected m.p. (for preston) in the first reformed parliament. again the government tried coercion, and after peterloo, for the next few years, intimidation and numerous arrests kept down all outward manifestation of the reform movement. in spite of this, the movement could not be stayed. each year saw political indifference changed to positive desire for enfranchisement, and the british public, which, in the main, had been left untouched by the vision of a democracy and the call for a national convention and a new constitution, became impatient for the reform of parliament and the representation of the manufacturing interest. thomas spence ( - ) the name of spence must be mentioned amongst those who preached the democratic idea at the close of the eighteenth century. a newcastle schoolmaster, spence, in , expounded his "plan" for land nationalisation on the following lines:-- "the land, with all that appertains to it, is in every parish made the property of the corporation or parish, with as ample power to let, repair, or alter all or any part thereof, as a lord of the manor enjoys over his lands, houses, etc.; but the power of alienating the least morsel, in any manner, from the parish, either at this or any time thereafter, is denied. for it is solemnly agreed to, by the whole nation, that a parish that shall either sell or give away any part of its landed property shall be looked upon with as much horror and detestation as if they had sold all their children to be slaves, or massacred them with their own hands. thus are there no more or other landlords in the whole country than the parishes, and each of them is sovereign lord of its territories. "then you may behold the rent which the people have paid into the parish treasuries employed by each parish in paying the parliament or national congress at any time grants; in maintaining and relieving its own poor people out of work; in paying the necessary officers their salaries; in building, repairing, and adorning its houses, bridges, and other structures; in making and maintaining convenient and delightful streets, highways, and passages both for foot and carriages; in making and maintaining canals and other conveniences for trade and navigation; in planting and taking in waste grounds; in providing and keeping up a magazine of ammunition and all sorts of arms sufficient for all the inhabitants in case of danger from enemies; in premiums for the encouragement of agriculture, or anything else thought worthy of encouragement; and, in a word, doing whatever the people think proper, and not as formerly, to support and spread luxury, pride, and all manner of vice." no taxes of any kind were to be paid by native or foreigner "but the aforesaid rent, which every person pays to the parish according to the quantity, quality, and conveniences of the land, housing, etc., which he occupies in it. the government, poor, roads, etc., are all maintained by the parishes with the rent, on which account all wares, manufactures, allowable trade employments, or actions are entirely duty free." the "plan" ends with the usual confidence of the idealist reformer of the time in the speedy triumph of right, and in the world-wide acceptance of what seemed to its author so eminently reasonable a proposal. "what makes this prospect yet more glowing is that after this empire of right and reason is thus established it will stand for ever. force and corruption attempting its downfall shall equally be baffled, and all other nations, struck with wonder and admiration at its happiness and stability, shall follow the example; and thus the whole earth shall at last be happy, and live like brethren." the american war and the french revolution hindered the consideration of spence's "empire of right and reason," but, in the course of nearly forty years' advocacy of land nationalisation, spence gathered round him a band of disciples in london, and the spenceans were a recognised body of reformers in the early part of the nineteenth century. the attacks on private property in land, and the revolutionary proposals for giving the landlords notice to quit, brought down the wrath of the government on spence, and he was constantly being arrested, fined and imprisoned for "seditious libel," while his bookshop in holborn was as frequently ransacked by the authorities. spence died in , and the movement for abolishing the landlords in favour of common ownership languished and stopped. the interesting thing about spence's "plan" is its anticipation of henry george's propaganda for a single tax on land values, and the extinction of all other methods of raising national revenue, a propaganda that, in a modified form for the taxation of land values, has already earned the approval of the house of commons. practical politics and democratic ideals because we insist on the experimental character of our british political progress, and the steady refusal to accept speculative ideas and _a priori_ deductions in politics, it does not follow that the services of the idealist are to be unrecognised. the work of the idealist, whether he is a writer or a man of action--and sometimes, as in the case of mazzini, he is both--is to stir the souls of men and shake them out of sluggish torpor, or rouse them from gross absorption in personal gain, and from dull, self-satisfied complacency. he is the prophet, the agitator, the pioneer, and after him follow the responsible statesmen, who rarely see far ahead or venture on new paths. once or twice in the world's history the practical statesman is an idealist, as abraham lincoln was, but the combination of qualities is unusual. the political idealist gets his vision in solitary places, the democratic statesman gets his experience of men by rubbing shoulders with the crowd. a democratic nation must have its seers and prophets, lest it forget its high calling to press forward, and so sink in the slough of contented ease. the preacher of ideals is the architect of a nation's hopes and desires, and the fulfilment of these hopes and desires will depend on the wisdom of its political builders--the practical politicians. often enough the structural alterations are so extensive that the architect does not recognise his plan; and that is probably as it should be; for it is quite likely that the architect left out of account so simple a matter as the staircase in his house beautiful, and the builder is bound to adapt the plan to ordinary human needs. the idealist has a faith in the future of his cause that exceeds the average faith, and in his sure confidence fails to understand why his neighbours will not follow at his call, or move more rapidly; and so he fails as a practical leader. here the work of the statesman and politician comes in. they are nearer to the mass of people, they hold their authority by election of the people, and they understand that the rate of speed must be slow. under the guidance of their political leaders, the people are willing to move. sometimes the idealist is frankly revolutionary, is for beginning anew in politics, and starting society all over again. if the state of things is bad enough, he may get into power, as he did in france at the revolution, and for a time the world will stagger at his doings. but there is no beginning _de novo_ in politics, and the revolutions wrought by men who would give the world an entirely fresh start (to be distinguished from mere changes of dynasty, such as our english revolution was) have their sandy foundations washed away by the floods of reaction. there is no such absolute escape from the past for men or nations, and we can only build our new social and political order on the foundations of experience. but we may not be moved to build at all but for the prophet and the agitator, and therefore the instinct that makes governments slay or imprison the political agitator and suppress the writings of political prophets can be understood. for the existence of every government is threatened by prophets and agitators, and in self-defence it resists innovation. a healthy democracy will allow too many opportunities for popular expression to fear innovation; yet even under a democracy the prophets have been stoned--their sepulchres to be subsequently erected by public subscription and handsomely decorated. democracy owes too much to its prophets in the past not to rejoice at their presence in its midst. but it will prudently leave the direction of its public affairs to men who, less gifted it may be in finding new paths, are more experienced in making the roads that others have discovered fit for the heavy tread of multitudes. * * * * * chapter vii parliamentary reform and the enfranchisement of the people the industrial revolution the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century changed the face of england and brought to the manufacturing class wealth and prominence. the population of lancashire was not more than , in , the west riding of yorkshire about , , and the total population of england , , . the inventions of arkwright, hargreaves, crompton, watt, and cartwright revolutionised the cotton trade in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, and increased enormously the production of woollen goods. england ceased to be mainly a nation of farmers and merchants; domestic manufacture gave way to the factory system; the labouring people, unable to make a living in the country, gathered into the towns. the long series of enclosure acts-- - --turned seven million acres of common land into private property, and with this change in agrarian conditions and the growth of population england ceased to be a corn-exporting country, and became dependent on foreign nations for its food supply. while these industrial and agrarian changes meant a striking increase in wealth and population, they were accompanied by untold misery to the common people. "instead of the small master working in his own home with his one or two apprentices and journeymen, the rich capitalist-employer with his army of factory hands grew up. many of these masters were rough, illiterate and hard, though shrewd and far-seeing in business. the workmen were forced to work for long hours in dark, dirty and unwholesome workshops. the state did nothing to protect them; the masters only thought of their profits; the national conscience was dead, and unjust laws prevented them combining together in trade unions to help themselves. women and children were made to work as long and as hard as the men. a regular system grew up of transporting pauper and destitute children to weary factory work. there was no care for their health. there were few churches and chapels, though the methodists often did something to prevent the people from falling back into heathendom. the workmen were ignorant, brutal, poor and oppressed. there were no schools and plenty of public houses. in hard times distress was widespread, and the workmen naturally listened to agitators and fanatics, or took to violent means of avenging their wrongs, for they had no constitutional means of redress. even the masters had no votes, as the new towns sent no members to parliament. the transfer of the balance of population and wealth from the south and east to the north and midlands made parliamentary reform necessary."[ ] with this transfer of the balance of economic power came a good deal of rivalry between the manufacturers and the landed gentry, the latter becoming more and more tory, the former more and more radical. as all political power, in the main, was in the landowner's hands, men anxious to take part in politics eagerly bought up the small estates, and the old yeoman class disappeared, except in out-of-the-way places. these yeomen and small landowners had been the backbone of the parliamentary party in the days of the stuarts, but they were left hopelessly behind in an age of mechanical inventions and agrarian changes, and were in most cases glad to sell out and invest their property in other ways. the story of the misery of rural depopulation in the first half of the sixteenth century repeats itself at the close of the eighteenth. "a single farmer held as one farm the lands that once formed fourteen farms, bringing up respectably fourteen families. the capitalist farmer came in like the capitalist employer. his gangs of poor and ignorant labourers were the counterpart of the swarm of factory hands. the business of farming was worked more scientifically, with better tools and greater success; but after the middle of the eighteenth century the condition of the agricultural labourer got no better, and now the great mass of the rural population were mere labourers.... pauperism became more and more a pressing evil, especially after , when _gilbert's act_ abolished the workhouse test (which compelled all who received relief from the rates to go into the half-imprisonment of a poor-house), and the system of poor law doles in aid of wages was encouraged by the high prices at the end of the century. in one-seventh of the people was in receipt of poor law relief."[ ] but with all the considerable distress, in town and country alike amongst the working people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, swift progress was taking place in agriculture and in manufactures. only, the accumulated wealth fell into fewer hands, and the fluctuations in the demand for goods, caused partly by the opening up of new markets, brought successions of good times and bad times. "the workmen shared but partially in the prosperity, and were the first to bear the brunt of hard times."[ ] the need for parliamentary reform the point for us to note here is that the changed economic conditions made parliamentary reform a necessity, and brought the question of popular enfranchisement within sight. it was useless for burke to maintain the incomparable beauty of the british constitution; english politicians might be indifferent to political theories of democracy, and heartily dislike any notion of radical change, but the abuses were too obvious to prevent reform. whatever the size of the county it returned two members elected by freeholders, and the cost of a county election was enormous. some of the boroughs, especially in cornwall, were tiny villages. eighteen members were returned from such boroughs in that part of cornwall which now returns one member for the liskeard division. the fields of old sarum belonged to seven electors and returned two members. as there was no habitation whatever in this "borough" of old sarum, a tent was put up for the convenience of the returning officer at election times. no general law decided the borough franchise. local custom and various political and personal considerations settled who should vote for members of parliament. places like westminster and preston had practically manhood suffrage. in most of the "corporation boroughs" the franchise was restricted exclusively to freemen of the borough, and to the self-elected non-resident persons who composed the governing body before the municipal corporation act of . a small number of rich and powerful men really worked nearly all the elections. seats were openly bought and sold, and a candidate had either to find a patron who would provide him with a seat, or, failing a patron, to purchase a seat himself. fox first entered parliament for the pocket borough of midhurst, and sir george trevelyan has described how it took place. midhurst was selected by the father of charles james fox as "the most comfortable of constituencies from the point of view of a representative; for the right of election rested in a few small holdings, on which no human being resided, distinguished among the pastures and the stubble that surrounded them by a large stone set up on end in the middle of each portion. these burbage tenures, as they were called, had all been bought up by a single proprietor, viscount montagu, who when an election was in prospect, assigned a few of them to his servants, with instructions to nominate the members and then make back the property to their employer. this ceremony was performed in march, , and the steward of the estate, who acted as the returning officer, declared that charles james fox had been duly chosen as one of the burgesses for midhurst, at a time when that young gentleman was still amusing himself in italy." three years earlier burke had entered parliament as a nominee of lord rockingham's. gibbon sat in the house for some years under patronage. gladstone first became a member by presentation to a pocket borough, and later spoke in praise of this method of bringing young men of promise into parliament. john wilson croker estimated that of six hundred and fifty-eight members of the house of commons at the end of the eighteenth century, two hundred and seventy-six were returned by patrons. men of more independence of mind who could afford to buy seats did so, and many of the reformers--including burdett, romilly and hume--thus sat in the house. manufacturing centres unrepresented in parliament it was not so much that the landowning aristocracy were over-represented in parliament by their control of so many pocket boroughs, as that great manufacturing centres were entirely unrepresented. the middle-class manufacturers had no means of making their influence felt in the unreformed house of commons, for towns of such importance as leeds, manchester and birmingham sent no representatives to parliament. this meant that parliament was out of touch with all the industrial life of the nation, and that nothing was done till after the reform act in the way of serious industrial legislation. constituencies with hardly any voters at all returned members constituencies with less than voters in each returned " constituencies with less than voters in each returned " constituencies with less than voters in each returned " male electors in other constituencies returned " the reform act of changed all this. it disfranchised all boroughs with less than , inhabitants--fifty-six in all; allowed one member only to boroughs with between , and , ; gave representatives to manchester, birmingham, leeds, and to several other large manufacturing towns and london boroughs; extended the county franchise to leaseholders and £ tenants at will; and settled the borough franchise on a uniform qualification of occupation in a house of £ rateable value. it also fixed two days, instead of fifteen, as the limit for county elections, and one day for boroughs. the passage of the great reform bill the reform bill was not carried without much rioting in the country, and some loss of life. the duke of wellington was at the head of the tory ministry in ; and though he declared in face of an opposition that was headed by the whig aristocrats, and included the middle-class manufacturers and the great bulk of the working class in the industrial districts of lancashire, yorkshire and the midlands, that "no better system (of parliamentary representation) could be devised by the wit of man" than the unreformed house of commons, and that he would never bring forward a reform measure himself, and should always feel it his duty to resist such measure when proposed by others, yet, in less than two years after this speech wellington's resistance had ended, and the reform bill was carried into law. what happened in those two years was this: at the general election in the summer of , the popular cry was "the bill, the whole bill, and nothing but the bill." "the whole countless multitude of reformers had laid hold of the principle that the most secure and the shortest way of obtaining what they wanted was to obtain representation. the non-electors felt themselves called upon to put forth such power as they had as a means to obtaining the power which they claimed." and the non-electors were enormously successful. for they "combined their will, their knowledge, and their manifest force in political unions, whence they sent forth will, knowledge, and influence over wide districts of the land. and the electors, seeing the importance of the crisis--the unspeakable importance that it should be well conducted--joined these unions." the reformers carried the day at the elections, and the new house of commons passed the second reading of the bill on july th, by : - . on september st the third reading passed by to . then on the th of october the house of lords threw out the bill by to , and at once fierce riots broke out all over the country, in especial at derby, nottingham, and bristol. at derby the jail was stormed. at nottingham the castle was burned, and of nine men subsequently convicted of riot, three were hanged. at bristol, the jail, the mansion house, the customs house, the excise office, and the bishop's palace were burned, and twelve lives were lost in three days. the new session opened in december, and again the bill was introduced, and this time the second reading had a majority of : - . the house of lords hesitated when the bill came up to them at the end of march, ; allowed the second reading to pass by to , and then in committee struck out those clauses which disfranchised the "rotten" boroughs--uninhabited constituencies like old sarum. grey, the whig prime minister, at once resigned, and the duke of wellington endeavoured to form a tory anti-reform ministry. but the task was beyond him, the temper of the country was impatient of any further postponement of the bill. petitions poured in urging parliament to vote no supplies, and resolutions were passed refusing to pay taxes till the bill became law. on wellington's failure to make a government, william iv. had to recall grey, and the whigs resumed office with an assurance that, if necessary, the king would create sufficient peers favourable to reform, so that the bill should pass. the battle was over, the anti-reformers retired, and on june th, , the reform bill passed the lords by to , receiving the royal assent three days later. the whigs protested that the reform bill was _a final measure_, and sir francis burdett, the veteran reformer, was content to vote with the tories when the act had become law. but there is no finality in politics, and the reform bill was only the removal of a barrier on the road to democracy. the tories described the bill as revolutionary, but as a matter of fact the act of neither fulfilled the hopes of its friends nor the fears of its foes. what the act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed aristocracy, which had been in the main predominant since , to the richer members of the middle class--the big farmers in the country, the prosperous shopkeepers in the towns. the working class was still voteless, and the old democratic franchise of preston and westminster was gone from those boroughs. the first reformed parliament met early in , and the change in the character of the house of commons was seen at once. government accepted responsibility for legislation in a way that had never been known before. the new poor law, , and the new municipal corporations act, , were the beginning of our present system of local government. slavery was abolished in all british colonies in . greville, in his memoirs, gives us an impression of the new regime in parliament as it appeared to one who belonged to the old dethroned aristocracy. "the first thing that strikes one is its inferiority to preceding houses of commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new members.... there exists no _party_ but that of the government; the irish act in a body under o'connell to the number of about forty; the radicals are scattered up and down without a leader, numerous, restless, turbulent, bold, and active; the tories, without a head, frightened, angry, and sulky." the working class still unrepresented but the working classes were the really disappointed people in the country. they had worked for the reformers, and their energies--and their violence--had been the driving force that had carried the bill into law. if their expectations were extravagant and their hopes over-heated, the more bitter was their distress at the failure of the reform act to accomplish the social improvements that had been predicted. chartism so the working class in despair of help from the government, decided to get the franchise for themselves, and for twelve years, - , chartism was the great popular movement. the _five points of the people's charter_ were proclaimed in : ( ) universal suffrage; ( ) vote by ballot; ( ) annual parliaments; ( ) abolition of property qualification for members of parliament; ( ) payment of members. a sixth point--equal electoral districts--was left out in the national petition. although the chartist demands were political, it was the social misery of the time that drove men and women into the chartist movement. the wretchedness of their lot--its hopeless outlook, and the horrible housing conditions in the big towns--these things seemed intolerable to the more intelligent of the working people, and thousands flocked to the monster chartist demonstrations, and found comfort in the orations of feargus o'connor, bronterre o'brien, and ernest jones. the charter promised political enfranchisement to the labouring people, and once enfranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation. so it seemed in the 'forties--when one in every eleven of the industrial population was a pauper. stephens, a "hot-headed" chartist preacher, put the case as he, a typical agitator of the day, saw it in : "the principle of the people's charter is the right of every man to have his home, his hearth, and his happiness. the question of universal suffrage is, after all, a knife-and-fork question. it means that every workman has a right to have a good hat and coat, a good roof, a good dinner, no more work than will keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in plenty."[ ] the lot of the labourer and the artisan was found to be worse than it was in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, before the great reform act had been passed.[ ] and while the anti-corn law league, the socialist propaganda of robert owen, and the agitation for factory legislation, all promised help and attracted large numbers of workmen, the chartist movement was by far the strongest and most revolutionary of all the post-reform popular agitations. chartism went to pieces because the leaders could not work together, and were, in fact, greatly divided as to the methods and objects of the movement. by bronterre o'brien had retired from the chartist ranks, feargus o'connor was m.p. for nottingham--to be led away from the house of commons hopelessly insane, to die in --and ernest jones could only say when the chartist convention broke up in hopeless disagreement, "amid the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee has been trampled out, and elements of our energy are scattered to the winds of heaven." in spite of its failure, chartism kept alive for many years the desire for political enfranchisement in the labouring classes. that desire never died out. although palmerston, the "tory chief of a radical cabinet"--so disraeli accurately enough described him--was prime minister from to (with one short interval), and during that period gave no encouragement to political reform, the opinion in the country grew steadily in favour of working-class enfranchisement. palmerston's very inactivity drove liberals and the younger conservatives to look to the working classes for support for the measures that were planned. the middle class was satisfied that the artisans could be admitted to the franchise without danger to the constitution. palmerston's death in left the liberal party to earl russell's premiership, with gladstone as its leader in the commons. reform was now inevitable. the bill as first introduced in was a moderate measure, making a £ rental the qualification for a vote in the boroughs. it was too moderate to provoke any enthusiasm, and it was hateful to the old palmerstonian whigs and most of the conservatives, who objected to any enfranchisement of the working class. by a combination of these opponents the bill was defeated, the liberals retired from office, and a conservative ministry under lord derby, with disraeli leading the house of commons, was formed. the hyde park railings ( ) it was seen quickly that there was a very real demand for the enfranchisement of the town workman--the agricultural districts remained unawakened--and reform leagues and reform unions sprang up as they had done in . then in london came the incident of the hyde park railings, which gave a distinct impetus to the reform movement. what happened at hyde park was this: the london reform union decided to hold a monster demonstration in hyde park on july rd, but the chief commissioner of police had declared the meeting must not take place, and ordered the gates to be closed at five o'clock. mr. edmund beales, and other leaders of the london reform union, on being refused admittance, drove away calmly to hold a meeting in trafalgar square, but the great mass of people remained outside the park, "pressed and pressing round the railings." some were clinging to the railings; others deliberately weakened the supports of the railings. park lane was thronged, and all along the bayswater road there was a dense crowd. the line was too long for the police to defend, and presently, when the railings yielded to the pressure, the people poured in to the park. "there was a simultaneous, impulsive rush, and some yards of railing were down, and men in scores were tumbling and floundering and rushing over them. the example was followed along park lane, and in a moment half a mile of iron railings was lying on the grass, and a tumultuous and delighted mob was swarming over the park. the news ran wildly through the town. some thought it a revolt; others were of opinion it was a revolution. the first day of liberty was proclaimed here--the breaking loose of anarchy was shrieked at there. the mob capered and jumped over the sward for half the night through. flower beds and shrubs suffered a good deal, not so much from wanton destruction, as from the pure boisterousness which came of an unexpected opportunity for horseplay. there were a good many little encounters with the police; stones were thrown on the one side, and truncheons used on the other pretty freely. a few heads were broken on both sides, and a few prisoners were made by the police; but there was no revolution, no revolt, no serious riot even."[ ] the guards were called out, and a detachment arrived at the park, but the people only cheered the soldiers good-humouredly. not even a blank cartridge was fired that day. the government, however, took the hyde park disturbance with extreme seriousness. "nothing can well be more certain than the fact that the hyde park riot, as it was called, convinced her majesty's ministers of the necessity of an immediate adoption of the reform principle."[ ] disraeli, who in had proposed reform without getting any support, now saw that a great opportunity had come for a constructive conservative policy, and boldly insisted to his party that parliamentary reform was a necessity. "you cannot establish a party of mere resistance to change, for change is inevitable in a progressive country," he told his followers. all through the autumn and winter great demonstrations took place in the large towns and cities of the country in support of the demand for the enfranchisement of the workman, and when parliament met in february, , a reform bill was promised in the queen's speech. to lord derby the measure was frankly a "leap in the dark," and one or two conservative ministers (including cranborne, afterwards lord salisbury) left the government in disgust. but the conservatives generally chuckled at "dishing the whigs," and the bill, with considerable revision, was passed through both houses of parliament by august. household suffrage by the reform bill of all male householders in boroughs were enfranchised, and all male lodgers who paid £ a year for unfurnished rooms. the town workman was enfranchised by this act as the middle-class man had been enfranchised by the act of , and the electorate was increased from about , to , , . an amendment that women should not be excluded from the franchise was moved by john stuart mill, and defeated. some redistribution of seats took place under the act of , eleven boroughs were disfranchised, thirty-five with less than , inhabitants were made single-member constituencies, and additional representation was given to chelsea, hackney, leeds, liverpool, manchester, salford, glasgow, birmingham, dundee, and merthyr. "thus was _household suffrage_ brought in in the boroughs, and a great step was made towards democracy, for it was plain that the middle-class county constituencies could not last very much longer now that all workmen who happened to live in boroughs had their votes."[ ] the third reform act, giving household suffrage to the country districts, was passed by gladstone in , and it was followed by a redistribution of seats act in . by these two acts the agricultural labourer was enfranchised, a service franchise was created for those who were qualified neither as householders nor lodgers, and the principle of single-member equal electoral districts--on a basis of , inhabitants--was adopted. only twenty-three boroughs, the city of london and the universities of oxford, cambridge, and dublin, retained double-member representation. the membership of the house of commons was increased from six hundred and fifty-eight to six hundred and seventy, the present total; and the franchise remains as it was fixed in --occupation and ownership giving the right to vote. from time to time, for more than a hundred years, a plea has been put forward for universal or adult suffrage for men on the ground of an abstract right to vote, but it has met with little encouragement.[ ] there is, however, a wide feeling in favour of simplifying the registration laws, so that a three-months' residence, instead of, as at present, a year's residence from one july to the next, should be sufficient to qualify for the franchise. there is also a strong demand for "one man, one vote." at present, while no elector may give more than one vote in any constituency, he may, if he has property in various places, give a vote in each of these districts, and some men thus give as many as a dozen votes at a general election. this plural voting by property and residential qualifications in different constituencies is not customary in other constitutional countries, and a bill for its abolition passed the house of commons in , but was rejected by the lords. while liberals urge "one man, one vote" as the more democratic arrangement, conservatives reply by asking for "one vote, one value"--that is, a new redistribution of seats, for in the last twenty-five years there have been deep and extensive changes in the distribution of populations, and ireland in particular is over-represented, it is maintained. but then the representation of ireland in the house of commons was really guaranteed by the act of union, .[ ] working-class representation in parliament with the extension of the franchise the change in the _personnel_ of the house of commons has become marked. the more wealthy of the middle class entered in considerable numbers after ; the acts of and made the entry of the workman inevitable. the miners were the first to send labour representatives to parliament, and to-day their members outnumber those of any other trade. since industrial constituencies, chiefly in yorkshire, lancashire, south wales, and the mining districts, have gone on steadily electing and re-electing working-class representatives--trade union secretaries and officers for the most part--and with the formation of a national labour representation committee in , these representatives became a separate and distinct party--the labour party after --in the house of commons. enfranchisement to secure representation for the redress of grievances has been the principle that has guided the english people towards democracy. both the middle class and the working class were convinced that enfranchisement was necessary if the house of commons was to be in any real sense a representative assembly, and both have used enfranchisement for obtaining representation in parliament. the return of forty labour members at recent general elections is evidence that a large electorate supports the labour party in its desire to carry in parliament legislation that will make life a better thing for the labourer and his family; and in the house of commons the labour members have won a general respect. as a matter of fact, the house of commons to-day is in every way a more orderly, a more intelligent, more business-like, and better-mannered assembly than it was in the days before . no stronger evidence of the value of parliamentary representation to the working-class can be offered than the large output of what may be called labour legislation in recent years. it is true that lord shaftesbury's benevolent and entirely disinterested activities promoted factory acts in the first half of the nineteenth century, but in the last twenty years measures for the amelioration of the lot of the workman have been constantly before parliament. removal of religious disabilities--catholics, jews, and freethinkers the nineteenth century was not only the century of popular enfranchisement; it was the century that saw the removal of religious disabilities, and the free admission to parliament and to the government of roman catholics, nonconformists, jews, and freethinkers. in the year roman catholics in england were excluded from parliament, from the franchise, from the magistracy, the bar, the civil service, from municipal corporations, and from commissions in the army and navy. pitt was willing to abolish these disabilities on the passing of the act of union, and the irish people were bitterly disappointed that the disabilities remained. but george iii. refused all assent to the proposals, and pitt resigned. several times the house of commons passed catholic relief bills, which were thrown out by the lords, and it was not till , when "the english ministry had to choose between concession and civil war," that peel and the duke of wellington yielded and persuaded their party to admit catholics to parliament and to the civil and military services. the repeal of the penal laws against roman catholics--acts of elizabeth that inflicted penalties on priests who said mass in england, and on roman catholics who attended mass--took place in , and in the parliamentary oath was amended and made unobjectionable to roman catholics. a roman catholic is still excluded by law from the crown, the lord chancellorship, and the lord lieutenancy of ireland, but many roman catholics are members of parliament--members of all parties--and the late lord ripon, a catholic, sat in a liberal cabinet. in rothschild was elected as a liberal m.p. for the city of london, but the law did not permit him to take his seat. then for some years jewish m.p.'s were allowed to take part in debates and sit on committees, but were not allowed to vote. finally, in , the lords, after rejecting the measure for ten years, passed the jews' disabilities bill, which removed all restriction. the right hon. herbert samuel, m.p., is the first jew to sit in the cabinet, for though disraeli was of the jewish race, he was a christian in belief. although in various acts on the statute book required nonconformists to subscribe to the religion of the church of england before taking part in municipal affairs, these acts had long been a dead letter. all that was done in the nineteenth century was to repeal these acts, and to throw open the universities and public offices to nonconformists. it is only, however, in recent years that nonconformists have filled posts of high importance in the cabinet. the last attempt at restriction on the religious beliefs of members of parliament was made in the house of commons itself, when charles bradlaugh, after being duly elected m.p. for northampton, was by the action of the house excluded from his seat. bradlaugh was a frank disbeliever in christianity, and the house of commons refused to allow him either to take the oath or make an affirmation. for five years ( - ) the struggle lasted--a liberal government being in power all the time--and three times during that period the electors of northampton triumphantly returned charles bradlaugh as their member, only to be answered by resolutions of refusal and expulsion passed by the house of commons against their representative. it was a repetition of the battle wilkes had fought one hundred and twenty years earlier, and it ended in the same way. a new parliament assembled in january, (after a general election in november), the new speaker (mr. peel) permitted bradlaugh to take the oath in the usual way, declined to allow any interference, and the battle was over. two years later a general affirmation bill was carried on the motion of bradlaugh, and became law. when charles bradlaugh lay dying in january, , the house of commons passed, without dissent, a resolution expunging from the journals of the house the old resolutions of exclusion. the enfranchisement of women the nineteenth century then will always be noted as the era of steady advance towards democracy, especially in england. enfranchisement of the workman, and his representation in parliament, have transferred the government of the country from an aristocracy to the middle class and the working class, for to-day, alike in parliament and in the permanent civil service, men of the middle class predominate, assisted by those who served apprenticeship in mine or workshop. the removal of religious disabilities has ended the old rule that confined the business of the legislature and the administration of justice to members of the established church of england, and roman catholics, jews, nonconformists, and freethinkers now take their share in all public work. one disability only remains--the sex disability that denies the parliamentary franchise to women. in the middle ages women were excused from parliamentary attendance, but there was no notion that their powers and privileges as landowners were shortened because, on account of their sex, they were granted exemption from parliament and from juries. in a test case--chorlton _v._ lings--was brought, and the judges decided that women householders were not to be registered as electors, and it was left to parliament to pass a women's enfranchisement bill. from the time of john stuart mill's advocacy in there have always been supporters of women's suffrage in the house of commons, and in the last five years these supporters have been growing in numbers. only the refusal of the government to give time for the discussion of the bill in committee has prevented a woman's enfranchisement measure, which on several occasions has received a second reading, from passing the house of commons; and the announcement by the present ( ) government that full facilities for such discussion are to be granted next year ( ) would indicate that the removal of political sex disabilities is close at hand. women are not asking for adult suffrage, but are willing to receive enfranchisement on the terms that qualify men as electors, and the conciliation bill, as it is called--because members of every political party have agreed to make it their bill--would place on the roll of electors rather more than a million of women voters. meantime, while waiting for the removal of the anti-democratic barrier that excludes them from full political citizenship, women are admitted in the united kingdom to an equal share with men in all local government. since women who are householders have enjoyed the municipal franchise, and as poor law guardians and members of school boards, they have been freely elected to sit side by side with men. in women were declared eligible by parliament for membership on county and borough councils, and for the chairmanship of county councils and the mayoralty of boroughs. since this act was passed we have seen women elected to the councils of great cities--manchester and liverpool, for instance--and chosen as mayors in several towns. no political movement in recent years has been of greater public interest or importance than the agitation for "votes for women." the demand for enfranchisement is based on the old constitutional ground of the parliamentarians of the seventeenth century--that those who are directly taxed by government must have some political control of the public expenditure--and it is supported by the present leader of the conservative party[ ] on the ground that government can only be carried on in england by consent of the governed. the demand for the parliamentary franchise is with us the expression of that deep dissatisfaction at the unequal relations of the sexes that is felt by many men, and by far more women, all over the civilised world. as the middle-class man and the workmen of great britain were sure that they could not get from parliament an understanding of popular grievances, still less fair treatment, until they possessed the right to choose their own parliamentary representatives, so women are convinced that there can be no adequate adjustment of these unequal relations until they too enjoy the same privilege of citizenship; for enfranchisement and representation are the two chosen instruments of democratic government in our day. * * * * * chapter viii democracy at work local government to-day in great britain, in america, in the self-governing colonies, and in many european countries, we can sec the principles of democracy in working order. the whole system of local government in great britain and ireland is essentially democratic. the municipal councils of all the large cities are elected on household suffrage, and have enormous powers. there is now no sex disability to prevent the election of women to these bodies, and, except in the case of the clergy of the established church, who are disqualified from sitting on town councils (but not on county or district councils), all ratepayers are eligible for nomination. the result is that on nearly every city council, and on a great number of county councils, london borough councils, urban and rural district councils, boards of guardians, and parish councils, there are working-class representatives, while women members have been elected to the great councils of liverpool and manchester, and sit on many boards of guardians and parish councils. all these councils are of recent creation. the municipal corporations act of placed the election of town councils for the first time in the hands of the ratepayers, but the real reform of local government dates from . in that year the conservative government established county and district councils and lord rosebery became the first chairman of the london county council. six years later the liberals set up parish councils in the rural districts, with parish meetings where the population did not exceed three hundred. in the conservatives displaced the old london vestries by borough councils, and in - abolished in england the school boards created in , and made the county council the local authority for public elementary education. scotland was allowed to retain its school boards, and strong but unsuccessful opposition was made in london and the chief cities to the suppression of the specially elected education authority. [illustration: the right hon. john burns, m.p. _photo: moyse, putney._] as far as rural england is concerned, county councils, district councils, and parish councils are, generally speaking, very reluctant to put into operation the wide powers they possess. the average county council, though popularly elected, is composed in agricultural england of landowners and the bigger farmers, who, as a common rule, do not favour a land programme for labourers, and are anxious to keep down the rates. the rural district council and board of guardians are equally averse from any display of public enterprise, and the parish council, which often consists mainly of labourers, rarely accomplishes anything except at the prompting, or with the sanction, of the parochial landowner. the result is that allotments, rural housing, village baths and washhouses, an adequate water supply, public halls and libraries, are not regarded as the concern of rural elected authorities, but are left to the private enterprise of landowners. civic pride, which glories in the public proprietorship of lands and libraries, tramways and lodging-houses, waterworks and workmen's dwellings, art galleries and swimming baths, and is a living influence in the municipalities of, let us say, london, glasgow, liverpool, leeds, bradford, manchester, birmingham, west ham, and many a smaller borough, does not exist in rural councils. to the farmer and the peasant public ownership is a new and alien thing. the common lands and all the old village communal life have gone out of the memory of rural england; but the feudal tradition that the landowner is the real centre of authority has survived, and it is the benevolent landowner who is expected to build cottages, grant allotments, and see to the water supply, as fifty years ago he built and managed the village school. political organisation could break through this tradition, but farmers and agricultural labourers are without this organisation; and so the authority of the landowner remains, in spite of the democratic constitution of local government. the people can allow their power to remain in the hands of others, just as a king can be content to reign without ruling, and the local government of rural england is an oligarchy elected by a popular franchise. in the factory towns and the mining districts it is a very different matter. here the people are organised, and take their share in local government. in the county of durham, for instance, the working class predominates on local councils, and the influence of trade unions prevails in these assemblies wherever a strong labour party exists. mr. joseph chamberlain began his public career on the birmingham town council, and his municipal services earned for him the enthusiastic support of birmingham for all his later political ventures. it would be difficult to mention the name of a great statesman who laid the foundations of his fame in rural local government. as in local government, so in the imperial parliament. rural england sends no labour member to the house of commons. only in very exceptional cases has a tenant farmer been elected. it is the social labour of the mine and the mill that has produced the labour member of parliament. mr. joseph arch made a valiant attempt to organise the agricultural labourers of england, and from to a rural labourers' union, with some thousands of members, was in existence. for a time this secured a rise in wages, and when mr. arch was in parliament, as a liberal m.p. ( - ), the rural labourer hoped for lasting improvement in the conditions of life. but the union fell to pieces, and mr. arch was not strong enough single-handed to force the claims of his constituents on the house of commons. the workman in the house of commons to-day there are more than forty workmen in the house of commons, and the great majority of these have served an apprenticeship in municipal and trade union offices. northumberland, durham, yorkshire, lancashire, stafford, south wales, glasgow, dundee, leicester, norwich and london, all have their elected labour members in parliament, and a marked preference is shown for the man who has proved his honesty and capacity in the municipality, or as the leader of his trade union. all the miners' representatives are tried and experienced men. mr. g.n. barnes, m.p., was for ten years the general secretary of the amalgamated society of engineers. mr. clynes, m.p., was elected to the office of district secretary of the gas workers' and general labourers' union twenty years ago; mr. will thorne, m.p., has been general secretary of the same union since , and has sat on the west ham corporation for more than sixteen years. mr. george lansbury, m.p., and mr. will crooks, m.p., are well known for their work on the london county council and on their local borough council and board of guardians. similarly with other labour members of parliament. their lives are marked by a sense of public responsibility, with the result that in the house of commons they are grave, business-like, and undemonstrative. the labour members do not make "scenes"; they respect the rules of the house and the dignity of the national assembly, partly because they are all in sober middle age, but more because they have learnt that public business can only be carried on by due observance of order; and they are in parliament to get business done for their constituents, to promote legislation that will make life easier for the working class. when mr. victor grayson, in the exuberance of youth, and with a passion that blazed out against the misery of the poor, made a "scene" in the house of commons, and was expelled, the labour members were quite sincere in their disapproval. they understood, with a wider knowledge than mr. grayson possessed, that "scenes" alienated sympathy in the house, were not helpful in debate, and were not popular with the electors. the member who would succeed in the house of commons must respect the usages of the house, and show himself loyal to its laws of debate. as long as this respect and loyalty are shown the labour member is accepted by his fellow-members as one who has been elected to the greatest club in the world, and is justly entitled to all the privileges of membership. for the british house of commons is a democratic assembly, and in its collective pride it cares nothing for the opinions or social rank of its members. all it asks is that the newly-elected member should be alive to the honour of membership, should be modest in his bearing, and should as soon as possible "catch the tone of the house." he may be a labourer, or the son of a belted earl; the house is indifferent so long as his parliamentary manners are good. the house of commons is a far more orderly assembly than it was a hundred years ago; it is more sober and less noisy, and the arrival of labour members has increased rather than diminished its good behaviour. it is also a far more industrious assembly, and the influence of the labour party compels an amount of legislation that honourable members would have thought impossible fifty years ago. working-class leaders in parliament three representative working-class leaders in the house of commons stand out pre-eminently in contemporary politics--the right hon. john burns, mr. j. keir hardie, and mr. j. ramsay macdonald. the right hon. d. lloyd george is conspicuous rather as the representative of the industrious nonconformist middle class, but the success of his career is no less significant of the advance of democracy. the very cabinet is now no longer an aristocratic committee, and the highest offices of executive government are held by men who are neither wealthy nor of distinguished family. two working-class leaders of an earlier generation--the right hon. t. burt, m.p., and mr. h. broadhurst--held office as under-secretaries in the liberal government of - ; but mr. john burns is the first trade unionist to sit in the cabinet. he, too, might have been an under-secretary in the days of that short-lived ministry, but decided, with characteristic vigour, that if he was fit to be an under-secretary he was fit for the cabinet. at the close of the opportunity came, and the offer of sir h. campbell-bannerman to preside over the local government board was promptly accepted. the workman first took his place in the cabinet when mr. john burns, at the age of forty-seven, went to the local government board--to the complete satisfaction of mr. burns. for the robust egoism of mr. burns is largely a class pride. his invincible belief in himself is part of an equally invincible belief in the working class. his ambitions thrive on the conviction that whatever mr. john burns does, that the working class does in the person of their representative. always does he identify himself with the mechanics and labourers with whom his earlier years were spent, and by whose support he has risen to office. the more honours for mr. john burns, the more does it seem to this stalwart optimist that the working class is honoured. he arrays himself in court dress at the palaces of kings, receives honorary degrees at universities, and is kept before the public by the newspaper paragraphist, without wincing or pretending to dislike it. why should the workman not be esteemed by kings and universities? mr. burns asks. so great is his self-respect that the respect of others is taken as a matter of course. much of the criticism that has been directed against mr. john burns misses the mark, because it does not recognise that the motive power at work all the time in his career is the triumph of his class. it is the triumph of a member of the amalgamated society of engineers, of a london workman, that mr. john burns beholds with unconcealed pleasure in his own success. there are drawbacks, of course, to this complete self-satisfaction. since the workman has triumphed in the person of mr. john burns, the working class would do well to follow his example, and heed his advice on all matters affecting its welfare, mr. burns argues. the failures of working-class life and the misery of the poor are due to the lack of those virtues that he possesses, he is apt to maintain. hence mr. burns is hated as a pharisee in certain quarters when he extols self-reliance and total abstinence as essential to working-class prosperity, and points to gambling and strong drink as the root of all evil in the state. it is sometimes urged that mr. burns over-praises his own merits; but the fault is really in the opposite direction; he does not appreciate sufficiently that the gifts he possesses--the gifts he has used so fully and so freely--are exceptional. these gifts are a powerful physique, a great voice, a tremendous energy, and a love of literature; and they are not the common equipment of the skilled mechanic and the labourer. true, they are often wasted and destroyed when they do exist; and in the case of mr. burns a strongly disciplined will has made them abundantly fruitful. but from the first the physique, the voice, and the untiring energy were far above those that fall to the lot of the average workman; and the love of books stored the mind with rich supplies of language to be drawn upon when speeches were to be made. not as an administrator at the local government board has mr. burns become famous. his fame as a champion of the working class was established by popular ovations in hyde park and at dock gates. battersea has been won and held by the speeches of its member. it is not the mighty voice alone, silencing interruption often enough by sheer volume of sound, but the plainly pointed epigram, the ready jest and the quick repartee that endear mr. john burns' speeches to the multitude. his sayings and phrases are quoted. his wit is the wit of the londoner--the wit that dickens knew and studied, the wit of the older cabmen and 'bus drivers, the wit of the street boy. it is racy, it is understood, and the illustrations are always concrete and massive, never vague or unsubstantial. apt shakespearian quotations, familiar and unfamiliar, embellish the speeches. personality, vital personality, counts for so much in the orator of the market place. the speaker must be alive to his audience, he must convince by his presence no less than by his arguments. and mr. burns is so obviously alive. he warms the shrunken, anæmic vitality of followers, and overpowers the protests of enemies by sheer force of character. mr. john burns is at his real vocation when addressing a great multitude. his energy finds an outlet in speech on those occasions, an outlet it can never find in the necessary routine of office administration. he was made for a life of action, and when once, in youth, he had thrown himself into the active study of political and industrial questions, every opportunity was seized for stating the results of that study. as a social democratic candidate for parliament, mr. burns polled votes at west nottingham in . in he was charged (with messrs. hyndman, champion, and williams) with seditious conspiracy--after an unemployed riot in the west end--and acquitted. in he suffered six weeks imprisonment (with mr. r.b. cunninghame graham) for contesting the right of free speech in trafalgar square. in came the great london dock strike, and, with messrs. mann and tillett, mr. burns was a chief leader of the dockers. battersea returned him to the london county council in and to the house of commons in . the liberal party promised a wider sphere of work than the socialists could offer; political isolation was a barren business; and mr. burns gradually passed from the councils of the trade union movement to the treasury bench of a liberal ministry. but the socialist convictions of early manhood had a lasting influence on their owner. these convictions have been mellowed by work; responsibility has checked and placed under subjection the old revolutionary ardour; experience finds the road to a co-operative commonwealth by no means a quick or easy route, and admits the necessity of compromise. but there is still a consciousness of the working class as a class in the speeches of mr. burns; and there is still the belief expressed that the working class must work out their own salvation, and that it is better the people should have the power to manage their own national and municipal affairs, and the wisdom to use that power aright, rather than that a benevolent bureaucracy should manage things for them. mr. john burns is an older man by twenty-five years than he was in the stormy days of the trafalgar square riots, and he is now a privy councillor and cabinet minister, but his character is little changed. his speeches on the settlement of the great dock strike of august, , are the speeches of the man of . parliamentary life made sharper changes in the minds of gladstone and mr. joseph chamberlain than it has made in the mind of the right hon. john burns. but mr. burns never admits that he possesses health and vigour beyond the average. a working class leader of vastly different qualities is mr. j. keir hardie, m.p. he, too, no less significant of democracy, stands as the representative of his class, claims always to be identified with it, to be accepted as its spokesman. a lanarkshire miner and active trade unionist, mr. hardie has striven to create a working-class party in politics independent of liberals and conservatives; to him, more than to any other man, the existence of the independent labour party and the parliamentary labour party--the latter consisting of the independent labour party and the trade unions--may justly be said to be due. the political independence of an organised working class has been the one great idea of mr. hardie's public life. not by any means his only idea, for mr. hardie has been the ever-ready supporter of all democratic causes and the faithful advocate of social reforms; but the _great_ idea, the political pearl of great price, for which, if necessary, all else must be sacrificed. only by this independence can democracy be achieved, and a more equal state of society be accomplished--so mr. hardie has preached to the working people for the last twenty-five years at public meetings and trade union congresses, travelling the length and breadth of great britain in his mission. there is something of the poet in mr. keir hardie but much more of the prophet, and withal a good deal of shrewd political common sense. where mr. john burns wants, humanly, the approval and goodwill of his friends and neighbours for his work, mr. keir hardie is content with the assurance of his own conscience; and in times of difficulty he chooses rather to walk alone, communing with his own heart, than to seek the consolations of social intercourse. mr. burns is a citizen of london, a lover of its streets, at home in all its noise, a reveller in its festivities. mr. hardie belongs to his native land; he is happier on the hills of lanarkshire than in the parliament of westminster; solitude has no terrors for him. both men entered the house in . personal integrity, blameless private life, and a doggedness that will not acknowledge defeat, have had much to do with the success that both have won. for if mr. hardie remains a private member of the house of commons while mr. burns is a cabinet minister, mr. hardie has lived to see an independent labour party of forty members in parliament, and has himself been its accredited leader. again, exceptional gifts may be noted. an eloquence of speech, a rugged sincerity that carries conviction, a love of nature and of literature--all these things, controlled and tempered by will and refined by use, have won for mr. hardie a high regard and an affection for the cause he champions. for years mr. hardie was misrepresented in the press, abused by political opponents and misunderstood by many of the working class. from to he was out of parliament, rejected by the working-class electorate of south west ham. but nothing turned mr. hardie from his policy of independence, or shook his faith in the belief that only by forming a political party of their own could the working people establish a social democracy. merthyr tydvil re-elected him to the house of commons in at the very time when he was braving a strong public opinion by denouncing the south african war; and for merthyr mr. hardie will sit as long as he is in parliament. it may safely be said that mr. hardie will never take office in a liberal ministry. the sturdy republicanism that keeps him from court functions and from the dinner parties of the rich and the great, and the strong conviction that labour members do well to retain simple habits of life, are not qualities that impel men to join governments. visionary as he is--and no less a visionary because he has seen some fulfilment of his hopes--so indifferent to public opinion that many have exclaimed at his indiscretions, with a religious temperament that makes him treat his political work as a solemn calling of god and gives prophetic fire to his public utterances, mr. keir hardie may remain a private member of parliament; but he also remains an outstanding figure in democratic politics, conspicuous in an age that has seen the working class rising cautiously to power. mr. hardie's influence with the politically minded of the working class has contributed in no small degree to the changes that are now at work. the ideal of a working class, educated and organised, taking up the reins of government and using its power in sober righteousness, has been preached by mr. hardie with a fervour that commands respect. he has made an appeal that has moved the hearts of men and women by its religious note, and hence it is very considerably from the ranks of nonconformists with puritan traditions that the independent labour party has been recruited. mr. hardie is now fifty-five years of age. he has never been afraid of making mistakes, and he has never sought the applause of men. he has succeeded in arousing large numbers of people from a passive allegiance to the party governments of liberals and conservatives, and constrained them to march under a labour banner at political contests. whether the labour party in parliament will remain a separate organisation or will steadily become merged in the liberal party, forming perhaps a definite left wing of that party: whether a sufficiently large number of voters will ever be found to make the labour party anything more than a group in parliament: and whether the independent labour movement is not passing as robert owen's socialist movement and as the chartist movement passed away in the middle of the nineteenth century, are questions that are yet to be answered. democracy will go its own way in spite of the prophets. in any case, the work of mr. keir hardie has been fruitful and valuable. for it has made for a quickened intelligence, and a more exalted view of human life amongst the working people; and it has increased the sense of personal and civic responsibility. it has made for civilisation, in fact, and it has insisted on the importance of things that democracy can only forget to its own destruction. the third distinguished working-class leader in parliament is mr. j. ramsay macdonald, the elected leader of the labour party, and its secretary since its formation. mr. ramsay macdonald is for the working class, but, though born of labouring people, and educated in a scotch board school, has long ceased to be of them. never a workman, and never associated with the workman's trade union, mr. macdonald went from school teaching to journalism and to a political private secretaryship, and so settled down quickly into the habits and customs of the ruling middle class. marriage united him still more closely with the middle class, and strengthened his position by removing all fear of poverty, and providing opportunities for travel. from the first mr. macdonald's political life has been directed clearly to one end--the assumption of power to be used for the social improvement of the people. and this ambition has carried him far, and may carry him farther. with the industry and persistence that are common to his race, mr. macdonald has taken every means available to educate himself on all political questions; with the result that he is accepted to-day as one of the best informed members of the house of commons. he taught himself to speak, and his speeches are appreciated. he taught himself to write, and his articles on political questions have long been welcome in the monthly reviews, and his books on socialism are widely read. twenty years ago the liberal party promised no political career to earnest men like mr. macdonald, men anxious for social reform. the future seemed to be with the socialists, and with the independent labour party. when the liberal downfall came in , it was thought that the fortunes of liberalism were ended. native prudence has restrained mr. ramsay macdonald from pioneering, but once the independent labour party, of mr. keir hardie's desire, was set going, and promised an effectual means for political work, mr. macdonald joined it, and did well to do so. as an ordinary liberal or radical member of parliament, mr. ramsay macdonald would never have had the opportunities the labour party has given him. he only entered the house of commons in --at the age of forty--and already as leader of the labour party he is a distinguished parliamentary figure, of whose future great things are foretold. mr. macdonald has studied politics as other people study art or science. he has trained himself to become a statesman as men and women train themselves to become painters and musicians. he has learnt the rules of the game, marked the way of failure and the road to success, and his career may be pondered as an example to the young. no generous outburst of wrath disfigures mr. macdonald's speeches, no rash utterance is ever to be apologised for, no hasty impulse to be regretted. in the labour movement mr. macdonald won success over older men by an indefatigable industry, a marked aptitude for politics, and by an obvious prosperity. other things being equal, it is inevitable that in politics, as in commerce, the needy, impecunious man will be rejected in favour of the man with an assured balance at the bank, and the man of regular habits preferred before a gifted but uncertain genius. the socialist and labour movements of our time have claimed the services of many gifted men and women, and the annals of these movements are full of heroic self-sacrifice. but an aptitude for politics was not a distinguishing mark of socialists, and therefore mr. macdonald's experience and abilities gave him at once a prominent place in the council of the independent labour party, and soon made him the controlling power in that organisation. with the formation of the national labour party a very much wider realm was to be conquered, and mr. macdonald has been as successful here as in the earlier independent labour party. but now the labour party having made mr. macdonald its chairman, it can do no more for him. he is but forty-five years old, his health is good, his talents are recognised; by his aversion from everything eccentric or explosive, the public have understood that he is trustworthy. we may expect to see mr. ramsay macdonald a cabinet minister in a liberal-labour government. it may even happen that he will become prime minister in such a government. he is a "safe" man, without taint of fanaticism. his sincerity for the improvement of the lot of the poor does not compel him to extravagant speech on the subject, and his imagination is sufficient to exclude dullness of view. he has proved that the application of socialist principles does not require any violent disturbance of the existing order, and is compatible with social respectability and political authority. a public opinion that would revolt against the notion of an ex-workman becoming prime minister would not be outraged in any way by mr. macdonald holding that office. mr. burns and mr. hardie have remained in their own and in the public eye representatives of the working class, all education notwithstanding. mr. macdonald has long cut himself off from the labouring class of his boyhood. he has adapted himself easily and naturally to the life and manners of the wealthier professional classes, and he moves without constraint in the social world of high politics, as one born to the business. no recognition of the workman is possible in mr. ramsay macdonald's case, and this fact is greatly in his favour with the multitudes who still hold that england should be ruled by "gentlemen." the right hon. d. lloyd george is a striking figure in our new democracy, and his character and position are to be noted. it was not as a labour representative but as the chosen mouthpiece of the working middle class, enthusiastic for welsh nationalism, that mr. lloyd george entered parliament in , at the age of twenty-seven. with his entry into the cabinet, in company with mr. john burns, at the liberal revival in , government by aristocracy was ended; and when mr. lloyd george went from the board of trade to the chancellorship of the exchequer, startling changes were predicted in national finance. these predictions were held to have been fulfilled in the budget of . the house of lords considered the financial proposals of the budget so revolutionary that it took the unprecedented course of rejecting the bill, and thus precipitated the dispute between the two houses of parliament, which was brought to a satisfactory end by the parliament act of . romantic and idealist from the first, and with unconcealed ambition and considerable courage, mr. lloyd george, with the strong backing of his welsh compatriots, fought his way into the front rank of the liberal party during the ten years ( - ) of opposition. more than once mr. george pitted himself against mr. joseph chamberlain in the days of the conservative ascendancy and the south african war, and his powers as a parliamentary debater won general acknowledgment. in youth mr. lloyd george, full of the fervour of mazzini's democratic teaching, dreamed of wales as a nation, a republic, with himself, perhaps, as its first president. welsh nationalism could not breed a home rule party as irish nationalism has done, and mr. lloyd george has found greater scope for his talents in the liberal party. the welsh "question" has dwindled into a campaign for the disestablishment of the church in wales, a warfare of dissenters and churchmen, and to mr. lloyd george there were bigger issues at stake than the position of the welsh church. [illustration: the right hon. d. lloyd george, m.p. _photo: reginald haines, southampton row, w.c._] already mr. lloyd george's budget and his speeches in support of the budget have made the name of the chancellor of the exchequer familiar to the people of great britain; and now, in the eager discussion on his bill for national insurance, that name is still more loudly spoken. hated by opponents and praised by admirers, denounced and extolled, mr. lloyd george enjoys the tumult he arouses. his passionate speeches for the poor provoke the sympathy of the working class; his denunciations of the rich stir the anger of all who fear social revolution. hostile critics deny any constructive statesmanship in mr. lloyd george's plans and orations, and prophesy a short-lived tenure of office. radical supporters hail him as a saviour of society, and are confident that under his leadership democracy will enter the promised land of peace and prosperity for all. neutral minds doubt whether mr. lloyd george is sufficiently well-balanced for the responsibilities of high office, and express misgivings lest the era of social reform be inaugurated too rapidly. the obvious danger of a fall always confronts ambition in politics, but the danger is only obvious to the onlooker. pressing forward the legislative measures he has set his heart upon, and impatient to carry out the policy that seems to him of first importance to the state, mr. lloyd george pays little heed to the criticism of friends or foes. a supreme self-confidence carries him along, and the spur of ambition is constantly pricking. political co-operation is difficult for such a man, and an indifference to reforms that are not of his initiation, and a willingness to wreck legislation that cannot bear his name, are a weakness in mr. lloyd george that may easily produce a fall. only a very strong man can afford to say that a reform shall be carried in his way, or not at all, in cheerful disregard of the wishes of colleagues and followers. mr. lloyd george's attitude on the question of women's suffrage is characteristic. professing a strong belief in the justice of women's enfranchisement, he assumes that he can safely oppose all women's suffrage bills that are not of his framing, even when these bills are the work of ardent liberals. he would have the measure postponed until he himself can bring in a reform bill, to the end that the enfranchisement of women may be associated with his name for all time. it is dangerous to the statesman, the ambition that finds satisfaction less in the success of a party or the triumph of a cause, than in the personal victory. dangerous, because it brings with it an isolation from friends and colleagues. these come to stand coldly aloof, and then, if a slip occurs or a mistake is made, and there comes a fall, no hands are stretched out to repair the damage or restore the fallen. the statesman who is suspected of "playing for his own hand" may laugh at the murmurs of discontent amongst his followers while all goes well for him, but when he falls he falls beyond recovery. no one can foretell the end of mr. lloyd george's career, but his popularity with the multitude will not make up to him for the want of support in parliament should an error of judgment undo him. the pages of political history are strewn with the stories of high careers wrecked in a feverish haste for fame, that overlooked dangers close at hand; of eminent politicians broken in the full course of active life by the mere forgetfulness of the existence of other persons. a simple miscalculation of forces, and from lofty station a minister tumbles into the void. the stability of the working-class leaders makes their future a matter of fairly safe conjecture. mr. lloyd george, romantic in temperament, covetous of honour, confident of popularity, but heedless of good-will alienated and of positive ill-will created, has reached the chancellorship of the exchequer. will he climb still higher in office, or will he pass to the limbo peopled by those who were and are not? time alone can tell. but in this year of grace mr. lloyd george, incarnation of the hard-working middle class, is a very distinct personality in the government of the country, and his presence in the cabinet a fact in the history of democracy. the present position of the house of lords more than once since the house of lords has come into conflict with the house of commons when a liberal government has been in power. a compromise was effected between the two houses over the disestablishment of the irish church in , the lords, on the whole, giving way. when the lords proposed to "amend" the army reform bill (for abolishing the purchase of commissions) in , gladstone overpowered their opposition by advising the crown to cancel the royal warrant which made purchase legal, and to issue a new warrant ending the sale of commissions. this device completely worsted the house of lords, for a refusal to pass the bill under the circumstances merely deprived the holders of commissions of the compensation awarded in the bill. the army reform bill became law, but strong objection was taken by many liberals to the sudden exercise of the royal prerogative. in the lords refused to pass the bill for the enfranchisement of the rural labourer unless a bill was brought in at the same time for a redistribution of seats. after some discussion gladstone yielded, the redistribution bill was drawn up, and passed the commons simultaneously with the franchise bill in the lords. several bills have been rejected or "amended" by the lords since the liberals came into power in , and the crisis came when the budget was rejected in . in june, , the following resolution was passed by the house of commons by to votes: "that in order to give effect to the will of the people, as expressed by their elected representatives, it is necessary that the power of the other house to alter or reject bills passed by this house should be so restricted by law as to secure that within the limits of a single parliament the final decision of the commons shall prevail." this resolution was embodied in the parliament bill of . between and came ( ) the rejection of the budget, november, ; ( ) the general election of january, , and the return of a majority of (liberal, labour, and irish nationalist) in support of the government; ( ) the passing of resolutions (majority, ) for limiting the veto of the lords; ( ) the failure of a joint conference between leading liberals and conservatives on the veto question, followed by ( ) the general election of december, , and the return of the liberals with a united majority of . the parliament bill declared that every money bill sent up by the commons, if not passed unamended by the lords within a month, should receive the royal assent and become an act of parliament notwithstanding, and that every bill sent up for three successive sessions shall in the third session become an act of parliament without the assent of the lords. the lords passed this bill with amendments which the commons refused to accept, and the parliament bill was returned to the lords in august. but, as in , the prime minister announced that he had received guarantees from the crown that peers should be created to secure the passage of the bill if it was again rejected; and to avoid the making of some three or four hundred liberal peers, lord lansdowne--following the example of the duke of wellington--advised the conservatives in the house of lords to refrain from opposition. the result of this abstention was that the lords' amendments were not persisted in, and the bill passed the lords on august th, , by to votes. by this parliament act the lords' veto is now strictly limited. the lords may reject a bill for two sessions, but if the commons persist, then the bill passes into law, whether the lords approve or disapprove. the real grievance against the house of lords, from the democratic standpoint, has been that its veto was only used when a liberal government was in power. there is not even a pretence by the upper house of revising the measures sent from the commons by a conservative ministry; yet over and over again, and especially in the last five years, liberal measures have been rejected, or "amended" against the will of the commons, by the lords after the electors have returned the liberals to power. the permanent and overwhelming conservative majority in the lords acts on the assumption that a liberal ministry does not represent the will of the people, an assumption at variance with the present theory of democratic government, and in contradiction to the constitutional practice of the crown. the great size of the house of lords makes the difficulty of dealing with this majority so acute. in the creation of forty peerages would have been sufficient to meet the tory opposition to the reform bill; to-day it is said that about four hundred are required to give the liberals a working majority in the lords. the rapid making of peers began under george iii., but from to the present day prime minister after prime minister has added to the membership of the house of lords with generous hand. satire, savage and contemptuous, has been directed against the new peers by critics of various opinions, but still the work of adding to the house of hereditary legislators goes gaily on, and liberal prime ministers have been as active as their tory opponents in adding to the permanent conservative majority in the lords; for only a small minority of liberal peers retain their allegiance to the liberal party. thackeray gave us his view of the making of peers in the years when lord melbourne and his whig successors were steadily adding to the upper house. (between and melbourne made forty-four new peers, and twenty-eight more were added by .) "a man becomes enormously rich, or he jobs successfully in the aid of a minister, or he wins a great battle, or executes a treaty, or is a clever lawyer who makes a multitude of fees and ascends the bench; and the country rewards him for ever with a gold coronet (with more or less balls or leaves) and a title, and a rank as legislator. 'your merits are so great,' says the nation, 'that your children shall be allowed to reign over us, in a manner. it does not in the least matter that your eldest son is a fool; we think your services so remarkable that he shall have the reversion of your honours when death vacates your noble shoes.'" j.h. bernard, in his "theory of the constitution" ( ), was no less emphatic:-- "as the affair is managed now, the peerage, though sometimes bestowed as the reward of merit, on men who have adorned particular professions, is yet much more frequently--nine times out of ten--employed by the minister of the day as his instrument to serve particular views of public policy; and is often given to actual demerit--to men who hire themselves out to do his commands through thick and thin. the peerage is now full of persons who have obtained possession of it by disreputable means." but in spite of satire and hostile criticism members of the house of lords have always enjoyed a considerable social popularity. they are widely esteemed for their titles, even by those who denounce hereditary legislators and desire to abolish the second chamber. disraeli created six new peers in - , and seventeen more from to , in addition to conferring the earldom of beaconsfield on himself. yet disraeli had written in "coningsby" ( ):-- "we owe the english peerage to three sources: the spoliation of the church, the open and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder stuarts, and the borough-mongering of our own times. those are the three main sources of the existing peerage of england, and, in my opinion, disgraceful ones." gladstone made fifty peers in his four premierships, and mr. herbert paul, the liberal historian of "modern england," makes the following comments:-- "no minister since pitt had done so much as mr. gladstone to enlarge and thereby to strengthen the house of lords. "mr. gladstone was lavish in his distribution of peerages, and rich men who were politically active, either in the house of commons or behind the scenes, might hope to be rewarded with safe seats elsewhere." [illustration: the passing of the parliament bill in the house of lords _from the drawing by s. begg._] sir henry campbell-bannerman exceeded all previous records of the last century by making twenty new peers in less than two years-- to --and mr. asquith maintained this vigorous policy by thirteen new creations in the first year of his premiership. already many of these peers, whose titles are not more than six years old, vote with the conservatives. great britain is now the only country in the world that combines a democratic form of government with a second chamber of hereditary legislators, and many proposals are on foot for the reform of the house of lords. while the conservatives are more anxious to change the constitution of the upper house, and to make it a stronger and more representative assembly, the liberals prefer that its power of veto should be abolished. no act of parliament was required to abolish the veto of the crown on acts of parliament, but the growth of a democratic public opinion did not prove strong enough to end the veto of the lords on the bills passed by a liberal majority in the commons, and therefore the parliament act was passed. the popularity of the crown the popularity of the crown has become increasingly wider and more general in the years that have seen the british people steadily taking up the work of self-government. the fear of a hostile demonstration by the inhabitants of london kept william iv. from visiting the mansion house in , and the death of that monarch in evoked no national mourning. queen victoria, unknown to the people on her accession, had the very great advantage of lord melbourne's political advice in the early years of her reign. her marriage, in , with the prince consort--who himself learnt much from melbourne--brought a wise counsellor to the assistance of the throne. "i study the politics of the day with great industry," wrote the prince consort. "i speak quite openly to the ministers on all subjects, and endeavour quietly to be of as much use to victoria as i can." the prince consort saw quickly that "if monarchy was to rise in popularity, it could only be by the sovereign leading a good life, and keeping quite aloof from party." the days of a profligate court and of "the king's friends" in politics were past and gone; the royal _influence_ was to succeed the royal _prerogative_.[ ] the aloofness from political partisanship has been faithfully maintained by the successors of queen victoria, and great as the royal influence may be in the social life of the wealthier classes, it is certain that no such influence operates in the casting of votes by the people at parliamentary elections. no one suspects the king of desiring the return of liberals over tories, or of favouring the tory programme rather than the liberal; and this neutrality is the surest guarantee of the continued popularity of the crown. for some years in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties of the nineteenth century republicanism was the creed of many ardent working-class radicals in england. charles bradlaugh was its chief exponent, and both mr. joseph chamberlain and the late sir charles dilke were regarded as republicans before they entered gladstone's ministry in . the republican movement waned before bradlaugh's death. he himself was "led to feel that agitation for an ideal form of government was less directly fruitful than agitation against the abuses of class privilege; and in the last dozen years of his life, his political work went mainly to reforms within the lines of the constitution."[ ] with the rise of the socialist movement in england in - , and the celebration of the queen's jubilee in , republicanism became utterly moribund, and nothing save an attempt on the part of the sovereign to take a definite side in party politics, or a notorious lapse from the morals required of persons in office of state, could revive it. the interest in socialism was fatal to the republican movement, because it turned the enthusiasm of the active spirits in democratic politics from the desire for radical changes in the _form_ of government, to the crusade for economic changes, and the belief in a coming social revolution. the existence of monarchy seemed a small and comparatively unimportant affair to men and women who were hoping to get poverty abolished, and the landlords and capitalists expropriated either by direct revolution, or by the act of a house of commons, dominated by working men with socialist convictions. the national celebrations at the queen's jubilee in marked the beginning of the popular revival in pageantry and official ceremonial. in the church of england this revival began some forty years earlier, and it has, in our day, changed the whole conduct of public worship. the revival of roman catholicism in england with its processions and solemn ritual has been equally significant. by gratifying the common human instinct for spectacle and drama the monarchy has gained the popular affections. the whigs scoffed at pageants and symbols; the earlier puritans had proscribed ceremonial as savouring of idolatry, and feared any manifestation of beauty as a snare of the devil. in the latter half of the nineteenth century, england began to throw off the shackles of puritanism, and to lose all interest in whiggery. the new democracy was neither coldly deist, nor austerely republican. it has shown no inclination to inaugurate a reign of "pure reason" in religion or politics, but has boldly and cheerfully adopted symbolism and pageantry. friendly societies and trade unions have their badges, banners, and buttons. the roman catholic church grows in popularity with the working class, and in many towns and cities the church of england and the salvation army are distinctly popular. on the other hand, the nonconformist churches confess annually to a decreasing membership, and secularist and ethical societies have but the smallest following. the royal processions and the pageantry of monarchy have provided a spectacular display that average human nature enjoys. the symbols and trappings of monarchy must be shown if the sovereign is to be popular; they add to the gaiety of life, and people are grateful for the warmth of colour they impart to our grey streets. the sovereign in encouraging the renewed and growing love for pageants and ceremonial has discerned the signs of the times. modern democracy does not desire that kings or priests shall rule; but it does require that they shall on state occasions and in the performance of their office, be clad in kingly and priestly robes, and by their proceedings enrich the dignity of public life, and the beauty of public worship. the democratic ideals: socialism and social reform the rise of socialism in the 'eighties not only diverted the attention of working-class leaders from political reform, but it substituted for the destruction of monarchy and the house of lords a reconstruction of society as the goal of democracy; and the socialist teaching has been of enduring and penetrating influence. fifty years earlier in the nineteenth century, robert owen had preached a socialist crusade with strenuous persuasion--but, ignoring politics, he outlived the temporary success of his cause. the utopian socialism of owen flourished and died, as chartism, under different treatment, flourished and died. the "scientific" socialism of karl marx was planned on stronger foundations. it brought a message of hope; it revealed how the change was to be wrought that would "emancipate the workers of the world from the slavery of wage service"; and it insisted that this change was inevitable. on the continent, and more particularly in germany, the social democratic party has gained an enormous working-class support, and every election adds to its strength. in england the social democratic federation--now the social democratic party--was founded in by mr. h.m. hyndman; but in spite of its untiring efforts, it has never won the sympathy of the trade unions, nor the confidence of the working-class electorate. its parliamentary candidatures rarely attract attention, and it is not a force in labour politics. nevertheless, indirectly, the influence of the social democratic party has been very considerable. mr. john burns, and many another labour leader, have passed through its ranks, and a social conscience has been made sensitive to the miseries of the poor, largely by the voices--that will not be silenced--of this comparatively small company. the fabian society also began its work of educating public opinion to socialism in , but, unlike the social democratic federation, it made no proposals for the creation of a socialist party or the organisation of the working class into a separate political party. mainly, its influence can be seen in the increase of statistical knowledge and of state interference in the conditions of life and labour in the working class. the independent labour party was not formed till , and while professing socialism, it has aimed rather at securing the return of labour members to parliament, and to local governing councils than at the conversion of the working class to a dogmatic social democracy. often frankly opportunist and experimental, the independent labour party and its offspring, the labour party in the house of commons, have followed the national custom in politics of attacking and redressing evident evils, and have done this with considerable success. but while the socialists have compelled the attention of all classes to existing social ills, and have made social reform the chief concern of all politicians, the idea of a social democracy steadily recedes from the political vision, and the conscious movement to socialism falters. socialist workmen in parliament or on city councils soon find themselves absorbed in the practical work of legislation or administration, and learn that there is neither leisure nor outlet for revolutionary propaganda. the engrossing character of public work destroys the old inclination to break up the existing order, for the socialist member of parliament, or city councillor interested in his work, has become part of the machinery responsible for the existing order, and without losing his sympathy for the labouring people is content that the amelioration of society shall come, as it now seems to him it must come, by slow and orderly stages and without violence. the very return of so many labour members to parliament and to local councils has damped down the fires of socialism, by placing in positions of authority and responsibility, and thereby withdrawing them from the army of disaffection, the ablest leaders of the working-class movement. the labour member who cannot settle down to legislative or administrative work, but attempts to play the agitator's part in the house of commons or the council chamber, is generally doomed to banishment from official public life, and is allowed to remain an agitator. mr. john burns may be denounced as a renegade by socialist critics, but a working-class electorate returns him to parliament. mr. cunninghame graham and mr. victor grayson may be applauded for their consistency by socialist audiences, but working-class constituencies are loth to return such representatives to the house of commons. as socialism quietly passes out of the vision of the political world, and from a definite inspiration to democracy becomes a dim and remote possibility of the future, social reform takes its place. not only in great britain, but throughout europe, the social reformers or "revisionists" are gaining the mastery over the scientific marxian socialists in democratic politics. in great britain where "practical," or experimental, politics have always prevailed over political theory, the passing of positive socialist dogma is naturally more obvious. social reform is now the cry of liberals and conservatives alike. the old liberal doctrines of _laissez faire_, unrestricted competition, and the personal liberty of the subject are as dead as the stuart doctrine of the divine right of kings. the old liberal hostility to state interference in trade or commerce, and to compulsory social legislation has melted away at the awakened social conscience. it still has its adherents--lord cromer and mr. harold cox repeat the ancient watch-words of victorian liberalism, and they are regarded with a respect mingled with curiosity, as strange survivals of a far-off age--but no popular echo follows their utterances. pensions for the aged, better provision for the sick and the infirm, a more careful attention to the well-being of children, national health, some cure for destitution, and some remedy for unemployment--these are the matters that a liberal government is concerned about to-day. and the conservatives are no less sincere in their willingness to help in these matters. legislative proposals for social reform are treated as non-party questions, and the chief item in the conservative programme, tariff reform, was adopted and is advocated mainly as a social reform, a cure for industrial evils, and the misery of unemployment. socialism proposed the abolition of poverty, and the common ownership and control of the land and the means of production, distribution, and exchange as the solution of economic questions. social reform proposes to mitigate the hardships of life for the multitude, and, while leaving land and capital in private hands, to compel by taxation provision for the wants of the people. its aim is the abolition of destitution by state assistance to voluntary effort, and the gradual raising of the standard of life. it does not propose to remove the cause of poverty. socialism would place the democracy in possession of the means of wealth. social reform requires the state to tax wealth and provide for the people. it promises a living wage, decent housing accommodation, an insurance against unemployment, and security in old age, and leaves the question of national ownership or private ownership to be settled by posterity. land reform and the single tax apart from the ideals of socialism, the democratic ideal of a community owning the full value of its land was presented by henry george, an american economist, in , and his book "progress and poverty," was at once received with enthusiasm by certain reformers in england and america. george visited england in , , and , and his visits resulted in a strong movement for the taxation of land values. this movement has been inspired by an ideal of a democratic community as definite as the socialist ideal, and it has grown steadily in popular favour as the justice of a tax on land values has been recognised. "progress and poverty" is the bible of the land reformers, as marx's "capital" is (or was) the bible of socialists. it is claimed that a tax on land values is the true remedy of social and economic ills, and that democracy can eradicate the root-cause of poverty by such a tax. in this belief the followers of henry george have preached the single tax, as it is called, with unquenchable fervour, and the liberal party has been gradually won over--if not to the single tax, at least to a tax on land values. many conservatives, too, favour the taxation of land values in cities, and all the principal municipalities have petitioned parliament in favour of this method of taxation. but it is the democratic ideals of henry george that have been the life of the movement for the single tax, and but for these ideals the movement would never have become a living influence towards democracy, or inspired a social enthusiasm. the charm about the single tax propaganda is that its ideals of democracy do not discourage the practical politician and the average citizen from supporting what seems a necessary and reasonable proposal. without committing themselves at all to henry george's full scheme for the total abolition of land monopoly by a tax of twenty shillings in the pound on all land values, and without abandoning the common british suspicion of the doctrinaire and the political idealist, the ordinary shopkeeper and householder are quite of opinion that urban values in land can be taxed legitimately for the benefit of the community, and that democracy would do well to decree some moderate tax on land values for the relief of the overtaxed non-landowner. so the taxation of land values is presented by its advocates as a social reform more radical and democratic than all other social reforms, as a reform that in fact would make democracy master of its own land, and the people free from the curse of poverty; and it is accepted by the great mass of working people as a just and useful method of raising revenue for local and imperial needs. socialism, social reform, the single tax--various are the ideals of a democratic people at work at the business of government, and various are the means proposed to establish the democracy in economic freedom. * * * * * chapter ix the world-wide movement: its strength and weakness east and west the movement towards democracy is world-wide to-day, and the political constitutions of the west are desired with fervour in the east. for generations there has been agitation in russia for representative government, and men and women--in countless numbers--have sacrificed wealth, reputation, liberty, and life itself in the cause of political freedom. on the establishment in of the duma, a national chamber of elected members, there was general rejoicing, because it seemed that, at length, autocracy was to give place to representative government. but the hopes of the political reformers were short lived. the duma still exists, but its powers were closely restricted in , and the franchise has been narrowed, to secure an overwhelming preponderance of the wealthy, so that it is altogether misleading to regard it as a popular assembly. in egypt and in india the nationalist movements are directed to self-government, and are led by men who have, in most cases, spent some years at an english university, or have been trained at the english bar. residence in england, and a close study of british politics make the educated indian anxious for political rights in his own country, similar to those that are given to him in great britain. in england the indian has all the political rights of a british subject. he can vote for a member of parliament, he can even be a member of the house of commons. on two occasions in recent years, an indian has been elected to parliament: mr. dadabhai naoroji sat as liberal m.p. for finsbury, - ; sir m.m. bhownagree as a conservative for bethnal green, - . back in his native land, the indian finds that he belongs to a subject race, and that the british garrison will neither admit him to social equality, nor permit him the right of legislation. hence with eyes directed to western forms of government, the indian is discontented with the bureaucracy that rules his land, and disaffected from the imperial power. but so many are the nations in india, and so poverty-stricken is the great multitude of its peasantry that the nationalist movement can touch but the fringe of the population, and the millions of india live patiently and contentedly under the british crown. nevertheless, the national movement grows steadily in numbers and in influence, for it is difficult for those who, politically minded, have once known political freedom, to resign themselves to political subjection. in egypt the nationalist movement is naturally smaller and more concentrated than in india and the racial divisions hinder its unity. egypt is nominally under the suzerainty of turkey, though occupied by great britain, and now that turkey has set up a constitution and a parliament, patriotic egyptian politicians are impatient at the blocking out by the british authorities of every proposal for self-government. as in india, so in egypt: it is the men of education who are responsible for the nationalist movement. and in both countries it is the desire to experiment in representative government, to test the constitutional forms in common use in the west, and to practise the responsibilities of citizenship, that stimulates the movement. the unwillingness of the british government to gratify this desire explains the hostility to british rule in india and egypt. japan received a constitution from the emperor in , and in its diet was formally opened with great national enthusiasm. it is a two-chamber parliament--a council of nobles, and a popularly elected assembly--and only in the last few years have the business men given their attention to it. although the cabinet is influenced by japanese public opinion, it is not directly responsible to the diet, but is the ministry of the mikado. the resolution of the japanese statesmen of forty years ago to make japan a world-power made constitutional government, in their eyes, a necessity for the nation. in europe, norway, sweden, and denmark all possess democratic constitutions, and only the removal of sex disabilities in the latter two is needed to achieve complete adult suffrage. finland established complete democracy nine years ago, and, with equal electoral districts, complete adult suffrage, and the free election of women equally with men to its diet, is a model democratic state. but the liberties of finland are gravely threatened by the russian government, and there is no security for the finns that their excellent self-government will be preserved. in germany, with universal manhood suffrage, the struggle is to make the government responsible to the elected reichstag. the british self-governing colonies show a tendency of democracy to federate. the australian colonies are federated into a commonwealth, and their example has been followed by the south african colonies. new zealand and australia are at one in their franchise, which allows no barrier of sex; but south africa still restricts the vote to males. in australia the working class are in power, and the commonwealth prime minister is a labour representative. there is no willingness to grant political rights to those who are not of european race, either in south africa or in australia; and the universal republic dreamed of by eighteenth century democrats, a republic which should know no racial or "colour" bar, is not in the vision of the modern colonial statesmen of democracy, who are frankly exclusive. only in new zealand does a native race elect its own members to parliament--and four maori m.p.'s are returned. tyranny under democratic forms experience has proved that democratic and republican forms of government are no guarantee that the nation possesses political liberty. mexico, nominally a republic under president diaz, was in reality a military autocracy of the severest kind. the south american republics are merely unstable monarchies, at the mercy of men who can manipulate the political machinery and get control of the army. it is too early yet to decide whether the constitutional form of government set up in turkey in , or the republic created on the abolition of monarchy in portugal in , mark national movements to democracy. in neither country is there evidence that general political freedom has been the goal of the successful revolutionist, or that the people have obtained any considerable measure of political power or civil liberty. ambitious and unscrupulous men can make full use of republican and democratic forms to gain political mastery over their less cunning fellows, and no machinery of government has ever yet been devised that will safeguard the weak and the foolish from the authority of the strong and the capable. those who put their trust in theories of popular sovereignty, and urge the referendum and initiative as the surer instruments of democracy than parliamentary representation, may recall that a popular plebiscite organised by napoleon in conferred on him the consulate for life; that louis napoleon was made president of the french republic in by a popular vote, obtained a new constitution by a plebiscite in , and a year later arranged another plebiscite which declared him hereditary emperor, napoleon iii. france, where naturally rousseau's theories have made the deepest impression, has since the revolution gloried in the right of the "sovereign people" to overthrow the government, and its elected representatives have been alternately at the mercy of dictators and social revolutionists. on the whole, the stability of the british government, rooted in the main on the traditional belief in the representation of the electorate, would seem to make more surely for national progress and wider political liberty than the alternation of revolution and reaction which france has known in the last hundred and twenty years. england has not been without its popular outbursts against what the american poet called "the never-ending audacity of elected persons," but these outbursts are commonly accepted as manifestations of intolerable conditions; and while the outbursts are repressed means are taken by government to amend the conditions. when the government fails to amend things, the house of commons takes the matter up; and if the commons neglect to do so, then the electors make it plain that amendment and reform are necessary by returning men to parliament pledged to change matters, and by rejecting those who have failed to meet the situation. the obvious dangers the dangers that threaten democracy are obvious. universal adult suffrage, short parliaments, proportional representation, equal electoral districts, second ballots--none of these things can insure democracy against corruption. for a government which rests on the will of a people--a will expressed by the election of representatives--is inevitably exposed to all the evils attendant on the unruly wills and affections of the average man. the orator can play upon the feelings of the crowd, and sway multitudes against a better judgment; and he has greater chance of working mischief when a referendum or other direct instrument of democracy is in vogue than he has when government is by elected representatives. for the party system, itself open to plenty of criticism, constantly defeats the orator by the superior power of organisation. hence it frequently happens at parliamentary elections that a candidate whose meetings are enthusiastic and well attended fails lamentably at the poll. his followers are a crowd; they are not a party. they do not know each other, and they have not the confidence that comes of membership in a large society. party government if the orator is a menace to the wise decisions of the people by a referendum, the party organiser and political "boss" can easily be a curse to representative government on party lines. by all manner of unholy devices he can secure votes for his candidate and his party, and he has raised (or lowered) the simple business of getting the people to choose their representative into the art of electioneering. the triumph of political principles by the election of persons to carry out those principles becomes of less importance than the successful working of the party machine, when the boss and the organiser are conspicuous. patronage becomes the method for keeping the party in power, and the promise of rewards and spoils enables an opposition to defeat the government and obtain office. to be outside the party is to lose all chance of sharing in the spoils, and to take an interest in politics means, under these circumstances, to expect some consideration in the distribution of honours. the "spoils system" is notorious in america, but in england it has become practically impossible for a man to take any serious part in politics except by becoming part of the machine. an independent attitude means isolation. to belong to a party--liberal, unionist, or labour--and to criticise its policy, or differ from its leaders, is resented as impertinence. the machine is master of the man. a troublesome and dangerous critic is commonly bought or silenced. he is given office in the government, or rewarded with a legal appointment; perhaps made a peer if his tastes are in that direction. a critic who cannot command a considerable backing among the electorate will probably be driven out of public life. the disinterested activity in politics that puts the commonwealth before party gain is naturally discouraged by the party organisers. yet when public interest in national affairs sinks to the merely sporting instinct of "backing your candidate" at elections as a horse is backed at race meetings, and of "shouting for your party" as men shout for their favourite football team, or sinks still lower to the mercenary speculation of personal gain or loss on election results, then another danger comes in--the indifference of the average honest citizen to all politics, and the cynical disbelief in political honesty. the warnings of john stuart mill against leaving politics to the politicians and against the professional position may be quoted: "representative institutions are of little value, and may be a mere instrument of tyranny or intrigue when the generality of electors are not sufficiently interested in their own government to give their vote; or, if they vote at all, do not bestow their suffrages on public grounds, but sell them for money, or vote at the beck of some one who has control over them, or whom for private reasons they desire to propitiate. popular elections as thus practised, instead of a security against misgovernment, are but an additional wheel in its machinery." mill himself was a striking example of the entirely disinterested politician, who, caring a great deal more for principles than for party, finds little favour with the electors, and less with the party managers, and retires from politics to the relief of his fellows. a general lack of interest in politics can prove fatal to democracy. the party managers, without the fear of the electorate before their eyes, will increase the number of salaried officials and strengthen their position by judicious appointments. nominally, these inspectors and officers will be required for the public service, and the appointments will be justified on patriotic grounds. there will be little criticism in parliament, because the party not in power will be anxious to create similar "jobs" when its own turn comes. besides, as the public pays for these officials, there is no drain on the party funds; and this is a matter of congratulation to party managers, who are always anxious not to spend more than they can help on the political machinery. bureaucracy but the horde of officials and inspectors will change democracy into bureaucracy, and the discovery is sometimes made too late that a land is ruled by permanent officials, and not by elected representatives. the elected representatives may sit and pass laws, but the bureaucracy which administers them will be the real authority. it may be an entirely honest and efficient bureaucracy, as free from political partisanship as our british civil service and police-court magistracy are, but if it is admitted to be outside the jurisdiction of the house of commons, and to be under no obedience to local councils, and if its powers involve a close inquisition into the lives of the people, and include the right to interfere daily with these lives, then bureaucracy and not democracy is the actual government. a host of salaried political workers--agents, organisers, secretaries, etc.--will make popular representative government a mere matter of political rivalry, an affair of "ins and outs," and by this development of the party system will exclude from active politics all who are not loyal to the "machine," and are not strong enough to break it. but a host of public officers--inspectors, clerks, etc.--paid out of the public funds will do more than pervert representative government: they will make it subordinate to the permanent official class; and bureaucracy, once firmly in the saddle, is harder to get rid of than the absolutism of kings, or the rule of an aristocracy. yet a permanent civil service is better in every way in a democracy than a civil service which lives and dies with a political party, and is changed with the cabinet. on the whole, the best thing for democracy is that the paid workers in politics should be as few as possible, and the number of salaried state officials strictly limited. the fewer the paid political workers, the fewer people will be concerned to maintain the efficiency of the political machine, and the more freely will the electorate act in the choice of its representatives. the fewer the salaried officials of state, the less inspection and restriction, and the less encouragement to habits of submission in the people. democracy must depend on a healthy, robust sense of personal responsibility in its citizens, and every increase in the inspectorate tends to diminish this personal responsibility, and to breed a "servile state" that will fall a willing prey to tyranny and bureaucracy. nevertheless, whilst in self-defence democracy will avoid increasing its officials, it will distinguish between officials and employees. it is bound to add to the number of its employees every year, as its municipal and imperial responsibilities grow steadily larger, and these employees, rightly regarded as public servants, cannot threaten to become our masters. working-class ascendancy still one more danger to democracy may be mentioned, and that is the notion that from the working class must necessarily come our best rulers. "rulers are not wise by reason of their number or their poverty, or their reception of a weekly wage instead of a monthly salary or yearly income. it is worse and more unpleasant and more dangerous to be ruled by many fools than by one fool, or a few fools. the tyranny of an ignorant and cowardly mob is a worse tyranny than the tyranny of an ignorant and cowardly clique or individual. "workers are not respectable or to be considered because they work more with their hands or feet than with their brains, but because the work they do is good. if it is not good work they do, they are as unprofitable as any other wasters. a plumber is not a useful or admirable creature because he plumbs (if he plumbs ignorantly or dishonestly, he is often either a manslayer or a murderer), but because he plumbs well, and saves the community from danger and damp, disease, and fire and water. makers of useless machine-made ornaments are, however 'horny-handed,' really 'anti-social persons,' baneful to the community as far as their bad work goes; more baneful, possibly, than the consumers of these bad articles, quite as baneful as the _entrepreneurs_ who employ them. "the only good institutions are those that do good work; the only good work done is that which produces good results, whether they be direct, as the plough-man's, or navvy's, or sailor's; or indirect, as the policeman, or the schoolmaster, or the teacher of good art, or the writer of books that are worth reading. a man is no better or wiser than others by reason of his position or lack of position, but by reason of his stronger body, wiser head, better skill, greater endurance, keener courage."[ ] there it is. democracy needs for its counsellors, legislators and ministers, strength, wisdom, skill, endurance and courage, and must get these qualities in whomsoever they are to be found. democracy can afford the widest range of choice in the election of popular representatives, or it will never reach its full stature. in the choice of its representatives, a democracy will do well to elect those who know the life of the working people, and who share its toils; just as it will do well to shun the mere talker, and to seek out for itself candidates for election rather than have candidates thrust upon its attention by some caucus in london. but the main thing is that it should first discern men and women of ability and of character and then elect them for its representatives, rejecting those, it may be of more dazzling qualities, who are unstable in mind and consumed with vanity. it would be well if the elected representative were always an inhabitant of the county or the borough, known to his neighbours, and of tested worth. true, the prophet is often without honour in his own country, and a constituency acts wisely in electing a representative of national repute. but to search for a man of wealth who will subsidise every club and charitable institution in the constituency, and to rejoice when such a candidate is procured from some political headquarters, is a wretched proceeding in a democratic state. the member who buys a constituency by his gifts will always feel entitled to sell his constituents should occasion arise. again, the delegate theory of representation can be a danger to democracy. a parliamentary representative is something better than a mechanical contrivance for registering the opinions of electors on certain subjects. otherwise all parliamentary debate is a mockery. a representative he is of the majority of electors, but he must act freely and with initiative. often enough he may be constrained to vote, not as many of his constituents would prefer, but using his own judgment. of course when the choice is between obedience to the party whip and the wishes of his constituents, and personal conviction is with the latter, then at all costs the decision should be to stand by his constituents, or popular representation is a delusion. to-day the pressure is far greater from the party whips than from the constituents, especially when in so many cases election expenses are paid, in part at least, from the party funds. and to overcome this constant danger to popular representation a sure plan would be the payment of all necessary election expenses out of the local rates, and the prohibition by law of all payments by the candidate or by political associations. when members are paid for their attendance in parliament, far better would it be, too, if such payment were made by the constituents in each case, and not from the national exchequer.[ ] worse than the delegate theory is the opinion that a representative of the people is in parliament chiefly to keep his party in power. political parties are inevitable, and they are effective and convenient when principles divide people. but popular representation is older than a party system of government, and when it becomes utterly subordinate to the welfare of parties it is time for a democratic people to realise the possible loss of their instrument of liberty. great britain is not partial to groups, it has always broadly been divided politically into two camps, but a few men of strong independent judgment are invaluable in a popular assembly. there need be no fear lest governments totter and fall at the presence of men who dare to take a line of their own, and to speak out boldly on occasion. the bulk of members of parliament will always cleave to their party, as the bulk of electors do, and the dread of being thought singular is a potent influence on the average man, in or out of parliament. democracy is in danger of losing the counsel of its best men when it insists that its representatives must be merely delegates of the electors, without minds or wills of their own; but it is in greater danger if it allows its representatives to be nothing but the tools of the party in power or in opposition. for when parliamentary representation is confined to those who are willing to be the mechanical implements of party leaders and managers, the house of commons becomes an assembly of place-hunters and self-seekers, for whom the profession of politics affords the gratification of vanity or enrichment at the public expense. in such an assembly the self-respecting man with a laudable willingness to serve the state is conspicuous by his absence. with a press in the hands of party politicians, and with editors and journalists engaged to write up their party through thick and thin, and to write down every honest effort at political independence of mind, the danger of losing from all political service the few rare minds that can ill be spared is a very real and present danger. on behalf of democracy "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance," and often enough we sleep at our vigils. but when all the dangers and difficulties that beset democracy are enumerated, and all its weak spots are laid bare, we can still hold democracy to be the only suitable form of government for persons possessing free will, and the representation of the people the most satisfactory expression of democracy. government by autocrat, by despotism, benevolent or otherwise, by expert officials, or by an oligarchy of superior intelligences is irksome to the average man or woman of reasonable education, and in each case has been intolerable to the british people. they have all been tried and found wanting--royal absolutism, aristocracy, military dictatorship, and only of late have we been threatened by an expert bureaucracy. parliamentary representation adapted, by the removal of disabilities of creed and rank and income, to meet the demands of the nation, has been proved by experience a clumsy but useful weapon for checking oppression. nowadays, we are using it less for defence against oppression, or as an instrument for removing political grievances, and are testing its worth for the provision of positive social reform. more and more it is required of parliament that means be found for getting rid of the ills around us, for preventing disease and destitution, for promoting health and decency. and just because legislation is, at the prompting of a social conscience, invading our homes and workshops, penetrating into prisons, workhouses, and hospitals, touching the lives of all of us from the cradle to the grave, the more imperative is it that our legislators should be chosen freely by the widest electorate of men and women. we fall back on the old maxim: "that which touches all shall be approved by all," and can perceive no other way of obtaining that general approbation for the laws than by the popular election of our representatives. demagogues may exploit the popular will, the cunning and unscrupulous in power may have us at their mercy, in our folly and indifference the nation may be brought to grave losses; but still there is always the means of recovery for the well-disposed while the vote remains in their hands. so it is that, in spite of obvious failings and shortcomings, democracy by representative government remains for nations throughout the world that have not yet tried it the goal of their political striving. we are alive to the imperfections of democracy. it is no automatic machine for conferring benefits in return for taxes. it is the creation of mankind, not a revelation from heaven; and it needs, like all good human things, constant attention and can bear many improvements. it has to be adjusted from time to time to suit the growing capacities of mankind--as the popular assembly gave way to the representative assembly--and only on the failure to make the adjustment does it get rusty and out of order. it has to meet the requirements of vast empires and mighty confederations of states, and to fulfil the wants of small republics and parish councils. what but democracy can answer to the call for political liberty that sounds from so many lands and in so many varying tongues? did any other form of government devised by the wit of man make such universal appeal? and when all is said and done--what does this democracy, this government by popular representatives, mean, but government by the consent of the governed--the only form of government tolerable to civilised mankind in the twentieth century? given a fairly good standard of common honesty in the ordinary dealings of life, and the honesty of our public life, whether in parliament or in the civil service, in executive or administration, will serve. if the private and commercial life is corroded with dishonesty, then democracy will be bitten by knaves and rascals. for our chosen rulers have a way of faithfully reflecting the morality of their electors, and are not free to indulge their fancies, as kings of old were. politics are not, and never will be, or ought to be, the chief interest and concern of the mass of people in a healthy community where slavery is extinct. and democracy makes no demand that would involve such interest and concern. the choice of honest representatives, persons of goodwill, and reasonable intelligence, is no tremendous task in a community where honesty, goodwill, and intelligence prevail. and if these things do not prevail, if honesty is contemned in business, and goodwill between man and man despised, and intelligence frowned upon, then it is of small importance what the government of such a nation is, for that nation is doomed, and it is well for the world that it should be doomed. but, on the whole, it seems indisputable that the common people of the great nations do cleave to honesty and goodwill, and that the desire for intelligence is being widely fostered. as long, then, as we can count on honesty, goodwill, and intelligence in our streets and market-places, as we can to-day, mankind does well to elect its representatives to council and parliament and proclaim democracy--"government of the people, by the people, for the people"--as the proper government for mankind. * * * * * notes. [ ] we cannot be sure about the constitution of the witenagemot. the evidence is conflicting, and, at best, we can only offer a statement of opinion. [ ] "the parish was the community of the township organised for church purposes and subject to church discipline, with a constitution which recognised the rights of the whole body as an aggregate, and the right of every adult member, _whether man or woman_, to a voice in self-government, but at the same time kept the self-governing community under a system of inspection and restraint by a central authority outside the parish boundaries."--bishop hobhouse, _somerset record society_, vol. iv. "the community had its own assembly--the parish meeting--which was a deliberative assembly. it had its own officers, who might be either men or women, duly elected, sometimes for a year, sometimes for life, but in all cases subject to being dismissed for flagrant offences. the larger number of these officials had well-defined duties to discharge, and were paid for their services out of funds provided by the parishioners."--dr. jessopp, _before the great pillage_. [ ] radmer, _life of anselm_. (rolls series.) [ ] "the boldness of anselm's attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of independence."--j.r. green, _history of the english people_. [ ] "for as long as any one in all the land was said to hold any power except through him, even in the things of god, it seemed to him that the royal dignity was diminished."--eadmer, _life of anselm_. [ ] see palgrave's _history of normandy and england_. [ ] "a martyr he clearly was, not merely to the privileges of the church or to the rights of the see of canterbury, but to the general cause of law and order as opposed to violence."--freeman, _historical essays_. [ ] _see_ campbell's _lives of the chancellors_. [ ] f. york powell, _england to _. "ecclesiastical privileges were not so exclusively priestly privileges as we sometimes fancy. they sheltered not only ordained ministers, but all ecclesiastical officers of every kind; the church courts also claimed jurisdiction in the causes of widows and orphans. in short, the privileges for which thomas contended transferred a large part of the people, and that the most helpless part, from the bloody grasp of the king's courts to the milder jurisdiction of the bishop."--freeman, _historical essays_. [ ] walter of coventry. (rolls series.) [ ] roger of wendover. (rolls series.) [ ] "clause by clause the rights of the commons are provided for as well as the rights of the nobles; the interest of the freeholder is everywhere coupled with that of the barons and knights; the stock of the merchant and the wainage of the villein are preserved from undue severity of amercement as well as the settled estate of the earldom or barony. the knight is protected against the compulsory exaction of his services, and the horse and cart of the freeman against the irregular requisition even of the sheriff."--stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] "quod anglicana ecclesia libera sit."--_magna charta_, i. [ ] "this most important provision may be regarded as a summing-up of the history of parliament so far as it can be said yet to exist. it probably contains nothing which had not been for a long time in theory a part of the constitution: the kings had long consulted their council on taxation; that council consisted of the elements that are here specified. but the right had never yet been stated in so clear a form, and the statement thus made seems to have startled even the barons.... it was for the attainment of this right that the struggles of the reign of henry iii. were carried on; and the realisation of the claim was deferred until the reign of his successor. in these clauses the nation had now obtained a comparatively clear definition of the right on which their future political power was to be based."--stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] "ut quod omnes similiter tangit ab omnibus approbetur." [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] stubbs, _ibid_. [ ] "analogous examples may be taken from the practice of the ecclesiastical assemblies, in which the representative theory is introduced shortly before it finds its way into parliament."--stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] f. york powell, _england to _. [ ] sir courtenay ilbert, _parliament_. [ ] ilbert, _parliament_. [ ] bagehot, _the english constitution_. [ ] bagehot, _ibid_. [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] andrew marvell, the poet, who sat for hull in the reign of charles ii., was paid by the mayor and aldermen of the borough. in return marvell wrote letters describing passing events in london. there are stray cases of the payment of members in the early years of the eighteenth century. four shillings a day, including the journey to and from london, for the knight of the shire, and two shillings a day for the borough member were the wages fixed by law in . [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] bagehot, _the english constitution_. [ ] _see_ stopes' _british freewomen_ for a full examination of this matter. [ ] stubbs, _constitutional history_. [ ] for the last fifty years the political influence of london has been less than that of the manufacturing districts. [ ] "the project was clearly to set up a new order of things founded on social equality--a theory which in the whole history of the middle ages appears for the first time in connection with this movement."--dr. gairdner, _introduction to paston letters_. [ ] four centuries later and this doctrine of all men having been born free at the beginning was to be preached again in popular fashion by rousseau and find expression in american independence and the french revolution. [ ] froissart seems to be chiefly responsible for the notion, found in the writings of later historians, that this john tyler was the leader of the revolt, and for the confusion that mistakenly identifies him with wat tyler, of maidstone, the real leader. three other tylers are mentioned in the records of the peasant revolt--walter, of essex, and two of the city of london. [ ] hallam, _middle ages_. [ ] this law of winchester was the statute of edward i., , which authorised local authorities to appoint constables and preserve the peace. according to a statement made by jack straw, tyler and his lieutenants intended, amongst other things, to get rid of the king's council, and make each county a self-governing commune. [ ] there are some grounds for believing that a plot had been made to slay wat tyler at smithfield. _see_ dr. g. kriehn _american review_, . [ ] f. york powell, _england to _. [ ] durrant cooper, _john cade's followers in kent_. [ ] "these lords found him sober in talk, wise in reasoning, arrogant in heart, and stiff in opinions; one who by no means would dissolve his army, except the king in person would come to him, and assent to the things he would require."--holinshed. [ ] stow. [ ] "whereof he (cade) lost the people's favour and hearts. for it was to be thought if he had not executed that robbery he might have gone far and brought his purpose to good effect."--fabyan's _chronicle_. "and for this the hearts of the citizens fell from him, and every thrifty man was afraid to be served in likewise, for there was many a man in london that awaited and would fain have seen a common robbery."--stow. [ ] "during the period, which may be roughly defined as from to , enclosure meant to a large extent the actual dispossession of the tenants by their manorial lords. this took place either in the form of the violent ousting of the sitting tenant, or of a refusal on the death of one tenant to admit the son, who in earlier centuries would have been treated as his natural successor. proofs abound."--w.j. ashley, _economic history_. [ ] _see_ dr. jessop, _the great pillage_. [ ] "that a populous and wealthy city like norwich should have been for three weeks in the hands of , rebels, and should have escaped utter pillage and ruin, speaks highly for the rebel leaders."--w. rye, _victoria county history of norfolk_. "robert ket was not a mere craftsman: he was a man of substance, the owner of several manors; his conduct throughout was marked by considerable generosity; nor can the name of patriot be denied to him who deserted the class to which he might have belonged or aspired, and cast in his lot with the suffering people."--canon dixon, _history of the church of england_. [ ] "there was something in the temper of these celebrated men which secured them against the proverbial inconstancy both of the court and of individuals.... no parliament attacked their influence. no mob coupled their names with any odious grievance.... they were, one and all, protestants. but ... none of them chose to run the smallest personal risk during the reign of mary. no men observed more accurately the signs of the times.... their fidelity to the state was incorruptible. no intrigue, no combination of rivals could deprive them of the confidence of their sovereign."--macaulay, _burleigh, his times._ [ ] "the tudor monarchs exercised freely their power of creating boroughs by charter. they used their parliaments, and had to find means of controlling them. in the creation of 'pocket' or 'rotten' boroughs, queen elizabeth was probably the worst offender. she had much influence in her duchy of cornwall, and many of the cornish boroughs which obtained such a scandalous reputation in later times were created by her for the return of those whom the lords of her council would consider 'safe' men."--ilbert, _parliament._ [ ] elizabeth's popularity steadily diminished in her last years. the death of essex, ecclesiastical persecutions, increased taxation, and the irritations caused by royal expenditure were all responsible for the discontent. james i. failed from the first to secure the goodwill of the people. [ ] oxford men all three. sir john eliot was at exeter college, ; john hampden at magdalen, ; and john pym at broadgate hall (later called pembroke), . [ ] clarendon, _history of the great rebellion_. [ ] "the same men who, six months before, were observed to be of very moderate tempers, and to wish that gentle remedies might be applied, talked now in another dialect both of kings and persons; and said that they must now be of another temper than they were the last parliament."--clarendon, _ibid._ [ ] macaulay, _hallam's constitutional history_. [ ] "the great rule of cromwell was a series of failures to reconcile the authority of the 'single person' with the authority of parliament."--ilbert, _parliament_. [ ] "a very large number of persons regarded the struggle with indifference.... in one case, the inhabitants of an entire county pledged themselves to remain neutral. many quietly changed with the times (as people changed with the varying fortunes of york and lancaster). that this sentiment of neutrality was common to the greater mass of the working classes is obvious from the simultaneous appearance of the club men in different parts of the country with their motto: 'if you take our cattle, we will give you battle.'"--g.p. gooch, _history of democratic ideas in the seventeenth century_. [ ] see _memorial of english affairs_. [ ] "by its injudicious treatment of the most popular man in england, parliament was arraying against itself a force which only awaited an opportunity to sweep it away."--g.p. gooch, _history of democratic ideas in the seventeenth century_. [ ] "so die the leveller corporals. strong they, after their sort, for the liberties of england; resolute to the very death."--carlyle. [ ] "then ensued a scene, the like of which had in all probability never been witnessed in an english court of justice, and was never again to be witnessed till the seven bishops were freed by the verdict of a jury from the rage of james ii."--s.r. gardiner, _history of the commonwealth_. [ ] professor c.h. firth, lilburne in _dict. nat. biography_. [ ] winstanley's _new law of righteousness_, . [ ] palgrave. introduction to erskine may, _parliamentary practice_. [ ] sir john eliot, . [ ] edward ii., in , and richard ii., in , had not been deposed without the consent of parliament. [ ] "the monarchical regime which was revived under charles ii. broke down under james ii. it was left for the 'glorious revolution' of , and for the hanoverian dynasty, to develop the ingenious system of adjustments and compromises which is now known, sometimes as cabinet government, sometimes as parliamentary government."--ilbert, _parliament_. [ ] g.p. gooch, _annals of politics and culture_. [ ] palmerston's influence in the house of commons was about as bad in the nineteenth century.--_see_ bagehot, _the english constitution_. [ ] "here and there we find an eminent man, whose public services were so notorious that it was impossible to avoid rewarding them; but putting aside those who were in a manner forced upon the sovereign, it would be idle to deny that the remainder and, of course, the overwhelming majority, were marked by a narrowness and illiberality of sentiment, which, more than anything else, brought the whole order into contempt. no great thinkers, no great writers, no great orators, no great statesman, none of the true nobility of the land, were to be found among those spurious nobles created by george iii. nor were the material interests of the country better represented. among the most important men in england those engaged in banking and commerce held a high place; since the end of the seventeenth century their influence had rapidly increased.... but in the reign of george iii. claims of this sort were little heeded."--buckle, _history of civilisation_. [ ] "they, the friars, and especially the franciscans, largely influenced politics. the conception of individual freedom, upon which the life of st. francis was built, went far to instil the idea of civic freedom into men's minds.... it was the ideas of the friars that found expression in the baron's war." the song of the battle of lewes "set forth unmistakably the conception of the official position of the king, and affirmed the right of his subjects to remove evil counsellors from his neighbourhood, and to remind him of his duty--ideas due to the political influence of the franciscans."--creighton, _historical lectures and addresses_. [ ] the late lord acton pointed out that st. thomas aquinas was really the first whig. [ ] see introduction to rousseau's _social contract_, by h. j. tozer. [ ] "that which distinguishes the french revolution from other political movements is that it was directed by men who had adopted certain speculative a priori conceptions with the fanaticism and proselytising fervour of a religious belief, and the bible of their creed was the _contrat social_ of rousseau."--lecky, _england in eighteenth century_, vol. v. "the original contract seized on as a watchword by rousseau's enthusiasm grew from an arid fiction into a great and dangerous deceit of nations."--sir f. pollock, _history of the science of politics_. [ ] mr. h.j. tozer. introduction to rousseau's _social contract_. [ ] see conway's _life of paine_, vol. i. [ ] professor t.f. tout, _england from _. [ ] tout, _ibid._ [ ] tout, _ibid._ [ ] r.g. gammage, _history of the chartist movement_. [ ] "the condition of the labouring classes was the least satisfactory feature of english life in . politically they were dumb, for they had no parliamentary votes. socially they were depressed, though their lot had been considerably improved by an increased demand for labour and by the removal of taxes in peel's great budget of . that was the year in which the misery of the english proletariat reached its lowest depth."--herbert paul, _history of modern england_. [ ] justin mccarthy, _short history of our own times_. [ ] mccarthy, _ibid_. [ ] tout, _england since _. [ ] "for a general extension of the franchise, an extension from the occupation franchise to the adult franchise, there does not appear to be any demand, except in connection with the burning question of the franchise for women."--ilbert, _parliament_. [ ] "on the mere numerical basis ireland is much over-represented, but ireland claims to be treated as a separate entity, and her claims cannot be disregarded."--ilbert, _parliament_. [ ] rt. hon. a.j. balfour, m.p., house of commons, . [ ] "with great tact, and without very much friction, he brought the monarchy into touch with the state of things brought about by the reform bill. he did for the crown what wellington did for the house of lords. just as the duke saw that the lords must give up setting themselves against the national will strongly expressed, so did the prince see that the crown could no longer exercise those _legal_ rights for which george iii. had fought so manfully. like the lords, the crown now became a checking and regulating, rather than a moving, force. it remained as the pledge and symbol of the unity and continuity of the national life, and could do good work in tempering the evils of absolute party government. such of the royal _prerogatives_ as were not dead must be carried out by ministers. the royal _influence_ continued to run through every branch of the state."--professor t.f. tout, _england from ._ [ ] mr. j.m. robertson, m.p., _charles bradlaugh--a record of his life and work_. [ ] f. york powell, _thoughts on democracy_. [ ] unfortunately the present house of commons has just decided, august, , to pay its members a salary of £ a year from the national revenue. it is to be regretted that the cost has not been laid directly on the electors, and that the time is not more appropriate. with the country torn with strikes of workmen seeking a few extra shillings a week, it was hardly the opportune moment for a house of commons to vote itself some £ , a year. the proposal would have been more palatable to the nation if the commons had decided that payment should begin with the _next_ parliament. +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note: | | | | all greek words have been transliterated into english, and are | | contained within { } brackets. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ the cult of incompetence first edition november, . second edition july, . the cult of incompetence by emile faguet _of the french academy_ translated from the french by beatrice barstow with an introduction by thomas mackay new york: e. p. dutton & company contents. page introduction chapter i. the principles of forms of government ii. confusion of functions iii. the refuges of efficiency iv. the competent legislator v. laws under democracy vi. the incompetence of government vii. judicial incompetence viii. examples of incompetence ix. manners x. professional customs xi. attempted remedies xii. the dream index the cult of incompetence. introduction. though it may not have been possible in the following pages to reproduce the elegant and incisive style of a master of french prose, not even the inadequacies of a translation can obscure the force of his argument. the only introduction, therefore, that seems possible must take the form of a request to the reader to study m. faguet's criticism of modern democracy with the daily paper in his hand. he will then see, taking chapter by chapter, how in some aspects the phenomena of english democracy are identical with those described in the text, and how in others our english worship of incompetence, moral and technical, differs considerably from that which prevails in france. it might have been possible, as a part of the scheme of this volume, to note on each page, by way of illustration, instances from contemporary english practice, but an adequate execution of this plan would have overloaded the text, or even required an additional volume. such a volume, impartially worked out with instances drawn from the programme of all political parties, would be an interesting commentary on current political controversy, and it is to be hoped that m. faguet's suggestive pages will inspire some competent hand to undertake the task. if m. faguet had chosen to refer to england, he might, perhaps, have cited the constitution of this country, as it existed some seventy years ago, as an example of a "demophil aristocracy," raised to power by an "aristocracy-respecting democracy." it is not perhaps wise in political controversy to compromise our liberty of action in respect of the problems of the present time, by too deferential a reference to a golden age which probably, like lycurgus in the text, p. , never existed at all, but it has been often stated, and undoubtedly with a certain amount of truth, that the years between and were the only period in english history during which philosophical principles were allowed an important, we cannot say a paramount, authority over english legislation. the characteristic features of the period were a determination to abolish the privileges of the few, which, however, involved no desire to embark on the impossible and inequitable task of creating privileges for the many; a deliberate attempt to extirpate the servile dependence of the old poor law, and a definite abandonment of the plan of distributing economic advantages by eleemosynary state action. this policy was based on the conviction that personal liberty and freedom of private enterprise were the adequate, constructive influences of a progressive civilisation. too much importance has perhaps been attached to the relatively unimportant question of the freedom of international trade, for this was only part of a general policy of emancipation which had a much more far-reaching scope. rightly understood the political philosophy of that time, put forward by the competent statesmen who were then trusted by the democracy, proclaimed the principle of liberty and freedom of exchange as the true solvents of the economic problems of the day. this policy remained in force during the ministry of sir r. peel and lasted right down to the time of the great budgets of mr. gladstone. if we might venture, therefore, to add another to the definitions of montesquieu, we might say that the principle animating a liberal constitutional government was liberty, and that this involved a definite plan for enlarging the sphere of liberty as the organising principle of civil society. to what then are we to impute the decadence from this type into which parliamentary government seems now to have fallen? can we attribute this to neglect or to exaggeration of its animating principle, as suggested in the formula of montesquieu? it is a question which the reader may find leisure to investigate; we confine ourselves to marking what seem to be some of the stages of decay. when the forces of destructive radicalism had done their legitimate work, it seemed a time for rest and patience, for administration rather than for fresh legislation and for a pause during which the principles of liberty and free exchange might have been left to organise the equitable distribution of the inevitably increasing wealth of the country. the patience and the conviction which were needed to allow of such a development, rightly or wrongly, were not forthcoming, and politicians and parties have not been wanting to give effect to remedies hastily suggested to and adopted by the people. political leaders soon came to realise that recent enfranchisements had added a new electorate for whom philosophical principles had no charm. at a later date also, mr. gladstone, yielding to a powerful and not over-scrupulous political agitation, suddenly determined to attempt a great constitutional change in the relations between the united kingdom and ireland. whether the transference of the misgovernment of ireland from london to dublin would have had results as disastrous or as beneficial as disputants have asserted, may be matter for doubt, but the manner in which the proposal was made certainly had one unfortunate consequence. mr. gladstone's action struck a blow at the independence and self-respect, or as m. faguet terms it, the moral competence of our parliamentary representation from which it has never recovered. men were called on to abandon, in the course of a few hours, opinions which they had professed for a lifetime and this not as the result of conviction but on the pressure of party discipline. political feeling ran high. the "caucus" was called into more active operation. political parties began to invent programmes to capture the groundlings. the conservative party, relinquishing its useful function of critic, revived the old policy of eleemosynary doles, and, in an unlucky moment for its future, has encumbered itself with an advocacy of the policy of protection. for strangely enough the democracy, the bestower of power, though developing symptoms of fiscal tyranny and a hatred of liberty in other directions clings tenaciously to freedom of international trade--for the present at least--and it would seem that the electioneering caucus has, in this instance, failed to understand its own business. the doles of the new state-charity were to be given to meet contributions from the beneficiaries, but as the class which for one reason or another is ever in a destitute condition, could not or would not contribute, the only way in which the benevolent purpose of the agitation could be carried out was by bestowing the dole gratuitously. the flood gates, therefore, had to be opened wider, and we have been and still are exposed to a rush of philanthropic legislation which is gradually transferring all the responsibilities of life from the individual to the state. free trade for the moment remains, and it is supposed to be strongly entrenched in the convictions of the liberal party. its position, however, is obviously very precarious in view of the demands made by the militant trade unions. these, in their various spheres, claim a monopoly of employment for their members, to the exclusion of those who do not belong to their associations. logic has something, perhaps not much, to do with political action, and it is almost inconceivable that a party can go on for long holding these two contradictory opinions. which of them will be abandoned, the future only can tell. the result of all this is a growing disinclination on the part of the people to limit their responsibilities to their means of discharging them, the creation of a proletariate which in search of maintenance drifts along the line of least resistance, dependence on the government dole. in the end too it must bring about the impoverishment of the state, which is ever being called on to undertake new burdens; for the individual, thus released from obligation to discharge, is still left free to create responsibilities, for which it is now the business of the state to make provision. under such a system the ability to pay as well as the number of the solvent citizens must continuously decline. the proper reply to this legislation which we describe as predatory in the sense that we describe the benevolent habits of robin hood as predatory, cannot be made by the official opposition which was itself the first to step on the down grade, and which only waits the chances of party warfare to take its turn in providing _panem et circenses_ at the charge of the public exchequer. in this way, progress is brought to a standstill by the chronic unwillingness of the rate- and tax-payers to find the money. a truer policy, based on the voluntary action of citizens and capable of indefinite and continuous expansion, finds no support among politicians, for all political parties seem to be held in the grip of the moral and technical incompetence which m. faguet has so wittily described. the only reply to a government bent on such courses is that which above has been imputed--perhaps without sufficient justification--to the governments of the period - ; and that reply democracy, as at present advised, will allow no political party to make. there does not appear, therefore, to be much difference between the situation here and in france, and it is very interesting to notice how in various details there is a very close parallelism between events in this country and those which m. faguet has described. the position of our lord chancellor, who has been bitterly attacked by his own party, in respect of his appointment of magistrates, is very similar to that of m. barthou, quoted on p. . our judicial system has hitherto been considered free from political partisanship, but very recently and for the first time a minister in his place in parliament, has rightly or wrongly seen fit to call in question the impartiality of our judicial bench, and the suspicion, if, as appears to be the case, it is widely entertained by persons heated in political strife, will probably lead to appointments calculated to ensure reprisals. astute politicians do not commit themselves to an attack on a venerated institution, till they think they know that that institution is becoming unpopular with the followers who direct their policy. criminal verdicts also, especially on the eve of an election, are now made liable to revision by ministers scouring the gaols of the country in search of picturesque malefactors whom, with an accompaniment of much philanthropic speech, they proceed to set at liberty. even the first principles of equity, as ordinarily understood, seem to have lost their authority, when weighed in the balance against the vote of the majority. very recently the members of an honourable and useful profession represented to a minister that his extension of a scheme of more or less gratuitous relief to a class which hitherto had been able and willing to pay its way, was likely to deprive them of their livelihood. his reply, _inter alia_, contained the argument that the class in question was very numerous and had many votes, and that he doubted whether any one would venture to propose its exclusion except perhaps a member for a university; as a matter of fact some such proposal had been made by one of the university members whose constituents were affected by the proposal. the minister further declared that he did not think that such an amendment could obtain a seconder. the argument seems to impute to our national representatives a cynical disregard of equity, and a blind worship of numbers, which if true, is an instance of moral incompetence quite as remarkable as anything contained in m. faguet's narrative. if readers of this volume will take the trouble to annotate their copies with a record of the relevant incidents which meet them every day of their lives, they cannot fail to acknowledge how terribly inevitable is the rise of incompetence to political power. the tragedy is all the more dreadful, when we recognise, as we all must, the high character and ability of the statesmen and politicians who lie under the thrall of this compelling necessity. this systematic corruption of the best threatens to assume the proportions of a national disaster. it is the system, not the actors in it, which m. faguet analyses and invites us to deplore. t. mackay. chapter i. the principles of forms of government. the question has often been asked, what is the animating principle of different forms of government, for each, it is assumed, has its own principle. in other words, what is the general idea which inspires each political system? montesquieu, for instance, proved that the _principle_ of monarchy is _honour_, the principle of despotism _fear_, the principle of a republic _virtue_ or patriotism, and he added with much justice that governments decline and fall as often by carrying their principle to excess, as by neglecting it altogether. and this, though a paradox, is true. at first sight it may not be obvious how a despotism can fall by inspiring too much fear, or a constitutional monarchy by developing too highly the sentiment of honour, or a republic by having too much virtue. it is nevertheless true. to make too common a use of fear is to destroy its efficacy. as edgar quinet happily puts it: "if we want to make use of fear we must be certain that we can use it always." we cannot have too much honour, but when we can appeal to this sentiment only and when distinctions, decorations, orders, ribbons--in a word _honours_--are multiplied, inasmuch as we cannot increase such things indefinitely, those who have none become as discontented as those who, having some, want more. finally we cannot, of course, have too much virtue, and naturally here governments will fall not by exaggerating but by abandoning their guiding principle. yet is it not sometimes true that by demanding from citizens too great a devotion to their country, we end by exhausting human powers of endurance and sacrifice? this is what happened in the case of napoleon, who, perhaps unwittingly, required too much from france, for the building up of a 'greater france.' but that, some one will object, was not a republic! from the point of view of the sacrifices required from the citizen, it was a republic, similar to the roman republic and to the french republic of . all the talk was 'for the glory of our country,' 'heroism, heroism, nothing but heroism'! if too much is required of it, civic virtue can be exhausted. it is, then, very true that governments perish just as much from an excess as from a neglect of their appropriate principle. montesquieu without doubt borrowed his general idea from aristotle, who remarks not without humour, "those, who think that they have discovered the basis of good government, are apt to push the consequences of their new found principle too far. they do not remember that disproportion in such matters is fatal. they forget that a nose which varies slightly from the ideal line of beauty appropriate for noses, tending slightly towards becoming a hook or a snub, may still be of fair shape and not disagreeable to the eye, but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all." this law of proportion holds good with regard to every form of government. * * * * * starting from these general ideas, i have often wondered what principle democrats have adopted for the form of government which they favour, and it has not required a great effort on my part to arrive at the conclusion that the principle in question is the worship and cultivation, or, briefly 'the cult' of incompetence or inefficiency. let us examine any well-managed and successful business firm or factory. every employee does the work he knows and does best, the skilled workman, the accountant, the manager and the secretary, each in his place. no one would dream of making the accountant change places with a commercial traveller or a mechanic. look too at the animal world. the higher we go in the scale of organic existence, the greater the division of labour, the more marked the specialisation of physiological function. one organ thinks, another acts, one digests, another breathes. now is there such a thing as an animal with only one organ, or rather is there any animal, consisting of only one organ, which breathes and thinks and digests all at the same time? yes, there is. it is called the amoeba, and the amoeba is the very lowest thing in the animal world, very inferior even to a vegetable. in the same way, without doubt, in a well constituted society, each organ has its definite function, that is to say, administration is carried on by those who have learnt how to administer, legislation and the amendment of laws by those who have learnt how to legislate, justice by those who have studied jurisprudence, and the functions of a country postman are not given to a paralytic. society should model itself on nature, whose plan is specialisation. "for," as aristotle says, "she is not niggardly, like the delphian smiths whose knives have to serve for many purposes, she makes each thing for a single purpose, and the best instrument is that which serves one and not many uses." elsewhere he says, "at carthage it is thought an honour to hold many offices, but a man only does one thing well. the legislator should see to this, and prevent the same man from being set to make shoes and play the flute." a well-constituted society, we may sum up, is one where every function is not confided to every one, where the crowd itself, the whole body social, is not told: "it is your business to govern, to administer, to make the laws, &c." a society, where things are so arranged, is an amoebic society. that society, therefore, stands highest in the scale, where the division of labour is greatest, where specialisation is most definite, and where the distribution of functions according to efficiency is most thoroughly carried out. * * * * * now democracies, far from sharing this view, are inclined to take the opposite view. at athens there was a great tribunal composed of men learned in, and competent to interpret, the law. the people could not tolerate such an institution, so laboured to destroy it and to usurp its functions. the crowd reasoned thus. "we can interpret and carry out laws, because we make them." the conclusion was right, but the minor premise was disputable. the retort can be made: "true, you can interpret and carry out laws because you make them, but perhaps you have no business to be making laws." be that as it may, the athenian people not only interpreted and applied its own laws, but it insisted on being paid for so doing. the result was that the poorest citizens sat judging all day long, as all others were unwilling to sacrifice their whole time for a payment of six drachmas. this plebeian tribunal continued for many years. its most celebrated feat was the judgment which condemned socrates to death. this was perhaps matter for regret, but the great principle, the sovereignty of incompetence, was vindicated. modern democracies seem to have adopted the same principle, in form they are essentially amoebic. a democracy, well-known to us all, has been evolved in the following manner. it began with this idea; king and people, democratic royalty, royal democracy. the people makes, the king carries out, the law; the people legislates, the king governs, retaining, however, a certain control over the law, for he can suspend the carrying out of a new law when he considers that it tends to obstruct the function of government. here then was a sort of specialisation of functions. the same person, or collective body of persons, did not both legislate and govern. this did not last long. the king was suppressed. democracy remained, but a certain amount of respect for efficiency remained too. the people, the masses, did not, every single man of them, claim the right to govern and to legislate directly. it did not even claim the right to nominate the legislature directly. it adopted indirect election, _à deux degrés_, that is, it nominated electors who in turn nominated the legislature. it thus left two aristocracies above itself, the first electors and the elected legislature. this was still far removed from democracy on the athenian model which did everything itself. this does not mean that much attention was paid to efficiency. the electors were not chosen because they were particularly fitted to elect a legislature, nor was the legislature itself elected with any reference to its legislative capacity. still there was a certain pretence of a desire for efficiency, a double pseudo-efficiency. the crowd, or rather the constitution, assumed that legislators elected by the delegates of the crowd were more competent to make laws than the crowd itself. this somewhat curious form of efficiency i have called _compétence par collation_, efficiency or competence conferred by this form of selection. there is absolutely nothing to show that so-and-so has the slightest legislative or juridical faculty, so i confer on him a certificate of efficiency by the confidence i repose in him when nominating him for the office, or rather i show my confidence in the electors and they confer a certificate of efficiency on those whom they nominate for the legislature. this, of course, is devoid of all common sense, but appearances, and even something more, are in its favour. it is not common sense for it involves something being made out of nothing, inefficiency producing efficiency and zero extracting 'one' out of itself. this form of selection, though it does not appeal to me under any circumstances, is legitimate enough when it is exercised by a competent body. a university can confer a degree upon a distinguished man because it can judge whether his degreeless condition is due to accident or not. it would, however, be highly ridiculous and paradoxical if the general public were to confer mathematical degrees. a degree of efficiency conferred by an inefficient body is contrary to common sense. there is, however, some plausibility and indeed a little more than plausibility in favour of this plan. degrees in literature and in dramatic art are conferred, given by 'collation,' by incompetent people, that is by the public. we can say to the public: "you know nothing of literary and dramatic art." it will retort: "true, i know nothing, but certain things move me and i confer the degree on those who evoke my emotions." in this it is not altogether wrong. in the same way the degree of doctor of political science is conferred by the people on those who stir its emotions and who express most forcibly its own passions. these doctors of political science are the empassioned representatives of its own passions. --in other words, the worst legislators!-- yes, very nearly so, but not quite. it is very useful that we should have an exponent of popular passion at the crest of the social wave, to tell us not indeed what the crowd is thinking, for the crowd never thinks, but what the crowd is feeling, in order that we may not cross it too violently or obey it too obsequiously. an engineer would call it the science of the strength of materials. a medium assures me that he had a conversation with louis xiv, who said to him: "universal suffrage is an excellent thing in a monarchy. it is a source of information. when it recommends a certain course of action it shows us that this is a thing which we must not do. if i could have consulted it over the revocation of the edict of nantes, it would have given me a clear mandate for that revocation and i should have known what to do, and that edict would not have been revoked. i acted as i did, because i was advised by ministers whom i considered experienced statesmen. had i been aware of the state of public opinion i should have known that france was tired of wars and new palaces and extravagance. but this was not an expression of passion and prejudice, but a cry of suffering. as far as passion and prejudice are concerned we must go right in the teeth of public opinion, and universal suffrage will tell you what that is. on the other hand we must pay heed, serious heed to every cry of pain, and here too universal suffrage will come to our aid. universal suffrage is necessary to a monarchy as a source of information." this, i am told, is louis xiv's present opinion on the subject. as far as legislation therefore is concerned, the attempt to secure competence by 'collation' is an absurdity. yet it is an inverted sort of competence useful for indicating the state of a nation's temper. from this it follows that this system is as mischievous in a republic as it would be wholesome in a monarchy. it is not therefore altogether bad. the democracy which we have in view, after having been governed by the representatives of its representatives for ten years, submitted for the next fifteen years to the rule of one representative and took no particular advantage therefrom. then for thirty years it adopted a scheme which aimed at a certain measure of efficiency. it assumed that the electors of the legislature ought not to be nominated, but marked out by their social position, that is their fortune. those who possessed so many drachmas were to be electors. what sort of a basis for efficiency is this? it is a basis but certainly a somewhat narrow one. it is a basis, first, because a man who owns a certain fortune has a greater interest than others in a sound management of public business, and self-interest opens and quickens the eye; and again a man who has money and does not lose it cannot be altogether a fool. on the other hand it is a narrow basis, because the possession of money is of itself no guarantee of political ability, and the system leads to the very questionable proposition that every rich man is a competent social reformer. it is, however, a sort of competence, but a competence very precariously established and on a very narrow basis. this system disappeared and our democracy, after a short interregnum, repeated its previous experiment and submitted for eighteen years to the rule of one delegate with no great cause to congratulate itself on the result. it then adopted democracy in a form almost pure and simple. i say almost, for the democratic system pure and simple involves the direct government of the people without any intervening representatives, by means of a continuous plebiscite. our democracy then set up and still maintains a democratic system almost pure and simple, that is to say, it established government of the nation by delegates whom it itself elected and by these delegates strictly and exclusively. this time we have reached an apotheosis of incompetence that is well nigh absolute. this, our present system, purports to be the rule of efficiency chosen by the arbitrary form of selection which has been described. just as the bishop in the story, addressing a haunch of venison, exclaimed: "i baptise thee carp," so the people says to its representatives: "i baptise you masters of law, i baptise you statesmen, i baptise you social reformers." we shall see later on that this baptism goes very much further than this. if the people were capable of judging of the legal and psychological knowledge possessed by those who present themselves for election, this form of selection need not be prohibitive of efficiency and might even be satisfactory; but in the first place, the electors are not capable of judging, and secondly, even if they were, nothing would be gained. nothing would be gained, because the people never places itself at this point of view. emphatically never! it looks at the qualifications of the candidate not from a scientific but from a moral point of view. --well that surely is something, and, in a way, a guarantee of efficiency. the legislators are not capable of making laws, it is true; but at least they are honest men. this guarantee of moral efficiency, some critic will say, gives me much satisfaction. please be careful, i reply, we should never think of giving the management of a railway station to the most honest man, but to an honest man who, besides, understood thoroughly railway administration. so we must put into our laws not only honest intentions, but just principles of law, politics, and society. secondly, if the candidates are considered from the point of view of their moral worth it is in a peculiar fashion. high morality is imputed to those who share the dominant passions of the people and who express themselves thereon more violently than others. ah! these are our honest men, it cries, and i do not say that the men of its choice are dishonest, i only say that by this criterion they are not infallibly marked out even as honest. --still, some one replies, they are probably disinterested, for they follow popular prejudices, and not their own particular, individual wishes. yes, that is just what the masses believe, while they forget that there is nothing easier than to simulate popular passion in order to win popular confidence and become a political personage. if disinterestedness is really so essential to the people, only those should be elected who oppose the popular will and who show thereby that they do not want to be elected. or better still only those who do not stand for election should be elected, since not to stand is the undeniable sign of disinterestedness. but this is never done. that which should always be done is never done. --but, some one will say, your public bodies which recruit their numbers by co-optation, academies and learned societies, do not elect their members in this way.-- quite so, and they are right. such bodies do not want their members to be disinterested but scientific. they have no reason to prefer an unwilling member to one who is eager to be elected. their point of view is entirely different. the people, which pretends to set store by high moral character, should exclude from power those who are ambitious of power, or at least those who covet it with a keenness that suggests other than disinterested motives. these considerations show us what the crowd understands by the moral worth of a man. the moral worth of a man consists, as far as the crowd is concerned, in his entertaining or pretending to entertain the same sentiments as itself, and it is just for this reason that the representatives of the multitude are excellent as documents for information, but detestable, or at least, useless, and therefore detestable, as legislators. montesquieu, who is seldom wrong, errs in my opinion when he says, "the people is well-fitted to choose its own magistrates." he, it is true, did not live under a democracy. for consider, how could the people be fitted to choose its own magistrates and legislators, when montesquieu himself, this time with ample justification, lays down as one of his principles that morals should correct climate, and that law should correct morals, and the people, as we know, only thinks of choosing as its delegates men who share, in every particular, its own manner of thinking? climate can be partially resisted by the people; but if the law should correct morals, legislators should be chosen who have taken up an attitude of reaction against current morality. it would be very curious if such a choice were ever made, and not only is it never made but the contrary invariably happens. to sum it all up, it is intellectual incompetence, nay moral incompetence which is sought instinctively in the people's choice. * * * * * if possible, it is more than this. the people favours incompetence, not only because it is no judge of intellectual competence and because it looks on moral competence from a wrong point of view, but because it desires before everything, as indeed is very natural, that its representatives should resemble itself. this it does for two reasons. first, as a matter of sentiment, the people desires, as we have seen, that its representatives should share its feelings and prejudices. these representatives can share its prejudices and yet not absolutely resemble it in morals, habits, manners and appearance; but naturally the people never feels so certain that a man shares its prejudices and is not merely pretending to do so, as when the man resembles it feature by feature. it is a sign and a guarantee. the people is instinctively impelled therefore to elect men of the same habits, manners and even education as itself, or shall we say of an education slightly superior, the education of a man who can talk, but only superior in a very slight degree. in addition to this sentimental reason, there is another, which is extremely important, for it goes to the very root of the democratic idea. what is the people's one desire, when once it has been stung by the democratic tarantula? it is that all men should be equal, and in consequence that all inequalities natural as well as artificial should disappear. it will not have artificial inequalities, nobility of birth, royal favours, inherited wealth, and so it is ready to abolish nobility, royalty, and inheritance. nor does it like natural inequalities, that is to say a man more intelligent, more active, more courageous, more skilful than his neighbours. it cannot destroy these inequalities, for they are natural, but it can neutralise them, strike them with impotence by excluding them from the employments under its control. democracy is thus led quite naturally, irresistibly one may say, to exclude the competent precisely because they are competent, or if the phrase pleases better and as the popular advocate would put it, not because they are competent but because they are unequal, or, as he would probably go on to say, if he wished to excuse such action, not because they are unequal, but because being unequal they are suspected of being opponents of equality. so it all comes to the same thing. this it is that made aristotle say that where merit is despised, there is democracy. he does not say so in so many words, but he wrote: "where merit is not esteemed before everything else, it is not possible to have a firmly established aristocracy," and that amounts to saying that where merit is not esteemed, we enter at once on a democratic regime and never escape from it. the chance, then, of efficiency coming to the front in this state of affairs is indeed deplorable. first and last, democracy--and it is natural enough--_wishes to do everything itself_, it is the enemy of all specialisation of functions, particularly it wishes to govern, without delegates or intermediaries. its ideal is direct government as it existed at athens, its ideal is "democracy," in the terminology of rousseau, who applied the word to direct government and to direct government only. forced by historical events and perhaps by necessity to govern by delegates, how could democracy still contrive to govern directly or nearly so, although continuing to govern through delegates? its first alternative is, perhaps, to impose on its delegates an imperative mandate. delegates under this condition become mere agents of the people. they attend the legislative assembly to register the will of the people just as they receive it, and the people in reality governs directly. this is what is meant by the imperative mandate. democracy has often considered it, but never with persistence. herein it shows good sense. it has a shrewd suspicion that the imperative mandate is never more than a snare and a delusion. representatives of the people meet and discuss, the interests of party become defined. henceforward they are the prey of the goddess opportunity, the greek {kairos}. then it happens one day that to vote according to their mandate would be very unfavourable to the interest of their party. they are therefore obliged to be faithless to their party by reason of their fidelity to their mandate, or disobedient to their mandate by reason of their obedience to their party; and in any case to have betrayed their mandate with this very praiseworthy and excellent intention is a thing for which they can take credit or at least obtain excuse with the electors--and on such a matter it will be very difficult to refute them. the imperative mandate is therefore a very clumsy instrument for work of a very delicate character. the democracy, instinctively, knows this very well, and sets no great store by the imperative mandate. what other alternative is there for it? something very much finer, the substance instead of the shadow. it can elect men who resemble it closely, who follow its sentiments closely, who are in fact so nearly identical with itself that they may be trusted to do surely, instinctively, almost mechanically that which it would itself do, if it were itself an immense legislative assembly. they would vote, without doubt, according to circumstances, but also as their electors would vote if they were governing directly. in this way democracy preserves its legislative power. it makes the law, and this is the only way it can make it. democracy, therefore, has the greatest inducement to elect representatives who are representative, who, in the first place, resemble it as closely as possible, who, in the second place, have no individuality of their own, who finally, having no fortune of their own, have no sort of independence. we deplore that democracy surrenders itself to politicians, but from its own point of view, a point of view which it cannot avoid taking up, it is absolutely right. what is a politician? he is a man who, in respect of his personal opinions, is a nullity, in respect of education, a mediocrity, he shares the general sentiments and passions of the crowd, his sole occupation is politics, and if that career were closed to him, he would die of starvation. he is precisely the thing of which the democracy has need. he will never be led away by his education to develop ideas of his own; and having no ideas of his own, he will not allow them to enter into conflict with his prejudices. his prejudices will be, at first by a feeble sort of conviction, afterwards by reason of his own interest, identical with those of the crowd; and lastly, his poverty and the impossibility of his getting a living outside of politics make it certain that he will never break out of the narrow circle where his political employers have confined him; his imperative mandate is the material necessity which obliges him to obey; his imperative mandate is his inability to quarrel with his bread and butter. democracy obviously has need of politicians, has need of nothing else but politicians, and has need indeed that there shall be in politics nothing else but politicians. its enemy, or rather the man whom democracy dreads because he means to govern and does not intend to allow the mob to govern through him, is the man who succeeds in getting elected for some constituency or other, either by the influence of his wealth or by the prestige of his talent and notoriety. such a man is not dependent on democracy. if a legislative assembly were entirely or by a majority composed of rich men, men of superior intelligence, men who had an interest in attending to the trades or professions in which they had succeeded rather than in playing at politics, they would vote according to their own ideas, and then--what would happen? why then democracy would be simply suppressed. it would no longer legislate and govern; there would be, to speak exactly, an aristocracy, not very permanently established perhaps, but still an aristocracy which would eliminate the influence of the people from public affairs. clearly it is almost impossible for the democracy, if it means to survive, to encourage efficiency, nay it is almost impossible for it to refrain from attempting to destroy efficiency. thus, we may sum up, only those are elected as the representatives of the people, who are its exact counterparts and constant dependents. chapter ii. confusion of functions. and what is the result of all this? the result, which is very logical, very just from the democratic point of view, and precisely that which the democracy desires and cannot do otherwise than desire, is that the national representatives do exactly what the people would wish them to do, and what the people would do itself if it undertook to govern directly itself. _the representative government wishes to do everything itself_, just as the people would like to do, if it were itself exercising the functions of government directly, just as it did in olden times on the pnyx at athens. montesquieu realised this fully, though naturally he had no experience of how the theory worked under a representative and parliamentary system. the principle of it all is at bottom the same, and only the change of a single phrase is needed to make the following quotation strictly applicable. "the principle of democracy," he says, "is perverted not only when it loses the spirit of equality, but still more _when it carries the spirit of equality to an extreme, and when every one wishes to be the equal of those whom he chooses to govern him_. for then the people, not being able to tolerate the authority which it has created, _wishes to do everything itself_, to deliberate for the senate, to act for the magistrates, and to usurp the functions of the judges. the people wishes to exclude the magistrates from their functions, and the magistrates naturally are no longer respected. the deliberations of the senate are allowed to have no weight, and senators naturally fall into contempt." let us translate the foregoing passage into the language of to-day. under democratic parliamentary government the representatives of the people are determined to do everything themselves. they must be equal to those whom they choose for their rulers. they cannot tolerate the authority which they have entrusted to the government. they must themselves govern in the place of the government, administer in the place of the executive staff, substitute their own authority for that of all the bench of judges, perform the duties of magistrates, and, in a word, throw off all regard and respect for persons and things. this is the true inwardness of the popular spirit, the will of the people which wishes to do everything itself, or what is the same thing, through its representatives, its faithful and servile creatures. from this point onwards efficiency is hunted and exterminated in every direction; just as it was excluded in the election of representatives, so the representatives laboriously and continuously exclude it from every sort of office and employment under the public service. the government, to begin our analysis of functional confusion at the top, ought to be watched and advised by the national representatives, but it ought to be independent of the national representatives, at least it ought not to be inextricably mixed up with them, in other words the national representatives ought not to govern. under democracy this is precisely what they want to do. they elect the government, a privilege which need not be denied them; but, "not being able to tolerate the authority which they have created," as soon as they have set it up, they put pressure on it and insist on governing continuously in its place. the assembly of national representatives is not a body which makes laws, but a body which, by a never ending string of questions and interruptions, _dictates_ from day to day to the government what it ought to do, that is to say, it is a body which governs. the country is governed, literally, by the chamber of deputies. _this is absolutely necessary_ if, as the true spirit of the system requires, the people is to be governed by no one but itself, if there is to be no will at work other than the will of the people, emanating from itself and bringing back a sort of harvest of executive acts. again, i repeat, this is absolutely necessary, in order that there shall be nothing, not even originating with the people, which, for a single moment and within the most narrowly defined limits, shall exercise the functions of sovereignty over the sovereign people. this is all very well, but government is an art and we assume that there is a science of government, and here we have the people governed by persons who have neither science nor art, and who are chosen precisely because they have not these qualifications and on the guarantee that they have none of them! again, in a democracy of this kind, if there exist, as a result of tradition or of some necessity arising out of foreign relations, an authority, independent for a certain term of years of the legislative assembly, which has no accounts to render to it and which cannot be questioned or constitutionally overthrown, that authority is so strange, and, if the phrase may pass, so monstrous an anomaly, that it dares not exercise its power, and dreads the scandal which it would raise by acting on its rights, and seems as it were paralysed with terror at the very thought of its own existence. and its attitude is right; for if it exercised its powers, or even lent itself to any appearance of so doing, there at once would be an act of will which was not an act of the popular will, a theory altogether contrary to the spirit of this system. for in this system the chief of the state can only be the nominal chief of the state. a will of his own would be an abuse of power, an idea of his own would be an encroachment, and a word of his own would be an act of high treason. it follows that, if the constitution has formally conferred these powers, the constitution on these points is a dead letter, because it contravenes an unwritten constitution of higher authority, viz., the inner inspiration of the political institution. one of these honorary chiefs of the state has said: "during all my term as president, i was constitutionally silent." this is not correct, for the constitution gave him leave to speak and even to act. at bottom it was true, for the constitution, in allowing him to act and speak, was acting unconstitutionally. in speaking he would have been constitutional, in holding his tongue he was _institutional_. he had been in fact _institutionally_ silent. he disobeyed the letter of the constitution, but he had admirably extracted its meaning from it, and understood and respected its spirit. under democracy, then, the national representatives govern as directly and as really as possible, dictating a policy to the executive and neutralising the supreme chief of the executive to whom it is not able to dictate. the national representatives are not content with governing, they wish to administer. now consider how it would be if the permanent officials of finance, justice and police, etc., depended solely on their parliamentary chiefs, who are ministers only because they are the creatures of the popular assembly, liable to instant and frequent dismissal; surely then, these officials, more permanent than their chiefs, would form an aristocracy, and would administer the state independently of the popular will and according to their own ideas. this, of course, must not be allowed to happen. there must not be any will but the people's will, no other power, however limited, but its own. this causes a dilemma which is sufficiently remarkable. here we seem to have contrary results from the same cause. since the popular assembly governs ministers, and frequently dismisses them, they are not able to govern their subordinates as did colbert and louvois, and these subordinates accordingly are very independent; so it comes about that the greater the authority which the popular assembly wields over ministers, the more it is likely to lose in its control over the subordinates of ministers, and in destroying one rival power it creates another. the dilemma, however, is avoided easily enough. no public official is appointed without receiving its _visa_, and it contrives even to elect the administrative officials. in the first place, the national representatives, in their corporate capacity, and in the central offices of government, watch most attentively the appointment of the permanent staff, and further each single member of the representative government in his province, in his department, in his _arrondissement_ picks and chooses the candidates and really appoints the permanent staff. this is, of course, necessary, if the national will is to be paramount here as well as elsewhere, and if the people is to secure servants of its own type, if it is "to choose its own magistrates," as montesquieu said. the people, then, chooses its servants through the intervention of its representatives; and consider, to return to our point, how absolutely necessary it is for it to secure representatives who are intellectually the exact image and imitation of itself. everything dovetails neatly together. here then we have the people interfering influentially in the appointment of the civil service. it continues "to do everything itself." complaints are raised on all sides of this confusion of politics with the business of administration, and indeed we hear continually that politics pervade everything. but what is the reason of this? it is the principle of the national sovereignty asserting itself. politics, political power, means the will of the majority of the nation, and is it not fitting that the will of the majority should make itself felt--indeed need we be surprised that it insists on making itself felt--in the details of public business, as administered by the permanent staff, as well as elsewhere? the ideal of democracy is that the people should elect its own rulers, or, if this is not its ideal, it is its idea, and this is what it does under a parliamentary democracy through the intervention of its representatives. this is all very well, but efficiency has been dealt another blow. for how is a candidate to recommend himself for an office to which appointment is made by the people and its representatives? by his merit? his chiefs and his fellow civil servants might be good judges of that; but the people or its representatives are much less capable of judging. "the people is admirably fitted to choose those to whom it has to entrust some part of its authority"; so montesquieu; we must now examine this saying a little more closely. what reasons does the philosopher give? "the people can only be guided by things of which it cannot be ignorant, and which fall, so to speak, within its own observation. it knows very well that a man has experience in war, and that he has had such and such successes; it is therefore quite capable of electing a general. it knows that a judge is industrious, that many of those who are litigants in his court go away satisfied, and that he has never been convicted of bribery, and this is enough to warrant it in appointing to any judicial office. it has been impressed by the magnificence or riches of some citizen, and this fits it for appointing an ædile. all these things are matters of fact about which the man in the street has better knowledge than the king in his palace." this passage, i confess, does not appear to be convincing. why should not a king in his palace know of the riches of a financier, the reputation of a judge or the success of a colonel just as well as the man in the street? there is no difficulty in getting information about such things. the people knows that such an one was always a good judge and such another always an excellent officer. therefore it is qualified to appoint a general or a high-court judge or other officer of the law. so be it, but for the selection of a young judge or a young and untried officer what special source of information has the people? i cannot find that it has any. in this very argument, montesquieu limits the competence of the people to the election of the great chiefs, and of the most exalted magistrates, and indeed further confines the popular prerogative in this matter to assigning an office and career to one who has already given proof of his capacity. but for putting the competent man for the first time in the place where he is wanted, how has the people any special instinct or information? montesquieu shows that the people can recognise ability when it has been proved, but he says nothing to show that it recognises readily nascent, unproved talent. the argument of montesquieu is not here conclusive. he has been led astray, it seems to me, by his desire to present his argument antithetically (using the term in its logical sense). what he really wished to prove was not so much the truth of the proposition that he was then advancing, but the falsity of quite another proposition. the question for him, the question which he had in his mind, was as follows: is the people capable of governing the state, of taking measures beforehand, and of understanding and solving the difficulties of home and foreign affairs? by no means. then is it fit to elect its own magistrates? well, it might do that. thus he had been led away by this antithesis so far as to say: able to govern?--certainly not! able to elect its own magistrates? admirably! the explanation of the whole paragraph which i have just quoted lies in the conclusion, which runs as follows: "all these things are matters of fact about which the man in the street has better knowledge than the king in his palace. _but_ can the people pursue a policy and know how to avail itself of the places, occasions, and times when action will be profitable? no! certainly not." the truth is that the people is a little better fitted to choose a magistrate than to undertake a policy for the gradual humbling of the house of austria. but not very much so, as it is only a little more difficult to humble the house of austria, than it is to discover the man who is able to do it. the masses are particularly incapable of making initial appointments and of giving promotion in the early stages of a career to those who deserve it. yet in a democracy this is what they are constantly doing. again, by what means has the candidate for civil service employment, who is favoured by the people and its representatives, earned their approval? by his merit, of which the people and its representatives are very bad judges? no! by what then? by his conformity to the general views of the people; that is, by the subserviency of his political opinions. the political opinions of a candidate for civil service employment are the only things which mark him out to the popular choice because they are the only subjects on which the people is a good judge. yes, but the subserviency of his political opinions may be combined with real merit. true, but this is a mere matter of chance. the people is not, perhaps, in this particular matter consciously hostile to efficiency, rather it is indifferent, or ignores the qualification altogether. indeed, there is no great compliment paid to efficiency in such transactions. here is what inevitably happens. the candidate for a permanent appointment who is not conscious of possessing any particular merit is not slow to realise that it is by his political opinions that he will succeed, and he naturally professes those which are wanted. the candidate who is conscious of merit, very often knowing very well what less meritorious competitors are about, and not wishing to be beaten, also professes the same useful opinions. there we have that "infection of evil," which m. renouvier has explained so admirably in his _science de la morale_. first, then, we see how most of the candidates chosen by the mandatories of the people are incapable; others who are chosen in spite of their capacity are men of indifferent character; and character, we must admit, in all or nearly all public careers is a necessary part of efficiency. there remains a small number of meritorious persons who have never identified themselves with current political opinions, and who have slipped into public employment, thanks to some brief moment of inattention on the part of the politicians. these intruders sometimes get on by the mere force of circumstances, but they never reach the highest posts which are always reserved, as indeed is proper and fitting, for those in whom the people has put its trust. this is how the people administers as well as governs through the intervention of the representative system, dictating to ministers the policy and the details of government. --i realise, some one here will object, that administrators are nominated by the people, but i do not see how the affairs of the country are actually administered by the people.-- well, i will tell you. in the first place, by nominating officials it is already far on the road to controlling them, for it infuses into the body of the permanent civil service the spirit of the people to the exclusion of every other source of inspiration, and effectually prevents the civil service from becoming an aristocracy as otherwise it has always a tendency to do. next, the people does not confine itself to electing its administrators, it watches and spies on them, keeps them in leading strings, and just as the popular representatives dictate to ministers the details of government, so also they dictate to administrators the details of administration. a _préfet_, a _procureur-général_, an engineer-in-chief under democratic rule is a much harassed man. he has to play his own hand against his ministerial chief and the deputies of his district. he ought to obey the minister, but he has also to obey the deputies of the district which he administers. in this connection curious points arise and situations not a little complicated. the _préfet_ owes obedience to the deputies and to the minister, and the minister obeys the deputies, and it might therefore have been supposed that there was only one will, the will which the _préfet_ obeyed. but what the minister has to obey is the general will of the popular representatives, and it is this will that he transmits for the allegiance of the _préfet_; but then the _préfet_ finds himself colliding against the individual wills of the deputies of his district. the result is what we may call conflicts of obedience which have extraordinary interest for the psychologist, but which are less agreeable for the _préfet_, the engineer-in-chief, or the _procureur-général_. we note then, in the first place, how everything concurs to make the representative of the popular will as incompetent as he is omnipotent. incompetent he undoubtedly is, as we have already seen, to start with, and _if he were not so already_, he would certainly become so by reason of the trade or rather of the miscellaneous assortment of trades which are thrust upon him. the surest way of making a man incompetent is to make him jack-of-all-trades, for then he will be master of none. in the next place, the representative of the popular will and spirit, besides his trade of legislator, has to cross-examine ministers and to dictate to them the details of their duty, that is to say, he has to busy himself in all home and foreign politics. he has also to administer, by choosing and watching administrators and by controlling and inspiring their actions. without saying anything of the small individual services which it is his interest to render to his constituents and which his constituents are by no means backward in demanding, he looks on himself as responsible for the conduct of things in general. he becomes a sort of universal foreman, not a man, but a man-orchestra, a busybody, so busy that he can apply himself to nothing. he cannot study, or think, or investigate, or, to speak accurately, acquire any sense at all. if he be efficient in some particular subject, when he enters on his public career, he becomes hopelessly inefficient in all subjects after a few years of public life, and then, void of all individuality, he remains nothing but a public man, that is, a man representing the popular will and never thinking, or able to think, of anything but how to make that will prevail. and, to press the point again, this is all that is wanted of him; for can you conceive a representative of the popular will, who had somehow preserved a measure of competence in financial or judicial administration, who would prefer, before other candidates, not a political partisan but a man of merit, knowledge and aptitude, and who would even approve in an administrator not acts of political partiality but acts that are just and in conformity with the interests of the state? why! such a man would be a detestable servant in the eyes of democracy. yes, and i have known such a man. he was not wanting in intelligence or wit and he was honest. a lawyer, he was naturally interested in politics. for local reasons he had failed to be elected as deputy or as senator. tired of fighting, he obtained a judicial appointment by the influence of his political friends. he became president of court. a case was brought before him where the accused, a person not perhaps of altogether blameless life, was clearly not guilty of any indictable offence. the accused, however, a former _préfet_, appointed by a government now become very unpopular, and known as a reactionary and an aristocrat, was pursued by the animosity of the whole democratic population of the town and province. the president, in the face of openly expressed hostility in court, acquitted him. in the evening the president remarked, not without a touch of humour: "there, that serves them right for not making me a senator!" in other words: "if they had accepted me as a politician, they would have made me a fool, or at least paralysed my efficiency. but they would not have it; so here i am, a man who knows the law and applies it. so much the worse for them!" "by making a man a slave zeus took from him half his soul." so homer. by making a man a politician, demos takes from him his whole soul, and in omitting to make him a politician, it is foolish enough to leave him his soul. this is why demos hates a permanent civil service. an irremovable magistrate or functionary is a man whom the constitution sets free from the grip of the populace. an irremovable official is a man enfranchised, a free man. demos does not love free men. this will explain why in every nation where it is paramount, democracy suspends from time to time the irremovable independent official element wherever it is found. the object is nominally to clarify and filter the _personnel_ of the official world; but really it is intended to teach the officials whom it spares, that their permanence is only very relative and that, like every one else, they have to reckon with the sovereignty of the people which will turn and rend them if they venture to be too independent. according to the constitution of there were irremovable senators in france. in the interest of good government, this was perhaps a sound arrangement. the irremovable senators, in the scheme of the constitution, were intended to be, and in fact were, political and administrative veterans from whose knowledge, efficiency and experience their colleagues were to profit. the plan, from this point of view, might have worked well if the irremovable senators had not been elected by their colleagues but had become so by right; for example every former president of the republic, every former president of the _cour de cassation_, every former president of the court of appeal, every admiral, every archbishop might _ex officio_ have been raised to the rank of senator for life. from the democratic point of view, however, it was regarded as a positive outrage that there should exist a representative of the people who had not to render account to the people, a representative of the people who had nothing to fear from the accidents of re-election, no risk of failing to secure re-election, in other words that a man should be elected for his supposed efficiency, in no sense representing the people but himself alone. permanent senators were abolished. obviously they constituted a political aristocracy, founded on the pretence of services rendered, and the senate which elected them also fell under the taint of aristocratic leanings since at that time it recruited its members by co-optation. this of course could not be tolerated. chapter iii. the refuges of efficiency. will efficiency then, you may well ask, when driven out of all public employment, find refuge somewhere? certainly it will. in private employments and in employments paid by public companies. barristers, solicitors, doctors, business men, manufacturers and authors are not paid by the state, nor are engineers, mechanics, railway employees; and so far from their efficiency being a bar to their employment, it is their most valuable asset. when a man consults his lawyer or his medical adviser he obviously has no interest in their politics, and when a railway company chooses an engineer, it enquires into his qualifications and ability and is quite indifferent as to whether his political views coincide with the general mentality of the people. it is for this reason, or at least partly for this reason, that democracy tries to nationalise all employment, as a step in the direction of the nationalisation of everything. for instance it can partly nationalise the medical profession by establishing appointments for doctors, at relief offices, schools, and _lycées_. it can also partly nationalise the legal profession by appointing state-paid professors of law. already the state has considerable control over this class of person, for most of them have relations in government employment, whom they do not wish to bring into bad odour by seeming hostile to the opinions of the majority. the state, however, wants to hold them in still tighter control by seizing every opportunity of nationalising and socialising them more completely. the state wants also to destroy all large associations, and to absorb their activities. the state purchase of a railway, for instance, is, in the first place, a means of exploiting the company; for there is always a hope that the state will be able to filch something out of the transaction; but its chief recommendation lies in the fact that it suppresses a whole army of the company's officials and employees, who were under no obligation to please the government, and who had no other interest but to do their work properly. the state will thus transform this free population into government employees, whose primary duty is to be docile and subservient. under the extreme form and under the complete form of this regime, that is to say under socialism, everyone will be a government official. consequently, say the socialist theorists, all the alleged drawbacks above mentioned will disappear. the state, the democracy, the dominant party, whatever you choose to call it, will no longer be obliged to select its servants, as you say it does, by reason of their subservience and their incompetence, because every citizen will be an official. thus too will disappear that dual social system, under which half the population lives on the state, while the other half is independent, and prides itself on its superiority in character, in intelligence and in efficiency. socialism solves the problem. i do not agree. under socialism, the electoral system, and, therefore, the party system will still exist. the citizens will choose the legislators, the legislators will choose the government, and the government will choose the directors of labour and the distributors of the means of subsistence. parties, that is, combinations of interests, will still exist, and each party will want to capture the legislature in order to secure the election, from its own number, of the directors of labour and the distributors of the means of subsistence. these directors and distributors will be the new aristocrats of socialism, and they will be expected to arrange "soft jobs" and ampler rations for the members of their own group or party. except that wealth and the last vestiges of liberty have been suppressed, nothing has been changed, and all the objections above mentioned still hold. there is no solution here. if it were a solution, then the socialist government could not long remain elective. it would have to reign by divine right, like the jesuits in paraguay. it would have to be a despotism, not only in its policy but in its origin, in fact a monarchy. no intelligent king has any inducement to choose incompetent men as his officials. his interest would lead him to do exactly the opposite. you will say that an intelligent king is a very rare, even an abnormal thing. i readily agree. except in a very few instances, which history records with amazement, a king has exactly the same reasons as the people for selecting as his favourites men who will not eclipse nor contradict him, and who consequently seldom turn out to be the best of citizens either in respect of intelligence or character. elective socialism and despotic socialism have the same faults as democracy as we understand the term. besides, in truth, the drift of democracy towards socialism is nothing but a reversion to despotism. if socialism were established, it would begin by being elective, and as every elective system lives and breathes and has its being in the party system, the dominant party would elect the legislature, consequently it would constitute the government and would extort from that government, simply because it has the power to extort it, every conceivable form of privilege. exploitation of the country by the majority would result, as in every country where elective government prevails. a socialist government therefore is primarily an oligarchy of directors of labour and distributors of subsistence. it is a very close oligarchy, for those beneath it are quite defenceless, levelled down to an equality of poverty and misery. it is a form of government very difficult to replace, for it holds in its hands the threads of such an intricate organisation that it must be protected against crude attempts to change it, and so it tends to be a permanent oligarchy. it would therefore concentrate very quickly round a leader, or at any rate, relegate to the second rank the national representatives and the electorate. such a course of events would be very similar to what occurred under the first empire in france, when the military caste eclipsed and domineered over everything. it became continuously necessary to the state, and though that necessity passed away, it was soon recalled. the caste then closed its ranks round the leader who gave it unity, and the strength of unity. * * * * * so under socialism, more slowly and perhaps after the lapse of a generation, the directors of labour and the distributors of food, peaceful janissaries of the new order, would form themselves into a caste, very close, very coherent, and (unlike legislators for whom an executive council can always be substituted), quite indispensable, and would close their ranks round a chief who would give them unity and the strength of unity. before we knew socialism, we used to say that democracy tended naturally to despotism. the situation seems somewhat changed, and we might now say that it tends to socialism: really nothing has changed. for in tending towards socialism it is towards despotism that it tends. socialism is not conscious of this, for it imagines that it is journeying towards equality, but out of these utopias of equality it is ever despotism that emerges. but this is a digression which refers to the future; let us return to the matter in hand. chapter iv. the competent legislator. democracy, in its modern form, encroaches first upon the executive and then upon the administrative authorities, and reduces them to subjection by means of its delegates, the legislators, whom it chooses in its own image, that is to say, because they are incompetent and governed by passion, just as in the words of montesquieu, though he perhaps contradicts himself a little: "the people is moved only by its passions." what ought then the character of the legislator to be? the very opposite, it seems to me, of the democratic legislator, for he ought to be well informed and entirely devoid of prejudice. he ought to be well informed, but his information should not consist only of book learning, although an extensive legal knowledge is of the greatest use, as it will prevent him from doing, as so often happens, the exact opposite of what he intends to do. he should also understand intimately the temperament and character of the people for whom he legislates. for a nation should only be given the laws and commandments that it can tolerate, as solon said: "i have given them the best laws that they could endure," and the god of israel said to the jews: "i have given you precepts which are not good," that is to say, they have only the goodness which your wickedness will tolerate. "this is the sponge," says montesquieu, "which wipes out all the difficulties that can be raised against the laws of moses." the legislator, then, ought to understand the temperament and genius of the people because he has to frame its laws. as the germans say, he ought to be an expert on the psychology of races. further, he ought to understand the temperament, peculiarities and character of the people, without sharing its temperament himself. for where the passions and inclinations are concerned, experience is not knowledge. on the contrary, experience prevents us from really knowing; and indeed one of the conditions of knowledge is absence of an experience which may be another word for bias. the ideal legislator, or indeed any legislator worthy of the name, ought to understand the general tendencies of his people, but he ought to be able to view them from a position of detachment and to be able to control them, because it is his business partly to satisfy and partly to combat these tendencies. _he has partly to satisfy them_, or at least, to consider them, because a law which outraged the national temperament would be like roland's mare, which had every conceivable good quality with this one serious defect, that she was dead, and born dead. suppose the romans had been given an international law decreeing respect for conquered peoples, it would have been a dead letter, and by a sort of contagion it would have led to the neglect of other laws. suppose the french were given a liberal law, a law prescribing respect for the individual rights of the man and the citizen. liberty, the object of such a law, is for the french, as baron joannès has remarked: "the right of each man to do what he likes and to prevent other men from doing what they like." in france such a law would never obtain any but a very grudging allegiance, and it would certainly lead to the neglect of other laws. the legislator ought therefore to understand the natural idiosyncrasies of his people in order to know how far he dare venture to oppose them. _partly he must combat them_, because law should be to a nation, or otherwise it is merely a police regulation, what the moral law is to an individual. law should be a restraint imposed continuously in the hope of future improvements. it should be a curb on dangerous passions and injurious desires. it should aid the warfare of enlightened selfishness against the selfishness of which all are ashamed. that is what montesquieu meant when he said that morals should correct climate, and laws should correct morals. the law, therefore, to a certain extent should correct national tendencies, it should be loved a little because it is felt to be just, feared a little because it is severe, hated a little because it is to a certain degree out of sympathy with the prevalent temper of the day, and respected because it is felt to be necessary. this is the law that the legislator has to frame, and therefore he ought to have expert knowledge of the genius of the people for whom he legislates. he must understand both those tendencies which will resist and those which will welcome him. he must know how far he can go unopposed and how much he can venture without forfeiting his authority. this is the principal and essential qualification for the legislator. the second, as we said before, is that he must be impartial. the very essence of the legislator is that he should have moderation, that virtue on which cicero set so high a value, which is so rare, if we look to its real meaning, _the perfect balance of soul and mind_. "it seems to me," said montesquieu: "_and i have written this book solely to prove it_, that the spirit of moderation is essential in a legislator, for political, as well as moral right, lies between two extremes." nothing is more difficult for a man than to control his passions, or more difficult for a legislator than to control the passions of the people of whom he forms a part, to say nothing of his own. "aristotle," says montesquieu, "wanted to gratify, first, his jealousy of plato and then his love for alexander. plato was horrified at the tyranny of the athenians. machiavel was full of his idol, the duke of valentinois. thomas more, who was wont to speak of what he had read rather than of what he had thought, wanted to govern every state upon the model of a greek city. harrington could think of nothing but an english republic, while hosts of writers thought confusion must reign wherever there was no monarchy. laws are always in contact with the passions and prejudices of the legislator, whether these are his alone, or common to him and to his people. sometimes they pass through and merely take colour from the prejudice of the day, sometimes they succumb to it and make it part of themselves." this is just the opposite of what should be. the legislator should be to the people what conscience is to the heart of the individual. he should understand its besetting passions in all their bearings and not be deceived by subterfuge or hypocrisy. sometimes he must attack them boldly, sometimes play off one against another, or favour one at the expense of another which is less influential, now yielding ground, now recovering it, but he must ever be skilful and impartial and never be intimidated, diverted from his purpose, nor deceived by his natural enemies. he should be, so to speak, more conscientious than conscience itself, because he must never forget that he has to obey to-morrow the law which he makes to-day--_semel jussit semper paruit_. he must, therefore, be absolutely disinterested, a thing most difficult for him, but for which conscience requires no effort. not only must he be without passion, but he must have trained himself to be impervious to passion, which is much more. we must conceive of him as a conscience that has risen from the ashes of passion. as rousseau said, "to discover the perfect ruler for human society we must find a superior intelligence who has seen all the passions of man but has experienced none of them, who has had no sort of relations with our nature but who knows it to the core, whose happiness is not dependent on us, but who wishes to promote our welfare, in a word, one who aims at a distant renown, in a remote future, and who is content to labour in one age and to enjoy in another." this is why the ingenious greeks imagined certain legislators going into exile to some remote and unknown retreat, as soon as they had made the people adopt and swear obedience to their laws until their return. it may have been to bind the citizens by this oath, but is it not equally probable that they wished to escape from the laws which they themselves had made? possibly they felt that they could make them all the stricter with the prospect of being able to evade obedience of them by flight. proudhon said: "i dream of a republic so liberal that in it i shall be guillotined as a reactionary." lycurgus was perhaps like proudhon, in that he founded so severe a republic that he knew he could not live under it and resolved to leave it as soon as it was established. solon and sylla remained in the states to which they had given laws; we must therefore place them higher than lycurgus who has perhaps this excuse for himself that in all probability he never existed at all. but the legend remains to show that the legislator should be so superior to his own passions and to the passions of his people, that, as legislator, he should make laws before which, as a man, he should stand in awe. this moderation, in the sense in which we use the term, has sometimes led the legislator to suggest or insinuate laws rather than impose them. this is not always possible, but it is so occasionally. montesquieu tells us the following of st. louis: "seeing the manifold abuses of justice in his time he endeavoured to make them unpopular. he made many regulations for the courts in his own domain, and in those of his barons, and he was so successful, that only a short time after his death his methods were adopted in the courts by many of his nobles. thus this prince attained his object, although his regulations were not promulgated as a general law for the whole kingdom, but merely as an example which any one might follow in his own interest. he got rid of an evil by making patent the better way. when men saw in his courts and in those of his nobles more reasonable and natural forms of procedure, more conformable to religion and morality, more favourable to public tranquillity and to the security of persons and property, they adopted the substance and abandoned the shadow. _to suggest where you cannot compel, to guide where you cannot demand, that is the supreme form of skill._" montesquieu adds with some optimism though no doubt the idea is encouraging: "reason has a natural empire, we resist it, but it triumphs over our resistance; we persist in error for a time but we always have to return to it." the instance above quoted is very remote, and can hardly be applied to anything in our day. but consider, for instance, the law of sunday observance which has been revived from the ecclesiastical law. it was a mistake to include it in the code because it was antagonistic to many french customs, and, in many ways, to the national temperament. the result is what might have been expected, namely, that it has only been carried out in rare instances, and with an infinity of trouble. it might have been made the subject of an edict without being included in the code. the state might have given a holiday on sunday to all its officials, employees and workmen. it might have been made quite clear simply by a circular from the minister of justice that a workman would not be punished for breach of contract by refusing to work on a sunday. the law of a weekly day of rest would then have existed, without being formally promulgated, and would have been limited precisely where it should be, by agreement between masters and men who would submit to working on sundays when they saw that it was necessary and inevitable. moreover this law would be strong enough to modify without destroying the ancient customs of the people. here is another instance which occurs within the law laid down by the code, where the legislator makes use of a method of suggestion and recommendation. early in the nineteenth century the legislator considered that it was seemly for a husband who surprised his wife in adultery to kill both her and her accomplice. the sentiment is perhaps questionable, but at all events, it was current. was it given legal sanction? no, not precisely. it is inserted in the law in the form of an insinuation, a discreet recommendation and affectionate encouragement. the legislator wrote these words: "in _flagrante delicto_ murder is excusable." i am not approving the sentiment, but only this manner of indicating rather than enforcing the law and what is thought to be a wholesome practice, and in other instances i should think it excellent. finally, one of the essential qualities of the legislator is to show discretion in changing existing laws, and for this purpose he should be immune from the passions of men or at all events complete master of those which beset him. for law has no real authority unless it is ancient. where a law is merely a custom which has become law, it is invested with considerable authority from the first, because it gains strength by the antiquity of the original custom. when on the other hand a law is not an old custom but runs counter to custom, then, before it can have any authority, it must grow old and become a custom itself. in both cases it is on its antiquity that the law must depend for its strength. the law is like a tree, at first it is a tender sapling, then it grows up, its bark hardens, and its roots go deep into the ground and cling to the rock. we ought to consider carefully before we venture to replace the forest tree by the young sapling. "most legislators," said usbek to rhédi,[a] "have been men of limited abilities, owing their position to a stroke of fortune, and consulting nothing but their own whims and prejudices. they have often abolished established laws quite unnecessarily, and plunged nations into the chaos that is inseparable from change. it is true that, owing to some odd chance arising out of the nature rather than out of the intelligence of mankind, it is sometimes necessary to alter laws, but the case is very rare and when it does arise it should be handled with a reverent touch. when it is a question of changing the law, much ceremony should be observed, and many precautions taken, in order that the people may be naturally persuaded that laws are sacred things, and that many formalities must precede any attempt to alter them." in this passage, as so often elsewhere, montesquieu is quite aristotelian, for aristotle wrote: "it is evident that at times certain laws must be changed, but this requires great circumspection for, when there is little to be gained thereby, inasmuch as it is dangerous that citizens should be accustomed to find it easy to change the law, it is better to leave a few errors in our magisterial and legislative arrangements than to accustom the people to constant change. the disadvantage of having constant changes in the law is greater than any risk that we run of contracting a habit of disobedience to the law." for the law assuredly will be disobeyed, if we regard it as ephemeral, unstable, and always on the point of being changed. some knowledge of the laws of the most important nations, a profound knowledge of the temperament, character, sentiments, passions, opinions, prejudices and customs of the nation to which he belongs, moderation of heart and mind, judgment, impartiality, coolness, nay even a measure of stolidity, these are the attributes of the ideal legislator. rather they are the necessary qualifications of every man who purposes to frame a good law; they are, indeed, the elementary attributes of a legislator. we have seen that it is the very opposite quality that democracy likes and expects of its legislators. it selects incompetent and almost invariably ignorant men, i have explained why; and its nominees are of a double distilled incompetence in that their passions would certainly neutralise their efficiency if they possessed any. further we have to observe this curious fact. so entirely does democracy choose its legislators, because they are dominated by passion, and not in spite of the fact, chooses them indeed precisely for the reasons for which it ought to reject them, that any moderate, clear-headed, practical man who wants to be elected and make use of his powers, has to start by dissembling his moderation, and by making a noisy display of factious violence. if he wants to be nominated to a post where it will be his business to defend and guarantee public security, he has to begin by advocating civil war: to become a peacemaker he must first pose as a rebel. every popular favourite passes through these two phases, and has to complete one stage before he starts on the next. is it not better, you will ask, that a man's whole career should be spent in defence of law and order rather than the latter part of it? not at all, because you cannot exercise any influence as a friend of law and order unless you have begun as an anarchist. these changes of opinion occur so frequently that they merely raise a smile. they have, however, this drawback, that the friend of law and order, with a seditious past, never has an undisputed authority, and he spends half his time explaining the reasons for his defection, and this is a sore let and hindrance to his subsequent career. the people always elects men swayed by real or simulated passion. these will either always remain in a state of frenzied excitement, and they are the great majority, or they will become moderate men, largely disqualified and handicapped, as we have above shown, for their new career. the vast majority of these sentimentalists rush into politics instead of studying them with deliberation, judgment and wisdom. the canons of good government as above set out are entirely subverted. the law does not control and restrain the passions of the populace. legislation becomes little more than an expression of their frenzy, a series of party measures levelled by one faction against the other. the introduction of a bill is a challenge; the passing of an act is a victory; definitions which at once damn the legislator, and convict the system. [a] characters in montesquieu's _lettres persanes_. letter cxxix. chapter v. laws under democracy. the truth of my contention is proved by the fact that nowadays all our laws are emergency laws, a thing that no law should ever be. montesquieu advised people to be very chary and to think twice before they destroyed old laws or pulled down an old house to run up a tent, but his advice is completely ignored. new laws are made for every change in the weather, for every little daily incident in politics. we are getting used to this hand-to-mouth legislation. like the barbarian warrior, of whom demosthenes tells us, who always protected that portion of his person which had just received a blow, holding his shield up to his shoulder, when his shoulder had been struck, down again to his thigh when the blow fell there, the dominant faction only makes laws to protect itself against an adversary who is, or is thought to be, already in the field, or it introduces a hurried, ill-digested reform under the pressure of an alleged scandal. if an aspirant to the tyranny, as they used to say in athens, is nominated deputy in too many constituencies, instantly a law is passed prohibiting multiple candidatures. for the same reason, for fear of the same man, _scrutin de liste_ is hurriedly replaced by _scrutin d'arrondissement_.[b] if an accused woman is supposed to have been ill-treated at her examination, taken too abruptly before the interrogatory of the president, or if the counts are ineptly set out by the public prosecutor, instantly the whole of the criminal procedure is radically reformed. it is the same everywhere. the legislative workshops turn out only "the latest novelties" of the season. or perhaps a newspaper would be a still better simile. first there is the 'interpellation,'[c] once at least every day; that corresponds to the leading article. then there are questions for ministers on this, that and the other trivial occurrence; that is the serial or short story. then there is a bill brought in about something that happened the night before, that is the special article. then some deputy assaults his neighbour, this is the general news column. you could not have a more faithful representation of the country. everything that happens in the morning is dealt with in the evening as it might be in the village pot-house. the legislative chamber is an exaggerated reflection of the gossiping public. now it ought not to be a copy of the country, it ought to be its soul and brain. but when a national representative assembly represents only the passions of the populace it cannot be otherwise than what it is. in other words modern democracy _is not governed by laws_ but by decrees, for emergency laws are no better than decrees. a law is an ancient heritage, consecrated by long usage, which men obey without stopping to think whether it be law or custom. it forms part of a coherent, harmonious and logical whole. a law improvised for an emergency is merely a decree. this is one of the things that aristotle saw better than any one. he comments frequently upon the essential and fundamental distinction between the two, and explains how it is as dangerous to misunderstand as to ignore it. i quote the passage in which he brings this out most forcibly: "a fifth form of democracy is that in which not the law but the multitude has the supreme power, and supersedes the law by its decrees. this is a state of affairs brought about by the demagogues. for in democracies which are subject to the law, the best citizens hold the first place and there are no demagogues; but where the laws are not supreme, there demagogues spring up. for the people becomes a monarch and is many in one; and the many have the power in their hands, not as individuals but collectively.... and the people, who is now a monarch, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honour; this sort of democracy being relatively to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy. "the spirit of both is the same, and they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens. the decrees of the demos correspond to the edicts of the tyrant, and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other. both have great power--the flatterer with the tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind which we are describing. the demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, and refer all things to the popular assembly. and therefore they grow great, because the people has all things in its hands and they hold in their hands the votes of the people, who is too ready to listen to them. such a democracy is fairly open to the objection that it is not a constitution at all; for _where the laws have no authority there is no constitution_. the law ought to be supreme over all. so that if democracy be a real form of government, _the sort of constitution in which all things are regulated by decrees is clearly not a democracy in the true sense of the word_, for decrees relate only to particulars." this distinction between true law, that is to say, venerable law, framed to endure, part of a co-ordinate scheme of legislation, and an emergency law which is merely a decree like the wishes of a tyrant, constitutes the whole difference, if we could realise it, between the sociologists of antiquity and those of to-day. by the term law, the ancient and the modern sociologists mean two different things and this is the reason for so many misunderstandings. when he speaks of law, the modern sociologist means the expression of the general will at such and such a date, for instance. the ancient sociologist would consider that the expression of the general will in the second year of the rd olympiad was not law at all, but a decree. a law to him would be a paragraph of the legislation of solon, lycurgus or charondas. whenever in a greek or roman political treatise we meet the expression--"a state governed by laws," the only way to translate it is--"a state governed by a very ancient and immutable legislation." this gives the true meaning to the famous personification of laws in the phædo, which would be quite meaningless if the greeks had understood what we do by the term. are laws the expression of the general will of the people? if so why should socrates have respected them, he who despised the people to the day he was condemned? it would be absurd. these laws which socrates respected were not the decrees of the people contemporary with socrates; they were the ancient gods of the city, which had protected it from the earliest days. these laws may err in that they seemed to sanction the verdict that condemned socrates to death, but they were honourable, venerable and inviolate, because they had been the guardians of the city for centuries, and guardians of socrates himself until the day when they were misapplied against him. a "constitution," therefore, to adopt aristotle's terminology, is a state which obeys laws, that is to say, laws framed by its ancestors. it is, then, an aristocracy, for it is even more aristocratic to obey our ancestors themselves by obeying the thoughts which they embedded in legislation, five centuries ago, than to obey the inheritors of their tradition, the aristocrats of to-day. for aristocrats of to-day belong only partly to tradition, in that they live in the present. whereas a fifteenth century law belongs to the fifteenth century and to no other period. to obey law as understood by the ancient sociologists, did not mean obeying scipio who has just passed us on the _via sacra_. it meant to obey his grandfather's great grandfather! all this is ultra-aristocratic. precisely! _law is an aristocratic thing;_ only _the emergency law_, the _decree_, is democratic. for this reason montesquieu always speaks of a monarchy as being limited, and, at the same time, maintained by its law. what did this mean in his day, when there was no "expression of the general will" to limit monarchy, and when royalty possessed legislative power, and could at will make and remake laws? it could only mean one thing, namely, that montesquieu's conception of law was the same as that of the ancient sociologists,--law far older than his time, "fundamental laws" as he calls them, of the ancient monarchy, which still bind and ought so to bind the monarch, whose rule without them would be despotism or anarchy. law is essentially aristocratic. it ordains that rulers should govern the people, and that the dead should govern the rulers. the very essence of aristocracy is the rule of those who have lived over those who live, for the benefit of those who shall live hereafter. aristocracy, properly so called, is an aristocracy in the flesh. law is a spiritual aristocracy. aristocracy, as represented by the aristocrats of to-day, only represents the dead by tradition, inheritance, education, physiological heredity of temperament and characteristics. law does not represent the dead, it is the dead themselves, it is their very thought perpetuated in immutable script. a nation is aristocratic both in form and spirit which preserves its old aristocracy and maintains its vitality by careful infusions of new blood. still more is that nation aristocratic which maintains its old legislation inviolate, adding to it, reverently and discreetly, new laws which combine something of the modern spirit with the spirit of the old. _homines novi, novæ res. homo novus_ means the man without ancestors who is worthy to be added to the ranks of the nobly born. _novæ res_ are things without antecedents, nay revolution itself. _novæ res_ should only be introduced partially gradually, insensibly and progressively into ancient things, as "new men" into the community of the old nobility. law is more aristocratic than aristocracy itself, hence democracy is the natural enemy of laws and can only tolerate decrees. our examination of modern democracy has brought us to the following conclusions. the representation of the country is reserved for the incompetent and also for those biassed by passion, who are doubly incompetent. the representatives of the people want to do everything themselves. they do everything badly and infect the government and the administration with their passion and incompetence. [b] see _france_, by j. e. c. bodley, , pp. , . under _scrutin de liste_ "the department is the electoral unit, each having its complement of deputies allotted to it in proportion to its population, and each elector having as many votes as there are seats ascribed to his department, without, however, the power to cumulate." _scrutin d'arrondissement_ is election by single-member constituencies. the _arrondissement_ is the electoral unit. [c] this is a question put to a minister by a deputy. "the effect ... is somewhat similar to a motion to adjourn the house in the english parliament." bodley, p. . chapter vi. the incompetence of government. this is not all. the law of incompetence spreads still further, either by some process of logical necessity or by a sort of contagion. it has often been made the subject of merriment, for, like all tragedy, when we regard it with good humour the matter has its comic side, that it is very rare for any high office to be given to a man who is competent for the post. generally the minister of education is a lawyer; the minister of commerce, an author; the war minister, a doctor; the minister for the navy, a journalist. beaumarchais' epigram "the post required a mathematician--it was given to a dancing master!" strikes the keynote much more of a democracy than of an absolute monarchy. the matter is so generally recognised that it has a sort of retroactive effect upon the historical ideas of the masses. three frenchmen out of every four are convinced that carnot was a civilian, and the statement has often appeared in print. why? because it is inconceivable that under a democracy the war minister could possibly be a soldier, or, that the members of the convention could possibly have given the war office to a soldier. this appeared too paradoxical to be true. at first sight this extraordinary method of making incompetent men into ministers seems merely a joke, merely the subtle and entertaining vagaries of the goddess incompetence. partly it is so but not entirely. the man whose business it is to appoint ministers has to divide the choicest plums of office among the various groups of the majority which supports him. as all of these groups do not contain specialists, the highest offices are disposed of on political grounds, and not on grounds of professional aptitude. i have shown what the result is; the only ministerial appointment which is made in a rational manner is that which the president of the council reserves for himself, and even in this case in order to conciliate some important political personage he very often gives it up and takes some post for which he is not so well suited. see what follows: each department is directed by an incompetent man, who, if he be conscientious, sets himself to learn the work in which he ought to be a fully trained expert, or, if he be not conscientious, and be pressed for time, as he always is, he directs his department according to his general political theories and not according to practical common sense--a double distillation of incompetence. we know the kind of speech a new minister of agriculture makes to his staff. he harangues them on the principles of the revolution of . moreover, in a highly centralised country, the minister does everything in his own department. he has to do everything under the pressure, it is true, of the national representatives; but still his is the supreme authority. it is easy to see what sort of decisions he will make. they are often very little supported by law, and sometimes are even contrary to law, and then they remain a dead letter from the first. ministerial circulars often have a remarkable character for illegality. in that case they fall and are forgotten, but not always before they have introduced a vast amount of trouble throughout the entire administration. as to appointments, they are made, as i have said, by political influence, and even when they are flagrantly improper and corrupt, there is no chance of their being corrected by the competence of a minister, who, holding enlightened views on the business and subordinates of his office, is able to put his foot down and say "no! this will not do, we must draw the line somewhere." chapter vii. judicial incompetence. here we find incompetence spreading its influence by the logical necessity of the case. there are other quarters in which it grows by a sort of contagion. have you ever noticed that the _ancien régime_, in spite of grievous shortcomings, by a sort of historical tradition, maintained a certain respect for efficiency in its different forms? for instance in matters of jurisdiction, there were seignorial, ecclesiastical and military courts. these were not founded as the result of argument and profound consideration, but by the natural course of events, by history itself, and they were maintained and approved by a monarchy which was verging on despotism. seignorial jurisdiction, without much rational justification, was none the less of considerable utility; it bound, or was capable of binding, the noble to his land, it prevented him from losing sight of his vassals, and his vassals from losing sight of him, and was in fact a conservative force in the aristocratic constitution of the kingdom. i submit that if this jurisdiction had been properly defined, limited and modified, which was never done, it would have been consonant with the law of competence. there are various local matters which come quite properly within the province of the noble, who in those days took the place of the magistrate. all that was wanted was that such matters should have been defined with precision and that in every case appeal should have been allowed. ecclesiastical jurisdiction was perfectly reasonable, as offences committed by ecclesiastics have a special character of which ecclesiastics alone can judge. this seems strange to modern ideas, although nowadays there are commercial courts and conciliation boards, because litigation between men of business, between workmen and women workers, and between employers and employed, can only be decided by men who have technical knowledge of the subject in dispute. appeal, moreover, to a higher court is always allowed. finally, in the old days there used to be military jurisdiction for precisely the same reason. all these exceptional jurisdictions are objects of the liveliest apprehension to democracy, because they infringe the rule of uniformity, which is the image and often the caricature of equality, and also because they are a stronghold of efficiency. democracy of course demolished aristocratic courts together with the aristocracy itself, and ecclesiastical courts together with the church when it ceased to be an estate of the realm. any special jurisdictions which still remain are looked upon as instruments of aristocracy; courts-martial are held in abhorrence because they have ideas of their own in respect of military honour and duty, and military offences. therein lies their efficiency, a thing absolutely necessary, if we are to maintain military spirit and discipline in a strong army. the private soldier or officer, who is only judged and punished as a civilian, will not be well judged nor adequately punished, considering the special duties and services which are required of the army. this is a question of moral as well as technical efficiency and to this the democracy pays no heed, because it is convinced that no special efficiency is necessary and that common sense is all that is required. common sense, however, is like wit; it is useful in every walk of life, but is not sufficient in any one of them. this is just what democracy cannot or will not understand. it makes just as great a mistake in its civil and criminal jurisdiction, though it has, up to now, so far departed from its principles as to appoint qualified jurists to civil judgeships. no one denies that this body of men is efficient. those who act as judges know their law. there is, however, as i have often had occasion to point out, a moral as well as a technical efficiency, and in limiting the independence that is essential to moral efficiency, democracy neutralises the technical efficiency of its servants. let me explain my meaning further. formerly the magistracy was a recognised and autonomous branch of the public service, and as a result, save as it was affected by revolution and in normal times by the fear of revolution, enjoyed an absolute independence. this gave, or rather preserved intact, its moral efficiency. for moral efficiency consists in an ability to act according to the dictates of conscience, and is equivalent to a sort of moral independence. now, the magistrates form a department of the administration and are a body of officials. the state appoints, promotes or refuses to promote and pays them. in short the state has them at its mercy, just as military officers are controlled by the war office, or tax-collectors by the treasury. hence they are deprived of their independence and moral efficiency, for they are always tempted to give judgment as the government would wish. there is, it is true, a guarantee for their independence in the permanence of their appointments, but this only applies to those who have reached the summit of their profession, or are on the point of retiring, or have no further interest in promotion. the young magistrate who wants to get on, a perfectly legitimate ambition, is by no means independent, for if he does not give satisfaction, he may enjoy a peculiar kind of permanence, the permanence of standing still at the starting point. the only independent judges, to whom justice is the sole interest, are either those who have served for forty years or the president of the _cour de cassation_. i may add also the man of independent means who is indifferent to promotion and content to spend all his time at the place of his first appointment. he is exactly like the magistrates in old days, but he and his kind get rarer every year. at best, moreover, this permanence, of which so much is thought, is an illusory guarantee, for it is often suspended by one government or another, and the magistrates are constantly at the mercy of political crises. their moral efficiency is indeed sorely tried. i affirm, therefore, that this diminution of moral efficiency affects technical efficiency, because magistrates dare not insist on technical exactitude when cases arise between the state and individuals, or between those who are protected by government and those who are not. though cases in which the state is a party do not occur very often, those in which friends of the government are involved are of daily occurrence in a country where government is a faction waging incessant warfare against all other factions. it has been said with much reason that parliamentary government on a basis of universal suffrage is legalised and continuous civil war. it is usually a bloodless civil war, but its weapons are insults, provocations, calumnies, personalities, libel actions. these go on from one year's end to the other. in a country where such a state of affairs is prevalent, the magistracy ought to be absolutely independent in order to be impartial. yet it is precisely in a country like this that the magistracy, not being independent and autonomous, is obliged to avoid offending the party in office which, moreover, is extremely exacting, for it lives in constant fear that it may be turned out of power. --is there nothing to be done? would you advocate a return to the practice of purchasing judicial appointments?-- in the first place, this would not be anything so very terrible, and secondly, it might be quite possible to secure all the advantages of purchase without its actual practice. i can show you that it is not so very terrible, for the case is parallel with that of the exceptional jurisdictions, the mention of which filled you with horror till you remembered the commercial courts and the councils of experts, all excellent institutions. we are appalled at the idea of a magistrate purchasing his office, and yet we employ advocates and solicitors and other legal officials and trust them with our most precious interests, yet they have, many of them, either bought or inherited their practice. under a system of purchase, we should be judged by lawyers of whom we required more extensive legal knowledge than is at present required of the profession. we should be judged in fact by solicitors and advocates of a superior order. there is nothing very alarming about that. montesquieu was in favour of a system of purchase. voltaire opposed it strongly. they were both right and were indeed agreed on general principles. montesquieu says: "venality,--the purchase system,--is a good thing under a monarchical form of government, because work which would not be done from mere civic virtue is then undertaken as a family business. each man's duty is laid down for him, and the orders of the state are given greater permanence. suidas says very aptly of anastasius that he turned the empire into an aristocracy by selling magisterial offices." voltaire replies: "is it as a matter of civic virtue that in england a judge of the king's bench accepts his appointment?" (it is either a matter of civic virtue or of profit and interest, and if it is not profit, it certainly must require considerable civic virtue.) "what! can we not find men in france willing to judge if we bestow their appointments upon them gratuitously?" (we certainly can: but they might be too grateful!) "can the work of administering justice, disposing of the lives and fortunes of men, become a family business?" (well, the business of bearing arms and disposing of men's lives and fortunes in civil war was in a family business. so too the business of being king, and you do not protest against that!) "it is a pity that montesquieu should dishonour his work by such paradoxes, but we must forgive him; his uncle purchased a provincial magistrate's office and left it to him. human nature comes in everywhere. none of us is without weaknesses." montesquieu thinks aristocratic bodies are good things. voltaire is in favour of absolute power. montesquieu would like the judicature to be a family office, that is to say hereditary like the profession of a soldier; this would make the judicial profession permanent like other professions. he demonstrates, as does suidas, that the purchase system creates an aristocracy. voltaire, like napoleon i., would make his soldiers, his priests, and his judges, king's men. they should all belong to the king, body and soul. montesquieu had a greater antagonist than voltaire in plato. plato wrote in his republic, referring to all judicial offices: "it is as if on board ship a man were made a pilot for his wealth. can it be that such a rule is bad in every other calling, and good only in respect of the governing of a republic?" montesquieu answers plato (and in anticipation voltaire) very wittily: "plato is speaking of a virtuous republic and i of a mere monarchy. under a monarchy if offices were not sold by rule, the poverty and greed of courtiers would sell them all the same, and chance after all will give a better result than the choice of a prince." to sum up, montesquieu wants the magistracy to be partly hereditary, and partly recruited from the wealthy classes, an independent, aristocratic body analogous to the army or the clergy, administering justice with that technical efficiency which university standards can guarantee, and with the moral efficiency which is founded on independence, dignity, public spirit and impartiality. i said above that venality, or the system of purchase, was not necessary to obtain these results. the principle is this, that the magistracy must be independent, and to be independent it must have a proprietary right in its duties. this can only be obtained if it hold its office by inheritance or purchase as was done under the _ancien régime_; or, if it were somehow contrived that magistrates should not be chosen by the government. the purchase or inheritance plan is not popular, then the only alternative is that the magistrates should be chosen by some body other than the government. by whom then? the people? then the judges would be dependent upon the people and the electors. --that would be better, or less bad.-- not at all. if the judges were chosen by the electors, they would be even less impartial than if they were elected by the government. the judge then would think of nothing but of being re-elected. he would always give judgment in favour of the party which had elected him. would you care to be judged before a court composed of the deputies of your department? certainly not, if you belong to the weaker party. yes, if you belong to the majority, but then only if you are certain that your adversary belongs to the minority, or, if he belong to your own party, that he is a less influential elector than yourself. to sum up, there is no guarantee of impartiality if the judges are elected. further, if the system of electing judges by those liable to their jurisdiction were adopted, there would be an extensive and, i might add, a most entertaining variety of justice. judges, who were elected by a "blue" or republican majority, and who were anxious for re-election, would always deliver judgment in favour of the blues. the same thing would happen in the "white" or royalists districts. "justice has her epochs," pascal said ironically, and in this case justice would have her districts. it would not be the same in the _alpes-maritimes_ as in the _côtes-du-nord_. the court of appeal, if it attempted to be impartial, would spend its time sending cases back from a blue district to be revised in a white, and the decisions delivered in a white country to be revised in a blue. there would be judicial and legal anarchy. --if the bench is not to be inherited, nor bought, nor chosen by the government, nor elected by the people, by whom is it to be nominated?-- by itself; i see no other solution. for instance i can suggest one good method, though there may be several. all the doctors of law in france could choose the judges of appeal and the judges of appeal could choose and promote all the judges. this is an aristocratic-democratic scheme on a very broad basis. or else the judges alone might choose the judges of appeal, and the judges of appeal might appoint and promote the judges. that is an oligarchical method. or again, here is a plan for passing from the system that is, to that which ought to be. for the first time the doctors of law might choose the _cour de cassation_, and it could choose the judges. afterwards the judges could fill the vacancies in the _cour de cassation_, which would nominate and promote the judges. the government would still go on, and continue to nominate the persons eligible to serve as magistrates. under all these systems the judges would form an autonomous, self-creative body, dependent upon and responsible to themselves alone, and by reason of their absolute independence, strictly impartial. --but they would form a caste!-- they would form a caste. i am sorry for it, but it is the case. you will never be well judged until you have a judicial caste, which is neither the government, nor the world at large. for the government cannot judge properly when it is both judge and party to the suit. further, if it be litigious; it will never be out of court. again, the world at large cannot judge properly, because, in practice, the world at large means the majority, and the majority is a party, and by definition a party can hardly be impartial. but democracy does not want to be judged by a caste. in the first place because it abhors castes, and secondly because it does not care about impartial justice. do not exclaim at the paradox. democracy does want to be judged impartially in little every-day cases, but in all important cases in which a political question is involved and in which one of the majority is opposed to one of the minority, the verdict then has to be for the stronger side. it says to the judicial bench what a simple-minded deputy said to the president of the chamber: "it is your duty to protect the majority." this is why democracy clings to its official magistracy, which contains some good elements though its members cannot always be impartial. they were condemned by the mouth of one of their highest dignitaries who answered when questioned about some illegal proceeding: "there are reasons of high state policy," thus throwing both the law and the judges at the feet of the government. on another occasion, with the very best intentions, in order to put an end to an interminable affair, they turned and twisted the law and set a bad example; for by not applying the law correctly, they laid themselves open to endless and justifiable attacks upon their decision; they did not procure the longed-for settlement, and, instead, left the matter open to interminable dispute. they have knowledge, good sense and intelligence, but as their want of independence, in other words their moral inefficiency, neutralises their technical efficiency, they do not and cannot possess authority. democracy will inevitably go further along the road towards its ideal, which is direct government. it will want to elect the judges. already it chooses them remotely in the third degree; for it chooses the deputies who choose the government, which chooses the judges; and to some extent, in the second degree, for it chooses the deputies who bring pressure to bear upon the nomination of the judges and interfere with their promotion and their decisions. this also is remote. and, as by this constitution, or, rather by this practice, recognition is given to the principle that it is the people who really appoints the judges through its intermediaries, democracy, always logical and matter of fact, would like to see the principle applied without concealment, and the people making the appointments directly. then endless questions will arise about the best way of voting and electing. if unipersonal ballot is adopted, the canton will nominate its _juge de paix_, the district its tribunal, the region its court, and the whole country the court of appeal. in this arrangement there will be the double drawback mentioned above; that is, varying interpretations of justice according to districts, and no impartiality. if, on the other hand, _scrutin de liste_ is adopted, the whole country will choose all the magistrates and they will belong to the majority. in this case there would be uniformity of justice but no impartiality. any intermediate system would combine the disadvantage of both plans. for instance, if nominations are made in each division, all the magistrates in brittany will be white partisans, while in provence they will be blue partisans. in both cases they will be biassed, and such diversity as there is will be merely a diversity of partiality and bias. we are talking of the future, though not perhaps of a very distant one. let us deal with the present. the jury is still with us. now the jury combines absolute moral competence with absolute technical incompetence. democracy must always have incompetence in one form or another. a jury is independent of everybody, both of the government and of the people, and in the best possible way, because it is the agent of the people without being elected. it does not seek re-election and is rather vexed than otherwise at being summoned to perform a disagreeable duty. on the other hand it always vacillates between two emotions, between pity and self-preservation, between feelings of humanity and the necessity for social protection; it is equally sensitive to the eloquence of the defending advocate, and the summing up of the prosecutor, and as these two influences balance each other it is in a perfect moral condition for delivering an equitable verdict. for this reason the jury is of ancient origin, and has always been an institution in the land. at athens the tribunal of the heliasts formed a kind of jury, too numerous indeed and more like a public meeting, but still a sort of jury. at rome, a better regulated republic, there were certain citizens chosen by the prætor who settled questions of fact, that is to say, decided whether an act had or had not been committed, whether a sum of money had or had not been paid; and the question of law was reserved for the centumvirs. in england the jury still exists and has existed for centuries. these various peoples have considered very properly that juries are excellently adapted for forming equitable decisions, since they possess a greater moral competence for this particular function, than is to be found elsewhere. this is true; but on the other hand a jury has no intelligence. in november , a jury in the côte d'or before whom a murderer was being tried, declared ( ) that this man did not strike the blows, ( ) that the blows which he struck resulted in death. thereupon the man was acquitted, although his violence, which never took place, had a murderous result. in the steinheil case in the same month and year, the jury's verdict involved ( ) that no one had been assassinated in the steinheils' house, and ( ) that mme steinheil was not the daughter of mme japy. if a verdict were a judgment this would have put an end to all attempts to discover the assassins of m. steinheil and mme japy, and on the other hand there would have been terrible social complications. but the verdict of a jury is not a judgment. why? because the legislator foresaw the alarming absurdity of verdicts. it is presumed in law that all juries' verdicts are absurd, and experience proves that this is often the case. juries' verdicts always seem to have been decided by lot like those of the famous judge in rabelais, and it is proverbial at the law courts that it is impossible to foresee the issue of any case that comes before a jury. it looks as if the jury reasoned thus: "i am a chance judge, and it is only right that my judgment should be dictated by chance." voltaire was in favour of the jury system, principally because he had such a very low opinion of the magistrates of his day, whom he used to compare to busiris. but, with his usual inconsequence, he takes no pains to conceal the fact that the populations of abbeville and its neighbourhood were unanimously exasperated against la barre and d'etalonde, and the people of toulouse against calas, and all of them would have been condemned by juries summoned from those districts as surely as they were by the magisterial busiris. the jury system is nothing but a refined example of the cult of incompetence. society, having to defend itself against thieves and murderers, lays the duty of defending it on some of its citizens, and arms them with the weapon of the law. unfortunately it chooses for the purpose citizens who do not know how to use the weapon. it then fondly imagines that it is adequately protected. the jury is like an unskilled gladiator entangled in the meshes of his own net. i need hardly say that democracy with its usual pertinacity is now trying to reduce the jury a step lower, and draw it from the lower instead of the lower middle classes. i see no harm in this myself, for in the matter of law the ignorance and inexperience of the lower middle class and the ignorance of the working class are much the same. i have only mentioned it to show the tendency of democracy towards what is presumably greater incompetence. now comes the turn of the _juges de paix_. at present we still have _juges de paix_. here we have a most interesting example of the way democracy strives after incompetence in matters judicial. owing to the expense entailed by an appeal the jurisdiction of a _juge de paix_ is very often final. he ought to be an instructed person with some knowledge of law and jurisprudence. he is therefore usually chosen from men who have a degree in law or from lawyers' clerks who have a certificate of ability. to be quite honest this is but a feeble guarantee. by the law of july th, , the french senate, anxious to find men of still grosser incompetence, decided that _juges de paix_ might be nominated from those, who, not having the required degree or certificate, had occupied the posts of mayor, deputy-mayor or councillor for ten years. the object of this decision was the very honest and legitimate one of giving senators and deputies the opportunity of rewarding the electoral services of the village mayors and their assistants. and remember senators especially are nominated by these officials. further it was an opportunity not to be missed for applying our principle--and our principle is this: we ask, where is absolute incompetence to be found, for to him who can lay indisputable claim to it we must confide authority. now mayors and their assistants answer this description exactly. they must be able to sign their names, but they are not obliged to know how to read, and eighty per cent. of them are totally illiterate. their work is done for them very usually by the local schoolmaster. the senate, therefore, was quite sure of finding among them men absolutely incompetent for the post of _juge de paix_, and it has found what it wanted. incompetence so colossal deserved an appointment, and an appointment has been given to it. the magistrature and the powers that be, seem to have been somewhat disturbed by certain consequences of this highly democratic institution. m. barthou, the minister of justice, complained bitterly of the work which this new institution caused him. he made the following speech in the chamber of deputies: "we are here to tell each other the truth, and, with all the due moderation and prudence that is fitting, i feel it my duty to warn the chamber against the results of the law of . at the present moment i am besieged with applications for the post of _juge de paix_. i need hardly mention that there are some , of them in my office, because a certain number are not eligible for consideration, but there are in round numbers , applications which are recommended and examined." (what he means to say is, that these are examined because they have been recommended, for, as is only right, those that are not backed by some political personage are not looked at.) "as the average annual number of vacancies is a hundred and eighty, you will readily see what a quandary i am in. some of these applications are made with the most extraordinary persistency, i might even call it ferocity, and these invariably come from men who have held the office of mayor or deputy-mayor for ten years, often in the most insignificant places." the minister of justice then read a report made on the subject by a _procureur-général_. "in this department there are forty-seven _juges de paix_, twenty of whom, as i learn from an enquiry, were mayors at the time of their appointment. it is not to be wondered at that the number of provincial magnates who aspire to the post is on the increase, for it seems to be generally recognised in this department that elective office irrespective of all professional aptitude is the normal means of access to a paid appointment, more especially to that of _juge de paix_. once they are appointed, the mayors combine both their municipal and judicial duties, and their interests lie far more in the commune which they administer than in the district in which they dispense justice and which, without permission, they should never leave. sometimes these district magistrates will go to any length to obtain moral support from the politicians of the neighbourhood. they extort this as a sort of blackmail given in exchange for the electoral influence which they can bring to bear in their municipal capacity. they attach far less importance to being quashed by the bench, than to the eventual support of the deputy. those who come into their courts are the unfortunate victims of these compromising arrangements which are giving the republican system a bad name." i think the minister of justice and his _procureur-général_ have very little ground for these lamentations. after all the minister only complains of having , applications for office. it would surely be quite easy for him, in compliance with the generally recognised principle, to choose those whose incompetence seems to be most thorough, or those who are most influentially supported, according to the prevailing custom. as for the _procureur-général's_ sarcasms, which he thinks so witty, they are quite delightfully diverting and ingenuous. "it seems to be generally recognised that elective office, irrespective of all professional aptitude, is the normal means of access to a paid appointment." what else does he expect? it is eminently democratic that the marked absence of professional capacity should single a man out for employment. that is the very spirit of democracy. he surely does not think that a man is an elector by reason of his legislative and administrative capacity? it is likewise essentially democratic that elective office should lead to paid appointments, for the democratic theory is that all office, paid and unpaid, should be elective. why, this _procureur-général_ must be an aristocrat! as for the mutual services rendered by the justice, as mayor, to the deputy, and by the deputy to the justice, this is democracy pure and simple. the deputies distribute favours that they may be returned to power; the influential electors put all their interest, both personal and official, at the service of the deputies in order to obtain those favours. they are hand in glove with each other, and form a solid union of interests. what more does the _procureur-général_ want? does he want a different system? if he wants another system, whatever else it may be, it will not be democracy, or at least it will not be a democratic democracy. nor have i any idea what he means when he says the republican system will get a bad name. the good name of the republic depends upon its putting into practice every democratic principle; and democratic principles have certainly never been more precisely realised than in the preceding example, which i have had great pleasure in rescuing from oblivion and presenting to the notice of sociologists. chapter viii. examples of incompetence. i have already compared this, our desire to worship incompetence, to an infectious disease. it has attacked the state at the very core, in its constitution, and it is not surprising that it is spreading rapidly to the customs and to the morals of the country. the stage, we know, is an imitation of life. life also, to perhaps an even greater extent, is an imitation of the stage. similarly laws spring from morals, and morals spring from law. "men are governed by many things," said montesquieu, "by climate, religion, laws, precept, example, morals and manners, which act and react upon each other and all combine to form a general temperament." morals, more often than not, determine the nature of our laws, particularly in a democracy, which is deplorable, but montesquieu was right in saying: "morals take their colour from laws, and manners from morals," for laws certainly "help to form morals, manners" and even "national character." for instance in rome under the empire the code of morals was to some extent the result of arbitrary power, as to-day the moral character of the english is to some extent due to the laws and constitution of their country. we know that by his laws peter the great changed if not the character at least the manners and customs of his people. custom is the offspring of law, and morals are the offspring of custom. national character is not really changed, for character, i believe, is a thing incapable of change, but it appears to be changed, and it certainly undergoes some modifications; one set of tendencies is checked, while others are encouraged. the law abolishing the right of primogeniture has obviously affected national morals, though it has not otherwise altered national character. for a peculiar mental attitude is evolved by the constant domination of an elder brother, whose birthright gives him precedence and authority second only to that of the father. in countries where the right of unrestricted testamentary bequests is still maintained, family morals are very different from those which obtain where the child is considered a joint proprietor of the patrimony. since the passing of the law permitting divorce, a sad but necessary evil, there have been far more applications for divorce than there ever were for separation. can this be accounted for solely by the fact that formerly it seemed hardly worth while to take steps to obtain the qualified freedom of separation? i think not. for when a yoke is unbearable, efforts to relax it would naturally be quite as strenuous and as unremitting as efforts to get rid of it altogether. the truth is, i think, that when both civil and ecclesiastical law agreed in prohibiting divorce, people held a different view of marriage; it was looked upon as something sacred, as a tie that it was shameful to break, and that could not be broken except as a last resource and then almost under pain of death. the law permitting divorce was what our forefathers would have called a "legal indiscretion." it has abolished the feeling of shame. except where there is strong religious feeling, there is now no scruple nor shame in seeking divorce. the old order has passed away; modesty has been superseded by a desire for liberty, or for another union. this change has been brought about by a law which was the result of a new moral code; but the law itself has helped to enlarge and expand the code. thus democracy extends that love of incompetence which is its most imperious characteristic. greek philosophers used to delight in imagining what morals, especially domestic morals, would be like under a democracy. they all vied with aristophanes. one of xenophon's characters says: "i am pleased with myself, because i am poor. when i was rich i had to pay court to my calumniators, who knew full well that they could harm me more than i could them. then the republic was always imposing fresh taxes and i could not escape. now that i am poor, i am invested with authority; no one threatens me. i threaten others. i am free to come and go as i choose. the rich rise at my approach and give me place. i was a slave, now i am a king; i used to pay tribute, now the state feeds me. i no longer fear misfortunes, and i hope to acquire wealth." plato too is quietly humorous at democracy's expense. "this form of government certainly seems the most beautiful of all, and the great variety of types has an excellent effect. at first sight does it not appear a privilege most delightful and convenient that we cannot be forced to accept any public office however eligible we may be, that we need not submit to authority and that every one of us can become a judge or magistrate as our fancy dictates? is there not something delightful in the benevolence shown to criminals? have you ever noticed how, in such a state as this, men condemned to death or exile remain in the country and walk abroad with the demeanour of heroes? see with what condescension and tolerance democrats despise the maxims which we have been brought up from childhood to revere and associate with the welfare of the republic. we believe that unless a man is born virtuous, he will never acquire virtue, unless he has always lived in an environment of honesty and probity and given it his earnest attention. see with what contempt democrats trample these doctrines under foot and never stop to ask what training a man has had for public office. on the contrary, anyone who merely professes zeal in the public interests is welcomed with open arms. it is instantly assumed that he is quite disinterested. "these are only a few of the many advantages of democracy. it is a pleasant form of government _in which equality reigns among unequal as well as among equal things_. moreover, when a democratic state, athirst for liberty, is controlled by unprincipled cupbearers, who give it to drink of the pure wine of liberty and allow it to drink till it is drunken, then if its rulers do not show themselves complaisant and allow it to drink its fill, they are accused and overthrown under the pretext that they are traitors aspiring to an oligarchy; for the people prides itself on and loves the equality that confuses and will not distinguish between those who should rule and those who should obey. is it any wonder that the spirit of licence, insubordination, and anarchy should invade everything, even the institution of the family? fathers learn to treat their children as equals and are half afraid of them, while children neither fear nor respect their parents. all the citizens and residents and even strangers aspire to equal rights of citizenship. "masters stand in awe of their disciples and treat them with the greatest consideration and are jeered at for their pains. young men want to be on the same terms as their elders and betters, and old men ape the manners of the young, for fear of being thought morose and dictatorial. observe too to what lengths of liberty and equality the relations between the sexes are carried. you would hardly believe how much freer domestic animals are there than elsewhere. it is proverbial that little lap-dogs are on the same footing as their mistresses, or as horses and asses; they walk about with their noses in the air and get out of nobody's way." aristotle, faithless at this point to his favourite method of always contradicting plato, has no particular liking, as we have said, for democracy. he does not spare it though he does not imitate plato's scathing sarcasm. in the first place, aristotle is frankly in favour of slavery, as was every ancient philosopher except perhaps seneca; but he is more insistent on this point than anyone else, for he looks upon slavery, not as one of many foundations, but as the very foundation of society. he considers artisans as belonging to a higher estate but still as a class of "half-slaves." he asserts as an historical fact that only extreme and decadent democracies gave them rights of citizenship, and theoretically he maintains that no sound government would give them the franchise of the city. "hence in ancient times, and among some nations, the working classes had no share in the government--a privilege which they only acquired under the extreme democracy.... doubtless in ancient times and among some nations the artisan class were slaves or foreigners, and therefore the majority of them are so now. the best form of state will not admit them to citizenship...." he admits that democracy may be considered as a form of government ("... if democracy be a real form of government...."), and he admits too that "... multitudes, of which each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together, may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively.... hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole. [observe that he is still speaking of a democracy in which slaves and artisans are not citizens.] doubtless too democracy is the most tolerable of perverted governments, and plato has already made these distinctions, but his point of view is not the same as mine. for he lays down the principle that of all good constitutions democracy is the worst, but the best of bad ones." but still aristotle cannot help thinking that democracy is a sociological mistake "... it must be admitted that we cannot raise to the rank of citizens all those, even the most useful, who are necessary to the existence of the state." democracy has this drawback that it cannot constitutionally retain within itself and encourage eminent men. in a democracy "if there be some one person or more than one, although not enough to make up the whole complement of a state, whose virtue is so pre-eminent that the virtues or the capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal of those who are so far inferior to him in virtue and in political capacity. such an one may truly be deemed a god among men. hence we see that legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in power; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law--they are themselves a law. anyone would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probably retort what, in the fable of antisthenes, the lions said to the hares--'where are your claws?'--when in the council of the beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all. and for this reason democratic states have instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, and therefore they ostracise and banish from the city for a time those who seem to predominate too much through their wealth, or the number of their friends, or through any other political influence. mythology tells us that the argonauts left heracles behind for a similar reason; the ship argo would not take him because she feared that he would have been too much for the rest of the crew." thrasybulus, the tyrant of miletus, asked periander, the tyrant of corinth, one of the seven sages of greece, for advice on the art of government. periander made no reply but proceeded to bring a field of corn to a level by cutting off the tallest ears. "this is a policy not only expedient for tyrants or in practice confined to them, but equally necessary in oligarchies and democracies. ostracism is a measure of the same kind, which acts by disabling and banishing the most prominent citizens." this is what we may call a constitutional necessity for the democracy. to be quite honest, it is not always obliged to cut off the ears of corn. it has a simpler method. it can systematically prevent any man who betrays any superiority whatsoever, either of birth, fortune, virtue or talent, from obtaining any authority or social responsibility. it can "send to coventry." i have often pointed out that under the first democracy louis xvi was guillotined for having wished to leave the country, while under the third democracy his great-nephews were exiled for wishing to remain in it. ostracism is, in these instances, still feeling its way, and its action is contradictory because it has not made up its mind. this will continue till it has been reduced to a science, when it will contrive to level, by one method or another, every individual eminence, great and small, that dares to vary by the merest fraction from the regulation standards. this is ostracism, and ostracism, so to speak, is a physiological organ of democracy. democracy by using it mutilates the nation, without it democracy would mutilate itself. aristotle often tries to solve the problem of the eminent man. "good men," he says, "differ from any individual of the many, as the beautiful are said to differ from those who are not beautiful, and works of art from realities, because in them the scattered elements are combined.... whether this principle can apply to every democracy and to all bodies of men is not clear.... but there may be bodies of men about whom our statement is nevertheless true. and if so, the difficulty which has been already raised--viz., what power should be assigned to the mass of freemen and citizens--is solved. there is still a danger in allowing them to share the great offices of state, for their folly will lead them into error and their dishonesty into crime. but there is a danger also in not letting them share, for a state in which many poor men are excluded from office will necessarily be full of enemies. the only way of escape is to assign to them some deliberative and judicial functions.... but each individual left to himself, forms an imperfect judgment." it is not only the eminent man that is the thorn in the flesh of democracies, but every form of superiority, whether individual or collective, which exists outside the state and the government. if we recollect that aristotle coupled extreme democracy with tyranny, it will be interesting to recall his summary of the "ancient prescriptions for the preservation of a tyranny...." "the tyrant should lop off those who are too high; he must put to death men of spirit: he must not allow common meals, clubs, education and the like; he must be upon his guard against anything which is likely to inspire either courage or confidence among his subjects; he must prohibit literary assemblies or other meetings for discussion, and he must take every means to prevent people from knowing one another (for acquaintance begets mutual confidence)." aristotle's conclusions are subjectively aristocratic: "in the perfect state there would be great doubts about the use of ostracism, not when applied to excess in strength, wealth, popularity or the like, but when used against some one who is pre-eminent in virtue. what is to be done with him? mankind will not say that such an one is to be expelled and exiled; on the other hand he ought not to be a subject, that would be as if men should claim to rule over zeus on the principle of rotation of office. the only alternative is that all should joyfully obey such a rule, according to what seems to be the order of nature, and that men like him should be kings in their state for life." but when he speaks objectively, aristotle comes to another conclusion, which we shall have occasion to mention later on. among moderns, rousseau declared that he was not a democrat, and he was right, because by democracy he meant the athenian system of direct government, of which he did not for an instant approve. in the "social contract" he has drawn up a most detailed scheme, which, in spite of some contradictions and obscure passages, is an exact description of democracy as we understand the word; but still we cannot tell if he is actually a democrat, because we do not know what he means by "citizens," whether he means everybody or only one class, though that a numerous one. rousseau has written more fully than anyone else, not so much of the influence of democracy on morals, as of the _coincidence_ between democracy and good morals. equality, frugality and simplicity can all be found, according to rousseau, in states where there is neither royalty nor aristocracy nor plutocracy. as i understand it, his meaning is that the same virtue which makes certain nations love equality, frugality and simplicity is also productive of a form of government which excludes aristocracy, plutocracy and royalty. if you have simplicity, frugality and equality, you will probably live in a republic that is democratic or virtually democratic. this is, i think, the clearest and most impartial summary that we can make of rousseau's doctrine, which, though set forth in rigid formulæ, is still extremely vague. in this he is a far more faithful follower of montesquieu than he will allow. all that i have quoted is to be found literally in montesquieu's chapters on democracy. even his famous saying, "the ruling principle of democracy is virtue," means, when he uses it in one sense, no more than that it is the synthesis of these three perfections, equality, simplicity and frugality. for montesquieu sometimes uses "virtue" in a narrow, and sometimes in a broad sense, sometimes in the sense of political and civic virtue or patriotism, sometimes in the sense of virtue properly speaking (simplicity, frugality, thrift, equality). in this latter case he and rousseau are absolutely agreed. montesquieu only considers democracy in decadence, as his custom is in respect of other forms of government, and though he does not actually cite plato, he really gives the substance of what we have already quoted. "when the people wishes to do the work of the magistrates, the dignity of the office disappears and when the deliberations of the senate carry no weight, neither senators nor old men are treated with respect. when old men do not receive respect, fathers cannot expect it from their children, husbands from their wives, nor masters from their men. at length everyone will learn to rejoice in this untrammelled liberty, and will grow as weary of commanding as of obeying. women, children and slaves will submit to no authority. there will be an end of morals, no more love of order, no more virtue." now as to this transition, this passage from the public morals of a democracy to the private, domestic, personal morals which exist under that form of government, have you observed what is the common root of our failings both public and private? the common root of both is misunderstanding, forgetfulness and contempt of competence. if pupils despise their masters, young men despise old men, if wives do not respect their husbands and the unenfranchised do not respect the citizens, if the condemned do not stand in awe of their judges, nor sons in awe of their parents, the principle of efficiency has vanished. pupils no longer admit the scientific superiority of their teachers, young men have no regard for the experience of the old, women will not recognise the supremacy of their husbands in practical matters, the unenfranchised have no sense of the superiority of the citizens from the point of view of national tradition, the condemned do not feel the moral supremacy of their judges, and sons do not realise the scientific, practical, civic and moral superiority of their fathers. indeed, why should they? how could we expect these feelings to be of anything but the most transient description since the state itself is organised on a basis of contempt for competence, or of what is even worse, a reverence for incompetence, and an insatiable craving for the guidance and government of the incompetent? thus public morals have a great influence on private morals; and gradually into family and social life there comes that laxity in the daily relations of the citizens which plato has wittily termed, "equality between things that are equal and those that are not." the first innovation which democracy brings into family life is the equality of the sexes, and this is followed by woman's disrespect for man. this idea, be it admitted, is substantially correct, it only ceases to be true when it is viewed relatively to the varying competences of the two sexes. woman is man's equal in cerebral capacity, and in civilised societies, where intellect is the only thing that matters, the woman is the equal of the man. she should be admitted to the same employments as men in society, and under the same conditions of capacity and education, but in family life the same rules should apply as in every other enterprise; ( ) division of labour according to the competence of each; ( ) recognition of a leader according to the competence of each. this is the law which women are constantly led to misunderstand in a democracy. they will not admit the principle of the division of labour either in the world at large or in the domestic circle. they try to encroach upon men's work, which perhaps they might do very successfully, if they were obliged to do it and had nothing else at all to do; but which they really spoil by undertaking when they have other obvious duties to perform. they will not admit that men should be at the head of affairs; they aspire to be not only partners but managing directors. this implies a contemptuous rejection of that form of social competence which comes from the acceptance of convention or contract. no doubt a woman would be just as good a tax-collector as her husband, but since they have entered into partnership, the one to administer the collection of taxes, the other to look after the house, it is just as bad for the one whose business it is to keep house to begin collecting taxes, as it is for the tax-collector to interfere with the housekeeping. it is necessary to respect the efficiency that arises out of the observance of convention and contract. this, with practice and experience, will quickly become a very real and a very valuable efficiency, but if thwarted from outside will lead to friction, insecurity and disorganisation. it is particularly by their contempt, which they are at no pains to disguise, for the competence that comes from contract and later from habit, by their refusal to recognise the position of the head of the family, that women every day and in every minute particular are training their children to despise their father. democracy seems bent on bringing up its children to despise their parents. no other construction can be put upon the facts, however good and innocent the motives. just sum up the facts. in the first place democracy denies that the living can be guided by the dead; it is one of its fundamental axioms that no generation should be tied and bound by its predecessor. what inference can children be expected to draw from this except that they owe no obedience to their father and mother? children have naturally only too great a tendency to look down on their parents. they are proud of their physical superiority; they know that their star is rising while that of their parents is setting. they are imbued with the universal prejudice of modern humanity that _progress is constant_ and that therefore whatever is of yesterday is _ex hypothesi_ inferior to that which is of to-day. they are driven also, as i am constrained to believe, by a sort of nemesis inspired by fear lest human science and power should hurry forward too fast if the children were content to pick up the burden of life where their parents left it, and simply followed their fathers and did not insist on effacing all that their fathers had done and beginning again--with the result that the edifice never rises far above its foundations, and that children for this and other reasons have a natural inclination to treat their parents as cassandras. then, as it were to clench the argument, democracy is ready with its teaching that each generation is independent of the other, and that the dead have no lesson to impart to the living. in the second place, democracy, applying the principle still further and proclaiming the doctrine that the state is master of all, withdraws the child from the family, as often and as completely as it can. "democracy," said socrates, in one of his humorous dialogues, "is a mountebank, a kidnapper of children. it snatches the child from its family while he is playing, takes him far away, allows him no more to see his family, teaches him many strange languages, drills him till his joints are supple, paints his face and dresses him in ridiculous clothes, and imparts to him all the mysteries of the acrobat's trade until he is sufficiently dexterous to appear in public and amuse the company by his tricks." at all events democracy is determined to take the child away from his family, to give him the education which it has chosen and not that which the parents have chosen, and to teach him that he must not believe what his parents teach him. it denies the competence of parents to rear their children and puts forward its own competence, asserting that it is only its own that has any value. this is one of the principal causes of the divisions between fathers and children in a democracy. you may retort that democracy does not always succeed in its efforts to separate children from their parents, because there is nothing to prevent the children extending the contempt, which for such excellent reasons they have been taught to entertain for their parents, to their state-appointed teachers. this is a most pertinent observation, for the general maxims of democracy are just as likely to make pupils despise their masters as to make sons despise their fathers. the master, too, represents in the eyes of his pupil that past which has no connection with the present and which by the law of progress is very inferior to the present. this is true; but the end of all is that between the school which counteracts the influence of the parents and the home which counteracts the influence of the school, the child becomes a personage who is never educated at all. he is in like case with a child who in the family itself receives lessons, and what is more important, example, from a mother who is religious and from a father who is an atheist. he is not educated, he has had no sort of education. the only real education, that is to say, the only transmission to the children of the ideas of their parents consists of an education at home which is reinforced by the instruction of masters chosen by the parents in accordance with their own views. this is precisely the form of education to which democracy refuses to be reconciled. * * * * * there is a still more cogent reason why old men are neither respected nor honoured in a democracy. here is yet another efficiency formally denied and formally set aside. an interesting treatise might be written on the rise and fall of old men. civilization has not been kind to them. in primitive times, as among savage races to-day, old men were kings. gerontocracy, that is, government by the aged, is the most ancient form of government. it is easy to understand why this should be. in primitive ages, all knowledge was experience and the old men possessed all the historical, social and political experience of the state. they were held in great honour and listened to with the profoundest respect and veneration, in fact with an almost superstitious reverence. nietzsche was thinking of those days when he said: "respect for the aged is the symbol of aristocracy," and when he added: "respect for the aged is respect for tradition," he was thinking of the reason for this assumption. that the dead should rule the living was accepted instinctively, and it was their nearness to death which evoked honour for the aged. at a later stage the old man shared in the civil government with monarchy, aristocracy or oligarchy, and retained an almost complete control of judicial affairs. his moral and technical efficiency were still appreciated. his moral efficiency to his contemporaries consisted in the fact that his passions were deadened and his judgment as disinterested as was humanly possible. even his obstinacy is rather an advantage than otherwise. he is not liable to whims and fancies and sudden gusts of temper or to external influence. his technical efficiency is considerable, because he has seen and remembered much and his mind has unconsciously drawn up a reference book of cases. as history repeats itself with very slight alterations, every fresh case which arises is already well known to him; it does not take him by surprise and he has a solution at hand which only requires very slight modification. all this, however, is very ancient history. that which undermined the authority of old men was the book. books contain all science, equity, jurisprudence and history better, it must be confessed, than the memories of old men. one fine day the young men said: "the old men were our books; now that we have books we have no further need for old men." this was a mistake; the knowledge which is accumulated in books can never be anything but the handmaiden of living science, the science which is being constantly remodelled and corrected by living thought. a book is a wise man paralysed; the wise man is a book which still thinks and writes. these ideas did not hold; the book superseded the old man, and the old man no longer was a library to the nation. later still, for various reasons, the old men drifted from a position of respect to one of ridicule. undoubtedly they lend themselves to this; they are obstinate, foolish, prosy, boring, crotchety and unpleasant to look upon. comic writers poked fun at these failings which are only too self-evident and showered ridicule upon them. then as the majority of audiences is composed of young men, first of all because there are more young men than old, and secondly because old men do not often go to the theatre, authors of comic plays were certain of raising a laugh by turning old men into ridicule, or rather by exposing only their ridiculous characteristics. at athens and at rome and probably elsewhere, the old man was one of the principal grotesque characters. these things, as rousseau pointed out, have a great effect upon morals. once the old man became a recognised traditional stage-butt, his social authority had come to an end. in the _de senectute_ it is obvious that cicero is running counter to the stream in seeking to restore to favour a character about whom the public is indifferent and for whom all he can do is to plead extenuating circumstances. it is a remarkable fact that even in mediæval epics, charlemagne himself, the emperor of the flowing beard, often plays a comic part. the epic is invaded by the atmosphere of the fable. during the renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the old man is generally, though not invariably, held up to ridicule. molière takes his lead from aristophanes and plautus rather than from terence and is the scourge of old age as well as "the scourge of the ridiculous"; he pursues the old as a hound his prey and never leaves them in peace either in his poetry or his prose. we must do this much justice to rousseau that both he and his child, the revolution, tried to restore the old man to his former glory; he makes honourable mention of him in his writings, and she gives him important posts in public ceremonies and national fêtes. therein were received the ancient memories of lacedæmon and of early rome, combined with a form of reaction against the days of louis xiv and louis xv. but with the triumph of democracy the old man was finally banished to the limbo of discredited things. montesquieu's advice was quite forgotten (see the context laws, v, ). he said that _in a democracy_ "nothing kept the standard of morals so high as that young men should venerate the old. both profit by it, the young because they respect the old, and the old because they are confirmed in their respect for themselves" (for the respect of the young is an assistance to the self-respect of the aged). democracy has forgotten this advice, because it no longer believes in tradition and believes too much in progress. old men are the natural upholders of tradition, and we must confess that an enthusiastic faith in the value of what we call progress is not commonly their failing. for this very reason their influence would be a most wholesome corrective to the system, or rather to the attitude of mind, which despises the past and sees in every change a step in the path of progress. but democracy will not allow that it needs a corrective, and the old man, to it, is only an enemy. the old man upholds tradition and has no enthusiasm for progress, but beyond this he appeals for respect, first for himself, then for religion, for glory, for his country and for the history of his nation. democracy is indifferent to the sentiment of respect, or rather it lives in constant fear that the sentiment may be applied elsewhere. then what does democracy want for itself? not respect, but adoration, passion, devotion. we all like to see our own sentiments as to ourselves repeated in the minds of others. the crowd never respects, it loves, it yields to passion, enthusiasm, fanaticism. it never respects even that which it loves. it is quite natural that the masses should not care for old men. the masses are young. how aptly does horace's description of the young man apply to the people! _imberbis juvenis, tandem custode remoto gaudet equis, canibusque et aprici gramine campi; cereus in vitium flecti, monitoribus asper, utilium tardus provisor, prodigus æris, sublimis, cupidusque et amata relinquere pernix._ "once free from the control of his tutors, the young man thinks of nothing but horses, dogs and the campus martius, impressionable as wax to every temptation, impatient of correction, unthrifty, extravagant, presumptuous and light of love." at all events respect has no meaning for the crowd, and when it rules, we cannot from its example learn the lessons of respect. democracy has no love for the old; and it is interesting to note that the word gerontocracy to which the ancients attached the most honourable meaning is now only a term of ridicule, and is applied only to a government which, because it is in the hands of old men, is therefore grotesque. * * * * * this disappearance of respect, noted as we have seen by plato, aristotle and montesquieu as a morbid system, is, regard it how we will, a fact of the gravest import. kant has asked the question, what must we obey? what criterion is there to tell us what to obey? what is there within us which commands respect, which does not ask for love or fear, but for respect alone? he has given us the answer. the feeling of respect is the only thing that we can trust, and that will never fail us. in society the only feelings we obey are those which win our respect, and the men to whom we listen, and whom we honour, are those who inspire respect. this is the only criterion which enables us to gauge correctly the men and things to whom we owe, if not absolute obedience, at least attention and deference. old men are the nation's conscience, and it is a conscience at times severe, morose, tiresome, obstinate, over-scrupulous, dictatorial, and it repeats for ever the same old saws; in other words a conscience; but conscience it is. the comparison might be carried further with results that would be advantageous as well as curious. we degrade and finally vitiate our conscience if we do not respect its behests. conscience then itself becomes small and timid and humble, shamefaced, and at length a mere whisper. absolutely silent it can never be made. it becomes sophisticated, it begins to employ the language of passion, not of the vilest passions of our nature, but still the voice of passion; it ceases to use the categoric imperative and tries to be persuasive. it no longer raises the finger of command, but it seeks to cajole with caressing hand. then it falls still lower, it affects indifference and scepticism and it puts on the air of the trifler in order to insinuate a word of wisdom into the seductive talk that is heard around it, and it holds language somewhat as follows: "probably everything has its good points and there is something to be said for both vice and virtue, crime and honesty, sin and innocence, rudeness and politeness, licence and purity. these are all simply different forms of an activity which cannot be wholly wrong in any of its manifestations; and it is precisely because every one of these has its value that there may be nothing to lose in being honest, nay, perhaps something to gain." nevertheless, a nation that does not respect its old men changes their nature and despoils them of their beauty and integrity. how true is montesquieu's saying that the respect paid them by the young helps old men to respect themselves! old men who are not respected take no interest in their natural duties; they cease to advise, or else they only venture to advise indirectly, as though they were apologising for their wisdom, or they affect a laxity of morals to enable them to insinuate a surreptitious dose of worldly wisdom;--and worst of all in view of the insignificant part assigned to them in society, old men will nowadays decline to be old. chapter ix. manners. if the worship of incompetence reverberates with a jarring note through our domestic morals, it has an effect hardly less harmful on the social relations of men in the wider theatre of public life. we often ask why politeness is out of date, and everyone replies with a smile: "this is democratic." so it is, but why should it be? montesquieu remarks that "to cast off the conventions of civility is to seek a method for putting our faults at their ease." he adds the rather subtle distinction that "politeness flatters the vices of others, and civility prevents us from displaying our own. it is a barrier raised by men to prevent them from corrupting each other." that which flatters vice can hardly be called politeness, but is rather adulation. civility and politeness are only slightly different in degree; civility is cold and very respectful, politeness has a suggestion of flattery. it graciously draws into evidence the good qualities of our neighbour, not his failings, much less his vices. there is no doubt that civility and politeness are a delicate means of showing respect to our fellow-men, and of communicating a wish to be respected in turn. these things then are barriers, but barriers from which we derive support, which separate and strengthen us, but which, though holding us apart, do not keep us estranged from our neighbours. it is also very true that if we release ourselves from these rules, whether they are civility or politeness, we set our faults at liberty. the basis of civility and politeness is respect for others and respect for ourselves. as abbé barthélemy has very justly remarked: "in the first class of citizens is to be found a spirit of decorum which makes it evident that men respect themselves, and a spirit of politeness which makes it evident that they also respect others." this is what pascal meant by saying that respect is our own inconvenience, and he explains it thus, that to stand when our neighbour is seated, to remove our hat when he is covered, though trifling acts of courtesy, are tokens of the efforts we would willingly make on his behalf if an opportunity of being really serviceable to him presented itself. politeness is a mark of respect and a promise of devotion. all this is anti-democratic, because democracy does not recognise any superiority, and therefore has no sympathy with respect and personal devotion. respect to others involves a recognition from us that we are of less importance than they, and politeness to an equal requires from us a courteous affectation that we consider him as our superior. this is entirely contrary to the democratic ideal, which asserts that there is no superiority anywhere. as for pretending to treat your equal as though he were your superior, that involves a double hypocrisy, because it requires a reciprocal hypocrisy on the part of your neighbour. you praise his wit, only in order that he may return the compliment. without, however, insisting on this point, democracy will argue that politeness is to be deprecated, because it not only recognises but actually creates superiority. it treats an equal as a superior, as though there were not enough discrepancies already without inventing any more. it seems to imply that if inequality did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. it is tantamount to proclaiming that there cannot be too much aristocracy. that is an opinion which democracy cannot endure. considered as a promise of future devotion, politeness is equally anti-democratic. the citizen owes no devotion to any person, he owes it only to the community. it is no small matter to style yourself "your most humble servant"; it means that you single out one man from among many others and promise to serve him; it means that you acknowledge in him some natural or social superiority, and according to democracy there are no superiorities, social or natural, and if there were such a thing as natural superiority, nature has no business to allow it. this is tantamount to proclaiming a form of vassalage--a thing which is not to be tolerated. as to the absence of politeness considered as "a means of giving free play to one's feelings," we recognise that in one sense this also is essentially democratic. the democrat is not proud of or pleased with his faults; not at all; only _ex hypothesi_ he does not believe in their existence. a failing is an inferiority of one man in relation to another; the word itself implies it; it means that something is lacking, that one man has a thing which another has not. but all men are equal, therefore, argues the democrat, i have no failing; therefore i need not try to conceal and control my alleged failings, as they are at worst merely mannerisms, and are possibly virtues. the democrat, in fact, like young men, like most women, and like all human beings who have begun to think but do not think very profoundly, knows his failings and assumes that they are virtues. this is very natural, for our faults are the most conspicuous parts of our character, and when we are still at the self-satisfied stage it is our faults that we cherish and admire. consequently, politeness, in that it consists in concealing our faults, is intolerable to a man who is impatient to display qualities that to him appear commendable and worthy. the usual reason why we do not correct our faults is that we mistake them for qualities, and think that any practice which requires their concealment must be quite absurdly tyrannical. the democrat is therefore profoundly convinced of two things; first, that all men are equal and that there is no such thing as inferiority or failing, and secondly, that what men call faults are really natural characteristics of great interest. he believes that faults are popular prejudices invented by intriguers, priests, nobles and rulers, for their own base purposes to inspire the poor with humility. he looks upon this sense of inferiority as a curb on the people's power, all the more potent that it works from within and has a paralysing effect on its energy. he is persuaded that, from this point of view, politeness is an aristocratic instrument of tyranny. this explains why, when the wave of democracy swept over france, it brought with it a perfect frenzy of rudeness, all the more curious in a nation remarkable for courtesy. it was an affirmation that, appearances notwithstanding, neither superiorities nor excellences of human character had any real existence. rudeness is democratic. chapter x. professional customs. the contempt for efficiency is carried far even in the liberal professions and in professional customs. we all know the story, perhaps a mythical one, of the judge who said to an earnest young barrister who was conscientiously elaborating a question of law: "now, mr. so and so, we are not here to discuss questions of law but to settle this business." he did not say this by way of jest; he wished to say: "the courts no longer deliver judgment on the merits of a case according to law, but according to equity and common sense. the intricacies of the law are left to professors, so please when conducting a case do not behave like a professor of law." this theory, which even in this mild form would have horrified the ancients, is very prevalent nowadays in legal circles. it has crept in as an infiltration, as one might call it, from the democratic system. a magistrate, nowadays, whatever remnant of the ancient feeling of caste he may have retained, certainly does not consider himself bound by the letter of the law, or by jurisprudence, the written tradition; when he is anything more than a subordinate with no other idea of duty than subservience to the government, he is a democratic magistrate, a heliast of athens; he delivers judgment according to the dictates of his individual conscience; he does not consider himself as a member of a learned body, bound to apply the decisions of that body, but as an independent exponent of the truth. an eccentric, but in truth very significant, example of the new attitude of mind is to be found in the judge, who formally attributed to himself the right to make law and who in his judgments made references, not to existing laws, but to such vague generalities as appealed to him, or to doctrines which he prophesied would _later on_ be embodied in the law. his code was the code of the future. the mere existence of such a man is of no particular importance, but the fact that many people, even those partially enlightened, took him seriously, that he was popular, and that a considerable faction thought him a good judge, is most significant. there is another much commoner sign of the times. the worst form of incompetence is perhaps that which allows a man to be competent without realising it, and, in criminal cases at least, this seems to be the normal attitude of the majority of our magistrates. we should read on this point a very curious pamphlet called _le pli professionnel_ ( ), by marcel lestranger, a provincial magistrate. it is very pertinent to our subject. it shows plainly that the magistracy nowadays, both the qualified stipendiaries and the bench of magistrates, has lost all confidence in itself and is terrified of public opinion as represented by newspapers, associations, political clubs and the man in the street; the magistrate knows too, or thinks he knows, that promotion depends, not on a reputation for severity as it used to do, but on a reputation for indulgence. he is confronted in the execution of his duty by forces which are always in coalition against him; the public, almost always favourable to the accused, the press, both local and parisian, the so-called science of judicial medicine, which is almost always disposed to consider the accused as persons not responsible for their actions. he lives, too, in constant terror of being mixed up in a miscarriage of justice, for miscarriage of justice is now a sort of craze, and with a considerable section of the public every conviction is a miscarriage of justice. and so the magistrate of first instance never dares to sum up severely, and the stipendiary never dares press his interrogations with firmness. there are exceptions of course; but these exceptions, by the astonishment which they excite, and by the reaction to which they give rise, show sufficiently, indeed conclusively, that they are abnormal, outside the new order of things, outside the new habits of the people. more often than not the subordinate magistrate, whose business it is to commit the prisoner for trial, acts with timidity and reserve, apologetically attenuating the crime; he leaves loopholes of escape, appeals in audible asides for indulgence, dwells on the uncertainty of evidence. he demands indeed the prisoner's head but lives in terror lest he obtain it. the fact is what both he and the stipendiary desire is that the affair should be settled by an acquittal, for an affair settled by an acquittal is an affair buried. stone-dead has no fellow; it is consigned to oblivion. it can never be made the sort of affair which someone is sure to declare is a miscarriage of justice, or which someone, animated by private and political spite or merely for the sake of a jest, can make into a ghost to haunt for ten or even fifteen years the unfortunate magistrate who had to deal with it. m. lestranger tells a story which, from all the information i can glean and from what i can remember hearing at the time, is absolutely true and a perfect illustration of thousands of similar cases. a poacher, aged nineteen, first outraged and then strangled in the woods a peasant woman, the mother of a family. on this occasion there could be no question of a miscarriage of justice or even of any suggestion of such a thing, because the prisoner pleaded guilty. that is a great point. in france every conviction that is not based upon the prisoner's confession is a miscarriage of justice; but when the prisoner pleads guilty there can be no incriminations of this sort, although there might be, for false confessions are not unknown, but nothing of the sort is ever put forward, and the case seemed to be quite straightforward. but the magistrates were terrified that the prisoner would be condemned to death. the crime was horrible, particularly in the eyes of a village jury, whose wives and daughters were often obliged to work some distance from the village. moreover, there was a tiresome man, the widower of the victim, thirsting for vengeance, who sang the praises of his wife and brought his weeping son into court while he gave his evidence. the president and the public prosecutor were in despair. "i have done all i can," said the president to the public prosecutor. "i have made the most of his youth. i have repeated 'only nineteen years of age.' i have indeed done all i can." "i have done all i can," said the public prosecutor to the president. "i have not said a word about the punishment. i merely accused. i could not plead for the defence. i have done my best." at the close of the hearing the chief constable was very reassuring to these gentlemen. "he is under twenty and he looked so respectable at the enquiry. it is quite impossible that he should be condemned to death in this quiet village. you will see, he will not be sentenced to capital punishment." he was not. the jury brought in a verdict of guilty with extenuating circumstances. the magistrates recovered their tranquillity. m. lestranger's facts are supported by figures. those who commit crimes which excite pity, such as infanticide and abortion, are less and less likely to be prosecuted, and if they are, they are frequently let off, however flagrant the offence. the average number of acquittals during the last twelve years is twenty-six per cent. a magistrate nowadays is a st. francis of assize. either the magistrate does not believe in his own efficiency, or he sacrifices it to his peace of mind, and he cares more for his own peace of mind than for the public safety. the magistracy will soon be no more than a _façade_, still imposing but not at all alarming. there is already a very serious symptom of how little confidence the crowd has in the wholesome severities of justice; the criminal caught in the act is often lynched or almost lynched, because it is well known that if he is not punished immediately, he is very likely to escape punishment altogether. --yet this same crowd, in the form of a jury, is often, almost always, very indulgent.--true, and that is because between the crime and the assizes there is often an interval of six months. at the date of the crime it is the misfortune of the victim that excites the crowd, at the date of the assize it is the misfortune of the accused. be this as it may, the practice of lynching amounts to a formal accusation that both magistrates and juries are over indulgent. * * * * * the clergy even, who are more tenacious of tradition than any other order in the state, are gradually becoming democratic to this extent, that though by profession teachers of dogmas and mysteries, they now teach only morality. in this way they try to get into closer touch with the poor, and so have a greater hold upon them. evidently they are not altogether to blame. only, when they cease to teach dogma and interpret mysteries, they cease to be a learned body or to have the prestige of a learned body. on the other hand they sink to the level of any other philosophy, which teaches and explains morality, and illustrates it by sacred examples just as well as any priesthood. the result is that the people say to themselves "what need have we of priests? moral philosophers are good enough for us." this americanism is not very dangerous, in fact it does not matter, in america, where there are very few lay moral philosophers; but it is a very great danger in france, italy and belgium where their name is legion. * * * * * in every profession, to sum it all up, the root of the evil is this, that we believe that mere dexterity and cunning are incomparably superior to knowledge and that cleverness is infinitely more valuable than sound learning. those who follow professions believe this, and the lay public that employs the professions is not dismayed by this attitude of the professional class; and so things tend to that equality of charlatanry to which democracy instinctively tends. democracy does not respect efficiency, but it soon will have no opportunity to respect it; for efficiency is being destroyed and before long will have disappeared altogether. there will soon be no difference between the judge and the suitor, between the layman and the priest, the sick man and the physician. the contempt which is felt for efficiency destroys it little by little, and efficiency, accepting the situation, outruns the contempt that is felt for it. the end will be that we shall all be only too much of one opinion. chapter xi. attempted remedies. we have sought very conscientiously, and democrats themselves have sought very conscientiously, to find remedies for this constitutional disease of democracy. we have preserved certain bodies, relatively aristocratic, as refuges, we would fain believe, of efficiency. we have preserved for instance a senate, elected by universal suffrage, not directly, but in the second degree. we have preserved also a parliament (a senate and a chamber of deputies), a floating aristocracy which is continually being renewed. this is, however, in a sense an aristocracy inasmuch as it stands between us and a direct and immediate government of the people by the people. these remedies are by no means to be despised, but we recognise that they are very feeble, for the reason that democracy always eludes them. by the care it takes to exclude efficiency, it has made the chamber of deputies (with some few exceptions) a body resembling itself with absolute fidelity both in respect of the superficial character of its knowledge and the violence of its prejudices; with the result in my opinion that the crowd might just as well govern directly and, without the intervention of representatives, by means of the plebiscite. the same thing applies to the senate, though perhaps in a more direct fashion. the senate is chosen by the delegates of universal suffrage. these delegates, however, are not chosen by a general universal suffrage where each department would choose four or five hundred delegates, but by the town councillors of each commune or parish. in these communes, especially in the rural communes, the municipal councillors who are by far the most numerous and, with regard to elections, the most influential, are more or less completely dependent on the _préfets_. the result is that the senate is, practically, chosen by the _préfets_, that is, by the government, as used to be the case under the first and second empire. the maker of the constitution made this arrangement for the benefit of his own party, for he upheld authority; and he wanted the central government to control the elections of the senate. it has not turned out as he intended. _vos non vobis_, others have profited by his device, as the following considerations will show. it is well known that in france a deputy belonging to the opposition, though sure of his constituents, and certain to be re-elected indefinitely, who for private reasons wishes to be a senator, is obliged to be civil to the government in power, to abate his opposition, and to make himself pleasant, if he wishes to avoid failure in his new ambition. it is very inconvenient to have a strong and active opposition in the senate. it comes back again to this, that we have a senate not far removed from one elected by universal suffrage. universal suffrage elects the chamber of deputies, the chamber elects the government, and the government elects the senate. the senate is therefore an extremely feeble anti-democratic remedy, and if it were intended as a check on democracy, it has not been a striking success. if we really wish to have an upper chamber as competent as possible, independent of the central authority, and relatively independent of universal suffrage, we must establish a chamber elected by the great constituent bodies of the nation, and also in my opinion, by universal suffrage, but with modifications somewhat as follows. the whole nation, divided for practical purposes into five or six large districts, should elect five or six thousand delegates who in turn should elect three hundred senators. there would then be no pressure from government nor any manufacture by the crowd of a representation fashioned in its own image, and we should have a really select body composed of as much competence as could be got in the country. it is, however, exactly the opposite of this that is done, and the french senate is an extremely feeble, anti-democratic remedy. it represents the rural democracy, arbitrarily guided and governed by the democratic government. * * * * * another remedy which has been given an equally conscientious trial is the system of competitive examination, which is supposed to be a guarantee for the ability of those who seek admission into government service. the object of these examinations, which are extremely detailed and complicated, is to test the ability of the candidate in every particular, to give employment to merit and to exclude favouritism. --you call that an anti-democratic remedy! it is as democratic as well can be!-- nay, pardon! it would be anti-monarchical if we lived under a monarchy, anti-aristocratic if we lived under an aristocracy, and it is anti-democratic because our lot is cast in a democracy. competition for public offices is a sort of co-optation. in fact it is co-optation pure and simple. when i suggested that the magistracy should be chosen by the magistrates, that is, the _cour de cassation_ by the magistrates and the magistrates in turn by the _cour de cassation_, i was of course accused of being paradoxical, as is always the case, when one suggests something contrary to the usual custom. i was, however, only carrying a little further the principle which is already applied to officials. in a certain sense and to a large extent officials recruit their numbers by co-optation. it is true, they do not actually choose the officials, but they eliminate the candidates whom they do not wish to have. examination is ostracism of the inefficient. the government, of course, has to decide who may be candidates, but its selection for employment is limited to those of whom other officials (the officials who conduct the examination) can approve. it is in fact co-optation. the committee of examiners which admits a candidate to st. cyr appoints an officer. the committee which admits a candidate to the _Ã�cole polytechnique_ appoints an officer or an engineer. a committee also which refuses a candidate at either of these places is encroaching on the national sovereignty, because it is forbidding the national sovereignty to make of this young man an officer or an engineer. this is co-optation. this is a guarantee of efficiency. here a wall is raised against incompetence, and against the jobbery under which incompetence would profit. it is hardly necessary for me to add that this co-optation is limited to a very narrow field of operation. it is confined in fact to the threshold of a man's career. once the candidate has been consecrated official, by a board of examining officials, he belongs, both as regards advancement, promotion and the reverse, to the central authority alone, except in certain cases. the co-optation of officials is merely a co-optation by elimination. the elimination is made once and for all, and the non-eliminated (_i.e._, the successful candidate) steps at once into the toils of the government, that is, into the toils of popular electioneering and party politics, when all the abuses which i have enumerated can and do arise. to be fair i had of course to point out that we had tried to invent some slight barriers against the omnipotence of incompetence, which prevent it being absolutely supreme. unfortunately these prophylactic measures are very badly organised, and, far from being capable of amendment, ought to be completely revolutionised. the examination system in our country is founded on a misconception, i mean on the confusion between knowledge and competence. we search conscientiously for competence or efficiency, and we believe that we have found it when we find knowledge, but that is an error. an examination requires from a candidate that he shall know, and competition demands that he shall know more than the others, but that is almost all that examination and competition require of him. therefrom results one of the most painful open sores of our civilisation,--preparation for examinations. preparation for examination is responsible for intellectual indigestion, for minds overloaded with useless information, and for a system of cramming, which at once takes the heart out of men, perhaps with good ability, just at the age when their mental activity is most keen; which, further, as the result of this surfeit, disgusts for the rest of his life and renders impotent for all intellectual effort, the unfortunate patient who has been condemned to undergo this treatment for five, eight, and sometimes ten years of his youth. i am satisfied, if i may be allowed to speak of myself in order to support my argument by an instance well known to me, that, if i have been able to work from the age of twenty-five to that of sixty-three, it is because i have never succeeded except very moderately, and i am proud of it, in competitive examinations. being of a curious turn of mind i have been interested in the subject set in the syllabus, but in other matters also, and the syllabus has been neglected. i sometimes passed, more often i failed, with the result that at twenty-six i was behind my contemporaries, but i was not overworked, broken down, and utterly sick of all intellectual effort. i admit that some of my contemporaries who never failed in an examination, and who passed them all with great brilliance, have worked as hard as i have up to sixty, but they are extremely few. the curious thing is that the results, not perhaps disastrous, but obviously very unsatisfactory, of this examination system do not lead us to abandon it (that perhaps would be an extreme measure), but make us aggravate and complicate it. legal and medical examinations are much "stiffer" than they used to be, and they require a greater physical effort, but without requiring or obtaining any greater intellectual value. in truth, one might say, examination is nothing more than a test of good health, and it is a very searching test, for it often succeeds in destroying it. here is an example which i know well. it is necessary, if a man desire to gain distinction as a professor of secondary education, that he should be a bachelor, a licentiate, an _agrégé_ or a doctor. this is a qualification that counts, and it means ten examinations or competitions, two for the first half of the bachelor's degree, two for the second, two for the licentiate, two for _agrégé_, two for the doctor's degree. this, moreover, does not appear to be enough. between the second part of the bachelor's degree and the licentiate's degree there is normally an interval of two years; between the licentiate and the _agrégation_ two years, and between the _agrégation_ and the doctor's degree there is generally three or four years. you perceive the danger! between the _licence_ and the _agrégation_, to go no further at present, the future professor has two whole years to himself. that is to say, that during the first of these two years he will work alone. he can work freely, he can study in what direction he pleases, without thinking of an examination at the end of twelve months; he has escaped for the moment from the servitude of the syllabus. the prospect makes us shudder with apprehension. it is sadly to be feared that the young man may take a rest and draw breath, or worse still he may be carried into some extraneous study by his personal aptitudes or tastes. the personality of the candidate has here an opening, a moment at which it has a possibility of asserting itself. that must be stopped at all costs. the authorities, therefore, have put in an intermediate examination between the _licence_ and the _agrégation_. the examination, it is true, is on a subject chosen by the candidate himself; so much it is only fair to admit. the subject chosen, however, must be submitted to the professors. their advice and indeed assistance must be invited. the result, if not the object, of this examination is to prevent the candidate, during this perilous year of liberty, from developing original ideas of his own and acting on them. _one examination every year for ten years_--that is the ideal of the modern professor for the future professors who are in course of being trained. between the second part of the bachelor's degree and the licentiate, as there is there an interval of two years, they will presently perceive that there ought to be an examination at the end of the first year, and we shall have certificates of study in intermediate, secondary, higher subjects. between the _agrégation_ and the _doctorat_, there are four years, and naturally we shall want three examinations just to see how the future professor is getting on with his theses, to encumber him with assistance and to prevent him doing them alone; first examination called the _bibliography of the theses for the doctorat_, second examination called the _methodology of the doctorat_, third examination called the _preparation for the sustaining of the thesis_, and then the examination for the doctor's degree itself. in this way the desired object is attained. between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven or thirty the examinee will have had to undergo sixteen examinations. he will never have worked alone. he will always have worked, for periods of twelve months, on a syllabus, for an examination, with a view of pleasing such and such professors, modelling himself on their views, their conceptions, their general ideas, their eccentricities, aided by them, influenced by them, never knowing, and feeling he ought not to know, not wishing to know, and running a great risk if he did know, and forming habits for his whole life so that he may never know what he thinks himself, what he imagines himself, what he seeks and would like to seek of his own motion, or what he ought himself to try to be. he will take up all this after he is thirty. not a vestige of personality or original thought till the moment when it is too late for it to appear, that is the maxim! whence comes this frenzy, this _examino mania_? when one comes to think of it, it seems to be a simple case of _dandino-mania_. dandin says with great determination "i mean to go and judge." the professor of a certain age means to go and examine. he no longer loves to profess, he loves to be always examining. this is very natural. professing, he is judged; examining, he judges. the one is always much pleasanter than the other. for a professor, to sweat in harness, to feel oneself being examined, that is, criticised, discussed, held up to judgment, and chaffed by an audience of students and amateurs, ceases at a certain age to be altogether pleasant; on the other hand to examine, to sit on the throne with all the majesty of a judge, to have only to criticise and not to produce, to intervene only when the victim stumbles, and to let him know that he has made a slip, to hold the student for the whole year under the salutary terror of an approaching examination, to remind him that he may need help and must by no means displease his professor--all this is very agreeable and makes up for many of the worries of the teaching profession. the examination mania proceeds partly from the terror of being oneself examined, and partly from the pleasure of examining others. all this is true, but there is more than this. the precocious development of early talent and originality is the thing which strangely terrifies these examination-maniacs. they have a horror of the man who teaches himself. they have a horror of any one who ventures to think for himself and to enquire for himself at twenty-five years of age. they want, like an old hen, to mother the young mind as long as possible. they will not let it find its own feet, till very late, and till, as the scoffer might well say, its limbs are absolutely atrophied. i do not say that they are wrong. the man who has taught himself is apt to be a vain, conceited fellow who takes pleasure in thinking for himself, and has an absolute delight in despising the thoughts of others. it is, however, no less the fact, that it is among these self-taught men that we find those vigorous spirits who venture boldly beyond the domain of human science and extend its frontier. the question then is which is best, to favour all these troublesome self-taught people in the hope of finding some good ones among them, or by crossing and worrying them to run the risk of destroying the good as well as the bad. i am myself strongly in favour of the first of these alternatives. it is better to let all go their own way, even though pretenders to originality come to grief, a thing that matters very little. minds that are truly original will develop themselves and find room for the expansion of all their powers. but here,--take note how the democratic spirit comes in everywhere--the question of numbers is raised. ten times more numerous, i am told, are the pretenders to originality whom we save from themselves by discipline than the true geniuses whose wings we clip. i reply that, in matters intellectual, questions of figures do not count. an original spirit strangled is a loss which is not compensated by the rescue of ten fools from worse excesses of folly. an original spirit left free to be himself is worth more than ten fools whose folly is partially restrained. nietzsche has well said: "modern education consists in smothering the exceptional in favour of the normal. it consists in directing the mind away from the exceptional into the channel of the average." this ought not to be. i do not say that education should do the opposite of all this. oh no, far from that. it is not the business of education to look for exceptional genius, or to help in its creation. exceptional genius is born of itself and it has no need of such assistance. but even less is it the business of education to regard the exceptional with terror, and to take every means possible, even the most barbarous and most detailed, to prevent it as long as possible from coming to the light. education ought to draw all that it can out of mediocrity, and to respect originality as much as it can. it ought never to attempt to turn mediocrity into originality, nor to reduce originality to the level of mediocrity. and how can all this be done? by an intervention that is always discreet, and sometimes by non-intervention. at the present moment its policy is equally distant from non-intervention and from an intervention that is discreet. it is in this way that the very institution which we have invented to safeguard efficiency contributes not a little to the triumph of its opposite. these victims of examination are competent in respect of knowledge, instruction and technical proficiency. they are incompetent in respect of intellectual value, often, though perhaps not so often as formerly, in respect of moral value. as far as their intellectual value is concerned, they have very frequently no mental initiative. it has been cramped, hidden away, and trampled down. if it ever existed, it exists now no longer. they are all their days merely instruments. they have been taught many things, especially intellectual obedience. they continue to obey intellectually, their brain acts like well made and well lubricated machinery. "the difference between the novel and the play," said brunetière, "is that in the play the characters act, in the novel they are acted." i do not know if this be true, but of the functionary we might say as often as not, he does not think, he is thought. the official also is incompetent, though less and less often, in respect of moral worth. by the exercise of intellectual obedience, he has been trained to moral obedience also and he is little disposed to assert his independence. observe how everything tends to this end. this method of co-opting officials by means of elimination, as i have said, operates only, as i have also shown, at the outset of the official's career. from this moment onwards the functionary must depend on the government only, his whole preparation during ten years of education has been calculated to ensure his absolute dependence on his official directors. so far good, perhaps a little too good. it would have been well if the education of the functionary had left him, together with a little originality of mind, a little originality of character as well. * * * * * we have sought, very conscientiously also, and, i may even say, with an admirable enthusiasm, yet another remedy for the faults of democracy, another remedy for its incompetence. it is said: "the crowd is incompetent, so be it, it is necessary to enlighten it. primary education, spread broadcast, is the solution of every difficulty, and provides an answer to every question." from this argument aristocrats have derived some little amusement. "how is this?" they exclaimed, "what is the meaning of this paradox? you are democrats and that means that you attribute political excellence, 'political virtue,' as we used to say, to the crowd, that is to ignorance. why then do you wish to enlighten the crowd, that is to destroy the very virtue which, on your own showing, is the cause of its superiority?" the democrats reply that the crowd, even as it is, is already very preferable to aristocracy, and that it will be still more so when it has received instruction. they resolve the apparent contradiction by the argument _a fortiori_. at all events, the democrats set to work most vigorously on the education of the people. the result is that the people is much better educated than formerly, and i am one of those who regard this result as excellent; but the further result is, that the people is saturated with false ideas, and this is less comforting. ancient republics had their demagogues, their orators, who inflamed the evil qualities of the people, by bestowing on them high-sounding names and by flattery. the great democracy of modern times has its demagogues. these are its elementary school teachers. they come of the people, are proud to belong to it, for which of course no one can blame them, they distrust everything that is not the people, they are all the more of the people because among the people they are intellectually in the first rank while elsewhere they are of secondary importance; and what men love is not the group of which they form a part, but the group of which they are the chief. they are, therefore, profoundly democratic. so far nothing could be better. but it is a narrow form of democratic sentiment which they hold, for they are only half-educated, or rather (for who is completely educated or even well educated?), because they have only received a rudimentary education. rudimentary education may perhaps make us capable of having one idea, it certainly renders us incapable of having two. the man of rudimentary education is always the man of one single idea and of one fixed idea. he has few doubts. now the wise man doubts often, the ignorant man seldom, the fool never. the man of one idea is more or less impermeable to any process of reasoning that is foreign to this idea. an indian author has said: "you can convince the wise; you can convince, with more difficulty, the ignorant; the half-educated, never." now no one ever convinces the elementary schoolmaster. he is confirmed in his convictions by defending, and still more by discussing them. he is the slave of his opinion. he does not possess it always quite clearly, but it possesses him. he loves it with all his soul, as a priest his religion, because it is the truth, because it is beautiful, because it has been persecuted, and because it means the salvation of the world. he would enjoy its triumph but he yearns still more to be a martyr in its cause. he is a convinced democrat and a sentimental democrat. his conviction forms a solid basis for his sentiment, and his sentiment kindles to a white heat his conviction. his conviction makes him turn a deaf ear to every objection, his sentiment inspires him with hatred for his adversary. for him the man who is not a democrat is wrong, and further, to him an object of hatred. in his eyes the distance between himself and the aristocrat is as the distance between truth and error, nay between good and evil, between honour and dishonour. the schoolmaster is the fanatic vassal of democracy. then, as he is a man of one idea, he is single-minded, narrowly logical, and logical to the utmost extreme. he goes straight forward where his argument leads. an idea which admits neither qualification nor question can go far in a very short space of time. and the schoolmaster drives all his democratic principles to their natural and logical conclusion. he develops these principles and all that they imply by the sheer force of what he calls his "reasoning reason," and it appears to him to be not only natural but salutary to seek their realisation. everything of which the principle is good is good itself, and no one but montesquieu could ever believe that an institution could be ruined by the excess of the principle in which its merit consists. the schoolmaster, therefore, deduces their logical consequences from the two great democratic principles, the sovereignty of the nation, and equality; he deduces them rigorously, and arrives at the following conclusions. the people alone is sovereign. therefore, though there can be individual liberty and liberty of association, there ought to be only such individual liberty and liberty of association as the people permits. liberty cannot be and ought not to be anything more than a thing tolerated by the sovereign people. the individual may think, speak, write, and act as he pleases, but only so far as the people will allow him; for if he can do these things with absolute freedom, or even with limitations which are not imposed by the people, he becomes the sovereign power, or the power which fixed the limits of his freedom becomes the sovereign, and the sovereignty of the people disappears. this brings us back to the simple definition that liberty is the right to do what we please within the limits of the law. and who makes the law? the people. liberty is then the right to do everything which the people permits us to do. nothing more; if we attempt to go beyond this, the sovereignty of the individual begins, and the sovereignty of the people disappears. --but to have liberty to do only what the people permits, this is to be free as we were under louis xiv.--and that is not to be free at all! so be it. there will indeed be no liberty unless the law permit it. surely you do not wish to be free in opposition to the law? --the law may be tyrannical. it is tyrannical if it is unjust.-- the law has the right to be unjust. otherwise the sovereignty of the people would be limited and this must not be. --fundamental and constitutional laws might be devised to limit this sovereignty of the people in order to guarantee such and such of the liberties for the individual.-- and the people would then be tied! the sovereignty of the people would be suppressed! no, the people cannot be tied. the sovereignty of the people is fundamental and must be left intact. --then there will be no individual liberty?-- only such a measure as the people will tolerate. --then there will be no liberty of association? still less; for an association is in itself a limitation of the sovereignty of the nation. it has its own laws, which from a democratic point of view is an absurd and monstrous incongruity. the right of association limits the national sovereignty, just as would a free town or sanctuary of refuge. it limits the nation, and pulls it up short in face of its closed doors. it is a state within a state; where there is association, there arises at once a source of organisation other than the great organism of the popular will. it is like an animal which lives some sort of independent life within another animal larger than itself and which, living on that other animal, is still independent of it. in fact there can be only one association, the association of the nation, otherwise the sovereignty of the nation is limited, that is, destroyed. no liberty of association can then exist. associations of course will exist which the people will tolerate, but their right of existence is always revocable and they are always liable to be dissolved and destroyed. otherwise the national sovereignty would be held to abdicate and it can never abdicate. --ah! but there is one association, at least, which to some extent is sacred, and which the sovereignty of the people is bound to respect. i mean the family. the father is the head of the family, he educates his children and brings them up as he thinks best, till they come to man's estate.-- nay, that will not pass! for here again we have a limitation of the sovereignty of the nation. the child does not belong to his father. if this were so, at the threshold of each home the sovereignty of the people would be arrested, which means that it would cease to exist anywhere. the child, like the man, belongs to the people. he belongs to it, in the sense that he must not be a member of an association which might dare to think differently from the people, or perhaps even harbour ideas in contradiction to the thought of the people. it would indeed be dangerous to leave our future citizens for twenty years outside the national thought, which is the same thing as being outside the community. imagine five or six bees brought up apart, outside the laws, regulations, and constitution of the hive; imagine further that of these groups of bees there were several hundreds in the hive. the result would be the destruction of the hive. it is _above all things_ in the family that the sovereignty of the people ought to prevail. it ought above all things to refuse to recognise the association of the family, and to wage war against it wherever it finds it. it should leave to parents the right of embracing their children, but nothing more. the right to educate them in ideas perhaps contrary to those of their parents belongs to the people, which, here as well as elsewhere, perhaps even more than elsewhere for the interests at stake are more important, must be absolutely sovereign. this, then, is what the schoolmaster, with a relentless logic which appears to me to be irresistible, deduces from the principle of the national sovereignty. from the principle of equality he deduces another point. "all men are equal by nature and before the law." that is to say, if there were justice, all men ought to have been equal by nature, and further, if there is to be justice, all men ought to be equal before the law. very obviously, however, all men are not equal before the law, and they are not equal by nature. very well then, we must make them so. they are not equal before the law. they appear to be so, but they are not. the rich man, even supposing that the magistrates are perfectly and strictly honest, by reason of the fact that he can remunerate the best solicitors, advocates, and witnesses, by reason further of the fact that he intimidates by his influence all those who could appear against him, is not in every respect the equal of the poor man before the law. even less does this equality exist in the presence of that union of constituted social forces which we call society. in this respect the rich man will be the "influential man"; the "man well connected," the man on whom no one depends, but whom no one likes to cross or to contradict. there is, between the rich and the poor man, however equal we may pretend them to be before the law, the difference between the man who gives orders and the man who is obliged to obey. _real_ equality, in society, in presence of society and even in presence of the law, only exists where there is neither rich nor poor. but there will always be rich and poor, as long as the institution of inheritance remains. abolish inheritance therefore! but, even with inheritance abolished, there will still be rich and poor. the man who can make his fortune rapidly will be a strong man relatively to the man who can not make a fortune, and, i would have you note it, even when we have abolished inheritance, the son of the strong man, during the life of his father, will be strong himself, so that even if we abolish inheritance, a privilege, namely, the privilege of birth will still exist and equality will not exist. there is only one state of affairs under which equality is possible, that is when no one possesses and no one can acquire anything. the only social policy so devised that no one can possess and no one can acquire anything is the policy of a community of goods, that is communism or collectivism. collectivism is nothing very wonderful. collectivism is equality; and equality is collectivism, otherwise our equality will be nothing but a phantom and an hypocrisy. every one who is a convinced and sincere _egalitarian_, and who takes the trouble to think, is forced to be a collectivist. bonald asked very wittily: "do you know what is a deist? it is a man who has not lived long enough to be an atheist." we in our turn ask: "do you know what is an anti-collectivist democrat? it is a man who has not lived long enough to be a collectivist, or who, having lived long enough, has never taken the trouble to think, and to perceive what are the necessary consequences of his own principles." but surely collectivism is a chimæra, an utopia, a thing impossible. certainly it is impossible in the sense that in the country which adopts it the source of all initiative will be destroyed. no man will make an effort to improve his position, since it must never be improved. the whole country will become one of those stagnant pools to which one of our ministers lately referred. everyone having become an official, everyone will realise the ideal of the official which the goncourts have very neatly described. "the good official," they say, "is the man who combines laziness with extreme accuracy." it is a definitive definition. the country that reformed itself in this way would be conquered at the end of ten years by some neighbouring people more or less ambitious. that admits of no question; but what does it prove? that collectivism is only impossible because it is only possible if established in every country at once. very well, and in order to establish it in every country at once, only one thing is needful, namely, that there shall no longer be distinct and separate countries and no longer any nationalities. it surely will not answer to establish collectivism before the abolition of nationalities, since, once established, it will serve no purpose except to bring into prominent relief the vast superiority of countries which have not adopted collectivism. we must, therefore, take our problems in order and abolish nationalities before we can establish collectivism. now if nations organise themselves against nature (the nature that, the schoolmaster assumes, makes all men equal), if instinctively they organise themselves in a hierarchy which is aristocratic, if they have their leaders and their subordinates, their stronger and their weaker members, it is because this arrangement is necessary in a camp, and each nation feels that it is a camp. if each feels that it is a camp, it is simply because there are other nations round it, because it feels and knows that there are others round it. when there are no longer other nations, each nation will organise itself no longer against nature, but naturally, that is to say on _egalitarian_ principles. nature perhaps strictly speaking is not _egalitarian_, but it tends towards equality in the sense that it produces many more, indeed infinitely more, mediocrities than superior intelligences. thus equality demands the abolition of inheritance, and the equality of possessions. equality of possessions necessitates collectivism, and collectivism requires the abolition of nationalities. we are _egalitarians_, then collectivists, and by logical consequence anti-patriots. so argue the great majority of school teachers, with an absolute logic, in my opinion, irrefutable, with the logic which takes no account of facts, and which only takes account of its own principle and of itself. so they will all argue to-morrow, if they continue, as it is probable they will continue, to be very excellent dialecticians. will they go back to the premises and say, that if the sovereignty of the people and equality lead logically and imperatively to these conclusions, it is perhaps because the sovereignty of the people and equality are false ideas, and because these conclusions prove them to be false? this is a course not likely to be taken, for the sovereignty of the people and the principle of equality are something more than general ideas, they are sentiments. they are sentiments which have become ideas, as is the case doubtless with all general ideas, and they are sentiments of great strength. the sovereignty of the people is the truth for him who believes in it, because it ought to be true, because it is a thing as full of majesty for him as was cæsar in all his pomp for the ancient roman, or louis xiv. in all his glory for the man of the seventeenth century. equality is truth for him who believes, because it ought to be true, because it is justice, and because it would be infamous if justice and truth were not one. for the democrat, the world has ever been rising gradually, since its creation, towards the sovereignty of the people and the doctrine of equality; the latter contains the former, the former is destined to found the latter and has this mission for its purpose in life; together they constitute civilisation, and if they are not attained, there is a relapse into barbarism. they are dogmas of faith. a dogma is an overmastering sentiment which has found expression in a formula. from these two dogmas everything that can be deduced without breach of logic is truth which it is our right and duty to proclaim. we must add that the schoolmaster is urged in this same direction by sentiments of a less general character, which nevertheless have an influence of their own. he is placed in his commune in direct opposition to the priest, the only person very often who is, like himself, in that place a man of some little education. hence rivalry and a struggle for influence. now the priest, by a series of historical incidents, is a more or less warm partisan sometimes of monarchy but almost always of aristocracy. he is a member of a body that once was an estate of the realm, and he is persuaded that his corporation is still an estate of the realm, notwithstanding all that has happened. if the existing order is regulated by the _concordat_, the existing order recognises his corporation as a body legitimatised by the state, since it treats it on the same terms as the magistracy and the army. if the existing order is one based on the separation of state and church, his corporation appears to him still more to be an estate of the realm, because being forced into an attitude of solid organisation, and recognising no limitations of frontier, it becomes a collective personage which, not without peril, but also not without a certain measure of success, has often ventured to cross swords with the state itself. as the priest then belongs to an order endowed with an historic authority which is nevertheless distinct from, and in no wise a delegation from, the authority of the people, the priest cannot fail more or less definitely and consciously to adopt an attitude of mind favourable to aristocracy. the school teacher, his rival, is thrown then all the more inevitably towards the adoption of democratic principles, and he embraces them with a fervour into which enters jealousy quite as much as conviction. they mean more to him than even to an eighteenth century philosopher, because he has a much greater personal interest in believing them, the interest of personal dislike and animosity; for it is his belief that everything taught by the priest is the pure invention of ingenious oppressors who wish to enslave the people in order to consolidate their own tyranny; and that is his reason for professing philosophical ideas resuscitated from the teaching of diderot, and holbach. for the school teacher it is almost inconceivable that the priest should be anything but a rascal. "atheism is aristocratic," said robespierre, thinking of rousseau. atheism is democratic, say our present-day school teachers. whence comes this difference of opinion? first because it was fashionable among the great lords of the eighteenth century to be libertines and free-thinkers, but among the people the belief in god was unanimous. secondly, because the priests of our day, for the reasons which i have given and from remembrance of the persecutions suffered by their church at the date of the first triumphs of democracy, have remained aristocrats or have become so even more firmly than they ever were before. atheism then has become democratic as a weapon against the deists who are generally aristocrats. besides, atheism fits in very well, whatever robespierre may have thought, with the general sentiments of the baser demagogy. to be restrained by nothing, to be limited by nothing, that is the dominant idea of the people, or rather it is the dominant idea of the democrat for the people, that it should be restrained by nothing and limited by nothing in its sovereign power. now god is a limit, god is a restraint. and just as the democrat will not admit of a secular constitution which the people could not destroy and which would prevent him from making bad laws; just as the democrat will not submit--if we may adopt the terminology of aristotle--to being governed by _laws_, to be governed that is by an ancient body of law which would check the people and obstruct it in its daily fabrication of _decrees_; so just in the same spirit the democrat does not admit of a god who has issued his commandments, who has issued his body of laws, anterior and superior to all the laws and all the decrees of men, and who sets his limit on the legislative eccentricities of the people, on its capricious omnipotence, in a word, on the sovereignty of the people. after sedan, bismarck was asked: "now that napoleon has fallen, on whom do you make war?" he replied: "on louis xiv." so the democrat questioned on his atheism could reply: "i am warring against moses." this is the origin of the atheism of democrats and schoolmasters. this is the origin of the formula: "neither god nor master," which for the anarchist requires no correction nor supplement, which for the democrat has only to be modified: "neither god nor master, save the people." at the end of one of his great political speeches in or , victor hugo said: "in the future there will only be two powers; the people and god." the modern democrat has persuaded himself that if there be a god, the sovereignty of the people is infringed, if he believe in him. lastly, the school teacher is confirmed in his democratic sentiments, in all his democratic sentiments, by the political position which has been made for him in france. it is a strange thing, a disconcerting anomaly, that the governments of the nineteenth century (especially, we must do it this justice, the present government), have very handsomely respected the liberty of professors of higher education, and of secondary education, and have not in the very slightest degree respected the liberty of the teachers of elementary education. the professor of higher education, especially since , can teach exactly what he pleases, except immorality and contempt of our country and its laws. he can even discuss our laws, provided always that he maintains the principle that, such as they are, they ought to be obeyed till they are repealed. his liberty as to his opinions political, social and religious is complete. it is only occasionally constrained by the disorderly demonstrations of his students. the professor of secondary education enjoys a liberty almost equally wide. he is subject, but only in an extremely liberal fashion, to a programme or syllabus of studies. as to the spirit in which he conducts his work he is practically never molested. he is given a free hand. nor has it ever occurred to any government to ask a professor of higher and secondary education how he votes at political elections, still less to require him to canvass in favour of the candidates agreeable to the government. when, however, we pass to elementary education we see everything is changed. the elementary teacher is not appointed by his natural chief, the _recteur_ or minister of public education, he is appointed by the _préfet_, that is by the minister of the interior, the political head of the government. in other words, this is the same process as the appointment of officials by the people, described a few pages back, but with one intermediary the less. it is pre-eminently the minister of the interior who represents the political will of the nation at any given date. and it is the minister of the interior who through his _préfets_ appoints the elementary school teacher. it is then the political will of the nation which chooses the school teachers. it would be impossible to convey to them more clearly (which is only fair, for people should be made to understand their duties) that they are chosen for considerations of politics and that they ought to consider themselves as political agents. and indeed they are nothing else, or perhaps we should say they are something else but above all they are politicians. the schoolteachers depend on the _préfets_ and the _préfets_ depend much on the deputies, yet it is not the deputies who appoint them, but it is they who can remove them, who can get them promoted or disgraced, who by constant removals can reduce them to destitution. surely, every candid person will exclaim, given the difficult and scandalous situation in which they are put by the hand which appoints them, they ought at least to have the guarantee and assurance, very relative and ineffectual though it be, of irremovability. but they have not got it. the professors of higher education who do not require it have got it, the professors of secondary education have it to all intents and purposes. the elementary school teacher has it not. he is, therefore, delivered over to the politicians who make of him an electioneering agent, who reckon him as such, and who would never pardon him if he failed them. the result is that the majority of school teachers are demagogues because they like it, and with magnificent enthusiasm and passion. the minority who have no turn for demagogy are demagogues though they do not like it, and because they are forced by necessity. even those who have no disposition that way become demagogues in the end, for that is the way of the world. "in the heat of the _mêlée_," said augier, "there are no mercenaries." our school teachers, thrown, sometimes against their will, into the battle, forced at least to appear to be fighting, receive knocks and when they have received them, they become attached to the cause on whose behalf they have suffered. we always end by having the opinions which are attributed to us, and being taken for a demagogue the moment he arrives at his village, the young school teacher, not daring to say anything to the contrary, and being very ill received by all other parties, naturally becomes a demagogue with some show of conviction the very next year. * * * * * so the democracy receives no instruction that does not confirm and strengthen it in its errors. for its good some one ought to teach it not to believe itself omnipotent, to have scruples as to its omnipotence, and to believe that this omnipotence should have defined limits; it is taught without reserve the dogma of the unlimited sovereignty of the people. for its good it should believe that equality is so contrary to nature that we have no right to torture nature in order to establish real equality among men, and that the people which has established such a state of things, which is quite possible, must succumb to the fate of those who try to live exactly in opposition to the laws of nature. instead, it is taught, and it is true enough, that equality is not possible, if it is not complete, if it is not thorough, that it ought to be applied to differences of fortune, social position, intelligence, perhaps even to our stature and personal appearance, and that no effort should be spared to bring all things to one absolute level. for its good, since it is natural enough that it should dislike heavy taxation, sentiments of patriotism should be reinforced; it is taught on the contrary that military service is a painful legacy left by a hateful and barbarous past, and that it ought to disappear very soon before the warming rays of a peaceful civilisation. in a word, to use again the language of aristotle, the pure wine of democracy is poured out to the people as it was by the demagogues to the athenians; and from the quarter whence a remedy might have been expected there come only incitements to deeper intoxication. aristotle has made yet another wise and profound observation on the question of equality: "_we must establish equality_," he said, "_in the passions rather than in the fortunes of men._" and he adds: "and this equality can only be the fruit of education derived from the influence of good laws." that is indeed the point. education should have but one object; to reduce the passions to equality, or rather to _equanimity_, and to a certain equilibrium of mind. the education given to modern democracy does not lead to this, but leads in the opposite direction. chapter xii. the dream. what remedies can we apply to this modern disease, the worship of intellectual and moral incompetence? what is, as m. fouillée puts it, the best way of avoiding the hidden rocks which threaten democracies? it is hard to say, for we have to do with an evil which can only be cured by itself, with an evil which is more than content with itself. m. fouillée (in the _revue des deux mondes_ of november, ) proposes an aristocratic upper chamber, that is to say, one that would represent all the competence of the country, inasmuch as it would be appointed by everything which is based on some particular form of excellence, the magistracy, the army, the university, the chambers of commerce, and so on. nothing could be better; but the consent of the democracy would be necessary, and it is precisely these incorporations of efficiency that the democracy cannot abide, looking on them, not without reason, as being in a sense aristocracies. he proposes also an energetic intervention on the part of the state to restore public morality, action for the suppression of alcoholism, gambling and pornography. beyond the fact that his argument savours of reaction, for it recalls to us the programme of "moral order" of , we must remark, as indeed m. fouillée himself acknowledges, that the democratic state can hardly afford to kill the thing which enables it to live, to destroy its principal source of revenue. democracy, as its most authoritative representatives have admitted, is not a cheap form of government. it has always been instituted with the hope, and partly with the expressed design, of being an economical government, and it has always been ruinous, because it requires a much larger number of partisans than other forms of government, and a smaller number of malcontents than other forms of government, and these partisans have to be remunerated in one fashion or another and the malcontents have to be silenced and bought in one way or another. democracy, whether ancient or modern, lives always in terror of tyrants who are always imminent or thought by it to be imminent. against this possible tyrant who would govern with an energetic minority, the democracy requires an immense majority which it has to bind to it by the grant of many favours; it has also to detach from this tyrant the malcontents who would be his supporters if it did not disarm them by a still more lavish distribution of favours. democracy requires therefore plenty of money. it will find this by despoiling the wealthy as much as possible; but this is a very limited source of revenue, for the wealthy are not a numerous class. it will find it more easily, more abundantly also, by exploiting the vices of all, for all is a very numerous group. hence the complaisance shown to drinking shops, which, as m. fouillée remarks, it would be more dangerous for the government to close than to close the churches. as the needs of the government increase, as m. fouillée predicts, without much doubt it will claim a monopoly in houses of ill-fame and in the publication of indecent literature; enterprises in which there would be money. and after all, tolerating such things for the profit of certain traders and annexing them to be worked for the profit of the state, is surely much the same thing from a moral point of view. and the financial operation would be much more beneficent in the second case than in the first. m. fouillée also argues that reform must come "from above and not from below," and that "the movement for regeneration can come from above and not from below." i ask nothing better, but i ask also how is it going to be done? inasmuch as everything depends upon the people, who, what, can influence the people except the people itself? everything depends on the people, by what then can it be moved except by a force that is innate. we are here confronted--we are talking to a philosopher and can make use of scientific terms--with a {kinêtês akinêtos} with a motive force which causes but does not receive motives. a principle has disappeared, a prejudice if you like to call it so, the prejudice in favour of competence. we no longer think that the man who understands how to do a thing ought to be doing that thing, or ought to be chosen to do it. hence, not only is everything mismanaged, but it seems impossible by any device to handle the matter effectually. we see no solution. nietzsche really has a horror of democracy; only like all energetic pessimists, who are not mere triflers, he used to say from time to time: "there are pessimists who are resigned and cowardly. we do not wish to be like them." when he would not take this view he persuaded himself to look at democracy through rose-coloured spectacles. at times, looking at the matter from an æsthetic point of view, he used to say: "intercourse with the people is as indispensable and refreshing as the contemplation of vigorous and healthy vegetation," and although this is in flagrant contradiction to all he has elsewhere said of the "bestial flock" and the "inhabitants of the swamp," the thought has a certain amount of sense in it. it signifies that instinct is a force, and that every force must be interesting to study; and further that, as such, it contains an active virtue, a principle of life, a nucleus of growth. this, though vaguely expressed, is very possible. after all the crowd is only powerful by reason of numbers, and because it has been decided that numbers shall decide. it is an expedient; but an expedient cannot impart force to a thing that had it not before. motive power, initiative, belongs to the man who has a plan, who makes his combination to achieve it, who perseveres and is patient and does not relinquish pursuit. if he is eliminated and reduced to impotence or to a minimum of usefulness, one does not see how the crowd, without him, can obtain its power of initiation. further explanation is needed. at another time, nietzsche asks whether we ought not to respect the right, which after all belongs to the multitude, to direct itself according to an ideal--there are of course many ideals--and according to the ideal which is its own. ought we to refuse to the masses the right to search out truth for themselves, the right to believe that they have found it when they come upon a faith that seems to them vital, a faith that is to them as their very life? the masses are the foundation on which all humanity rests, the basis of all culture. deprived of them, what would become of the masters? it is to their interest that the masses should be happy. let us be patient; let us grant to our insurgent slaves, our masters for the moment, the enjoyment of illusions which seem favourable to them. so nietzsche argues, but more often, for he returns on various occasions to this idea, led thereto by his customary aristocratic leanings, he speaks of democracy as of a form of decadence, as a necessary prelude to an aristocracy of the future. "a high civilisation can only be built upon a wide expanse of territory, upon a healthy and firmly consolidated mediocrity." [so he wrote in . ten years earlier he held that slavery had been the necessary condition of the high civilisation of greece and rome.] the only end, therefore, which at present, provisionally of course but still for a long time to come, we have to expect, must be the decadence of mankind--general decadence to a level mediocrity, for it is necessary to have a wide foundation on which a race of strong men can be reared. "the decadence of the european is the great process which we cannot hinder, which we ought rather to accelerate. it is the active cause at work which gives us hope of seeing the rise of a stronger race, a race which will possess in abundance those same qualities which are lacking to the degenerate vanishing species, strength of will, responsibility, self-reliance, the power of concentration...." but how, out of this mediocrity of the crowd, a mediocrity which, as nietzsche says, is always increasing, by what process natural or artificial can a new and superior race be created? nietzsche seems to be recalling the theory, very disrespectful and very devoid of filial piety, by which renan sought to explain his own genius. "a long line of obscure ancestors," he says, "has economised for me a store of intellectual energy," and he jots down in his note book certain suggestions, a little immature but still emitting a ray of light. "it is absurd," he says, "to imagine that this victory or survival of values (that is low values, values, that is, that seem to be mediocrity) can be antibiological: we must look for an explanation in the fact that they are probably of some vital importance to the maintenance of the type 'man' in the event of its being threatened by a preponderance of the feeble-minded and degenerate. perhaps if things went otherwise, man would now be an extinct animal. the elevation of type is dangerous for the preservation of the species. why? _strong races are wasteful, we find ourselves here confronted with a problem of economy._" we perceive, in this train of reasoning, some inkling of what nietzsche is trying to formulate as his solution of the difficulty. what is needed must be a natural process, a _vis medicatrix naturæ_. in the process of declining and falling, races practise a sort of thrift; they save and they economise. then, if we may suppose that the quantity of energy of intellectual and moral power, _i.e._, of "human values" at the disposal of the race is constant, the races that so act are creating in themselves a reserve which one day will irresistibly take shape in a chosen class. they are creating in their own bosom an _élite_ which will one day emerge, they have conceived all unconsciously an aristocracy which will one day be born to be their ruler. we always find in nietzsche the theory of schopenhauer, the theory of the great deceiver who leads the human race by the nose and who makes it do and, as if it liked it, that which it would never do if it knew where it was being led. it is very possible; still it remains that economy carried to an extreme, though it can lead to a reserve of force, may also lead, and perhaps much more surely, to a condition of anæmia; the annihilation of one set of competent people in order to prepare the way for races of competent people in the future, i do not know if this is a game inspired by the great deceiver, but it is a game which to me appears dangerous. we ought to be sure (and who is sure?) that the great deceiver does not abandon those who abandon themselves. i have often said, without thinking of any metaphysical mythology, thinking indeed of the ambitious people whom we meet everywhere, and thinking only of giving them some good advice: "the best way to get there is to come down." nothing could be more philosophical, nietzsche would reply; it is even more true of peoples than of individuals: the best way for peoples to become one day great is to begin by growing smaller. i rather doubt it. there is no really solid reason to support the theory that feebleness cultivated with perseverance results in strength. neither greece nor rome supply examples, nor did the democratic republic of athens nor the democratic cæsarism of rome ever succeed in giving birth to an aristocracy of competence by a prolonged economy of values. --they did not have the time.-- ah yes, there is always that to be said. it would perhaps be better to try to put the brake on democracy than to encourage this process of degeneration on the chance of a favourable resurrection. at least this is the course which presents itself most naturally to our mind, and which seems most consonant with duty. when i say put the brake on democracy, it must be understood that i mean that it should put the brake on itself, for nothing else can stop it, when once it has made up its mind. it must be persuaded or left alone, and even persuasion is a rash experiment, for it dislikes being persuaded of anything but of its own omnipotence. it must be persuaded or left alone, for every other method would be still more useless. it must be reminded that forms of government perish from the abandonment and also from the exaggeration of the principle from which their merit is derived, though this is a very superannuated maxim; that they perish by an abandonment of their principle because that principle is the historical reason of their coming into existence, and they perish by carrying their principle to excess, because there is no such thing as a principle that is absolutely good and sufficient in itself for regulating the complexity of the social machine. what do we understand by the principle of a government? it is not that which makes it be such and such a thing, but that "which makes it act" in a particular way, as montesquieu has remarked; that is, "the human passions which supply the motive forces of life." it is clear then that the passion for sovereignty, for equality, for incompetence, is not sufficient to give to a government a life which is at once complete and strong. it is necessary to give to competence its part, or rather it is necessary to give competence one part, for i do not wish to argue that there is any question of right involved, i only affirm that it is a social necessity. it is necessary that competence, technical, intellectual, moral competence should be assigned its part to play, even though the sovereignty of the people should be limited and the principle of equality be somewhat abridged thereby. a democratic element is essentially necessary to a people, an aristocratic element also is essentially necessary to a people. a democratic element is essentially necessary to a people in order that the people should not feel itself to be a mere onlooker, but should realise that it is a part and an important part of the body social, and that the words "you are the nation, defend it," have a meaning. otherwise the argument of the anti-patriot demagogues would be just. "what is the good of fighting for one set of masters against another set, since it will make no difference, only a change of masters?" a democratic element is required in the government of a people, because it is very dangerous that the people should be an enigma. it is necessary to know what it thinks, what it feels, what it suffers, what it desires, what it fears, and what it hopes, and as this can only be learnt from the people itself, it is necessary that it should have a voice which can make itself heard. this should be done in one way or another, either by a chamber of its own which should be endowed with great authority, or by the presence in a single chamber of a considerable number of representatives of the people, or by plebiscites constitutionally instituted as necessary for the revision of the constitution and for laws of universal interest, or by the liberty of the press and the liberty of association and public meeting. this would not perhaps be enough, but it would be almost enough. it is necessary that the people should be able to make known its wants, and to influence the decisions of the government, in a word its voice should be heard and considered. an aristocratic element is also necessary in a nation and in the government of a nation so that all that admits of precision shall not be smothered by that which is confused; so that what is exact shall not be obscured by what is vague, and so that its firm resolves shall not be shaken by vacillating and incoherent caprice. sometimes history itself makes an aristocracy--a fortunate circumstance for a nation! this forms a caste more or less exclusive, it has traditions, traditions more conservative of the laws than the laws themselves, and it embodies in itself all that there is of life, and energy and growth in the soul of a people. sometimes history has failed to give us an aristocracy or that which history has made has disappeared. it is then that the people ought to draw one out of itself, it is then its duty to appropriate and preserve the high qualities to be found in men who have rendered service to the state or whose ancestors have rendered service to the state, who have special qualifications for each particular office and a moral efficiency for every form of public service. these qualities constitute the acquired aptitude of an aristocracy for taking a part in the government; these qualities constitute its adaptation to its social environment, and to its special function in our social machinery and organisation. one might say that it is by these qualities that _it enters into and becomes part of the organism of which it is the material_. as john stuart mill has justly remarked, there cannot be an expert, well-managed democracy if democracy will not allow the expert to do the work which he alone can do. what is wanted then and will always be wanted, even under socialism where, as i pointed out, there will still be an aristocracy though a more numerous one, is a blending of democracy and aristocracy; and here, though he wrote a long time ago, we shall find aristotle is always right for he studied in a scientific spirit some hundred and fifty different constitutions. he is an aristocrat, without concealment, as we have seen, but his final conclusions, whether he is speaking of lacedæmon, which he did not like, or of carthage, or in general terms, have always been in favour of mixed constitutions as ever the best. "there is," he says, "a manner of combining democracy and aristocracy--which consists in so arranging matters that both the distinguished citizens and the masses have what they want. the right of every man to aspire to magisterial appointments is a democratic principle, but the admission of distinguished citizens only is an aristocratic principle." this blending of democracy and aristocracy makes a good constitution, but the union must not be one of mere juxtaposition which would serve only to put hostile elements within striking distance. i said a "blending" but the blending must be a real fusion. our need is that in the management of public business aristocracy and democracy should be combined. how? well for many years i have been saying it and i hope i may live for many years longer to say it again. a healthy nation is one in which the aristocracy is "_demophil_," that is a lover of the people, and where the people is aristocratic in its leanings. every people where the aristocracy is aristocratic and where the democracy is democratic is a people destined to perish promptly, because it does not understand what a people is, it has not got beyond the stage of knowing what is a class and perhaps not even as far as that. montesquieu praises highly the athenians and the romans for the following reason. "at rome, although the people had the right of elevating plebeians to office, it could never bring itself to elect them; and although at athens, it could by the law of aristides, choose magistrates from all classes, it never happened according to xenophon, that the lower people demanded the election of rulers who could injure its safety and its glory. the two instances are identical; only, as far as athens is concerned, it signifies nothing, for at athens everything was decided by plebiscite and in consequence the real rulers of athens were the orators, in whom the people trusted, who enforced their decisions and really governed the city. at rome the fact is of great importance for it was the elected magistrates who governed." republican rome was indeed a country aristocratically governed which had, however, a democratic element in its constitution, and this democratic element, up to the time of the civil wars, was itself profoundly aristocratic, just as the aristocracy which was always open to an accession of members from the plebs was profoundly "demophil." the institution of patron and client, even in the state of degeneracy which overtook it, is a phenomenon which i believe is well-nigh unique. it shows to what extent two classes felt the social necessity, the patriotic necessity of mutual support and of a recognition of an identity of interest. a nation whose people is aristocratic and whose aristocracy is "demophil" is a healthy nation. rome succeeded in the world because for five hundred years she enjoyed this social health. an aristocratic people and a people-loving aristocracy. i had long believed the formula was of my own invention. i have just discovered, and i am in no way surprised, that aristotle was before me. he quotes the oath which oligarchs take in certain cities. "i swear to be always the enemy of the people and never to counsel any thing that i do not know to be injurious to them." "this," he continues, "is the very opposite of what they ought to do or to pretend to do ... it is a political fault which is often committed in oligarchies as well as in democracies, and where the multitude has control of the laws, the demagogues make this mistake. in their combat against the rich, they always divide the state into two opposing parties. _in a democracy, on the contrary, the government should profess to speak for the rich, and in oligarchies it should profess to speak in favour of the people._" it is a machiavelian counsel. aristotle seems convinced that democrats can only _profess_ to speak for the rich and that all we can expect from oligarchs is an appearance of speaking in favour of the people. nevertheless he recognises clearly that for the peace and well-being of the commonwealth such should be their attitude. there is something more profound than this. aristocrats ought not only to appear but to be verily favourable to the demos, if they understand the interests of aristocracy itself, for aristocracy requires a base. democrats also ought not only to appear but to be aristocratic if they understand the interests of democracy which requires a guide. this reciprocity of good offices, this reciprocity of devotion, and this combination of effort are as necessary in modern as they were in ancient republics. it is, and we must coin a word to express it, a social "synergy" that is wanted. a union of all the vitalizing elements is as necessary in society as in the family. every family that is divided must perish, every kingdom that is divided must perish. i have said little of royalty which only indirectly concerns my subject. if we have seen instances of the institution of royalty firmly established, it is where the sentiment of royalty, appealing at once both to the aristocracy and to the people, has realised that "synergy" of the whole community of which we speak; it is where both, being united in devotion to one object, are led to be devoted to each other by reason of this convergence of their wills. _eadem velle, eadem nolle amicitia est._ there is no need of royalty for this. royalty is our country itself personified in one man. in the identification of country and kingdom, we can and must arrive at this same union of the separate vitalities of the nation, at this same community and convergence of will. the humble must love their country in loving the great and the great must love their country in loving the humble; and so all classes must be at one in their hopes and in their fears. _amicitia sit!_ index. abbeville, abolition of inheritance, , academies, america, amoeba, _et seq._ antisthenes, aristides, law of, aristocracy, , , , ---- aptitude for government, ---- constitution which obeys laws, ---- demophil, , , ---- education under, ---- and examination system, ---- fusion with democracy, - ---- impossible without merit, ---- old men under, ---- of parliament, ---- permanent senators form, ---- and religion, , ---- result of indirect election, ----- and special jurisdictions, aristophanes, , aristotle, , , , , , , , , , - , , , , , , _arrondissement_, ---- _scrutin d'_, atheism, , athens, , , , , , , , , augier, austria, barthélemy, abbé, barthou, m., , belgium, bismarck, bonald, brunetière, busiris, calas, carnot, carthage, , caucus, chamber of deputies, , , - charlemagne, charondas, church, the, , cicero, ---- _de senectute_, civility, _et seq._ civil service, the, appointments to, - ---- examinations for, _et seq._ clergy, the, code, the, , , colbert, collectivism, - communism, _compétence par collation_, , competitive examination, _et seq._ conciliation boards, _concordat_, constitution of , ---- mixed, co-optation, _cour de cassation_, , , , court of appeal, , courts, ecclesiastical, ---- martial, criminal procedure, ---- jurisdiction, dandin, _dandino-mania_, decadence, , decrees, , , , demagogues, , , democracy, aristotle on, - ---- athenian, ---- children under, - ---- and direct government, _et seq._ democracy, encouragement of incompetence under, , , ---- english, ---- evolution of a modern, _et seq._ ---- fusion with aristocracy, - ---- governed by decrees, , ---- and imperative mandate, ---- lack of respect under, - ---- legislation under, , - ---- magistrature, - ---- montesquieu on, - ---- morality under, ---- nietzsche on, - ---- old men under, - ---- plato on, - ---- and politicians, , ---- position of women under, - ---- principle of, , ---- and private enterprise, - ---- and reform, - ---- rousseau on, , ---- and schoolmasters, - ---- and socialism, - ---- and special jurisdictions, , demos, , demosthenes, deputy, , ---- mayors, despotism, principle of, ---- tendency of democracy towards, , , d'etalonde, diderot, division of labour, ---- ---- in domestic life, divorce, germans, gerontocracy, , gladstone, mr., , goncourt, greece, , greeks, , , greek philosophers, holbach, homer, horace, hugo, victor, ideal legislator, the, imperative mandate, , indirect election, inequalities, artificial and natural, interpellation, italy, japy, mme., jesuits in paraguay, joannès, baron, judges, appointment of, , - ---- interpretation of the law, _juge de paix_, , _et seq._ jurisdiction, criminal, ---- ecclesiastical, ---- military, ---- seignorial, jury, the - , , kant, la barre, lacedæmon, , law, abolishing primogeniture, ---- abuse of, ---- of competence, ---- and decrees, - ---- degree in, ---- doctors of, ---- ecclesiastical, ---- emergency, - ---- fundamental, ---- governs men, ---- of july th, , ---- made by the ideal legislator, - ---- made by the people, , , , , - , ---- must be ancient and unchanged, - ---- not the same for rich and poor, ---- permitting divorce, ---- of proportion, ---- questions of, , ---- of sunday observance, , ---- and tradition, legal profession, the, legislation, ancient, ---- english, , ---- party, - ---- philanthropic, ---- predatory, ---- requires special knowledge, , legislator, essential qualifications for, - ---- greek, lestranger, m. marcel, , liberty of association, , louis xiv, , , , , , ---- xv, ---- xvi, louvois, lycurgus, , , lynching, , machiavel, machiavelian counsel, magistracy, hereditary system advocated for, , , magistrates, election of, , - ---- incompetence of, - ---- subservience to government, mayors, medical examinations, ---- profession, mill, john stuart, minister of agriculture, ---- of commerce, ---- of education, , minister of interior, ---- of justice, , - ---- of navy, ---- of war, , miscarriage of justice, monarchy, old men under, ---- principle of, , , montesquieu, , , , , , - , - , - , - , , , , - , , , moral effect of law, ---- order, morals, high standard of, ---- laxity of, ---- private, , ---- public, , , more, thomas, moses, , napoleon, , , nationalisation, nietzsche, , , - oligarchy, , , olympiad, ostracism, paraguay, parental authority, parliament, party system under socialism, pascal, , patriotism, , peel, sir r., periander, peter the great, phædo, personification of laws in, plato, , , - , , , plautus, plebiscite, , _pli professionnel, le_, pnyx, the, politeness, _et seq._ politician, definition of, ---- democracy's need of, , ---- as schoolmaster, _préfet_, - , , president of the chamber, ---- of the council, ---- of the republic, , primogeniture, _procureur-général_, , , - proudhon, public officials, appointment of, - ---- under socialism, purchase system, the, quinet, edgar, rabelais, republic, , , renaissance, renan, renouvier, revocation of the edict of nantes, rhédi, robespierre, , roman republic, , , , romans, the, , , rome, , , , , - rousseau, , , - , , , , royalty, , ---- democratic, st. cyr, st. louis, schopenhauer, _scrutin de liste_, , , and note ---- _d'arrondissement_, senate, , , , , - senators, , - ---- irremovable, seneca, socialism, - , socrates, , ---- on democracy, solon, , sovereignty of the people, , , , , - , - , specialisation of functions, - , special jurisdictions, , state control of children, ---- ---- of magistrates, , ---- ---- of private enterprise, - ---- danger of eminent man to, - ---- intervention to restore public morality, - state policy, ---- services rendered to, ---- within a state, steinheil case, suidas, , sunday observance, sylla, synergy, , terence, thrasybulus, toulouse, tyranny, universal suffrage, , - university degrees, , - upper chamber, suggestions for strong, usbek, virtue, civic, , , ---- the principle of a republic, , voltaire, - , women, their position in a democracy, - xenophon, , young man, horace's description of, _printed by sherratt & hughes, london and manchester._ the ghost in the white house some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president--how they can back him up--express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want by gerald stanley lee author of "crowds" and "inspired millionaires" "_the white house is haunted by a vague helpless abstraction,--by a kind of ghost of the nation, called the people_" new york e. p. dutton & co. fifth avenue copyright, by e. p. dutton & company _all rights reserved_ first printing may, printed in the united states of america to jennette lee transcriber's note: chapter xxii in book ii was printed without a title. contents book i what the people expect of the people i gist ii the lonesomest job on earth iii the president and the ghost iv real folks and the ghost v the ghost receives an invitation vi what a body for the ghost would be like vii the ghost gets down to business viii three rights of man in a democracy--the right to think ix the right to be waited on x the right to whisper xi the right to whisper together xii the right to trust somebody xiii the right to vote all day xiv the skilled consumer xv sample democracies xvi the town pendulum xvii the national listening machine xviii how the national listening machine will work xix making a right start xx up to the people xxi the way for a nation to speak up book ii what each man expects of himself i g. s. l. to himself ii if i were a nation iii what the mahogany desk is going to do iv rules for being lied to v getting one man right vi getting fifty men right vii engineers in folks viii the great new profession ix getting people to notice facts x the fool killers xi the whisperers xii mr. dooley, judge gary and mr. gompers xiii fooling onseself in politics xiv swearing off from oneself in time xv technique for not being fooled by oneself xvi the autobiography of a letter xvii the man fifty three thousand post offices failed on xviii causes of being fooled about oneself xix loco-mindedness xx flat-thinking. thinking in me flat xxi lost-mindedness xxii xxiii self-discipline by proxy xxiv machine mindedness xxv new brain tracks in business book iii technique for a nation's getting its way i big in little ii conscious control of brain tracks iii what is called thinking iv living down cellar in one's own mind v being helped up the cellar stairs vi reflections on the stairs vii helping other people up the cellar stairs viii helping a nation up the cellar stairs ix technique for labor in getting its way x technique for capital in getting its way xi philandering and alexandering xii the factory that lay awake all night xiii listening to jim xiv the new company xv the fifty-cent dollar xvi the business man, the professional man and the artist xvii the news-man xviii w. j. xix the look-up club looks up xx propagandy people xxi the skilled consumers of publicity book iv the technique of a nation's getting its way i fourth of july all the year round ii the vision and the body iii the call of a hundred million people iv the call of a world v missouri vi a victory loan advertisement book v the technique of a nation's being born again i reconstruction ii national biology iii the air line league iv the look-up club looks up ( ) for instance ( ) why the look-up club looks up v the try-out club tries out ( ) i + you = we ( ) the engineer at work ( ) the engineer and the game ( ) the american business sport vi the put-through clan puts through ( ) what ( ) how ( ) psycho-analysis ( ) psycho-analysis for a town ( ) to-morrow ( ) who ( ) the town fireplace ( ) the sign on the world book vi what the people expect of the president i the big brother of the people ii the man who carries the bunch of keys for the nation iii the president's temperament iv the president's religion v the red flag and the white house introduction the motion before the house this is a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. i am nominating in this book--in the presence of the people, the next president of the united states. the name is left blank. i am nominating a man not a name. i am presenting a program and a sketch of what the next president will be like, of what he will be like as a fellow human being, and i leave the details--his name, the color of his eyes and the party he belongs to, to be filled in by people later. here is his program, his faith in the people, his vision for the people and his vision for himself. * * * * * no one has ever nominated a president in a book before. i do it because a book can be more quiet, more sensible and thoughtful, more direct and human, and closer to the hearts of the people, than a convention can. a book can be more public too--can be attended by more people than a convention. only a few thousand people can get into a convention. a hundred million can get into a book. all in the same two hours, by twenty million lamps thousands of miles apart, the people can crowd into a book. so in this book, as i have said, i am merely acting as the secretary or employee of the hundred million people. i am writing a book a hundred million people would write if they could, expressing for them the kind of president for the next four years of our nation--the most colossal four years of the world, the people have ordered in their hearts. we are weary of politicians' politicians. we want ours. politicians may not be so bad but during the war they do not seem to us to have done as well as most people. in the dead-earnest of the war, with our liberty loan and red cross and council of defense, and our dollar a year men we have half taken over the government ourselves and we feel no longer awed by the regular political practitioners or government tinkerers. they are not all alike, of course, but we have turned our national glass on them and have come to see through them--at least the worst ones and many thousands of them--all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves. unless the more common run of our typical politicians see through themselves before the conventions come, and see that the people see through them, and see it quick, their days are numbered. instead of patronizing us and whispering to one another behind their hands about us, their time has come now--in picking out the next president to begin gazing up to the countenance of the people, to begin listening to the people's prayer to god. the people are a new people since the war. out of the crash of empires, out of threats in every man's door-yard the people are praying to god. and they are voting to god, too. the sooner the two great political parties reckon with this, the sooner they push around behind themselves out of sight all the funny little would-be presidents, and all the little shan't-be politicians running around like ants under the high heaven of the faith of a great people picking up tidbits they dare to believe--and put forward instead a live believing hot and cold human being, a man who will give up being president for what he believes, the sooner they will find themselves with a president on their hands that can be elected. whichever party it is that does this, and does it first and does it best, will be the one that will be underwritten by the people. the people of this country are to-day in a religious mood toward the great coming political conventions and the questions and the men that will come up in them. we are on the whole, in spite of the low estimate the majority of politicians have of us, straight-minded and free-hearted people, shrewd, masterful and devout, praying with one hand and keeping from being fooled with the other and we want our public men to have courage and vision for themselves and for us. we give notice that thousands of our most complacently puttering, most quibbly and fuddly politicians are going to be taken out by the people, lifted up by the people, and dropped kindly but firmly over the edge of the world. this nation is facing the most colossal, most serious and godlike moment any nation has ever faced, and it does not propose in the presence of forty nations, in the presence of its own conscience, its own grim appalling hope, to be trifled with. so far as any one can see with the naked eye the quickest and surest way to get past the politicians, to remind the politicians of the real spirit of the people, to loom up the face of the people before their eyes and make them suddenly take the people more seriously than they take themselves, is with a book. in a book a president can be nominated by acclamation--by a kind of silent acclamation. in a book, without giving any name or pointing anybody out at least the soul of a president can be ordered by a people. we will publish upon the housetops the hopes and the prayers and the wills of the people. then let the conventions feel the housetops looking down on them when they meet. in a book published in a hundred newspapers one week, wedged into covers across a nation another, the people with one single national stroke can put what they want before the country--a hundred million people in a book can rise to make a motion. we will not wait to be cornered by our politicians into a convention to which we cannot go. we will not wait to be told three months too late, to pick out--out of two men we did not want, the man we will have to take. the short-cut way for us as the people of this country to take the initiative with our politicians and to make the politicians toe our line, instead of toeing theirs, is for the people to blurt out the truth, write a book, get in early beforehand their quiet word with both great parties and tell them whatever his name is, whatever his party is, the kind of president they want. so here it is, such as it is, the book, a little politically innocent-looking thing perhaps, just engaged in being like folks instead of like politicians, just engaged in being human--in letting a nation speak and act as a human being speaks and acts, in a great simple sublime human crisis in which with forty nations looking on, we are making democracy work--making a loophole for the fate of the world. * * * * * i am trying to answer three questions. what shall the new president believe about the people and expect of the people? what shall the new people--people made new by this war, expect of themselves and expect of their new president? what kind of a president, with what kind of a personality or temperament do the people feel would be the best kind of a president to pull them together, to help the people do what the people have to do? i have wanted to bring forward a way in which the things the new president will expect the people to do, can be done by the people. what the people want done, especially with regard to the red flag, predatory capital, predatory labor, and the fifty-cent dollar cannot be done by the president for them, and they are not going to do it themselves lonesomely and individually by yearning, or by standing around three thousand miles apart or in any other way than by voluntarily agreeing to get together and do it together. book i what the people expect of the people i gist the crowd is my hero. the hero of this book is a hundred million people. i have come to have the feeling--especially in regard to political conventions, that it might not be amiss to put forward some suggestions just now as to how a hundred million people can strike--make themselves more substantial, more important in this country, so that we shall really have in this country in time a hundred million people who, taken as a whole, feel important in it--like a senator for instance--like senator lodge, like sugar even, or like meat or like oil, like trusts that won't trust, and congressmen that won't play and workmen that won't work--i am thinking out ways in this book in which the hundred million people can come to feel as if it made a very substantial difference to somebody what they wanted and what they thought--ways in which the hundred million people shall be taken seriously in their own country, and like a profiteer, or like a noble agitator, or like a free beautiful labor union,--get what they want. ii the lonesomest job on earth what is going to happen to the next president the day after he is inaugurated, a few minutes after it, when he goes to the place assigned to him, or at least that night? the ghost in the white house. the white house is haunted by a vague, helpless abstraction, a kind of ghost of a nation, called the people. the only way the nation, in the white house, gets in, is as a spirit. the man who lives there, if he wants to be chummy (as any man we want there would), has to commune with a generalization. what we really do with a president is to pick him deliberately up out of his warm human living with the rest of us, with people who, whatever else is the matter with them, are at least somebody in particular, lift him over in the white house, shut him up there for four years to live in wedlock with an average, to be the consort day and night of her who never was, and who never is--a kind of vague, cold, intellectual, unsubstantial, lonely, terrible angel called the people. just a kind of light in her eyes at times. that is all there is to her. it is a good deal like reducing or trying to reduce the aurora borealis to and = , to go into the white house for four years, warm up to this cold, passionately talked about, passionately believed in lady. it does not give any real satisfaction to anybody--either to the hundred million people or to the president. it certainly is not a pleasant or thoughtful thing for a hundred million people to do to a president--to be a ghost. it is not efficient. naturally--much of the time anyway, all the ghost of a people can get or hope to get (however hard he tries) is the ghost of a president. iii the president and the ghost there are a number of things about going into the white house the next four years and being the head employee of a hundred million people, that are going to make it, unless people do something about it, the lonesomest job on earth. the new president on entering the mansion and taking up his position as the head employee of the hundred million people is going to find he is expected to put up, and put up every day, with marked and embarrassing idiosyncrasies or personal traits in his employer, that no man would ever put up with, from any other employer in the world. absent-mindedness. non-committalness. halfness, or double personality. bodilessness. big, impressive-looking fool moments. cumulus clouds of slow sure conceit with sudden flops of humility. general irresponsibleness. and perhaps most trying of all in being the employee of a hundred million people, is the almost daily sense that the employee has that the employer--like some strange, kindly, big innocent, is going to be made a fool of before one's eyes and do things and be made to do things by unworthy and designing persons for which he is going to be sorry. the man who is conscientious in the white house has an employer whose immediate and temporary orders he must disobey to his face, sometimes in the hope that he will be thanked afterwards. once in a great while the man who has been put on the job as the expert, as the captain of the ship, has to tell the owner of the line, when the storm is highest, that he must not butt in. the restful and homelike feeling one has with the average employer that one is just being an employee and that one's employer is being responsible, is lacking in the white house, where one is practically expected to undertake at the same time being both one's own employee and one's own employer. but while this little trait of general irresponsibleness in the president's employer may be the hardest to bear, there are more dangerous ones for the country. i am dwelling on them long enough to consider what can be done about them. i have believed they are going to be removed or mitigated the moment the employer can be got to see how hard some of the traits are making it for the president to do anything for him. bodilessness is the worst. the man to whom the hundred million people are giving for the next four years the job of being their head employee, is not only never going to see his employer, but he has an employer so large, so various, so amorphous, so mixed together and so scattered apart he could never hope in a thousand years to get in touch with it. serving it is necessarily one long monstrous strain of guesswork, a trying daily, nightly, for four years to get into grip with a mist, with a fog of human nature, an abstraction, a ghost of a nation called the people. it is this bodilessness in the employer--this very simple rudimentary whiffling communion the employer has with his usually distinguished and accomplished head employee, which the head employee finds it hardest to bear. the only thing his employer ever says to him directly is (once in four years) that he wants him or that he does not want him and even then he confides to him that he only half wants him. he says deliberately and out loud before everybody, so that everybody knows and the people of other nations, "here is the man i would a little rather have than not." that is all. then he coops him up in the white house, drops away absently, softly into ten thousand cities, forgets him, and sets him to work. any man can see for himself, that having a crowd for an employer like this, a crowd of a hundred million people you cannot go to and that cannot come to you, puts one in a very vague, lonesome position, and when one thinks that on top of all this about forty or fifty millions of the people one is being the head employee of (in the other party) expect one to feel and really want one to feel lonesome with them, and that at the utmost all one can do, or ever hope to do is to about half-suit one's employer--keep up a fair working balance with him in one's favor, it will be small wonder if the man in the white house feels he has--especially these next most trying four years, the lonesomest job on earth. the prime minister of england has a lonesome job of course, but he is the head of his own party, has and knows he has all the while his own special crowd, he is allowed and expected, as a matter of course, to snuggle up to. this special and understood chumminess is not allowed to our president. he has to drub along all day, day in and day out, sternly, and be president of all of us. it may be true that it has not always looked like the lonesomest job on earth and, of course, when theodore roosevelt had it, the job of being president considerably chirked up, but in the new never-can-tell world america is trying to be a great nation in now, the next four years of our next president, between not making mistakes with a hundred unhappy, senile, tubercular railroads and two hundred thousand sick and unhappy factories at home, and not making mistakes with forty desperate nations abroad, the man we put in the white house next is going to have what will be the lonesomest job this old earth has had on it, for four thousand years--except the one that began in nazareth--the one the new president is going to have a chance to help and to move along in a way which little, old, queer, bent, eager st. paul with his prayers in rome and his sermons in athens, never dreamed of. it does seem, somehow, with this next particular thing our new president and a hundred million people and forty nations are all together going to try to do, as if it were rather unpractical and inefficient at just this time for our president to have a ghost for an employer. all any man has to do to see how inefficient this tends to make a president, is to stop and think. if you have an employer who cannot collect himself and you cannot collect him, if all day, every day, all you do before you do anything for him is to guess on him and make him up--what is there--what deep, searching and conclusive and permanent action is there, after all, the man in the white house can take in his employer's behalf when his employer has no physical means of telling him what he wants and what he is willing to do with what he gets? what can the man in the white house hope to accomplish for a people with whom it is the constitutional and regular thing to be as lonely as this? i have wanted to consider what can be done, and done now not to have a lonely president the next four years. the first thing to do is to pick out in the next conventions and the next election a man for the white house a great-hearted direct and free people will not feel lonely with, and then set to work hard doing things that will back him up, that will make him daily feel where we stand, and not let him feel lonely with us. the feeling of helplessness, of bodilessness--the feeling the public has every day in the white house and in the senate, of being treated, and treated to its own face as if it was not there, is a feeling that works as badly one way as it does the other. the president does not want a ghost. the people do not want to be treated as a ghost. the object of this book is to resent--to expose to everybody as unfair and untrue and destroy forever the title i have written across the front of it, "the ghost in the white house." the object of this book is to take its own title back, to put itself out of date, to make people in a generation wonder what it means to save, to try to save a great people in the greatest, most desperate moment of all time, with forty nations thundering on our door before the whole world, from being an inarticulate, shimmering, wavering, gibbering ghost in its own house. there must be things--broad simple things about capital and labor people can do and do every day in this country, that will make a president timidly stop guessing what they want. it ought not to take as it does now, a genius for a president or a seer for a president to know what the people want. a man of genius--a seer, a man who can read the heart of a nation--especially in politics, comes not only not once in four years, but four hundred years and it is highly unlikely when he does that the republican party, or the democratic party in america will know him offhand and give people a chance to have him in the white house. the best the people can hope for in america now is to have a body--to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word--express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our president, our politicians--even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the senate--the kind of men who can feel happy and in their element in a place like congress will see what the people--the real people in this country are like. i am trying to put forward ways of forming body-tissues for a people so that we the people in america, at last, in the days that lie ahead, instead of being a ghost in our own house, shall have things that we can do, material, business things that we can do, so that we shall be able to prove to a president what we are like and what we want--so that each man of us shall feel he has something tangible he can make an impression on a president with--something more than a vague, faint, little ballot to hurl (like an autumn leaf) at him, once in four years. iv real folks and the ghost when a man speaks of the city national bank he speaks of it as if he meant something and knew what he meant. when the same man in the same breath speaks of the people, watch him bewhiffle it. when a good hearty sensible fellow human being we all know speaks of business he speaks of it in a substantial tone, with some burr in it, and when in the same half minute he speaks of the country, he drops in some mysterious way into a holy tone of unrealness, into a kind of whine of the invisible. business talks bass. patriotism is an Ã�olian harp. during the war this was changed. we found ourselves every day treating america, treating the country, treating the people as a bodily fact. i would like to see what can be done now in the next president's next four years, to give america this magnificent sense of a body in peace. why is it that we have in america a body for germans, and then wilt down in a minute after château-thierry into bodilessness for ourselves, into treating and expecting everybody else to treat the people, the will, the vision, the glory, the destiny of the people as a ghost--unholy, cowardly, voiceless, helpless--just a light in its eyes--just a vast national shimmer at a world, without hands and without feet. millions of people every day in this country are very particular to salute the flag, sing the "star-spangled banner" and ship bolshevists, but let them speak to you in conversation, of an industrial body like the steel trust or the pennsylvania railroad and they act as if something were there. bring up the body-politic and it's a whiff. it ought to be considered treason to think or to speak of the country in this vague, breathy way. the next immediate, imperative need of america is to see what can be done and done in the next president's next four years to make the body-politic people take the body-politic and what happens to the body-politic as if it were as substantial as a coal strike--as what happened at ypres, cambrai and château-thierry. otherwise we are a nation of whiners and yearners and are not what we pretend to be at all, and the only logical thing the germans and the rest of the world can do, is to protect themselves from democracy. i believe that the best things the old world has said about us and hoped for us, to the effect that we are a disinterested nation and a nation of idealists, are true to the american character and real. but they are not actual. we are the world's colossal tragic adolescent. forty nations are depending on us--are waiting for us--in the world's long desperate minutes--waiting for america to grow up. this nation has just as much spirituality, just as much patriotism and religion as it expresses bodily in its business in the conduct of its daily producing, buying and selling, and no more. any big beautiful evaporated body-politic we have or try to think we can have aside from this body--this actual working through of our patriotism, our democracy and our patriotism into our business, is weak, unholy, unclean and threatens in its one desperate and critical moment the fate of a world. all really religious men and all real patriots know this. in a democracy like ours a religion which is not occupied all day every day in this year of our lord in making democracy work, a religion that loafs off into a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, a religion that cannot be used to run steel mills so that men won't go to hell in them and to run coal mines so that men won't be in hell already, is not a religion at all. and a nation that sheds tears over three hundred thousand disabled and crippled soldiers, who gave up their jobs and sailed six thousand miles to die for them, and that has finally managed to get new jobs for just two hundred and seventeen of the three hundred thousand and taken nineteen months to do it, illustrates what it means--in just one simple item--for a hundred million people, to try to be good without a body. but it is not only in behalf of its helplessness with the president i am groping in these pages for a body for the public. the reason that the public in dealing in its daily business with powerful persons of any kind--whether good or bad, whether a president or anybody, is taken advantage of and does not get what it wants, is that the public is a ghost. theoretically all powerful persons, predatory trusts, profiteering labor unions and the wrong kind of politicians always speak respectfully to the public, but when they want something that belongs to the public they find the public is an abstraction and help themselves. they act when with the public, as if the public was not there. the only way this is ever going to be stopped is for us to make a spontaneous voluntary popular start in this country toward having a body for people in general, towards giving a hundred million people in dealing with their politicians, their trusts and labor unions, less bodilessness. we propose to give a hundred million people a face, a voice, a presence, a backbone, a grip. then all the people we ask things of who think we can be whoofed away, will pay attention to us. v the ghost receives an invitation being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now. we are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the world. international war ending to-night. to-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousand nations--between classes--unless we all do our seeing and do our living swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day. when one-tenth of the people of america tell the president of the united states and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic america is than germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. the idea of getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody. the really great immediate universal emergency to-day in america is the holdup. we get rid of one kaiser other people have three thousand miles away, to get instead five thousand kaisers we have to live with next door here at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please" to every time we cook, every time we eat, every time we buy something to wear. the emergency is not only immediate but it is universal, all the people are concerned in meeting it all the time. we have said to one another and to everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing for and dying for these four years is to make the world safe for democracy. this was our emergency. we were right. the emergency we are meeting now is to make democracy safe for the world. if the kaiser wanted to dream his wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic hate he would have dreamed us; he would have dreamed what we will be unless the men and women of america--especially the men and women of america formerly active in the red cross, shall meet the emergency and undertake in behalf of the people to prove to the people how (if anybody will go about and look it up) industrial democracy in america in distinction from industrial autocracy, really works. if it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million people--red cross people get up and say across this land in every village, town and city, it shall work now in all places for all of us. and then take steps--all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting together as they did in the red cross, to see to it that the whole town and everybody in it does something about it. when the soldiers of the american army we were all helping in the red cross stop fighting the germans, come home, divide off into classes and begin fighting one another, why--because now the soldiers we have been helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us more than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fighting germans--why should we stop helping them? on the day after the armistice--the very day when our war with just germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperate war germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for the men of this nation, in the red cross, talk about reducing to a peace basis? the people in the red cross have been having in the last three years the vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now--before the same people--that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is the vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and children fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for the liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and to wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the germans is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy in the world. i will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made the red cross what it was, who have made the red cross the trusted representative of american democracy in all nations, who now find themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a world, i will not believe that these men and women are going to lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have helped before. the logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the red cross to do--the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep on following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving on with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to be bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another. vi what a body for the ghost would be like i have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman could read looking over each other's shoulders. i would have two chapters on every subject. in one chapter i would tell the employer things his workman wants him to know, and in the next chapter i would tell the workman things that for years the employer has been trying to get him to notice. i would begin each chapter in such a way that no employer or workman would ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he had got in quite a little way; and i would do my best to have everybody read each other's chapters all through the book. an employer would be reading along in his chapter as innocent as you please, and slap his leg and say, "that's it! that's it! it does me good to think my workmen are reading this!" and then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full head on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the public feels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what god is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book are going to help god to do to him, that will make him think. the first thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. then before he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen to read softly poking itself out of the page at him. then he will slap his leg and think how i am making his workmen think. so he will go through the book slapping his leg and shouting "amen" in one chapter, and sitting still and thinking in the next. this is the gist of what i propose a new organization shall do on a national scale. it may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what i propose a great aggregation of american men and women on the scale of the red cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the technique of what i have in mind--in miniature, is in it. it is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author to prove to employers and employees that they could get on better together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it is true that a book in which i could make an employer and an employee work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would count some. i would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink. but people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink. the thing for an author or a man who has ideas to do if he must use words, is to use words to make his ideas happen. then let him use words about them and write books about them to advertise that they have happened. people are more impressed with things that have happened than they are with things that are perhaps going to. instead of having employers and employees go over the same ideas together in a book, i propose that twenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go over the same ideas together in the shop. are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves, have died to prove that the holdup, or german way of getting things, does not work? what the new league will be for will be to put before the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each other instead of blowing out each other's brains. the way to keep in place our bolshevists of america is to show them that we the combined people of america, combined and acting together as one in the organization i am sketching in this book, know what they want, and that we can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they can get it. the three great groups in american life--the employing class, the laboring class, and the consumer--have all belonged to the red cross together, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, and sacrificed their class, to work for the red cross. what the new league will stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that they have already demonstrated in the red cross that they can do. three classes can get a thing for one class better than one class can get it. this is the content of the league's vision of action. the method of it will be advertising with enormous campaigns never dreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. then we will have factories dramatize it. then we will advertise the factories. then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we will advertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies, abroad. people who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can be trusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even in their politics. * * * * * the idea i have in mind is already foreshadowed in the city of cleveland. the spirit of the people of cleveland has already rebelled against being treated as a ghost--against being whoofed at by labor unions and trusts. always before this, when incompetent manufacturers and incompetent labor unions, for the mere reason that they had not the patience to try very hard and were incompetent to understand one another and do their job, held up the whole city--five hundred thousand people--and calmly made them pay for it, the city of cleveland like any other city would venture to step in sweetly and kindly, look spiritual and intangible a minute, suggest wistfully that they did feel capital and labor were not being quite fair to cleveland and would they not please stop interrupting cleveland several million dollars a day. all that ever would come of it would be the yowls of labor at the ghost of cleveland, the noble whines of manufacturers at the ghost of cleveland. cleveland was treated as if it was not there. cleveland now swears off from being a ghost and proposes to deal bodily and in behalf of all, with its own lockouts and its own strikes in much the same way i am hoping the nation will, according to the news in my paper this morning. with mr. paul pfeiss, an eminently competent manufacturer, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as partly responsible for the holdups practiced on the city and with mr. warren s. stone, an eminently competent labor union leader, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as being also partly responsible--with these two men, one the official representative of the capital group, and the other the official representative of the labor group, both championing the public group and standing out for cleveland against themselves, taking the initiative and acting respectively as president and secretary of the public group, the ghost of the city of cleveland publicly swears off from being a ghost and begins precipitating a body for itself. i do not wish to hamper my own statement of my idea of a body for the people of the united states by linking it up with a definite undertaking in cleveland which may or may not prove to be as good an illustration of it as i hope, but the spirit and the understanding of what has got to happen, seems to be in cleveland--and i stop in the middle of my chapter with greetings to paul pfeiss and to warren stone. in my book the ghost of the people of cleveland salutes the ghost of the people of the united states! vii the ghost gets down to business a body usually begins with an embryo, and the tissue and skeleton come afterwards. a book does, too. i prefer not exposing a skeleton much, myself, and am inclined to feel that the ground plan of a book like the ground plan of a man, should be illustrated and used, should be presented to people with the flesh on, that a skeleton should be treated politely as an inference. but i am dealing with the body of democracy. and people are nervous about democracy just now, so much boneless democracy is being offered to them. so i begin with the principles--the skeleton of the body of democracy for which this book stands. the outstanding features of the body of democracy are the brain, the heart and the hand. with the brain of democracy goes the right to think. with the heart goes the right to live. with the hand goes the right to be waited on. with these three rights go three greater rights, or three duties, some people call them. with the right to think goes the right to let others think. with the right to live goes the right to let others live. with the right to be waited on, goes the right to serve. to call the right to serve a duty is an understatement. i doubt if the people who have succeeded best and who have really attained the largest amount of their three greater rights, have thought of them very often as duties. i end this chapter with the three questions america is in the world to-day to ask, to find out her own personal three answers to in the sight of the nations. i am putting with the three questions the three answers i am hoping to hear my country give, before i die. what determines what proportion of his right to think, each man shall have? his power to get attention and let others think. what determines what proportion of his right to live, each man shall have? his power to let others live. what determines what proportion of his right to be waited on, each man shall have? his power to serve. these are the principles of the new league--the voluntary, spontaneous organization of the men and women of america to meet the emergency in america of our war with ourselves, on the same scale and in the same spirit as the red cross met the emergency of our war with other nations, an organization which i hope to show ought to be formed, and which i am rising to make the motion to form, in this book. i put these principles forward as the by-laws of america's faith in itself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and the hand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that should govern all other men toward him--the skeleton of the body of the people. viii three rights of man in a democracy i--the right to think i am entitled to one one-hundred millionth of president wilson's time in a year. / , , th. if i want / , , ths of president wilson's time in a year i must show him why. i must also show the other , , people who think i deserve no more than my regular / , , th why i should have two. not allowing for the president's sleeping nights, my precise share of his time would be one-third of a second once a year. why should i have two-thirds of a second? i have to show. the success of democracy as a working institution turns on salesmanship--upon every man's selling himself--his right to the attention of the government. a democracy which considers itself a queue of a hundred million people standing before the window of the president's attention to be waited upon by the president in the order in which they are born or in which they come up, would be a helpless institution. the success of democracy--that is, the success of a government in serving the will of the hundred million people in the queue, turns on sorting people in the queue out, turns on giving attention to what some people in the queue want before others. the man who gets out of line and walks up ahead of people who have been standing in line longer than he has, must get the permission of the queue. he must make the people in the queue feel he represents them with the president if he steps up ahead. then they let him have their turn. they are glad to let him have hours with the president if they feel he is giving hours' worth of representation to their minutes. all each man wants to feel is that in letting gompers, for instance, or schwab, go up ahead, he is getting with the president a minute an hour long. miles of people in rows say to a man like this, who can give them and their interests with the president a minute an hour long, "you first, please." political democracy, if it works, turns on getting the attention of the queue and then going with it to the window. political democracy, in other words, turns on advertising. so does industrial democracy. industrial democracy in a factory of five thousand men consists in making arrangements for the five thousand men to appreciate each other, appreciate the firm, and to feel the firm appreciating them; arrangements for having the five thousand men get each other's attention in the right proportions at the right time so that they work as one. the next thing that is coming in industrial democracy is getting skilled capital and skilled labor to appreciate each other's skill. a skilled capitalist can not fairly be called a skilled capitalist or, now that this war is over, unless he knows how to keep his queue appreciating his skill, keep his five thousand men standing in line for his attention cheerfully. the difference between an industrial autocracy and an industrial democracy is that in an industrial autocracy you keep your queue in line with a club, or with threats of bread and butter, and in an industrial democracy you have your queue of five thousand men, each man in the row cheering you while he sees you giving one minute a week of your attention to him and one hour a day of your attention to others. still you find him cheering you. the skilled employer is the employer who so successfully advertises his skill to his employees and so successfully advertises their skill to themselves and to one another that they hand over to him in their common interest the right to sort them over. they hand over to him deliberately, in other words, in their own interests, the right not to treat them alike. democracy consists in keeping people in line without a club. democracy is a queueful of people cutting in ahead of one another fairly and in a way that the queue stands for. if a man standing in a queue before a ticket window wants to cut in ahead of five people, the way for him to do it is to show the five people something in his hand that makes them say, "you first, please." he must show why he should go first, and that he is doing it in their interest. the other day as i was standing in a long line of people before the ticket window in the northampton station, i noticed on a guess that half a dozen of the people were standing in line to buy a ticket to new york on the express due in half an hour, and a dozen and a half were standing in line to buy tickets to springfield on the local going in three minutes. i was number thirteen. i wanted to get a ticket for springfield. the thing for me to do, of course, to rise to the crisis and make democracy work, was to jump up on my suitcase and address the queue who were ahead of me: "ladies and gentlemen! eighteen or twenty of you in this line ahead of me want tickets to springfield on the train going in three minutes, and the rest of you want tickets on the train going in half an hour. if you people who are hoping you can get your tickets in time to go to springfield will let me cut in ahead of you out of my turn and get my ticket, i will buy tickets for all of you with this ten dollar bill in thirty seconds, and you can get your tickets of me on the train, and in this way we will all catch it." i did not do it, of course, but it would have been what i call democracy if i had. the whole problem of labor and capital, and of political and industrial freedom, from now on after this war would have been solved in miniature before that window--if i had. my invention for the future of the red cross is that it should do what i tried to do at that window, for the american people. * * * * * democracy is a form of government in which the people are essentially autocrats. the difference between an autocracy and a democracy is that the people select their autocrats. the more autocracy the more efficiency. a people can not have the autocracy they need to get what they want unless they are willing to give over to their representatives the necessary trust pro tem., the necessary ex officio right to be autocrats in their behalf. democracy is autocracy of the people, for the people, by the people--that is, by the people in spirit to their representatives who express their spirit. the representatives of the people can not keep the people's autocracy for them unless they keep in touch with the people--that is, unless they advertise to the people and the people feel that they can advertise to them. in an autocracy the autocracy of the ruler is based on forcing people's attention. in a democracy the autocracy is based on touching men's imaginations, on making people want to fall into line in the right order. if the kaiser had done this in germany, germany would have been the greatest democracy in the world and the greatest nation. if the kaiser had had the power and genius for advertising of the modern kind, if he had had the power of making people want things in distinction from making them meek and making them take them whether they wanted them or not, he would have invented and set up a working model for america. obviously, the more the people desire to form in line the better and more successful all the people in the line will be in getting what they want at the window. the more autocracy people know enough to give their representatives, the better democracy works. in the last analysis the fate of democracy in modern life turns on having autocrats on probation--autocrats selected for their positions by advertising, and kept in position as autocrats as long as they can advertise to the people and as long as the people feel that they can advertise to them. ix ii--the right to be waited on democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in the way kings are, and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves. * * * * * three rights to be waited on . skilled labor has the right to be waited on by skilled capital. skilled labor, being preoccupied as it naturally is by its highly specialized knowledge and skill, can not take the time off to do for itself what skilled capital could do in providing work, and providing markets for skilled labor. it cannot, on the other hand, take the time off to understand skilled capital and what it is doing in detail. even if it could take the time off, and if five thousand hands in a factory all devoted themselves all day to understanding the work the office is doing, the five thousand would make poor work of understanding. arrangements have got to be made in one way or another for skilled labor's trusting the office, for its feeling that the autocracy it intrusts to the office is being used fairly in its interest. the first and most important skill of skilled capital, of course, is its skill in doing for its employees and for its customers what it is supposed to do. but the second skill of capital must be skill in being believed in and finding means of being believed in by its employees. the more it is believed in, the more power to serve will be accorded to it. in other words, the second function of skilled capital is advertising to its skilled labor, and in making exchange arrangements with its skilled labor, for being advertised to. . skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled labor. the first skill of skilled labor must be with its machines and its tools, and in making its product, but the second skill must be its skill in being believed in. the skilled capital it is supposed to be waited on by is preoccupied with its skill, and unless labor makes special and very thorough provision to be understood and to keep understood by skilled capital, and by the public and the people who buy the goods, and unless skilled labor tries to keep in touch all around and do teamwork all around with all concerned so that it can do its work, it can not fairly be called skilled labor at all. skilled labor has to have skill in putting its skill with others to produce a result. in other words, the second skill of skilled labor is skill in making arrangements for being believed in and believing in others. its second skill is in advertising and in being advertised to. . the other group concerned in industry is one which i like to call the skilled consumers. the people have a right to have capital skilled in considering them, and labor skilled in considering them, at every point. the people are the employers of all employers and of all employees. the saying among business men and merchants in case of quarrel, "the customer is always right," has to be in the long run treated in a democracy as if it were approximately true. what the consumers have to do in a democracy, however, in a singular degree is to live up to it. the consumers must make, and i believe are going to make, elaborate arrangements for being skilled consumers. skilled capital has organized. skilled labor has organized. and now the consumers, or the people, if they are to be skilled, and if they are to get out of skilled capital and skilled labor what they want, will organize their skill to get it. they will organize to help the best skilled capital at the expense of the worst, to help the best skilled labor at the expense of the worst. in other words, the secret of industrial democracy and of making industrial democracy work, lies in making the people skilled in conveying their wishes to the skilled capital and skilled labor waiting on them. skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will support it when it is right and punish it when it is wrong, by the way they buy and sell. skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will defend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not. true and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled labor cannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedly skilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job and lazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as to reward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong to capital. in other words, the second function of the skilled consumers after telling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is to make arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capital and labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing how to help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as to help in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealing with themselves and one another and with the people. i have summed up the three rights to be waited on. all of these rights turn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, the science of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed by the people to make their democracy work. i would like to illustrate this in the next chapter. x iii--the right to whisper the employees in the stockyards in ---- have been trying to get the attention of mr. john doe, the young man who inherited the business, to the fact that the least a family can live on now is $ a year. mr. doe, who has never tried being bitterly poor and whose attention can not be got to what can be done in a year for a wife and five children with $ until he tries it, is rather discouraging to deal with. there is no known way of getting him to try it, and in the meantime he thinks he knows without trying, and he thinks his attention is got when it is not. he tells the workmen that two pairs of shoes ought to last a child a year--and goes home in his limousine. that is the end of it. it ought not to be the end of it. who can get mr. doe's attention? why is it that mr. doe's employees do not succeed in getting mr. doe's attention? why is it that mr. doe has so little difficulty in getting theirs? why is it that mr. doe's employees, when he speaks of the two pairs of shoes a year, hang on his words? because mr. john doe is their employer. who are the people whose words mr. doe would hang on and would be obliged to hang on? mr. doe's employers. who are mr. doe's employers? all the people in america who eat meat. of course if one had just come from mars yesterday and was looking about studying things, the first thing one would ask would be, why do not the people in america who eat meat, and who keep on mr. doe in his position, at once mention to him that they wish him to look into the matter of the two pairs of shoes a year? because the people who eat meat--mr. doe's employers--have no way of mentioning it to mr. doe. if the people who eat meat would but barely whisper to mr. doe it would get his attention as much as a whole year's shouting would from his workmen. but the people who eat meat in america have no whisper. in other words, it is because mr. doe's employers are absolutely dumb, and mr. doe is absolutely deaf to any one except his employers, that two pairs of shoes are not enough for the workmen's children. it is for the purpose of letting the people who eat meat in america--whisper and learn to whisper in this country that the new league organized to operate as a kind of people's advertising guild or consumers' advertising club, with its national office in new york and its local branches in ten thousand towns and cities, now offers its services to all people who eat meat in america. the employers of america have organized to do anything with their business, and anything with their workmen, and anything with the country that they like. the workmen of america have organized to do now, and are deliberately planning to do anything with their work, and anything with their employers, and anything with the country that they like. the new national league is now to be organized as the voice of the american people, as the whisper of the will of the consumer in every industry in america. the people to get the attention of employers are the employers of the employers. every civil war we are having in this country can be settled and the attention of the fighters on both sides can be got, and the country can work as one man in making democracy safe for the world, the moment the employers of the employers whisper. * * * * * the way i would like to end this chapter--with the blanks filled in, of course, would be this. anybody who wants to be a part of this whisper, who knows of any industry he would like to see a whisper from the people tried in, or who wishes as an associate member to join the air line league--a league for the direct action of the people in what concerns them all, is invited to send five dollars as membership fee and his name and address, to ----, treasurer national office of the air line league, number ---- street, new york. but the chapter cannot end in this way. this is merely the pattern of the way i would like to have it end later, and while i have put the name--the air line league--down and am going to use it for the convenience of this book, i only do so, leaving it open to the people who have the vision of the league and who put the vision into action, to change the name if they want to. xi the right to whisper together every man like all gaul is divided into three parts. he is an employee of somebody, an employer of somebody, and a consumer. the natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is making shoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that his employees ought to be paid less. as regards hats, and umbrellas, and overcoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial person towards employers and employees. he wants them to listen to each other and lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and by not fighting each other ten hours a day. in out of labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-minded person and the best-located person to control and determine how any particular business shall be run. the league proposed is planned to operate in its national and local functions as a national consumers' club, with working branches in every town which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day toward making the employers and employees in that town listen to each other in the interests of the consumer public. it is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it that people who have particular interests in a business should be compelled to listen to the others' interests. consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they do not run them for them, they are the natural people to make them do it. in the last resort the right to control is with the consumers. we are going to look to them very soon now as the natural central telephone exchange in business. it is the consumers who connect everybody up. they are the switchboard of the world. xii the right to trust somebody democracy--as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves. i try to go to the polls as i should. but i resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. i do not like to feel that i am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way i feel when i am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling i have--in those few brief miserable moments i spend with the yellow pencil--is the feeling that this country is being governed with. i met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country--he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other. as a democrat and as a believer in crowds i resent the idea that being stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names i cannot know anything about is democracy. it is tyranny. it is a demand that i do something no one has a right to make me do. i have other things every man knows i can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket--smiths and browns and smiths and smiths--it is a thing i want to have done for me, i want experts--engineers in human nature that i and my fellow citizens can hire to pick out my employees, _i.e._, the employees of the state that i want and that i have a right to and that i would have if i had time to stop work, study them and find them. very often the way we don't go to the polls in america is to our credit. it is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives toward so many people. we don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do, to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about, huge laundry-lists of people that god only knows or could know and that can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees who devote their time to it. if we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we put in office. it is not our business to, it seems to many of us. perhaps i should merely speak for myself. i can at least be permitted to say that it is not my business. if the state will give me ten men to watch, men in prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and easily, i will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. what i demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other sixty-five and let me attend to business. the other sixty-five have a right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect intelligently to do it for us--by men we have all looked through and through and trust. the last year or so i have been getting about three long communications a week from the ---- railway which has been trying to make me over into an expert on all the details of its relation to the government. i wish i had time to know all about it. some of us will have to. things are so arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads and the government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any government. but i resent having this crisis put up to me personally. i resent having a pile a foot high of things i have got to know before i can help the government to be fair to the railroads--or the railroads to be fair to the government. i am better anyway at writing books. i don't want to be jerked into a judge--or a corporation lawyer because i am a voter. railroads always bewilder me. even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand--time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking sunday trains on monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's job in this way, beat his congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads--with all the details about their poor insides--and with all their back bills and things? there must be other voters who feel about this as i do. is this democracy? this is what democracy is to me--democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders. the essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. a democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. they have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like--as if the main qualification of a candidate in america is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. i believe i am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously--as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. we are getting ready for great and true leaders in america. our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. even our banks are. our labor unions are. in our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. anybody can see it. there are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what america is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring america out. and america instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent, perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows what it wants, and gets it--and does not say much. xiii the right to vote all day this principle which i have applied in this last chapter to political democracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and to the right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilled capital. i do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything i buy every day is made, but i do want to have arrangements made through a national league to which i belong, for instance, so that i can practically know about the conditions under which anything is made, the moment i wish to. there should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town that i can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred million people. this is my conception of what the national league through its local branches could do and do for everybody. it would only cost a few cents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular article what ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happen to need it, by looking it up in the league's national opinion of it and national experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operate practically as a card catalogue. we all have the right in this country to spend our money intelligently. if people want to get our thousand dollars a year, or two thousand a year, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause why they should have it, dollar for dollar. we want our dollars to help people to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalists who are helping the country. every time i spend ten cents i want to know that i am getting ten cents' worth of democracy, ten cents' worth of skilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. i propose to vote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracy with silver coins and with dollar bills every day. the other kind of ballot, the paper ballot, i can only use in the nature of the case once or twice a year. xiv the skilled consumer the way to control the world and govern the well-being of men is not through the time they have left over, or the time they choose to lay one side for it, but directly and through their most important engagements and things they do and are sure to do all the time. a man's first important engagement in this world is with his own breath. his second engagement is with his own stomach. his third is with the night and with sleep. his fourth is with posterity, with the unborn, with his children and children's children. his fifth is with his ancestors and with god. in nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand things a man needs to have to keep these engagements--things he has to have if he is alive at all, he is a consumer. what the new league will say to the consumer is something like this: "in nine hundred and ninety-nine things out of a thousand you have to have to live, the air line league is organized to stand by you, express you and get the attention of everybody to what you want; and in the one thing you make for everybody it is going to express everybody to you and get your attention to what everybody wants of you." this would seem to most of us to be fair all around. when one thinks of it, why should one-thousandth part of what a man has and has to have, in order to live his life--the part he makes himself--be seen everywhere in this world in every man's life holding up and bullying, making him pay high prices for, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths? let the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of a man's life take possession of the one thousandth part of him. then we will have a civilization. or at least the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of him will persuade the one thousandth of him to coöperate. we have had autocracy of capital because on the whole in the world until machinery came in, capital kept close enough to labor and to the consumer to know what the workmen and the people wanted. now that capital has lost its grip, labor announces that it is going to be after this war the autocrat, and represent capital and the consumer. the air line league is here to ask, why should not the consumer represent himself? capital has tried and failed and has said, "let the public be damned." now labor has tried and failed, and is saying hoarsely in a thousand cities, "let the public be damned." what the air line league is for is to advertise the people together, and let the consumers represent themselves. what we have been fighting for essentially in this war is the control of the consumers in the world in all nations. when we speak of democracy and of organizing the will of the people, what we really mean is organizing the will of the consumers. organizing the will of the consumers is not a holdup. a holdup by all the people of all the people for all the people is liberty. xv sample democracies i do not want to delay or bother people with my definition of democracy, but i do not mind confiding to them where i have seen some. one is always coming upon bits or dots of democracy in america. it is these bits or dots of rough more or less unfinished democracy we have in america which make most of us believe in the people of this country. everybody in america knows of them. there are at least forty-four dots of democracy--little marked-off places--what might be called safety zones (everybody knows of them), even in new york. there are usually white globes in front of them, and a short name written in long plain slanting white letters across a huge piece of glass. if anybody wants to see just what democracy is like in business all he has to do is to go into the nearest childs restaurant, order some griddle-cakes, sit down and eat and think. all he really needs to do is to study the menu, but of course a menu is more thoroughly studied by eating some of it. one soon finds that a menu may be a little modest every-day magna charta of democracy or it may not. what a menu has long been for in the typical restaurant is to find a way of browbeating and bewildering a customer into spending more money for his luncheon than he intends to when he comes in. rows of grieved and vaguely disturbed people can be seen in restaurants every day--being mowed down by menus. in a childs restaurant business success is based on turning the whole idea of a menu around, and instead of the customer's coming in and studying the menu, the menu studies him. the consumer in a childs restaurant is there to economize and the restaurant is there to help him do it, the whole menu being constructed by experts in foods for the express purpose of telling the customer more than he knows about his food and his money, persuading him and practically tricking him into spending less money on his luncheon than he intends to. a business may be said to be a big vital and winning business in any line in proportion as one sees the consumers in it--practically running it--running it in spirit. a democratic business is one which is being run as the consumers would run it if they knew how. a business may be said to be a democratic business in proportion as one sees experts in it expressing crowds. one sees great crowds going to and fro and up and down in it acting for all practical purposes like geniuses, like skilled angels doing every day offhand inspired and inspiring difficult adventurous things as a matter of course--like tackling the high cost of living. what the air line league is for is to make the consumers of america--the all-class class, class-conscious--is to organize the consumers of america locally and nationally so that the comparative coöperation of crowds and geniuses and experts as in childs' restaurants, can be assured in all lines of business, taken over, improved, standardized, established as the label of modern successful business life. the air line league definition of democracy would be this: a democracy may be said to be a state of society in which the consumers or the people who want things, have the complete and whole-hearted expert attention of the men who make them. the triumph of america and of the other democracies during the war has been that they have proved that crowds can have and can be depended upon to have, experts, fifty thousand dollar men or anybody they want, to wait on them while they whip the germans. what the air line league proposes to do (further details later) is to arrange through its local and national branches to answer the sneer of the germans that crowds and experts in democracy can not find a way to keep this up. is it true or is it not true that the moment this war is over all our experts drop away--permanently drop away from waiting on crowds--are really going back now for fifty or a hundred thousand a year, to waiting on themselves in just the way the germans said they would? what the air line league will stand for will be that experts and crowds can be found waiting on each other and having the mutual convenience and power of waiting on each other during peace as well as war. why should we put up with the idea of having these conveniences and powers for a mere little sidesteppish interrupting thing like whipping the germans and not having them all the while, every day, for ourselves? xvi the town pendulum the air line league in its local, national and international branches will act as a listening machine. a listening machine may be said to work two ways, backward and forward. worked forward, it listens to people until they feel understood. when the same machine is turned around and worked the other way, it makes people listen until they understand. there are people in every town and in every local branch of the league who have what i like to call sometimes, pendulum temperaments. people in motion are not as reliable and as calculable as brass. people have wills, visions, individual emotions and lurchings of their own. when a man with a pendulum temperament sees a colossal pendulum made of crowds of people--crowds of employers and crowds of workmen--swinging from one extreme to another, the first thing he wants to do as each issue comes up, local or national, is to see to it that his own mind and each other man's mind in these two crowds on each side of the question should go twice through the middle, to going once to the extremes at either end. in other words, the national air line league will act to bring extremes together--twice through the middle to once at each end--and local clubs will act as attention-swinging machines--as attention-forcing machines between classes. i might give an illustration: the national league in its central office in new york gets a report from the local branch in the town where smith safety razors are made that the smith works are in a chronic state of strikes and sabotage and sustained ugliness and inefficiency. the central office, after quietly looking into it, hearing both sides and finding the charge is true, sends through its local branches reports to the ten million men shaving with smith blades every morning that the workmen and managers of the smith factories, who are working a nominal nine hours a day, are spending three hours a day in fighting with each other as to how smith blades should be made for the public, and six hours a day in making the blades. the consumer is told by the league that he is paying for nine hours' work a day on his blades and only getting six, and that if the employers and employees in the smith factories could be got to listen to each other and to work together the blades could be had for three cents less apiece. the league will then proceed through its local branch in the smith town to arrest the attention of the smith workmen and the smith employers. it will suggest that they get each other's point of view and sit down very earnest and hear everything that the other side has to say and everything the other side wants to do, until they find some way of getting together and being efficient and knowing how to make smith blades. if necessary in order to get the attention of the workmen and employers at the smith works to the desirability of their listening to each other, the users of smith blades throughout the country will shave themselves with their fathers' razors for three weeks. if the government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in america who shave will turn the government out of office and have the law changed. a strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is undemocratic and unfair. a lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair. in a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred million people for the hundred million people is democracy. i employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action of the league in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy when experts and crowds act together--the fact that democracy can really be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and practical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can. but only two or three per cent of what the league in its local and national branches would really do would be like the illustration i have used. the power the league would have to do things like this would make doing them unnecessary. the regular work of the league would largely consist in accepting invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different types of factories. the way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize. xvii the national listening machine people are so much more apt to bear in mind in proportion, the power of an organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to be ugly--to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead of fighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on the fact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in the air line league, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor or predatory capital, will never be abused. if what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a people together it is compelled as a matter of course, to get its own way with the same quietness, dignity and power it is telling other people to. the first business of the air line league is going to be, to be believed in by everybody. the way to be believed in by everybody is for the league to do itself the thing that it talks about doing. if in this way the league soon gets itself believed in by everybody, the first thing people will notice about the air line league will soon be that it is an organization that can lick anybody in sight with its little finger. the next thing people will notice is that it never gets so low that it has to do it. the power of labor unions and employers' associations has frequently been abused because they have many of them organized their power for the express purpose of abusing it. it is highly unlikely that people will need to be afraid of the power of the air line league. an organization which exists for the express purpose of driving out of business people who get what they want by holdups, the entire activities of which are devoted to proving to people how much more holding out a hand gets for people in business than sticking out a fist, soon gets its fist trusted. if the air line league abuses its power it will commit suicide so fast that people will feel suddenly safe. * * * * * if i were writing a platform for the air line league, it might be put perhaps for all practical purposes in one sentence. subject--war. object--stopping it. predicate--what we believe about war. verb--what we propose to do about what we believe about war. adverb--how we propose to do it. period--peace. the main trouble with the sentence forty nations are trying to stutter out now, is that there is no predicate, no verb, no spinal column of belief. the spinal column of belief in the air line league--the gist of our platform--is this one sentence: people fight because they cannot get other's attention. everything we believe and propose to do follows from this. the way to stop war is to advertise, to provide and set up in full sight and in working order before people who are trying to get what they want by war, a substitute for war which gets what they want for them quicker and better. the way to keep people who fight from fighting is to stand over them, advertise to them and dramatize to them how much more people can get by listening to each other. then compel them to listen. we do not believe in fighting on the one hand nor in an anæmic and temporary thing like arbitration on the other. all that men really do in arbitration is to hire their listening done for them by other people. listening which men were created to do themselves, which is done for them by others, only lasts a minute. the three plain spiritual brutal facts that capital and labor have to reckon with and conform to in dealing with human nature to-day are these: disputes can not be fought out--not even by the people themselves. disputes can not be arbitrated out by other people for them. all other people are for in a fight is to compel the fighters to listen to each other. doing anything less than compelling the fighters to listen to each other, is visionary, cowardly, temporary and impracticable. the moment people stop fighting, begin listening to each other and begin feeling listened to, nobody can hire them to organize to fight each other. they organize to listen to each other. what the air line league is for in every nation, in every city, town and village where a branch is set up, is to organize people to listen to each other. i do not think any one is going to feel obliged to feel afraid of the power of a league, that puts daily before its own face, before everybody's face--before every letter it writes, and before everything it does, across its letter-head, this chapter in nine words. people fight because they cannot get each other's attention. xviii how the national listening machine will work nine people out of ten who do wrong in business, do it because they feel that if they do not do the wrong to some one else, some one else will do the wrong to them. in the last analysis, some way of bringing about conscription for universal service in business is the only way in which we can be assured that the criminals and exploiters in any particular line of industry will not, at least temporarily, control and ruin the business. what the air line league would do practically would be to organize american business-men into a kind of "i won't if you won't" club. a very large majority of men daily see that certain things ought not to be done. it is not right-mindedness in people that is needed so much as the organization of the right-mindedness so that those who are wrong can be crowded out. my idea of the general policy of the air line league would be to bring the public to coöperate with the best men in each industry in such a way as to drive the worst ones out. probably from a publicity point of view the best way to do would be for the league to pick out the nine best factories in the country in which the laborers have a working understanding and a practical listening arrangement with their employers, and help the laborers in these nine factories advertise to other laborers in the country, at specific times and places, and to capital throughout the country, how they like it. one factory in ten, if necessary, could be selected for national discipline. a notorious factory could be picked out in which the laborers had the worst listening arrangement, and in which both the employers and employees were imposing upon each other to their own detriment and the detriment of their customers the most; and could be publicly disciplined by the national league acting through its local clubs everywhere. cooperating with nine factories and disciplining one would be my idea of the best way to get results. all that would need to be done would be to make a list of all the industries in the country and keep the buyers of the country informed about them through the local clubs. industrial democracy is coming in this country one industry at a time. each industry is going to work out its own salvation by emancipating and freeing the hands of the men who can run it best in the interests of the public--that is, run it with the lowest prices to the public, the highest prices to the wage earners, and a surplus for improvements, inventions and experiments in rendering its product of more service to all. i am not in favor of having capitalists try to convince labor as a class, nor having labor try to convince capital as a class. the skilled labor which has been convinced by capital should convince the others through the services of twenty thousand local clubs, and skilled capital which has succeeded in being believed in by its labor will do the same in convincing other capital. xix making a right start it will be seen that the idea i have in mind might be imagined as a kind of civic federation club, a super-consumers' league, and a super-advertising club rolled into one. rolling these three ideas into one is a temperament, and the men who are full of the vision of what can be done with them rolled into one, and of what is the matter with them if they are not rolled into one, must be the controlling powers in the new organization. the civic federation has been a safe plodding vague institution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and has not been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving and carrying out coöperation between capital and labor. it has been weak, theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had the driving force that such a man as schwab--some schwab in publicity instead of steel--could have given it. the consumers' league has been a useful, suggestive institution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that puts things through. the new organizations--as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising club--will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. programs which have merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming passion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. the selection and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is necessary. everything is waiting and ready. first we will get the men together who have the fire. then we will put fire under the boilers of the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world. xx up to the people there are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way i have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country. . the consumer class is practically everybody. . the consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. it is the natural umpire between them. its line of least resistance is to act fairly. . the interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. the consumer class as a class will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. the consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run. . in the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. the nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for. this national advertising campaign will be operated through national headquarters, coöperating with local branches organized in all manufacturing towns and cities. the national headquarters will act as a clearing house for the materials, facts, illustrations and demonstrations which the local centers collect and distribute and apply, proving that democracy works. everything turns, in getting a thing done to-day, on seeing to it that the people who take it up are the people who can best get the attention of others. the consumer class cannot fail because they are the best people in the country to compel everybody to listen. the consumers are the best people to get everybody to listen because they are the best listeners. the consumers are the best people to start anything in america and keep it going because everybody in america cares what the consumers think, wants to be on good terms with them, and to please them, wants to be heard by them and wants to hear what they say. xxi the way for a nation to speak up the air line league is not visionary. the people of this country have expressed an idea. they can do it again. not long after the american part in the war was under way our government had the idea--which it had not had at all when it began--that if america was going to do her part in defeating the germans, or if we were to come anywhere near defeating the germans, it would only be possible through an unexpected degree of self-sacrifice on the part of our people all day, every day until the war was over. our people did not believe this idea. how could our government get through to each man in america that winning the war depended on him? get through to each woman and each child that something must be given up by each of us to defeat the germans? the government not only wanted to advertise to the people how desperately the country needed them--every man of them--but it wanted also to inspire the people and to let the people see their power themselves. they wanted to teach the nations nation-conscience, world-conscience, and prove to the people and to the world how reverently the men, women and children of america could be depended upon to respond to an appeal to defeat the germans. i fell asleep in maine one night not long ago, and woke up in the grand central station. i came out into that first gasolineless, dreamlike sunday we had during the war. a single, forlorn, drooping fifty-dollar horse, which i could have had for a few minutes perhaps for a hundred dollars, greeted me. i mocked the driver a little, and walked on, feeling irreverent about human nature. i went over and stood and looked up madison avenue and looked down madison avenue. i had come from communing with the sea, from communing with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and i found myself upon what seemed to me the loneliest, the stillest, the most dreamlike place i had ever seen upon the earth--a corner of madison avenue. it seemed like a kind of vision to stand and look up and down that great, white, sunny, praying silence. i looked up at the sign on the corner. it really was madison avenue. it was as if the hand of a hundred million people had reached out three thousand miles. it was as if a hundred million people had met me at the corner and told me--one look, one silence: "here is this street we offer up that the will of god should go by. we are going to defeat the germans with the silence on this street." i stood and looked at the silent empty pavement crowded with the invisible--a parade of the prayers of a mighty people; and it came over me that not only this one street, but ten thousand more like it, were reaching, while i looked, across the country. i saw my people hushing a thousand cities, making the thunder-thinking streets of chicago, of san francisco and new york like the aisles of churches. there was no need of church bells the first gasolineless sunday, reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly--the way they do--that god was on the earth. one could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. but the first gasolineless sunday--five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying for a hundred million people, "god still reigneth." and twenty million little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had happened! i cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense i had when i waked up in the grand central station that morning, when out of communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out of the great roaring dark of the night i stepped into the street, into the long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundred million people its silent prayer for a world. i saw the mighty streets of a nation, from maine to california, lifted up as a vow to god. we have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the war. one gasolineless sunday attracts more attention to this country, to the great wager it had put up on whipping the germans, than twenty-four full page ads in a thousand papers could do. mr. garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--in advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement, eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into prayers for a world--mr. garfield had few equals. to advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits of a hundred million people. select something like being warmed or like being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single stomach in the country. to advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar when they ordered eight. make every butcher boy a prophet. make people sip their coffee thinking of the next two hundred years. make streets into posters. make people look out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets that stretch like silent prayers, like mighty vows of a great people to defeat the germans! we learned during the war that the way to get the attention of a hundred million people, the way to turn our own attention in america, the attention of our very cats and dogs to whipping germany--was to interrupt people's personal daily habits. the way for a great free people to express an idea is to dramatize it to the people to whom we are trying to express it. the way for the american people to express our feelings to capitalists and laborers who seem to think we make no difference is to think up and set at work some form of dramatizing the idea in what we are doing, so that the people we want to reach will look up and can forget us hardly an hour in the day. the moral from america's first gasless sunday for the american people, in expressing themselves to business men who say they are serving us, is plain. i whisper it in the ears of a hundred million consumers as one of the working ideas of the air line league. our general idea of the way to deal with people who will not listen is not to speak to them, but to do things to them that will make them wish we would, do things to them that will make them come over and ask us to speak to them. let a hundred million people do something to the people who take turns in holding us up, that will make them look up and wonder what the hundred million people think. the true way to advertise is to make the people you advertise to, do it. to get an idea over to the germans do something to them that will make them come over to us--come all the way over to us and extract it. the same principle is going to be applied next by the public group in industry. we will do something that will make them--capital and labor--say: "what do you mean?" then let them study us and search us and search their own minds and find out. book ii what each man expects of himself g. s. l. to himself i g. s. l. to himself the most important and necessary things a man ever says sometimes, are the things he feels he must say particularly to himself. in what i have to say about this nation i have stripped down to myself. of course any man in expressing privately his own soul to himself, may hit off a nation, because of course when one thinks of it, that is the very thing everybody in a nation would do, probably if he had time. but that may or may not be. all i know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this i do not want to tell other people what they ought to do. a large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to. i do not dare, for one, to let myself go. i am afraid i would be among the worst if i got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right. during the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more i feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself. i have always carried what i call a day book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on mount tom--wherever i am, i put it down--put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me. as the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself. on the other hand i want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. it has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next president, and with the end in view of getting them, i am bringing up in it certain things i have thought of that i would do, and begin to do, next week if i were the hundred million people. i do not think i could deny in court on a bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, i really believe it would be--at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine. nearly every man in the hundred million people--in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this. i cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it. and the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one or both of them, i believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. but it is not up to me. copying off this book is as far as i go with people. and the book is not to them. it is not even for them. this book is to me. i have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world. it is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry. ii if i were a nation economics, i suspect, are much simpler than they look. the soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is. why should i propose, if i were a nation--just because i am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the multiplication table--by a really simple thing like there being so many of me? i am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the united states would act more like me or act as practically almost any man i know would act, when it is really put up to him--forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple. all that is the matter with it is that so many senates have sat on it. reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a senate down to one human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. a baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials. and that is all there is to it. the other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like senators and from being on committees. * * * * * the other day in russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there. the crowds laughed. and the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves. a little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk. he told the committee he would not return with them. he said that a committee could not get him. the thousand men had rolled him away through jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back. the thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back. the crowds laughed. but the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy--had some imagination about each other and went to work. if i were a nation, the first question i would ask would be, "why bother with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic russian way to act an idea all out in order to see it?" in america we propose to come through to this same idea by being human, by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's imaginations. the issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern industrial life. these are the mahogany desk and the cog. iii what the mahogany desk is going to do the old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee. the next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row. to get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk. a polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man. in order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row. his workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow. the problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. it really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so? in the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work. very soon now, everywhere--much harder than hoeing in the next row--with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen's imaginations. the other main point in the book the hundred million people would write if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. i would devote the second ten chapters i think, not to mahogany desks, or to the buttons on them directing machines, but to cogs. the second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and will have to see a way out for in their book, is the way a cog feels about being a cog. if a cog in a big locomotive could take a day off and go around and watch the drivewheel and pistons--watch the smoke coming out of the smokestack and the water scooping up from between the rails--watch the three hundred faces in the train looking out of the windows and the great world booming by, and if the cog could then say, "i belong with all this and i am helping and making it possible for all these people to do and to have all this!" and if the cog could then slip back and go on just being a cog,--the cog would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be. he would be being the kind of a cog a man is supposed to be in a democracy-machine in distinction from a king-machine. what is more, if a cog did this, or if arrangements were studied out for some little inkling of a chance to do it, he would be making his job as a cog one third easier and happier and three times as efficient. a man is created to be the kind of cog that works best when it is allowed to do its work in this way. god created him when he drove in one rivet to feel the whole of the ship. it is feeling the whole of the ship that makes being a cog worth while. the great work of the american people in the next four years is to work out for american industry the fate of the cog in it. the fate of democracy turns next on our working out a way of allowing a cog some imagination, or some substitute for imagination in its daily work--something that the rest of the cog--the whole man in the cog can have, which will bring his spirit, his joy and his power to bear on his daily work. this is the second of the two main points the hundred million people would make in their book if they had time. these two main points--getting labor to see how a mahogany desk sweats--getting the mahogany desk to put itself in the place of a cog, know how a cog feels and what makes a cog work--are points which are going to be made successfully and quickly in proportion as they are taken up in the right spirit and with a method--a practical human working method which so expresses and dramatizes that right spirit that it will be impossible for people not to respond to it. i am not undertaking in this part of my book to make an inquiry as to what the right spirit is, or what the right method is that a hundred million people ought to adopt. i am a somewhat puzzled and determined person and i am instituting out loud a searching inquiry as to what i am going to do myself and what the principles and methods are that i should be governed by in doing my personal part, and conducting my own mind and judgment toward the movements and the men about me. to avoid generalizing, i might as well give my idea the way it came to me--one man's idea of how one man feels he wants to act when being lied to. i do not say in so many words, i _was_ lied to. i do not know. a great many people every day find themselves in situations where they do not know. the question i am asking of myself is, how can a man or a public take a fair human and constructive attitude when one does not know and cannot know for the time being, all that it is to the point to know? a stupendous amount of red-flagism, unrest and expensive unreasonableness would be swept away in this country if we all had in mind to use for ourselves when called for the following rules for being lied to. (not that i am going to lumber people's minds up by numbering them as rules out loud. they are all here--in what follows--the spirit of them, and people can make their own rules for themselves as they go along.) iv rules for being lied to (charles schwab or anybody) ---- dropped in, in the rain the other night, and sat by my fireplace and said: "charles schwab is the prince of liars. he says one thing about labor and does another." he went on to say things he said other people said. there are two courses of action to take about charles schwab's being the prince of liars. one way is to expose what he says. the other way is to help him make what he says true. i would rather do what i can to help charles schwab practice what he preaches than to stop his preaching. everything turns for the american people to-day on being constructive, on dealing with facts as they are, on using the men we have, and on getting the most out of the men we have. to get the most out of charles schwab throw around him expectation and malediction and then let him take his choice. charles schwab in saying what he says about the new spirit in which capital has got to deal with labor is rendering a great, unexpected, sensational and indispensable service to labor and to capital. it is a pity to throw this public confession of capital to labor, and in behalf of labor away. it would be a still greater pity to see labor itself throwing it away. if i could let myself be cooped up as a writer in any one class in this country to-day, and if it were my special business to take sides with labor, the thing i would try to do first with charles schwab, instead of undermining what he says and making what he says mean nothing--would be to coöperate with him--back him up--back him up with the public--back him up with the stockholders and the people in his mills, until he makes what he says mean three times as much. then i would see to it if i could, that he says four times as much. i would try, if i could, to keep charles schwab steadily at it, claiming more and more for labor. then catching up more and more to charles schwab, doing more and more, and compelling his partners to do more and more of what he says. charles schwab has fifty or a hundred thousand or so partners, of course--stockholders he has to educate. they have to be educated in public. he is not insincere because he has not educated them all in a minute. v getting one man right there are certain facts which make me believe in schwab as an asset for the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away. there are all manner of facts about schwab and his mills which i do not yet know which i could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up, by just sitting down and thinking. getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be fair to a nation. if charles schwab is what ---- says he is, if charles schwab is doing or winking while it is being done at the thing ---- says he is--he is an incredibly under-witted man--stupid about the public, about labor and about capital--and, what is the most reckless of all--stupid in behalf of himself. it is rather a hard nut to crack--charles schwab's being stupid. i cannot understand why people--why a man like ---- would apparently rather believe that charles schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said about him. if what ---- says is true about mr. schwab, he is not only a stupid man but a ruined man. in the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing will be able to keep charles schwab from to-morrow on, from being a stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead. the alternatives are: the assertions about mr. schwab's real attitude toward labor are not true. if true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be glad to allow. if true they are due to delegated authority. if a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient. if it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient. if it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments. people who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do things. vi getting fifty men right my experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and reformers are the same kind of people turned around. take any extreme radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme conservative. in the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and self-mutilating judgments of human nature. they are always getting wrong the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean--what they are like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like. the quick way to deal with the industrial situation is to expose the extreme reactionaries and the extreme radicals who have created it. the quick way to do this and to get the reactionaries and radicals to come to terms and get together, scatter their fear and their panic about one another, bone down to team work, join with the rest on a big constructive job on the fate of the world, is to pick out certain strategic human beings in business, see to it that the extremists on both sides are held up and held up close to the cold scientific facts about what these human beings are, and what they mean, and what they are driving toward, by engineering experts in human nature and in interpreting human nature. these personalities to unlock a nation with--to make a hundred million men believe together and act together should be picked out, men like charles schwab everybody is looking at and men not looked at yet everybody ought to look at, and will like to look at when they know them. intensive publicity extensively applied. then with a printing press and a postage stamp multiply it by a hundred million. make true beliefs about picked out men--typical men we have thousands of duplicates of, the daily habit of people's lives. if the american people can come to know and interpret fifty men--if they can get fifty sample men right--they will then be able to use these fifty men every day of their lives as keys to unlock understanding with, unlock team work with, with all the others. people will have something to work from and something to work toward, in judging what they can do with employers and with workmen around them. then we will have team work and civilization--we will have a democracy the germans would like to be asked to belong to. vii engineers in folks the most gravely important, unbusinesslike and unscientific blunders people make in economics, are their judgments of facts about people. the other facts than the facts about people--about how people feel and are going to feel inside, are comparatively accurate and obtainable. comparatively ordinary experts, or experts with rather routine training and education can deal with the other facts than the facts about people. the facts about labor, capital and superproduction, that we fail to get most, are the psychological facts about the way people are judging one another. we have strikes because on one side or the other, or both, people are off on their facts about one another. one of the first things business men are going to generally arrange for is to have these facts about human nature, like all other engineering facts in business, dealt with by experts--by the general recognition and employment of experts in human nature--of human engineers, of natural and trained interpreters of men to one another. if everybody will begin dealing to-morrow morning with people as they really are, our economics in america will be as simple as a primer, before night. viii the great new profession en route, new york, new haven & hartford r. r. january , . dined at the ----'s last night. judge ---- was there. two other lawyers. we sat after dinner and talked very late. three lawyers are too many for a dinner. i do not know what it is, but i never spend the evening with a lawyer, without talking back to him in my mind all the next day. probably, if at this late date i were picking out what i would be in the world, and had to be one thing rather than another, i would pick out being a lawyer backwards. the usual standard idea of what a lawyer is, is that he is an expert in conducting people's fights for them. my idea is that the whole thing should be turned around and that in the special state the world is in just now, a new profession should at once be started--a profession in which any man who went into it, would be occupied in being a lawyer backwards. (i think this would be perhaps the best way to put it because to most people, being a lawyer backwards is inspiring to think of--because everybody would see--a whole nation would see all in one unanimous minute, just what the new profession i have in mind would be like.) everybody knows about lawyers. they are always being advertised by the things they do and get the rest of us to do. the most conspicuous ad.--their huge national international display ad. just now of what a lawyer is like--of just how nice being a lawyer backwards would be, is the united states senate. it would be the most alluring spectacle we could have in america to most people, if we could have the spectacle in our country of two or three hundred thousand men being lawyers backwards--two or three hundred thousand men stationed strategically in ten thousand cities, as experts everybody went to, to keep them out of fights. you see a man's sign up over his door and you go in and pay him a fee, or pay him so much a year for making you love your enemies. and of course he will change your enemies some for you in spots so that you can put it over. then by putting in a little touch here and there on you perhaps, it is not impossible he will make your enemies love you. my idea is that this idea should be presented to people not for what it is worth--not as a high moral idea or as a spiritual luxury but as a plain practical every day convenience in our world as it is, for getting the things done one wants to do, and for getting what one wants. if i were hiring a man to help me get what i want out of other people and if i had my choice between hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people understand me and hiring a man who is a skilled expert in making people afraid of me, it would not take me long to say which would be the more practical thing for me to do. if i could go down town and engage a man at so much a year who would be an expert in making me understand myself and in making me make fun of myself, so that i could get myself into fairly good shape for other people to understand, it would be still more practical. i would soon find myself after the first few séances with the man i was hiring to sit down with me and be a lawyer backwards to me--i would soon find myself having things done to me that would be so plain, so pointed, so sensible, so scientific and matter of fact and thorough that i would be able in a minute to cut down to the quick with any man i met,--cut down to the quick and get what i wanted on any subject i took up, because nobody could fool me, because i couldn't even be fooled by myself. i do not know how long it is going to take but i do know that if the world is going to be reformed it is going to be by men who--either by doing it personally, or by hiring somebody else to help them do it, have reformed themselves. my own personal observation is, so far, that when i set out to see things against myself i seem to need somehow, a great deal of assistance. in such a naturally disagreeable mussy job of course, instead of going to my friends, to people one goes out to dine with, i feel there ought to be some regular professional person one could go to, some more noble refined sort of spiritual hired man--make an appointment by telephone, go down to a room down town on the way to one's office and then just as a plain matter of course be done off for the day, be done over, be put in shape for one's fellow human beings to get on with. then one could go out into the midst of the people and keel over a world. after one had hired some one to be a lawyer backwards to one and got used to it, one would soon be in shape to go to one's employers and let them put in some touches, go to one's employees, go to anybody and everybody right and left. one would soon get so that one could learn something from everybody. one would take points even from relatives. the main difficulty in a thing like this would be one that would come at the start, the difficulty of getting people to look upon undergoing the truth about themselves, respectfully and seriously and like an operation. no amateur or friend could get anybody started. the only way to begin is to have some special expert to go to, some special expert with a long string of notable moral patients, men who have succeeded in business by seeing through themselves more, and seeing through themselves quicker and oftener than other people do. you hear of some especially good man who is being a lawyer backwards practicing regularly with great success. you observe his patients from day to day and see how the truth works. then you go down to his office, plank down your money and get the truth. * * * * * the trouble with truth from friends and relatives is that even when they tell it, nobody pays for it. most people neither take the truth nor anything else in this world seriously if it is free. people get more, the more they want it. and the more they want it, the more they show it by wanting to pay for it. this is why i suspect that being a lawyer backwards will have to be a regular profession. there is going to be a tremendous demand for going down town and getting a disagreeable truth, the moment people see how going down and getting one and digesting one makes one get on with people in one's work. the lawyers who are hired to fight out for him, a man's lies about himself, will soon be crowded out of business by the lawyers who free a man from himself, who knock a man out from a kind of cramp or neuritis of himself and present him a world with the truth. this idea should be presented to people just as plain common sense. people should not be asked to take it up not as an ideal but as an operation. if a man goes down town to hire a doctor to tell him how he has got to eat in order to live, why should he not go down town to a man's office and hire him to tell him what he has got to be like in order to have any one willing to let him live? we have operations on all our other inner organs. the things that are done to us at these times are usually to say the least intensely personal and intimate things. and if people will let themselves be cut open and operated on so that they can eat, why should there not be men--hundreds of thousands of men everywhere in offices, people can go to to be operated on so that they can earn something to eat? nine out of ten of the things that keep people from earning a living as they should or as they might, are truths against themselves that have never been operated on. ix getting people to notice facts the first thing the man in the white house for the next four years is going to have to face is the problem of dealing with people as they really are. if i were writing a book for the next president to run for president on, one of the first things i would put into it would be a definite statement of what the president and the government proposed to do and what policy they proposed to adopt to keep labor and capital from being off on their facts about each other. there are two policies to choose from. first policy: have capital tell labor what is the matter with labor, and have labor tell capital what is the matter with capital. (results: strikes heaped on lockouts and lockouts heaped on strikes.) second policy: turn the whole truth-telling policy around. the way to make a truth count is to get the utmost possible attention to it. the way to get the utmost possible attention to a truth is to have people one does not expect it from telling it. the way to advertise the sins of capital is to have capital tell them. employers and capitalists can attract twenty times as much attention in telling things that are the matter with them, and will be believed forty times as much. and they not only can tell the facts against themselves more fairly, but while they are telling the facts against themselves they are in a position to change them. they can tell facts against themselves with one hand and change them with the other. or they can begin changing them--begin getting labor to help them change them. if i had to save the world in a week or rather get assurance in a week that it could be saved, i would get all the people in it to agree for a year to read each other's papers. have every man read two papers. we would start up for america the national parallel column habit. each man by himself daily putting his own little world and other people's world alongside until they got used to it, and then together. there is no limit to what reading the wrong papers would not do for this nation. it is not a matter to argue about. it is a mere plain matter of fact in ordinary every day psychology. the veriest tyro in human engineering can see it,--that the way to get a truth noticed about capital or labor, the way to make a truth of some use and get it believed and acted on, is to have the wrong people tell it. judge gary could say some of the things mr. gompers is saying a great deal better than mr. gompers could. there is one thing i am going to do when i put this up to the people. i am not going to let them think i am putting it up to them as a christian. the way to introduce the idea is to speak as a plain practical engineer in folks and in the way human nature works. i don't know as i would mind people having fine religious feelings about it, when they did it, if they liked, but i would prefer to call it and prefer to introduce it as simple, plain, hard-headed publicity. the most natural quick universal short-cut to peace, to different groups of people in america getting their facts right and getting them quick and dealing with each other as they really are, is to have people go around in america from now on, telling truths everywhere, who have just got them--people the truths look prominent on. x the fool killers the gist of the labor problem simmers down to our making some adequate universally understood provision, generally resorted to by everybody as a matter of course, for people's not being fooled about themselves. if people do not fool themselves nobody else can fool them. and they do not go around fooling others. the next thing employers and employees who are being fooled by themselves and who are trying to fool one another, are going to observe, is that their competitors in their own industry--the employers and employees in their own industry who are not fooled by themselves and who are not taking time to fool one another, are producing more, cheaper and better goods than they can. things that take years to straighten out, straighten out in weeks when people on both sides who have stopped fooling themselves, get together and look at the facts over each other's shoulders. all that is necessary is to get the thing started--looking at the facts over each other's shoulders. people who do not want to start to look at facts in this way should call in a specialist until they do. labor human nature is not one kind of human nature and capital human nature another. they both believe on both sides what they want to, unless they go to a specialist and get a practical, matter-of-fact, profitable habit started of making a deliberate, desperate effort not to. the world is not being run from day to day by the truth. it is run by what people believe is the truth. it is what the i. w. w. extremists believe is the truth, which constitutes the important fact--the fact which has to be looked up, considered and seriously dealt with. the truth about judge gary's attitude or charles schwab's, toward labor unions, makes no difference if nobody believes it, or if the labor unions don't believe it. as long as the labor unions are fooling themselves and believing what they want to believe, the only serious matter of fact way to deal with them is to consider how they manage to do it. the fundamental thing that is the matter with people is that they are off on their facts about themselves and believe what they want to about themselves. naturally having begun with this they branch out and believe what they want to about anybody. to this end in our present industrial deadlock, the first thing we have obviously got to make provision for in modern american life, is practically a new profession--regular professional persons everywhere in all cities, and in all the different industries and in the highly specialized groups each with their special and different techniques, who are experts in saving people from the consequences to themselves and others of believing what they want to about themselves. xi the whisperers a very considerable proportion of the things that labor unions are in the habit of saying against their employers, the employers lock their office doors and sit down and whisper to one another against themselves. a very considerable proportion of the thing that employers are in the habit of saying against their workmen, the workmen of the more efficient type are whispering around to one another against themselves. one cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up. but perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout. the first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,--the whisperers on the other side--they will stop shouting to listen. the whole industrial situation narrows down to this,--might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to capital and labor, "swap whispers!" the tumult and the shouting die. it is with the whisperers, we will save the world. xii mr. dooley, judge gary and mr. gompers the proposal that we have a new profession--a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. but something has made me want to begin my idea in this way. in strained situations between people--situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about themselves, i am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one--some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh. to start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical. mr. dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between capital and labor, could really do more than savonarola. and life could do more than the christian register. it was not frivolous in abraham lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his cabinet, for his emancipation proclamation, by introducing it with artemus ward. it was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his god. i am not sure but that if peter finley dunne could have been appointed on the president's industrial conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time--just as mr. gompers and his labor children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if mr. dooley and hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the president's conference might have been saved. the broad every day human fact about the conference was, that seen from the point of view of god or of common people, many of the men in it,--most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. so far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the conference would look in a week, were the men in the public group. there were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the capital group and the labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped. the president's conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp--a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves. when mr. gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, i do not claim that if they had met oliver herford or mr. dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but i do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, mr. gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. they had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves. of course it is only fair to say that capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself. with capital not yet grown up--not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,--incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with labor in the same undeveloped state, the president's conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,--a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that capital and labor in this country as institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were! for forty years capital and labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation--called the public. and we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word. there are three courses we can take in the public group now. we can try to discipline capital and labor into producing together by passing laws and heaping up embarrassments and penalties. we can let them see how much better they can make things by sticking them on to one another and letting them discipline one another. we can make fun of both of them quietly to themselves, keep quiet-hearted, matter of fact, full of realism, humor, relaxation and naturalness and deal with capital and labor as lincoln would, by getting laughing and listening started. then let them laugh at themselves. america should arrange to have judge gary, mr. dooley and mr. gompers get together on a desert island and face things out. a great deal of capital in this country--especially the best of it, is already seeing, and already acting on facts about itself it has not wanted to believe. it is already seeing that it cannot carry off with labor or with the public any longer the idea of looking pure and noble, standing before people in a kind of eternal moral-prince-albert coat, one's hand in one's bosom, and with the same old pompous-looking face, without looking ridiculous. it is seeing that it would rather laugh at itself, in a pinch, than to have other people laughing at it, that the only thing left to it to do now is to get serious, scientific and economic, smile at its airs with labor and the public, and lay them aside. if capital sees how it really looks, laughs at itself, goes in quietly for self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, labor will. if labor does it, capital will. whichever side does it first, and does it best,--does it in the most human, attractive and contagious way will find a hundred million people handing over to it the power and the leadership of the country. to whichever side it comes first, to show the most shrewdness, the most fearlessness, the most generosity in seeing facts against itself, will come the honor of the first victory. the first victory either side will be allowed by the people, is its victory over itself. people in this country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, can have anything they want. xiii fooling oneself in politics the same thing that everybody can see is going to happen in business in this country from now on--the pushing forward--the victory over all others in business of the men who are not fooled about themselves is going to be seen happening ten times over in politics. the leading symptom of the mood of the people, the magnificent blanket political secret that covers all the other secrets of the coming conventions and elections, the dominating fact of the next man's next four years in the white house, is the thing that is going to be done by the people from to-day on, to politicians who are fooled about themselves. one has but to mention one or two and a nation sees it. any little natural impression my fellow citizens may have had at the beginning of this article that in putting forward my idea of being a lawyer backwards, or the idea that we must all practice at being lawyers backwards to ourselves, i am putting forward just a gay pleasant thoughtlet, instead of a grave and pressing national issue, an issue on which the fate of a people is at stake, fades away when one really begins to think of how the idea would really work out if tried on particular politicians. everybody can pick out his own of course, but i am inclined to believe just at the moment, that if there was a good man everybody in this nation knew of who was being a lawyer backwards--say in new york or london--a man who had a big practice and who had a fine record in bracing men up to fight themselves and not to be fooled about themselves, the man that most people in this country would like to take up a national collection for, have sent to him and done over at once, no matter what it cost, would be henry cabot lodge. for six long weary months now, the main and international fact america and the world have had to get up and face every morning is the way a man called henry cabot lodge is being fooled by himself. ninety-nine million out of a hundred million people can see,--their very cats and dogs can see, and the little birds in the trees in washington can see, that the main particular uncontrollable force that grips henry cabot lodge in a vise all day every day for six months is his desire to make woodrow wilson ridiculous, to set woodrow wilson down hard in a lonely back seat of the world. but henry cabot lodge does not see what the cats and dogs of a hundred million people and the little birds in the trees see about henry cabot lodge. he does not see what it means about himself, that he trembles like an aspen leaf from soul to stern when the thought of wilson crosses his pale mind, that he has to go to bed for an hour after anybody mentions wilson's name to him, and that all that has really happened to him or to the world after all is that he--henry cabot lodge, of massachusetts, has taken the one single elemental dammed up (and not unnatural) desire to sit woodrow wilson down hard and made a great national and international emotion out of it--every day one more morning he gets out of bed, elevates his own private emotion into a transfiguration--into a great national stained-glass window for the monroe doctrine, sees twenty generations like attendant angels hovering around him--around henry cabot lodge in the window, like saint george with the dragon, blessing him for saving columbia from being crunched in the wandering fire-breathing jaws of a prowling league of nations! it is the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with god and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of himself that could be conceived. it would be of no use to argue--not even for a hundred million people to argue with henry cabot lodge, because what they would really have to do to argue to the point would be not to argue about henry cabot lodge's idea about the subject, but about henry cabot lodge's idea of himself. so it came to pass--a nation confronted with a man whom none can stop, a man who believes what he wants to believe about himself, a man magnificently obsessed--a man holding himself ready any minute of any day in the year, following the bogey of his wraith of wilson to the precipice of the end of the world, with forty nations in his pocket, jumps off.... who would have believed that a man who was writing history, who was measuring off calm perspectives of things to happen, and little leagues of nations of his own twenty years ago--who would have believed that a man with a proud, controlled and cultivated mind could let his mind in this way be seized from the sub-cellar of its own passions and its own desires, and at the expense of his party, to the humiliation of his nation and the weariness of the world, let itself be warped into a national, into an international helplessness like this? my own feeling is that the best possible use of henry cabot lodge at the present moment is as a national symptom, as a lesson in the psycho-analysis of nations, a suggestion of what nations that want to get things, must look out for and from, be on the lookout for next, and from now on, in the men they choose to get them. the ways in which great employers and labor unions are being fooled about themselves at the expense of all of us, in the industrial world, are matched on every side in the world of politics. the personal trait of great political as well as industrial value for which the people of this country are going to look in the men they allow to be placed over them--the men they give power and command to, is the quality in a man of being sensitive about facts, especially facts in people. what we are going to look for in a man is having an engineering and not a sentimental attitude toward his own mind and the minds of others. we are going to give power and place to the man who has a certain eagerness for a fact whatever it does to him, who has a certain suppleness of mind in not believing what he wants to. the man we are going to look past everybody for and pick to be a president or a senator after this, is the man who is not hoodwinked or polarized by his own party or by his own class, who is not fooled about himself, who keeps without swerving, because he likes it and prefers it, to the main trunk line of the interests of all of us. xiv swearing off from oneself in time before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is established, and before very many offices have really been opened up where one can go in and have one's mind changed ten dollars' worth instead of having it poured, soothed and petted, a good many of us are going to find it necessary to practice on ourselves and in a humble way as amateurs, do any little odd jobs we can on ourselves at home. we nearly all of us have it in us--we the hundred million people--to be like henry cabot lodge, on a less national scale, any minute. i say over to myself breathlessly between these very words while i write them down about henry cabot lodge, that beautiful thought john bunyan had, "except for the grace of god" a wife, five friends and a sense of humor, there goes gerald stanley lee! i have made myself say this over practically every day while writing this article (i have had to write it), and when i was in the same town henry cabot lodge is, last week, saw him snooping around the senate, so pure and high and from the back bay, so serene in his courtly chivalrous dream about himself, i got taken up every time--i do not deny it--on the same monotonous big beautiful wave of feeling superior followed by the same monotonous sweeping, sinking undertow of humbleness, and then i would stand there (he is my own senator) with his pass for the senate in my pocket ... i would stand and watch him,--watch him walking through the lordly corridors quoting over to myself that same beautiful thought john bunyan had about the murderer, "except for the grace of god there goes etc., etc." everybody fill in for himself! the essential fact in any fundamental workable truth about human nature is that all the people who have any are very much alike. the best we can do about it--most of us--is to recognize the fact that in spite of the thought of the people it mixes us up with, the best of us probably are going to be fooled about ourselves, and that the only practical working difference between us in the end is that some of us have caught ourselves in the act more often than others, have wrought out a livelier, more desperate self-consciousness, and have made rather elaborate and regular arrangements, perhaps,--when something in us starts us up into being lodges,--for catching up to ourselves and for swearing off from ourselves in time. here is charles evans hughes for instance, who from the day he was born hates a socialist from afar off,--a man who never had in his younger days perhaps, like some of us, a streak of being one, and yet the first thing charles evans hughes does before anybody can say jack robinson, the very first minute he reads in his paper that the new york assembly has refused to give their seats to five socialist members because they are socialists, is to be a lawyer backwards to himself, with a big national jerk draw his national self together, and before the country is half waked up at breakfast the next morning, we have the spectacle of an act of sympathy and protest on behalf of american socialists from the last man most people would think it of, an open letter insisting that the narrow partisans of the assembly itching with superiority, sweating with propriety, sitting in a kind of ooze of patriotism in their great chamber in albany, should take the socialist members they had waved out of the room simply for belonging to the socialist party, and conduct them back to their seats as the accredited representatives (until proved individually unfit) of citizens of the united states and let them sit there as a national exhibit of the way in which a great and free people, who are believing in themselves every day, can believe in themselves enough to listen to anybody, to make regular arrangements in albany and everywhere as a matter of course for listening to people with whom they do not agree, without fear and without frothing at the mouth. mr. hughes is as anxious to do anything he can during one lifetime to discourage socialism as henry cabot lodge is to discourage woodrow wilson, but the reason that the american people have been glad to have charles evans hughes as justice of the supreme court, the reason that they came within three inches of making him president of the united states is that in an eminent degree he is a man who has made elaborate, conclusive and habitual arrangements with his own mind for not being deceived by charles evans hughes, for being a lawyer backwards, for fighting himself, for stepping up out of being a mere lawyer and sitting sternly on the bench of the supreme court, against himself. of course i am not writing this article to point out to a hundred million people with this fountain pen of mine dripping in its sins, how superior i and a hundred million other people are to henry cabot lodge and to the way for the last six months he is mooning about in his mind and being internationally fooled about himself. the special point i seek to make is that as we are all in danger on one subject or another, of breaking out into millions of lodges any minute, that we should make the most of our new national chance of our power as a people just now--just before the two great national conventions of the parties to which we mostly belong, to make deliberate and national arrangements to be on our guard against ourselves, to see to it that we nominate and elect to the white house,--from whatever walk of life he comes,--a man who will have himself magnificently in hand, a man who will not trickle off before the people into his own private temperament, pocket himself up in his own class, or put down the lid of his own party gently but firmly over his soul--a man who will be the president of all the people everywhere all the time. when the members of the bar association of the city of new york who backed mr. hughes, were presenting to the world, our slowly enlightened world, the spectacle of several hundred lawyers rising to the occasion and being lawyers backwards to themselves, it probably would not be fair to divide off crudely the sheep from the goats, and to say that those who voted to back mr. hughes were, and those who did not, were not equally exposed to being fooled about themselves. mr. hughes and his followers were probably men who are more on their guard, who have regular and standing arrangements with themselves against themselves and who acted more quickly than others in this case in the way they should wish they had acted in three weeks, three years or three lifetimes. in the extraordinary struggle our nation is now making in the next four years to justify democracy--to justify the power of the human spirit to be free, generous, noble and just in self-government, the power of men of differing classes, of differing groups and interests to live in orderly good will and mutual understanding together, until we make at last a great nation together in the sight of nations that say we cannot do it,--all this is going to turn for this country, not upon our not being a blind people, or on our not being a prejudiced people, or upon our not being full of the liability to be deceived about ourselves, but on what we do about it when we are, upon our making arrangements beforehand for seeing through ourselves in time, upon our putting forward men to represent us who shall not be demagogues, who shall lead us as we are, with clear eyes to what we are going to be, men who shall lead us by opening our imaginations by touching, or our vision instead of petting us in our sins. xv technique for not being fooled by oneself the next twenty-eight pages of this book might be entitled: "an article that expected to appear in the _saturday evening post_." when the twenty-eight pages, which had been conceived and written to be read in this way, were completed, they were too late to submit to the _post_, and too late to change. the reader is therefore requested to bear in mind (as i do) that he is getting the next eleven chapters for nothing--that they have not been paid for and it can only be left to people's imaginations whether the _saturday evening post_ would approve or believe what i believe, or feel hurt if other people believe it. * * * * * the suggestion that before the new profession of being a lawyer backwards is started we shall all try in the present crisis of the nation, doing what we can as amateurs, putting in at once any little odd jobs of criticism on ourselves which may come our way, brings up the whole matter of an amateur technique for not being fooled by oneself. it is easy enough to talk pleasantly about a man's power of self-criticism or of self-discipline as the source of ideas, as a secret of increased production in factories, or power over others in business, and as a general rule for success whether in trade or in statesmanship, i say it is, but what is there anybody can really do after all about having or exercising this power of self-criticism? if the readers of the _saturday evening post_ were to come to me in a body in this part of my book and ask me what there is, if anything, they--the readers of the _saturday evening post_ can do, and do now to acquire a technique--a kind of general amateur technique for not being fooled about themselves, i am afraid i would have a hard time in holding back from giving good advice. even at this moment without being asked at all, i have a faint hopeful idea--i feel it at this moment floating about my head--a kind of nimbus of wanting to tell other people what they ought to do about not being fooled by themselves. but i have ripped the thing off. i cannot believe that only this far--in a few pages or so about it, i have made people's not being fooled by themselves alluring enough to them. it has occurred to me that perhaps if i want to have people in this country really allured by the prospect of not being fooled by themselves, the best thing for me to do is to pick out some man in the country everybody knows who is especially lacking in a technique for not being fooled by himself--some one man all our people have a perfect passion,--almost an epidemic of not wanting to be like, and try to make my idea alluring with him. naturally of course i have picked out mr. albert sidney burleson of austin, texas, postmaster imperturbable of the united states. it is true that other readers of the _saturday evening post_ besides mr. burleson might have been picked out. but everybody knows mr. burleson. everybody writes letters. mr. burleson is the great daily common intimate personal experience of a hundred million people. everybody who puts letters into mr. burleson's post office--everybody who waits for his letters to get to him after mr. burleson is through with them, must feel as i do, that mr. albert sidney burleson of austin, texas, as a kind of national pointer to this nation of things that other people do not want to have the matter with them, could hardly be excelled. i am using mr. burleson gratefully for a few moments as an example of three things of personal importance to all amateurs interested in the technique of self-criticism. st. what mr. burleson could get out of criticizing himself. nd. what mr. burleson could get out of letting other people criticize him. rd. how he could get it. technique and illustration. xvi the autobiography of a letter if the autobiography of a letter trying to work its way through from philadelphia to northampton, massachusetts, could be written down--if all the details of just what happened to it slumped into corners on platforms--what happened to it in slides, in slots and pigeon-holes, in mail bags on noisy city sidewalks, in freight cars on awful silent sidings in the night, in depots, in junctions--if all the long story of this one letter could be written like the lord's prayer on a thumb nail and could be put in that little hole of information stamped on the envelope--what is it that the little autobiography of the letter would do to albert sidney burleson? the autobiography of one letter put with millions of others like it every day, put with flocks of letters from along the ohio, from along the mississippi, from the grand canyon, the tombigbee and the maumee, waving their autobiographies across a nation from maine to california, would point to albert sidney burleson and with one great single wave of unanimity all in a day, would put him out of his office in washington by ten-thirty a.m., start him off from the station by his own rural parcel post to austin, texas, before night. i say by rural parcel post because he would probably arrive there quicker than if he were sent like a mere letter. why is it that if one were trying to think up some way in these present quarrelsome days, of making a hundred million people all cheerful all in a minute, all sweet and harmonious together, the most touching, the most national thing the hundred million people could be asked to do would be to take up gently but firmly and replace carefully in austin, texas, the most splendidly mislaid man, at the moment anyway, this country can produce. because mr. burleson is the kind of man who believes what he wants to believe and who keeps fooled about himself. an entirely worthy man who had certain worthy parlor store ideas about how money could be saved in business, made up his mind that if he was placed by the people at the head of the people's post office, he would save their money for the people instead of running their post office for them. this is all that has happened. this was mr. burleson's preconception of what he was for and what a post office was for and not a hundred million people could pry him out of it. mr. burleson ran his post office to suit himself and his own boast for himself, and the people naturally in being suited with their post office had to take anything that was left over that they could get after mr. burleson was suited with it. mr. burleson has had a certain hustling automatic thoughtless conception of albert sidney burleson and what he is like and what he can do, and so far as anyone can see he has not spent three minutes in seven years in thinking what other people's conceptions of him are. i am as much in favor as any one of saving money in a post office. but i want my letters delivered, and i feel that most people in america would agree with me that the main thing we want from a post office is to have it, please, deliver our letters for us. if the manuscript of this article, which is sure to be rushed at the last minute and which should plan to leave new york for philadelphia wednesday night and be (with a special delivery stamp on it) in philadelphia in the compositor's hands on thursday morning--should take as has happened before, from one and a half days to two days or three days (with its special ten cents on it to hurry it) to get there, what would any one suppose i would do? of course i could ask to have the article back a week and put in another column on mr. burleson. but i am not going to. mr. burleson and the readers of the _post_ are both going to get out of that extra column. i am going to do what i have done over and over before. instead of mailing as one would suppose this manuscript at nine o'clock wednesday evening and having it in the compositor's hands the next morning with eight cents for postage and ten cents for special delivery, i am going to go down to the pennsylvania station in the afternoon at six o'clock, with my eighteen-cent letter in my hand, buy a three dollar ticket to philadelphia for it, hire a seat in the pullman for it, hire a seat in the dining-car for it, put it up at the bellevue-stratford for the night and then go out and lay it on the editor's desk myself in the morning, see it in his hand myself and get a receipt from his eye. then i am going to pay my letter's bill at the bellevue-stratford, buy a three dollar ticket to new york and a place in the pullman for myself, g. s. l. on return, as the human envelope mr. burleson has required me to be, ship myself back to new york as the empty, as the container this article came in, and one more intimate painful twelve dollars and thirty-seven cents worth of an eighteen-cent experience with albert sidney burleson will be over. last time i did this i was early for my train at the pennsylvania station and walked out at the eighth avenue end, looked up wistfully at mr. burleson's new greek palace he puts up in when he comes to new york and i came with deep feeling upon the following beautiful emotion mr. burleson has about himself--four or five hundred feet of it, in letters four feet high all across the top. neither snow nor rain nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. of course i realized in a minute that this was said by herodotus, or homer or somebody, and was intended as a courteous reference probably to camels and not as would be supposed to burleson and his forty thousand mighty locomotives hurrying his orders up and down three thousand miles of sunsets across the land. but i must say that what herodotus claimed for the camels when i read it as i did that day in huge marble letters four feet high from thirtieth to thirty-second street, seemed just a little boastful for mr. burleson as i stood there and gazed at it holding tight my letter in my hand i was spending twenty-four hours and twelve dollars to keep him from mailing for me. xvii the man fifty-three thousand post offices failed on there is one thing i find when i am writing in a national magazine, trying to express myself on an idea i would like to believe but do not want to be fooled about, to four or five million people. i can not help feeling that out of all these four or five million people, at the very least anyway there really must be three million and five hundred thousand who are being very much less fooled about me and about my idea than i am. every day as i sit down to write one more chapter i try to catch up to them. of course anybody can see i am not equal to it, but it does give one a chance, and it gives the book a chance before i am through, to have some sense in it. i cannot help thinking what albert sidney burleson, who has a hundred million people to choose from, who has millions of people who are less fooled about him than he is, to catch up to every day, after all these seven long years they have put on him, ought to amount to. and what his post office ought to amount to. of course we are all human and know how it is, in a way. we know that the first thought that would come to mr. burleson as to any man when he finds he is being criticized--that people in fifty-three thousand post offices are criticizing him and acting with him as if he were fooled about himself, is the automatic thought of self-defense. the second thought, which is what one would hope for from a general, even a postmaster general, is that one resents it in oneself, that in an important opening for a man like being called foolish, one stops all one's thinking-works, and slumps ingloriously, automatically and without a quaver into self-defense. one would think a man who could get to be a postmaster general would have the presence of mind when he says "ouch!" to a nation that steps on his toes, to fix his face quick, smile and say, "thank you! thank you! i will see what there is in this!" why should a man when god is blessing him as he does mr. burleson, even out of the mouths of his enemies, butt in in the way he does and interrupt truths with enough juice in them to make one burleson, even one burleson into twenty great men before a nation's eyes? a whole cabinet--at least a whole democratic cabinet--could have been made time and time again out of the great-man-juice, the truth-pepsin great men are made out of, this country has wasted on burleson in the past seven years. xviii causes of being fooled about oneself i would like to give a diagnosis of this quite common disease, touch on the causes and see how they can be removed. there seem to be, speaking roughly and as far as my own observation of psychology goes, six main ways in which the average man is fooled about himself and needs to change his mind about himself. he is possessed with loco-mindedness or spotty-mindedness, sees things as they look to one kind or group of people--sees things in spotlights of personality, of place or time--all the rest black. or he suffers from what one might call lost-mindedness--is always getting lost in anything he does, somewhere between the end and the means. he either loses the means in contemplating with unholy contemplation the end, like an idealist, or he loses the end in contemplating the means. the habit of flat-thinking--of not thinking things out in four dimensions. the habit of evaporated thinking. if i were to generalize in what i have to say about men who are fooled by themselves instead of rounding my idea out with some particular man everybody knows, like mr. burleson for instance, it would be evaporated thinking. the habit of not having any habits--leaving out standardized elements in things and not being machine-minded enough. automatism, or machine-mindedness. these six forms of being fooled by oneself all boil down in the end--in their final cause, i suspect to the last one, to automatism or lack of conscious control of the mind. xix loco-mindedness loco-mindedness in a post office consists in mr. burleson's running the post office for one kind of people--the kind of people he has noticed. there are supposed to be various kinds of people who use a post office. there are the people who write hundreds of letters a day--letters that are being waited for accurately and by a particular mail--like telegrams. there are people who sit down with a pen and a piece of paper, stick out their tongues and chewing on one end of the pen, and slaving away and sweating ink on the other, scrooge out a letter once in three weeks that they have put off six months. i have no grudge against these people, but it seems to me that running a post office exclusively for them as mr. burleson does, is a mistake. even if they constitute ninety-eight per cent of the people, they only mail one-tenth of one per cent of the letters. they may not care whether or not their letters arrive as a matter of course, the way they used to in our post office until a little while ago, as accurately as telegrams in their first mail in the morning, but probably they would not feel hurt if they did. but millions of people in business who write scores or hundreds of letters a day, who find themselves being put off with a post office that is run apparently for people who write two letters a month, are hurt. in northampton, massachusetts, the letter from new york one used to receive at breakfast, hangs around a junction somewhere now, waits for a letter three hundred miles away--a letter from pittsburgh to catch up to it, and they both come together sweetly and with mr. burleson's smile on after luncheon at half past two in the afternoon. i do not deny that from the narrower business point of view of running a post office the way some women would run--or rather used to run a parlor store--with a bell on the door, there is something to be said for mr. burleson's philosophy. nor do i deny that a store can be run and run successfully and rightly on how much of its customer's money it can save on each purchase. but the point is that if i go into a store in northampton and cannot get the things i want there i go into some other store. i cannot go out from our post office in northampton and go over and get what i want at some other post office a little further down the street. when i and people in fifty-three thousand post offices, say aouch! mr. burleson says pooh! business correspondence between washington and new york which used to be a twenty-four hour affair is now half a week. letters thousands of men in new york used to receive in their offices in the early morning before interviews began and when they had time to read letters and to jot an answer to them at the foot of the page, are not received and placed before them for their answers until the late morning or early afternoon when they have other things to do and cannot even read them. so one's letters wait over a day--a night and a day, or until one gets back from chicago. why is it mr. burleson takes millions of dollars' worth a day out of the convenience, out of the profit and out of the efficiency of business in america and then with a huge national swoop of compliment to himself points out to people how he has saved them fifty cents? why is it that mr. burleson charges us a thousand dollars apiece, in our own private business, to save us fifty cents apiece in public? who asked him to? it is true that there are people in america who really prefer to do business at a puttering kind of a store no matter how much time it costs them. they take naturally to a cash and carry store or to a store that lovingly saves one forty cents' worth of money by taking four dollars' worth of one's time. it is probably true that some people want a cash and carry freight-car post office and want mr. burleson to save their money for them. millions of people would make more money by not having their post office save money for them. mr. burleson insists his business is to save people's money for them whether they can afford to have him save it or not. the first cause of mr. burleson's being fooled about himself is that he is spotty-minded about people, the fact that he has been running the post office with reference to one special slow canal-minded kind of america. his mind is jet black about all the rest. perhaps mr. burleson is not the only one of us in america who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people. xx flat-thinking thinking in me-flat what nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions. the thickness is what i think. the breadth is what other people think. the length is what god thinks. then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when i have taken what i think, and what i think other people think, and what i think god thinks, and put them together as well as i can, the result is--who i am and what i amount to. most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "i think" dimension, stop on the way to god in the "i think" thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "they think" breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to god at all. the trouble with the post office has been that mr. burleson likes to think in the first or "i think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to god. probably it would be unfair to say that the post office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of mr. burleson's being the hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the post office some in its present second-rate business idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped--if mr. burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand post offices think. there have been days--with my half-past two letters when if i had roger babson's gift for being graphic i would have charted mr. burleson's post office like this: [illustration: |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| |-----| |-----| u.s. me the p.o. people] xxi lost-mindedness or losing the end in the means i have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means. to avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing i am illustrating my idea once more from mr. burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, mr. burleson makes us see so many things together. i wish something could be done to get our postmaster general to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it. it does not seem to me that mr. burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means. every now and then when i take one up and hold it in my hand, i look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. it has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country--like a flag or a symbol. a two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous magna charta of the rights of the people. as an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-scraper as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the united states is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. three miles or three thousand miles for two cents. in physical things it is true that america because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in seattle for being three thousand miles from new york, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. the country pays for it for him. america tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to washington as rock creek park and as near to new york as yonkers. the two-cent stamp is the magna charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when albert sidney burleson, of austin, texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together--with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in new york or in philadelphia, washington and chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, mr. burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget. why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the _literary digest_ be fined for it? why fine the readers of the _review of reviews_ or _collier's_ or _scribner's_ for living in one place rather than another? i like to think of it saturday night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the _youth's companion_. every man is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it. a man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul--what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell--that his soul has got to live with a seattle lid on, or a boston lid on. as a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in america as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation. there is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all classes and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation--some place where three million people act as one. it is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it. and now mr. albert sidney burleson, of austin, texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like the _saturday evening post_, like _collier's_--dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every saturday night, and tells them to go home and read the _hampshire county gazette_. it is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the end in the means, i have to mention it--not in behalf of mr. burleson, but in behalf of all of us. xxii i had not intended to illustrate my idea of amateur technique in self-criticism quite so much with mr. burleson, especially as i stand for a bi-partisan point of view. i wish there were some way of dealing with mr. burleson as a republican for fifteen minutes and then as a democrat for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as i am, in what might be called a nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, i only hope my democratic friends will give me credit for making use of mr. burleson not as a democrat (it is just their luck that he's a democrat), but as a specimen human being i am trying to get hundreds of thousands of republicans that are just like him, not to be like any longer. i have only used our postmaster general in this rather personal fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he constitutes, in plain sight a kind of national common denominator of the sins of all of us. we are all concerned. we all want to know. it is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the reason mr. burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people so through fifty-three thousand post offices day after day, all day, and night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself. but why? what are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? when we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do? xxiii self-discipline by proxy my own experience is that my own faults really impress me most when i see them in other people. i cannot help feeling hopefully that out of the five or six million people who are supposed to read a national magazine, there may be a few scattered hundred thousands who will catch themselves suspecting they may have moments of being like me in this. self-discipline sets in, as far as i can make out, in most of us in a rather weak and watery way--that is: we usually begin with seeing how unbecoming other people make our faults look. then we begin disciplining our faults in other people, get our first faint moral glow, and then before we know it, having once got started chasing up our faults in other people we get so interested in them we cannot even leave them alone in ourselves. disciplining other people in itself as an object almost never does any good. mr. burleson is not going to get anything much out of this article, but i am the better man for it, and there are others, a million or so perhaps, who are helping me chase up our faults in him, who will chase them back to their own homes from the post office. there are few of us who do not have, certain people, certain times, and certain subjects, with which we can be trusted to be unerringly fooled about ourselves. and when we consider how albert sidney burleson has missed his chance, when we consider what he could have got out of fifty-three thousand wistful silenced post offices in the way of pointers in not being fooled about himself, we cannot but take mr. burleson very gravely and a little personally. we cannot but be grateful to mr. burleson in our better business moments as america's best, most satisfactory, most complete exhibit of what is the matter with american business. i leave with the reader the thought, that probably the majority of men who have been watching mr. burleson for seven years wasting fifty-three thousand post offices, and all the fifty-three thousand post offices could do for him to make a successful man out of him, will go down to their offices next monday morning, and instead of worming criticism out of everybody in sight, instead of using their business and everybody who approaches them in the business to produce goods, will use the business to produce the impression that they are perfect and that nobody can tell them anything--will just sit there all glazed over with complacency cemented down into their self-defending minds, imperious, impervious, as hard to give good advice to, as hard to make a dent in as beautiful shining porcelain-lined bathtubs. * * * * * it would be only fair and would save a good deal of time in business for some of us who like to try new ideas, if there were some way of telling these men--if some warning could be given to us not to bother with them--if these men with brilliantly non-porous minds, could be fitted up so that one could tell them at sight--by their heads looking the way they are--by their being bald--by their having brilliantly non-porous heads--just nice perfectly plain shiny knobs of not-thinking. one could tell them across a room. but the man with the most refreshingly eager mind toward new ideas, i know, the mind the most brilliantly open--which fairly glistens inside with eagerness, glistens outside, too. the only thing there is to go by, in telling a man with a non-porous mind, is to try gently--changing it, and see what happens. xxiv machine-mindedness the various forms i have mentioned of the malady of being fooled by oneself, all practically boil down to one in the end--one cause which we have to recognize and avoid--automatism, the lack of conscious control of the mind--letting oneself be rolled under the little wheels in one's head. the main central cause operating with people when they are being fooled about themselves, is machine-mindedness. a man's body being a great storehouse of psycho-mechanical processes and habits makes his mind react automatically, and when some one calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody how perfect he is. everybody knows how it is. xxv new brain tracks in business speaking roughly, there are two kinds of men who are markedly successful in business--the men who give people what they want, and the men who make people want things they have thought they did not want before. moving pictures, watermelons, pianolas, telephones, forks, flying machines and locomotives, appendicitis, christianity and chewing gum, umbrellas and even babies--have all been brought to pass by convincing other human beings that they do not know what they want, by a process which is essentially courting, that is: by a combination of fighting and affection which arrests, holds and enthralls people into adding new selves to themselves. i confess to a certain partiality for men who get rich by making people different because i am an evolutionist and the chances are that anything you do to most people that makes them different, improves them. but comparisons are irrelevant and i am not willing to back down from my good opinion of american human nature in business and admit that men who prosper by making people want telephones, or things they have not wanted, are the business superiors of men who prosper by just piling up on people more and more and better--things they want already. the superior business man is the man who has a superior knowledge of himself, who searches out and uses the gift he is born with in himself and who gets other people to use theirs. because it happens that i am an inventor, or what is called an artist, and because though i cannot remember, without the slightest doubt, i began, to advertise that i was here, or about to be here, before i was born, and because i would be bored to death handing out to people things i know they want, or presenting to people truths they merely believe already, it would be shallow for me to say that the men in american business who do not make people want things, and who just heap up on them what they want, are not successful men, are not equally important, equally essential to the state and are not doing for themselves and others just what the country, if it was a wise country and was around asking people to do things, would ask them to do. on the other hand, i believe that in the present new tragic economic crisis with which all kinds of business men, whatever they are like, are being brought sharply face to face at a time when new brain tracks in business are especially called for--a time when practically millions of people have got to have them and use them whether they want to or not, i have thought it would be to the point to consider in the chapters that follow, what new brain tracks are like, how they work, and what people who have been accustomed not to have new brain tracks or to find them awkward, can do to get them and to make them work. book iii technique for a nation's getting its way i big in little a nation, in order to be a safe nation for itself, or safe for other nations in this world, must have a technique for getting and for getting a world to want it to get--its own way. i am interested in a technique for a nation's getting its way and deserving to get its way because i want to get mine, and because being human and having quite a good deal of human nature taken out of the same stuff--out of the same mixed hot and cold ingredients as other people's, i have quite naturally come to think that what works for me, if i cut down to the quick and am honest with myself, in getting what i want, will probably, with proper shadings, of course, work for anybody. i have thought i would see if i could not work out in this book, a technique which could be used modestly by one man, tried out in miniature as it were--a technique for getting and deserving to get one's own way. i pick out one man, to try out the principle on, because it is safer and fairer to try out a principle other people are supposed to be asked to risk, on one man first. because i happen to know him better than i know anybody else, and because my experience is, he will stand more from me than anybody else, i have picked out myself. when the technique has been tried out on one man the people who know him will believe it and try it. then we will try it on one hundred men one after the other. then as i have been working it out in this book, try it on the body-politic, the soul and body of a nation, try it on a hundred million people. then with a technique for having a body and for not being fooled by ourselves and having some substance in what we say and what we do, we would have the spectacle of a hundred million people making themselves felt in political conventions, making themselves felt in the white house and even being noticed perhaps in time at the other end of pennsylvania avenue by the great i am, or i can't, or i won't tucked under the come of all of us--called the united states senate. ii conscious control of brain tracks my experience is that the first thing for me to attend to and know, in getting people to let me have my way, is to know when and how to discover and open up in people new brain tracks and when and how to make my main dependence on their old ones. getting what one wants from people turns on seeing the situation--the brain track situation in one's own mind at a particular time, and in other people's, as it really is. in other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know and extend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness in one's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soon makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds of others. i do not precisely know this, of course, because i have never practiced having my own way with other people as much as i would like, but my theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in speaking for all of us to believe this: the way for a man to do who wants to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself than others. then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him to, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it. a man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. the indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new brain tracks and old ones together--is the secret of getting one's way for all of us, whether with nature or with one another. of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other people and with ourselves. this part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most of us--what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what people can do to get them. iii what is called thinking the one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that nobody wants them. the way people really act--even the best of us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is as if they had no place to put them. the plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are rather appalling. they first appear when one begins to observe closely what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us. in making as i have tried to make during the last six months, a few special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what i call my mind, i have come to feel that any man who will try several hours each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about man as a rational being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago. the first fact is this: nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of ears--one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves and really do their living with. i first came on them--on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a young man in speaking to audiences. in the vague helpless way a young lecturer has, i studied as well as i could what seemed to me to be happening to my audiences--what they seemed to be doing to themselves, but it was a good many years before i really woke up to what they were doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me. i would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their outside ones up at me kindly as if i cared, or as if i doted on them--on outside ears, on ears of any kind if i could get them and i would feel hurt but i did not wake up to what it meant. as i remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that i never seemed to want to speak if i could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a woman's club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age. the trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. in any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. when the women go under the men emerge. the same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. fewer passages are wasted. middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else. i do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse--the psychological clang of it--than what they do do. it would merely look worse. the facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. and they all keep thinking they are listening, too. one almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall. what is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still more true of words in books. if i could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding what i have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think. (for every time i say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read "we.") if there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines--printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights--if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so. if the type in the pages in this book dealing with mr. burleson could be more responsive, could act the way mr. burleson's mind does when he reads it--that is if i could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what mr. burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls--even mr. burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it. if in mr. burleson's own personal copy of this book, i were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon--especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all--printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them--so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than i or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not. iv living down cellar in one's own mind what i saw a little three-year-old girl the other day doing with her dolly--dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding on to it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man's body can be seen almost any day, doing to his mind. one feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a few million more men have made similar practical observations in the psychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what our civilization is bringing us to--what it really is that almost any man one knows, including the man of marked education--take him off his guard almost any minute--is letting his body do to his mind. a very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. you say a thing to a man that calls up record no. and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. he just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body. with the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. the tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (probably this is why saint paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member--because of its roots.) the main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. the body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose--all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped. i saw some wooden flowers in a florist's window on the avenue the other day--four or five big blossoms six inches across--real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in south america--real flowers that had chemically turned to wood--(probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!)--and i stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. then i turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and i could not help seeing, of course, no one can--what their bodies--thousands of them--were apparently doing to their souls. after all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people--many of them--were for people. from the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them. left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one's soul in with some portland cement and making one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one--just as they are. unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritual experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever. there is ground for belief (and this is what i am trying to have a plan to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. what we really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. he is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him. the soul--the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said. what a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. the very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. the spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear. of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years--say for twenty or thirty years--the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people--even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. one has no new way of being fond of them. one looks for nothing one has not had before. they go about--even the most elegant of them--thinking with their stomachs. thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven--as if they had just been caught passing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below. v being helped up the cellar stairs most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people. we realize--whatever our personal habits may be that the great mass of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs. the question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it--the question of how other people--a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation--these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that i would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it. the men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoördinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. the man i know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is p. mathias alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in london, for people in the way of reëducating and recoördinating their bodies. i took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by professor james harvey robinson in the _atlantic_, mr. alexander's quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by professor john dewey, of columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world. i am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of mathias alexander. it is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as i cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, i am going to touch for a moment on the principle alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation. what mr. alexander does with people i have already hinted at in what i have said about our having a new profession in america--the profession of being a lawyer backward. of course mr. alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do. he makes it his business to change people's minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing i have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics--to a single first relation in which a man's mind needs to be changed--the relation of a man's mind to his body. if a man's mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. the first thing a man's mind should be changed about usually is his body. this is the principle upon which mathias alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in london, proceeds. when you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in alexander's office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room--whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. then he takes you in his hands--his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins--quite literally begins reshaping you like phidias. you begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably. then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you--just as phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, x-rays down through you with a look--through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet. then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to butt in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas--ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. in other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. as it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, alexander's first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind--your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. what he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. so he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty--a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind--and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before. this goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else--like somebody else that has been lent to you to be--somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life. incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before--even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. he has changed your mind about your body. you are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you. it is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. it is a putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness--as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself. i have been reading over this chapter and all i can say to my readers is, as a substitute for leaving it out, that i hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. i like to think when i am going on from chapter to chapter in a book--i like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are. the principles underlying what mr. alexander does with new brain tracks and what i am trying to do can be discussed in this book. the facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits. vi reflections on the stairs it is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over. (these figures or rather points of the compass may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. you have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well. what seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be--if anybody is--the most intimately acquainted. one keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people's inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often--even the most important of them have been mislaid--a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea. the sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full--in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones. all kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes--all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been assigned to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day. a man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled from the sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top of him which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about the immortality of the soul, or the league of nations. reforms and reformers which overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some of us a little superficial. of course the moral of all this is--as regards changing society or persuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. stop flourishing around with fine and noble philosophies and phrases on the surface of men's souls. see that their souls and their bodies are both intricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them both together. if you are arguing with a man and do not make much headway, stop arguing with him. cut out his tonsils. or it may be something else. or send him to alexander and have his back ironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are. then argue with him afterwards and quote shakespeare and the bible to him, stroke his soul and see how it works. vii helping other people up the cellar stairs it is getting almost dangerous to talk to me. i lay violent hands on people, when they disagree with me and send them to alexander. everybody, anybody, my wife, my pastor, every now and then an editor, whole shoals of publishers.... i think what it would be like for us all, to ship the united states senate in a body to him. on every side it keeps coming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install my idea, to get my idea started and to install my idea of new brain tracks, new ways for this nation to get its way and deserve its way, is to have people the minute they don't agree with me, alexandered, at once. here is this book for instance. the proper course for me to take to get a man to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of the book to say yes or no to. then if he does not agree with me and i am tempted to argue with him, i will drop the matter with him at once, send him to alexander, have alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mind from his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so that he can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism--that is, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of setting his stomach on it, and then i will ask him to read my book again. in the meantime, of course, i should be going to alexander and rewriting the book. by the time the gentleman was cured i would have a cured book to send him, we would both be in a position to believe what we don't want to believe, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in a position to do team work together at once and take steps to install new brain tracks for nations immediately. this brings me to the two horns of my dilemma. in installing new brain tracks for nations it is not practicable for me to take up people who disagree with me--say a hundred million people or so and ship them to alexander in london and have them done over by alexander. what is the best possible substitute arrangement that can be made for having a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape by alexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly? the principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodies which mr. alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the same principles which i have been trying for a long time to express and apply to ideas and to all phases of the personal and the national life. where i have been studying for years as an artist, the art of changing my own mind and other people's about ideas, of working out new spiritual experiences for myself and other people, alexander in his workroom in london has been engaged in changing people's minds toward their bodies, in giving men new brain tracks toward their own bodies. it is obvious that these principles--alexander's principles for installing new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritual ones, must be if they are fundamental or are worth anything, the same. my own feeling is that if anybody can go to alexander and can be done over by alexander personally in london that is the best thing to do. but it is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into alexander's office in london, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for a hundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. before giving the principles, i would like to state the question--what are the steps we all can use--those of us who are not alexander--to install new brain tracks in this nation? the principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for this nation should be installed and which i would like to deal with are these: first. get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them. second. get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. people go to alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book. third. pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in. the fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them. viii helping a nation up the cellar stairs the air line league is a national organization of millions of american men and women belonging to all classes and all social and industrial groups, who become members of the league for the express purpose of asking people to help to keep them, in their personal and industrial relations, from being off on their facts, from being fooled by their subconscious and automatic selves. unless one is practically asked, it is not an agreeable experience telling a man how he looks, handing over to him the conveniences for his being objective, for his being temporarily somebody else toward himself, and yet if one can persuade any one to do it, it is probably the most timely and most priceless service rendered in the right spirit, any one man or group of men can ever render another. the best way to secure the right people for this service is to ask them. the people who do not need to be asked and who would be only too cheerful to do it, who are lying awake nights to do it to us whether we want them to or not, are not apt to do it in a practical way. the best way to ask the best people is to place oneself in a position, as in joining the air line league, where people will feel asked without any one's saying anything about it. this is the first principle we propose to follow in the league. by the act of joining the league, by the bare fact that we are in it, we announce that we are askers, and listeners, that as individuals, and as members of a class, or of our capital groups or our labor groups, we are as a matter of course open and more than open to facts--facts from any quarter we can get them which will help to keep us in what we are doing from being fooled about ourselves. having agreed to our principle, whether as individuals or groups, of being unfooled about our subconscious and automatic selves, who are the best people in a nation constituted like ours, to unfool us the most quickly, to get our attention the most poignantly, and with the least trouble to us and to themselves? ix technique for labor in getting its way the best people to advertise a truth are the people the truth looks prominent on--the people from whom nobody expects it. in my subconscious or automatic self the decision has apparently been made and handed up to me, that there are certain books, i do not need to read. my attention has never been really got as yet, to the importance of my reading one of harold bell wright's novels. but if i heard to-morrow morning that henry cabot lodge and president wilson during the last few peaceful months had both read through harold bell wright's last novel, i would read it before i went to bed. or judge gary and mr. gompers. any common experience which i heard in the last few weeks judge gary and mr. gompers had had, a novel by harold bell wright or anything--i would look into, a whole nation would look into it--the moment they heard of it--at once. the first thing to do in making a start for new brain tracks for america is to pick out persons and brain tracks that set each other off. even an idea nobody would care about one way or the other becomes suddenly and nationally interesting to us when we find people we would not think would believe it, are believing it hard and trying to get us to believe it. suppose for instance that next fourth of july (i pick out this day for what i want to have happen because i have so longed for years to have something strong and sincere said or done on it that would really celebrate it)--suppose for instance that next fourth of july, beginning early in the morning all the labor leaders of america from maine to california, acting as one man broke away--just took one day off, from doing the old humdrum advertising everybody expects from them--suppose they proceeded to do something that would attract attention--something that would interest their friends and disappoint their enemies--just for twenty-four hours? suppose just for one day all the labor leaders instead of going about advertising to themselves and to everybody the bad employers and how bad employers are in this country would devote the fourth of july to advertising a few good ones? then suppose they follow it up--that labor do something with initiative in it--the initiative its enemies say it cannot have, something unexpected and original, true and sensationally fair, something that would make a nation look and that a hundred million people would never forget? what does any one suppose would happen or begin to happen in this country, if labor; after the next fourth of july, started a new national crusade for four weeks--if the fifty best laborers in the endicott johnson mills where they have not had a strike for thirty years should go in a body one after the other to a list of bolshevist factories, factories that have ultra-reactionary employers, and conduct an agitation of telling what happens to them in their endicott johnson mills, an agitation of telling them what some employers can be like and are like and how it works until the bolshevist workmen they come to see are driven by sheer force of facts into being non-bolshevist workmen, and their bolshevist or their reactionary employers are driven by sheer force of facts into being endicott johnsons, or into hiring men to put in front of themselves, who will be endicott johnsons for them. all that is necessary to start a new brain track in industrial agitation in america to-day is some simultaneous concerted original human act of labor or capital, some act of believing in somebody, or showing that either of them--either capital or labor--is thinking of somebody, believing in somebody, and expecting something good of somebody besides themselves. millions of individual employers and individual laborers about have these more shrewd, these more competent practicable and discriminating beliefs about employers and employees as fellow human beings, and all we need to do to start a new national brain track is to arrange some signal generous conclusive arresting massive move together to show it. this is the kind of work the air line league proposes on a national scale like the red cross to arrange for and do. the common denominator of democracy in industry is the human being, the fellow human being--employer or employee. the best, most practicable way to make it unnecessary for america in shame and weakness to keep on deporting bolshevists, is to arrange a national advertisement, a parade or national procession as it were in this country soon, of team work in industry and of how--to anybody who knows the facts--it carries everything before it. the best possible national parade or pageant would be up and down through ten thousand cities to expose every laborer to long rows of employers who stand up for workmen, expose every employer to long rows of workingmen from all over the country who stand up for employers. of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence. the best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as i have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other's shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows. x technique for capital in getting its way i should hate to see capital, in the form of a national manufacturers' association, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to god. i would rather see a confession of the sins of capital toward labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by capital in person to labor. god will get it anyway--the confession--and it will mean ten times as much to him and to everybody if he overhears it being given to labor. of course labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from labor to capital to the effect that labor admits that labor like the trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it--of the bully and the liar. not only the capital group but the public group feel that a confession from labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired. but the practical question that faces us is--supposing that what is wanted next by all, is a confession from labor, what is the practical way from now on, to get labor to confess? some supposing might be done a minute. suppose i have a very quick temper and five sons and suppose the oldest one has my temper and is making it catching to the other sons, what would any ordinary observer say is the practical course for the poor wicked old father to take with the boy's temper of which he has made the boy a present? my feeling is when my boy loses his temper with me at dinner for instance in the presence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a bible feebly out at him and saying to him, "he that keepeth his temper is greater than he that taketh a city," would be rude. the way for me to give him good advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he is losing his, and keep mine. if capital wants to get its way with labor--and thinks that the way to begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has happened, is with a vast national spectacle of labor confessing its sins, the most practical thing to do is for capital to give labor an illustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works. the capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place, extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them. labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific thing that capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with the scarcity of money and jobs. it seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for capital to try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off and confessing its sins to god. labor will slink off and confess its sins to god, too. that will be the end of it. it may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing our sins to god, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the eye and confessing our sins to one another. i am not saying this because i am a moral person. i am not whining at thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to them and telling them that this is what they ought to do. i am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be practical and serious, and really get their way with other people they are going to begin by being imperfect, by talking and acting with labor, like fellow-imperfect human beings. in the new business world that began the other day--the day of our last shot at the germans, the only way a man is going to long get his way is to be more human than other people, have a genius for being human in business, for being human quick and human to the point where others have talent. xi philandering and alexandering by philandering i mean fooling oneself with self-love. by alexandering i mean going to one's alexander whoever he or she or it is, some one person--or some one thing, which either by natural gift or by natural position is qualified to help one to be extremely disagreeable to oneself--and ask to be done over--now one subject and now another. nearly all men admit--or at least they like to say when they are properly approached, or when they make the approach themselves, that they make mistakes and that they are poor miserable sinners. everybody is. they rather revel in it, some of them, in being in a nice safe way, miserable sinners. the trouble comes in ever going into the particulars with them, in finding any particular time and place one can edge in in which they are not perfect. this fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks--another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way. there are various alexandering stages in the technique of not being fooled by oneself. self-criticism. asking others to help--one's nearest alexander. self-confession to oneself. self-discipline. asking others to help. the way to keep from philandering with one's own self-love or with one's own group or party--is to look over the entire field--the way one would on other subjects than being fooled by one's own side, strip down to the bare facts about oneself and facts about others for one's vision of action and fit them together and act. in getting one's way quickly, thoroughly, personally--_i.e._, so that other people will feel one deserves it and will practically hand it over to one, and want one to have it, the best technique seems to be not only to utilize self-criticism or self-confession, as a part of getting one's way, but self-confession screwed up a little tighter--screwed up into self-confession to others. i need not say that i am not throwing this idea out right and left to employers with any hopeful notion that it will be generally acted on offhand. it is merely thrown out for employers who want to get their way with their employees--get team work and increased production out of their employees before their rivals do. it is only for employers who want their own way a great deal--men who are in the habit of feeling masterful and self-masterful in getting their own way--who are shrewd enough, sincere enough to take a short-cut to it, and get it quick. xii the factory that lay awake all night there is a man at the head of a factory not a thousand miles away, i wish thirty thousand banks and a hundred million people knew, as i know him--and as god and his workmen know him. some thirty years ago his father, who was the president of the firm, failed in health, lost his mind slowly and failed in business. the factory went into the hands of a receiver, the family moved from the big house to a little one--one in a row of a mile of little ones down a side street, and the sixteen year old son, who had expected to inherit the business stopped going to school, bought a tin dinner pail and walked back and forth with the tin dinner pail with the other boys in the street he lived in, and became a day laborer in the business he was brought up to own. in not very many years he worked his way up past four hundred men, earned and took the right to be the president of the business he had expected to have presented to him. eight or ten years ago he began to have strikes. his strikes seemed uglier than other people's and singularly hopeless--always with something in them--a kind of secret obstinate something in them, he kept trying in vain to make out. one day when the worst strike of all was just on--or scheduled to come on in two days, as he looked up from his desk about five o'clock and saw four hundred muttering men filing out past his windows, he called in jim--into his office. jim was a foreman--his most intimate friend as a boy when he was sixteen years old. he had lived in the house next door to jim's and every morning for years they had got out of bed and walked sleepily with their tin dinner pails, to the mill together talking of the heavens and the earth and of what they were going to do when they were men. the president had some rather wild and supercilious conversation with jim, about the new strike on in two days and it ended in jim's dismissing the president from the interview and slamming himself out of the door, only to open it again and stick his head in and say, "the trouble with you, al, is you've forgotten you ever carried a dinner pail." the president lay awake that night, came to the works the next morning, called the four hundred men together, asked the other officers to stay away, shut himself up in the room with the four hundred men and told them with a deep feeling, no man present could even mistake or ever forget, what jim had said to him about himself--that he had forgotten how he felt when he carried a dinner pail, told them that he had lain awake all night thinking that jim was right, that he wanted to know all the things he had forgotten, that they would be of more use to him and perhaps more use than anything in the world and that if they would be so good as to tell him what the things were that he had forgotten--so good as to get up in that room where they were all alone together and tell him what was the matter with him, he would never forget it as long as he lived. he wanted to see what he could do in the factory from now on to get back all that sixteen-year-old boy with the dinner pail knew, have the use of it in the factory every day from now on to earn and to keep the confidence the sixteen-year-old boy had, and run the factory with it. jim got up and made a few more remarks without any door-slamming. fifteen or twenty more men followed with details. this was the first meeting that pulled the factory together. in those that followed the president and the men together got at the facts together and worked out the spirit and principles and applied them to details. the meetings were held on company time--at first every few days, then every week, and now quite frequently when some new special application comes up. nine out of ten of the difficulties disappeared when the new spirit of team work and mutual candor was established and everybody saw how it worked. no one could conceive now of getting a strike in edgewise to the factory that listened to jim. i am not unaccustomed to going about factories with presidents and it is often a rather stilted and lonely performance. but when i first went through this factory with the president that listened to jim, stood by benches, talked with him and his men together, felt and saw the unconscious natural and human way conversations were conducted between them, saw ten dollars a day and a hundred dollars a day talking and laughing together and believing and working together, it did not leave very much doubt in my mind as to what the essential qualities are that business men to-day--employers and workingmen--are going to have and have to have to make them successful in producing goods, in leading their rivals in business and in getting their way with one another. naturally as a matter of convenience and a short cut for all of us, i would like to see capital take what is supposed to be its initiative--be the side that leads off and makes the start in the self-discipline, self-confession and conscious control of its own class, which it thinks labor ought to. whichever side in our present desperate crisis attains self-discipline and the full power in sight of the people not to be fooled about itself first, will win the leadership first, and win the loyalty and gratitude and partiality and enthusiasm of the american people for a hundred years. * * * * * the first thing for a man to do to get his way with another man--install a new brain track with him that they can use together, is to surprise the man by picking out for him and doing to him the one thing that he knows that you of all others would be the last man to do. it looks as if the second thing to do is to surprise the man into doing something himself that he knew that he himself anyway of all people in the world, is the last man to do. first you surprise him with you. then with himself. after this of course with new people to do things, both on the premises, the habit soon sets in of starting with people all manner of things that everybody knew--who knew anything--knew the people could not do. this is what the president of the factory not a thousand miles away accomplished all in twenty-four hours by not being fooled about himself. he took a short cut to getting what he wanted to get with his employees, which if ten thousand other employers could hear of and could take to-morrow would make several million american wage earners feel they were in a new world before night. * * * * * the thing that seemed to me the most significant and that i liked best about the president of the company who listened to jim, was the discovery i made in a few minutes, when i met him, that unlike henry ford, whom i met for the first time the same week, he was not a genius. he was a man with a hundred thousand duplicates in america. any one of a hundred thousand men we all know in this country would do what he did if he happened on it, if just the right jim, just the right moment, stuck his head in the door. here's to jim, of course. but after all not so much credit to jim. there are more of us probably who could have stuck our heads in the door. the greater credit should go to the lying awake in the night, to the man who was practical enough to be inspired by a chance to quit and quit sharply in his own business, being fooled by himself and who got four hundred men to help. incidentally of course though he did not think of it, and they did not think of it, the four hundred men all in the same tight place he was in of course, of trying not to be fooled about themselves, asked him to help them. of course with both sides in a factory in this way pursuing the other side and asking it to help it not to be fooled, everything everybody says counts. there is less waste in truth in a factory. truth that is asked for and thirsted for, is drunk up. the refreshment of it, the efficiency of it which the people get, goes on the job at once. xiii listening to jim (a note on collective bargaining) i would like to say to begin with that i believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works. i do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. the moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it. a book entitled "a few constructive reflections on marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,--a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. a symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. most candid people would admit this as a principle. the same principle seems to hold good about what people think in national associations of employers and national associations of workingmen in labor unions. thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions. capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time. the trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. other people have it. when a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and i feel i have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. but when i am told in a deep bass national tone that multiplied by is i am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. at all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if i have multiplied by right, or if i have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, i am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word. labor unions and trusts in dealing with the american public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years. it is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do i suppose, at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,--especially in the difficulties we are all facing together in america now, to let ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer. the difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin, dealing at particular times and in particular places with particular human beings. in the factory that listened to jim, no order from a national collective bargaining works could have begun to meet the situation as well as jim did and the factory did. if jim had stuck his head in the door by orders from indianapolis, or if the president of the company had had a telegram giving him national instructions to lie awake that night, what would it have come to? i believe in national or collective bargaining as a matter of course, in certain aspects of all difficulties between capital and labor. but the causes of most difficulties in industry are personal and have to be dealt with where the persons are. the more personal things to be done are, the more personally they have to be attended to. if the women of america were to organize a childbirth labor union, say next christmas--and if from next christmas on, all the personal relations of men and women and husbands and wives--the stipulations and conditions on which women would and would not bear children were regulated by national rules, by courtship rules and connubial orders from indianapolis, indiana, it would be about as superficial a way to determine the well-being of the sexes, as foolish and visionary a way for the female class to attempt to reform and regulate the class that has been fenced off by the creator as the male class, as the present attempt of the labor class to sweep grandly over the spiritual and personal relation of individual employers and individual workmen and substitute for it collective bargaining from indianapolis. there is one thing about women. it would never have occurred to the women of this country as it has to the men to get up a contraption for doing a thing nationally that they could not even do at home. for every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside. the whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it. as the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,--as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal--that is to say, the more alive it is. all live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the sexual relation and for the same reasons. if it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in america get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in america get together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go? only anæmic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together. and in twenty years only anæmic employers and anæmic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right. xiv the new company i met a wagon coming down the street yesterday, saying across the front of it--half a street away, american experience co. i wanted to get in. of course it turned out to be as it got nearer, the american express co., but i couldn't help thinking what it would mean if we had an equally well-organized arrangement for rapid transit of boxes--boxes people have got out of or got into, as we have for conveying other boxes people are mixed up with. (fixes were called boxes when i was a boy. we used to speak of a man having a difficult experience, as being in a box.) the air line league proposes to be the american experience company--a big national concern for shipping other people's experiences to people, so that unless they insist on it, they will have the good of them without having to take their time and everybody else's time around them to go through them all over again alone and just for themselves. of course there are people who tumtytum along without thinking, who will miss the principle and insist on having a nice private misery of doing it all over again in their own home factory for themselves. but there are many million people with sense in this country--people as good at making sense out of other people as they are in making money out of them, and the air line league proposes that to these people who have the sense, when they want them, when they order them, experiences shall be shipped. and when they get orders--they can ship theirs. if some of the experience the labor unions in england have had and got over having, could be shipped in the next few weeks, unloaded and taken over by the americans, anybody can see with a look, ways in which the air line league or american experience company, if it were existing this minute, could bring home to people what they want to know about what works and what does not, what they long to have advertised to them--at once. experiences--or date of experiences shipped from england would not only make a short-cut for america in increasing production in this country, lowering the cost of living, but would give america a chance in the same breath by the same act, to win a victory over herself and to turn the fate of a world. what the air line league proposes to do is to act--particularly through the look-up club--as the american shipping experience company. xv the fifty-cent dollar this book is itself--so far as it goes, a dramatization of the idea of the look-up club. the thing the book--between its two bits of pasteboard does on paper--a kind of listening together of capital and labor, the look-up club of the air line league is planned to do in the nation at large and locally in ten thousand cities--capital, labor and the consumer listening to each other--reading the same book as it were over each other's shoulders, studying their personal interests together, working and acting out together the great daily common interest of all of us. the look-up club, acting as it does for the three social groups that make up the air line league and having an umpire and not an empire function, operates primarily as a publicity or listening organization. i might illustrate the need the look-up club is planned to meet and how it would operate by suggesting what the club might do with a particular idea--an idea on which people must really be got together in america before long, if we are to keep on being a nation at all. millions of american laborers go to bed every night and get up every morning saying:-- "the american employer is getting more money than he earns. we are going to have our turn now. nobody can stop us." result: under-production and the fifty-cent dollar. the cure for the american laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the american laboring man to believe that the american employer is working for something besides money--that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. if the american laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the fifty-cent dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together. i know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like. if all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of labor toward capital--the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week. suppose i propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing i would come upon? the first thing i would come upon would be a convention. it is one of the automatic ideas or conventions of business men--not to believe in themselves. xvi the business man, the professional man, and the artist why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain thing--people believe him and that if a business man does or says precisely the same thing--most business men are suspicious? when i say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of the _saturday evening post_--as i did awhile ago--"i would pay people to read what i am saying on this page,"--everybody believes me. as people read on in one of my articles in the _post_, they cannot be kept from seeing how egregiously i am enjoying my work. anybody can see it--that i would pay up to the limit all the money i can get hold of--my own, or anybody's--to get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as i do. nobody seems inclined to deny that if i could afford to--or, if i had to--i would pay ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what i write. precisely the way i feel about an article in the _saturday evening post_ so fortunate as to be by me--or, about a book written by g.s.l., a man i know very well--w. j. ---- feels about a house or about a bank created by w. j. ----. but if w. j., a designer--contractor--a builder--pretends he enjoys his creative work in building as much as i enjoy writing--if w. j., a business man, were to go around telling people or revealing to people that he would like to hire them to be his customers by handing back to them twenty, thirty or forty per cent of his agreed upon profits when he gets through (which is what he practically does over and over again) there are very few business men who would not say at first sight that w. j. is a man who ought to be watched. and he is too, but for precisely turned around reasons most people have to be watched for. w. j. in designing and constructing a house, or a bank for a client, sets as his cost estimate a ten per cent maximum profit for himself, as a margin to work on; aiming at six or five per cent profit for himself, on small contracts and at a four, three or two and one-half per cent profit for himself on million dollar ones. changes and afterthoughts from his clients in carrying out a contract are inevitable. w. j. wants a margin on which to allow for contingencies and for his customers' afterthought. the three things that interest w. j. in business are: his work on a perfect house, his work on a perfect customer and his work on making enough money to keep people from bothering his work. a perfect house is a house built just as he said it would be which comes out costing less than he said it would cost--possibly a check on his client's dinner plate the first night he dines in it. a perfect customer is a customer who is so satisfied that he cannot express himself in words but who cannot be kept from trying to--who cannot be kept from coming back and who cannot be kept from sending everybody to w. j. he can think of. the tendency of mean typical business men--even men who do this themselves, when i tell them about a man like this, is to wonder what is the matter with the man and then wonder what is the matter with me. this is what is the matter with the country--the conventional automatic assumption that millions of men--even men who are not in business merely to make money themselves--make in general, that we must arrange to run a civilization and put up with doing our daily working all day, every day, in a civilization in which most people are so underwitted, so little interested in life, so little interested in what they do, that they are merely working for money. if we all stopped believing that this is so, or at least believe it does not need to be so, that the country is full of innumerable exceptions and that these exceptions are and can be and can be proved to be the rulers and the coming captains of the world, holding in their hands the fate of all of us--we would be a new nation in a week. in a year we would increase production fifty per cent. this has happened over and over again in factories where this new spirit of putting work first and money second, caught from the employers, has come in. naturally, inasmuch as w. j. as all people who know him know, has made a very great business success of running his business on this principle, of making it a rich, happy and efficient thing, and of doing more things at once than merely making money--running a business like any other big profession, one of the first things i think of doing is to write something that will make everybody know it. well, as i have said, the first fact i come on is that many business men do not approve of believing in themselves or in business or in what i say about its being a profession, any more than they can help. xvii the news-man i have recently come in my endeavors as a publicist, as a self-appointed, self-paid employee of the american people, upon what seems to me a very astonishing and revolutionary fact. i have come to put my faith for the world in its present crisis into two principles. . the industrial and financial fate of america and the world turns in the next few years--or even months, on news--on getting certain people to know in the nick of time that if they do not do certain things, certain things will happen. . news, in order to be lively and contagious must not be started as a generalization or as a principle. to make news compelling and conclusive one has to say something in particular about somebody in particular. here is the fact i have come on in acting on these principles. when i find news done up in a man to save a nation with, if i make everybody know him, the fact i face about my country is this. a generalized--that is--a sterilized idea is free. a fertilized or dramatized idea--an idea done up and dramatized in a man so that everybody will understand it and be interested in it, is hushed up. i am not blaming anybody. i am laying before people and before myself a fact. suppose that i think it is stupendously to the point just now to advertise as a citizen or public man, without profit or suspicion of profit to myself and without their knowing it, certain men it would make a new nation for a hundred people to know? suppose that with considerable advantages in the way of being generally invited to write about what interests me, instead of indulging in a kind of spray or spatter work of beneficial publicity--instead of getting off ideas at a nation with a nice elegant literary atomizer, i insist on making ideas do things and i plan on having my ideas done up solidly in ten solid men who will make the ideas look solid and feel catching? suppose inasmuch as in the present desperate crisis of underproduction, a man who dramatizes--makes alluring, dramatic and exciting the idea of increased production or superproducing, seems to the point--suppose i begin with w. j.? what does anyone suppose would happen? xviii w. j. if w. j. were dead, or were to die to-morrow, it would be convenient. in bearing upon our present national crisis it would be thoughtful and practical of w. j. to die. if w. j.'s worst enemy were to push him off the top of the fortieth story of the equitable building to-morrow morning all i would have to do would be to write an article about him in some national weekly, _saturday evening post_ or _collier's_, which would be read by four million people. but the _saturday evening post_ or _collier's_ has no use for w. j. until he is dead. it would like to have, of course, but it would not be fair to the business men who are paying ten thousand dollars a page to be advertised in it, for the _saturday evening post_ to let any other man--any man who is not dead yet, be advertised in it. this is the reason for the look-up club, a national body--the gathering together of one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise w. j. to--who will then turn--the hundred thousand men of vision--and advertise him to everybody. then other men, strategic men like w. j.--men who are dramatizing other strategic ideas will be selected to follow w. j. for the one hundred thousand men of vision to advertise to a hundred million people. by writing a book and having my publisher distribute through the bookstores a book, i would reach, at best, only one hundred thousand people, and i am proposing to reach a hundred million people--to organize a hundred thousand salesmen scattered in five thousand cities and reach with my book, the hearts and minds, the daily eight-hour-a-day working lives of a hundred million people. this is what the look-up club is for. it is an organized flying wedge of one hundred thousand salesmen who have picked each other out for driving into the attention of a nation, national ideas. the fate of america and the fate of the world at the present moment turns upon free advertising written by men who could not be hired to do it--in books distributed by a hundred thousand men who could not be hired to distribute them. we are setting to work a national committee of a hundred thousand men, to unearth in america, advertise, make the common property of everybody the men who dramatize, who make neighborly and matter-of-fact the beliefs a great people will perish if they do not believe. xix the look-up club looks up we are drawing in the next few months in america the plans and specifications for a great nation and a new world. we want a committee of a hundred thousand. we are proposing to gather a look-up committee of a hundred thousand men of constructive imagination in business and other callings, in ten thousand cities, who will work out together and place before the people, plans and specifications of what this nation proposes to be like--a picture of what a hundred million people want. the situation we are trying to meet is one of providing new brain tracks for a hundred million people. it will not seem to many people, too much to say that the quick way to do this, is to form a club--a committee in this country, of a hundred thousand men to ask to be told about these new brain tracks, who will then tell them to the hundred million. the look-up club is a publicity and educational organization for the purpose of focusing and mobilizing the vision of the people acting as a clearing house of the vision of the people--gathering, coördinating, pooling and determining and distributing the main points in their order of what the american people believe. the first subject we act in our publicity organization as our listening conspiracy--our coöperative news-service to our members--is the subject of how coöperation between capital and labor works. our first news-service will be planned to increase production, decrease the cost of living, stop strikes and lockouts, drive out civil war and substitute coöperation as a means of getting things in american life. every man who is nominated to membership in the look-up club naturally asks four questions. . how can i belong? . what does it cost? . what do i undertake to do for the club? . what do i get--what does the club do for me? the idea is for each man who is deeply interested, to pick out, to nominate any fifty men--i put down for instance on my list franklin p. lane--among forty-nine others, ask mr. lane who the men are he knows in this nation, men he has come on in his business in the course of twenty years, who are characterized either by having creative imagination themselves or by marked power to coöperate with men who have it. after mr. lane had given me his fifty, i would ask each of mr. lane's fifty for their fifty and each in turn for their fifty until we had covered the country and had picked out and introduced to each other from maine to california the men of creative imagination in america. other members will of course be nominated by members of the air line league in their respective communities and everybody who is invited to nominate for the look-up section of the air line league will be asked to nominate in three lists--( ) those he thinks of as representing invention in the nation at large, ( ) those he knows or deals with in his own business or line of activity--all over the country, who have creative imagination or power of discovery and planning ideas, and ( ) those he knows in his own home-community that he and his neighbors would like to see in the look-up club, on the nation's honor roll of men of vision in the nation representing his own community. the cost is to be determined by the club, but is planned as a small nominal sum--nominal dues for expense of correspondence and conducting the activities of the club. what a man gets by joining the club is the association with two or three thousand members from all over the land at any given time who will be in the club headquarters in a skyscraper hotel of its own, when he comes to new york and the advantage of common action and common looking at the same things at the same time with the other members of the club, through the activities of the club by mail. the look-up club bulletins, pamphlets and little books containing news of critical importance and timeliness to all members--news not generally known or not available in the same concentrated form in the daily press, will be sent to all members for their own use and for distribution to others at critical times and places and with strategic persons--labor unions and employers and public men. what the look-up club does for a man is to give him the benefit of a friendly candid national conspiracy between a hundred thousand men, to get the news and to pass on the news that counts and to do it all at the same time instead of in scattered and meaningless dabs. if the thing each man of a hundred thousand sees once a year in a little lonely dab of vision all by himself could be seen by all of us by agreement the same week in the year, we will do the thing we see. anything we see will have to happen. the only reason the thing we see does not happen now, is that we make no arrangements to see it together. seen together, news that looks like a rainbow acts like a pile driver. a man becomes a hundred thousand times himself. in the look-up club what a man gets for his own use, is hundred thousand man-power news. what does a man when he joins the look-up club, undertake to do? send in news when he knows some, and use news when he gets it. i do not undertake to say just what each member of the look-up club will undertake to do with news when he receives it. when a man receives live news which immediately concerns him and his nation in the same breath, the way he feels about it and acts about it--about real news he applies to himself and to his work and the people around him, will seem to him to come, not under the head of duties to the club, but under the head of the things the club will tempt him to do and that he cannot be kept from doing. if a hundred thousand picked men in this country in all walks of life all get the same news the same week, and then use the news the week they get it, and put it where other people will use it, we will all know and everybody else will know what the look-up club is for. we will be carrying out in the look-up club what might be called a selective draft of vision. we will mobilize and bring to action the vision and the will of the people. xx propagandy people i am weary and sad about the word propaganda. i am weary of being propaganded, or rather of being propaganded at and as regards propagandafying others myself, or propagandaizing them, whatever it is publicists and men who are interested in public ideas suppose they do, i am sad at heart. there is a prayer some one prayed once one tired new year's eve, which appeals to me. "forgive me my christmases as i forgive them that have christmased against me." i could pray the same model outline for a prayer. but for christmasing, substitute propagandy-izing. the word somehow itself in its own unconscious beauty dramatizes the way i feel about it. i have written many hundred pages of what i believe about reformers--about people who are trying to get other people's attention, and about advertising, but the brunt of what i believe now is that most people if they would stop trying to get other people's attention and try to get their own, would do more good. the advertising in which i believe is the advertising that is asked for. i believe in getting a few million people to ask to be advertised to and to give particulars. more good would be done this way than by turning the whole advertising idea around and working it wrong end to as we do now. for instance at this present moment i want to know everything about myself and against myself, my enemies know. i do not see why i should put up with my enemies being the ones of all others to know things against me that if i knew would be the making of me. what i want to do is to find a way--make arrangements if i can, to get them to tell me--tell me politely--if they can, but tell me. if every person, or party, or group in america to-day would do this, capital, labor, bankers, socialists, republicans and democrats, america would quit being merely a large nation at once, and begin being a great one. people who have organized to be advertised to will read advertising more poignantly, even sometimes perhaps (as i would) more desperately. they will get ninety-three per cent value out of advertising they read where now they get three and a half. everybody who has read advertising he has asked for and advertising that has butted in on him whether or no the same day, and who has compared for one minute how he has felt about them and how he has acted about them, knows that this is true. it is a platitude. a platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth. what the air line league is for, one of the things it is for, is to act on this truth. through the three branches, the look-up club, the try-out club and the put-through clan, the air line league is an organization not for asserting or for pushing advertising, but for nationally sucking advertising. with its thirty million people joining it, asking to be advertised to, and giving particulars, it is to be the national vacuum cleaner for truth. xxi the skilled consumers of publicity the trouble with the consumers of publicity is that they are not skilled. they are not organized to get what they want. we should organize the consumers of publicity, make it possible for the people of america as readers, to be skilled readers in getting what they want. we should make arrangements which would be the equivalent of organizing skilled readers' labor saving unions. the difficulties of attaining a power of national listening together--through the press and through pamphlets and books, are so great that they can only be overcome practically and immediately, by our having an organization the members of which join it as they will join the air line league for the express purpose not of advertising--but of being advertised to. the most fundamental activity of the air line league in the present crisis of the nation is to be the superimposing upon the advertising of the ordinary kind we already have, of free advertising by men who have certain ideas and certain types of men they want to advertise to a specific twenty or thirty million people who contract with them (as i would have often wished my readers would contract with me) to have these same men or types of men and ideas, advertised to them. it would be hard to overemphasize or overestimate the power of an organization that exists not to advertise but to be advertised to. i say again--if i may be forgiven for the still small voice of platitude--a platitude because nobody acts as if he believes it--the most effective advertising is advertising that is asked for. book iv the technique of a nation's getting its way with other nations i fourth of july all the year round it would be very convenient for the other nations in the world to-day if america--being the biggest, the freshest and the most powerful after the war and having the other nations for the time being most dependent on it, could be the one that they felt most deserved to lead them and have its way with them. it is almost the personal necessity of forty other nations to-day that america should be a success, that america instead of instantly disappointing the other nations, should instantly prove itself worthy of the leadership they would like to place in her hands. "america's success is the world's success," people keep saying. this has a prettified and pleasant sound--in speaking of a great, or rather of a big, nation. but what of it? what is the fact? what do we wish we could believe is the fact? what is there--either in our own interests or the interests of others that can really be done and done now about the fact--if it is a fact--by any real person or body of persons in america? as a practical and not a fourth of july institution,--or rather as an institution for celebrating the fourth of july all the year round, the air line league looks upon direct action to be taken by the american people to meet the world's particular situation at this time, as follows: if america is to get its way--the way, as we like to think, of democracy and freedom, with other nations, there are certain things about us the other nations want to know. the other nations want to know that america has a technique for getting its way with itself. the nation that has the most self-control will be the nation that as a matter of course and of common safety will be asked in the crisis, by the other nations, to take the lead in controlling order, in controlling or insuring the self-control of others. the other nations want to know--if they are going to let us have our way with them--put over what we like to call our superior democratic open way upon them, that we have a vision--a vision of human nature and of modern life which is better, clearer, more practical and timely than their vision. the other nations want to know,--if we are to have our way, that we not only have a vision of what our way is--a national vision, but a technique for expressing and embodying that national vision. to deserve our way with them they must know we have a vision which can be proved, which is historic--the facts of which--specifications, dates, names and places, can be placed in their hands. the other nations if they are going to let us have our way with them, will want to know by observation that america has not only a vision and a technique for embodying a vision, but that when her vision proves to be wrong (as during the war) america has a technique for being born again. ii the vision and the body i have dwelt already on what a body for the people would be like and how it would work. i would now like to touch on two facts--the fact that there is a particular and desperate need of a vision for the soul of the american people at this time, and the fact that the body to express the vision grows logically out of what already is and that this body is going to be had. the success of a nation in getting its way with other nations turns on its having a technique for getting the attention of other nations--on its getting connected up with a body through which its spirit can really be expressed. the technique for a nation getting the attention of other nations turns on a nation's getting its own attention, upon the nation's becoming self-conscious, upon its having a conception, upon its having a vision of action developing within itself from which a body implacably comes forth. this fact is not supposed to be open to argument. it is a biological fact--the mysterious and boundless platitude of life. everybody knows, or thinks that he thinks that he knows it, but only a few people here and there at a time for a short time, in america--inventors, great statesmen, children and lovers are ever caught acting as if they believed it. everything about america that is lively, or powerful, or substantial and material begins in imaginative desire, in somebody's vision or somebody's falling in love and becoming conscious of his own desire. the first thing this nation has to do to have a body is to get its own attention. the reason that the people of america in the red cross achieved a body, is that some one had a body for--the vision that if all the different kinds of people we had in america who had never dreamed of doing a thing together before, could be got together to do one thing together now the world war could be won. this spectral and visionary-looking idea somehow in the red cross, was not only the thing that started the red cross, but it was the daily momentum, the daily mounting up in the hearts of the people that made it go. the leaders of the red cross--mr. davison and the men he gathered about him had a vision of what could be done which other people did not dare to have. the secret of the red cross was that it was a vision-machine, a machine for multiplying one man's vision a millionfold, working out in the sight of the people three thousand miles a vision greater than the people would have thought they could have. this vision which the red cross had, which it advertised to people and made other people have, is what the people liked about it. the people threw down their jewels for it--for something to believe about themselves and do with themselves greater than they had believed before. they threw down their creeds for it. they threw down their class prejudices for it--a huge buoyant serious daily vision of action in which all classes and all creeds of people could live and dream and work together every day. no more matter of fact conclusive demonstration of the implacable splendid brutal power of vision, of the power of vision to precipitate across three thousand miles a body for the souls and the prayers of a people, could be imagined than the red cross during its great days in the war. the red cross became capable of doing what it did because it touched the imagination of the average humdrum man rich or poor and made him think of somebody besides himself. the red cross did this by what was practically an advertising campaign, the advertising of different sets of people, to all of the others. the result was what looked and felt like a miracle--a kind of apocalypse of people who have outdone themselves. naturally the people liked it. and naturally people who have watched themselves and one another outdoing themselves, can do anything. my own experience is that when i set out to find the real truth about people whether it pets me in my feeling about them or not, people turn out to be incredibly alike. they are all more full of good than they seem to want me to believe. the only difference is that some of them are more successful in keeping me from believing in them than others. i have taken some satisfaction in seeing in the red cross, a nation backing me up in this experience with human nature in america. iii the call of a hundred million people the nearest the american people have come to getting their way in other nations--to having a vision and a body with which to do it and deserve to do it--is in the red cross, and in our food distribution. in both of these organizations we succeeded in getting the attention of others to what we could do for them--and with them--by getting our own attention first and by making our own sacrifice at home first. we were allowed to administer food abroad because we had shown self-control and sacrifice about food at home and were given headway in emergency and rescue abroad because millions of people here had a vision for others and gave a body to their vision at home. i have been filled with sorrow over the way millions of men and women in the american red cross, their daily lives geared to a great issue, living every day with a national international vision suffusing their minds and hearts and touching everything they said and did, suddenly disappeared as the people that they really were and that they seemed to be, from sight. i have never understood it, how twenty million men and women out of that one common colossal daily vision of a world, almost in a day, almost in an hour, across a continent as on some great national spring, snapped back into the little life. i do not know as i would have minded them--three thousand miles of them going back into the convolutions of their own individual lives, but i have wished they could have kept the vision, could have taken steps to move the vision over, could have taken up the individual lives they had to go back to and had to live, and live them on the same level, and driving through on the same high common momentum of purpose, live them daily together. the necessity of the every-day individual lives we all are interested in living--the necessity of the actual personal things we all are daily trying to do, is a necessity so much more splendid and tragic, so much more vivid, personal and immediate, so much more adapted to a high and exhilarating motive and to a noble common desire than the rather rudimentary showy stupid necessity the germans thrust upon us could ever dream of being, that it is hard to understand the way in which the leaders of the red cross in the supreme critical moment when the mere war with germany was being stupendously precipitated into forty wars of forty nations with themselves, at the very moment when with one touch of a button the new vision of the people could have been turned on instead of the old one and the hundred million people stood there asking them, snapped off the light, dismissed the hundred million people--clapped them back into their ten thousand cities into the common life. the magnificent self discovery, the colossal single-heartedness lighting up the faces of the people whiffed out by one breath of armistice! who would have believed it or who can forgive it?... the red cross--the redeemer, the big brother of nations, holding steady the nerves of a whole world--not meeting the emergency of a whole world--the whole world yesterday tightened up into war, and to-day falling apart into colossal complicated, innumerable, hemming and hawing, stuttering peace! what people used to think wealth was, what they used to think might was, the power of attracting the whole attention of millions of people is. in the red cross a hundred million people--american people, had looked at the same thing at the same time with their eyes, they had heard the same thing at the same time with their ears and they had been doing the same thing in a thousand ways with their hands. in the red cross the feet of a hundred million people became as the feet of one man. the red cross had hunted out, accumulated, mounted up and focused the attention of forty nations. it had in its hands the trigger of a ninety mile long range gun aimed at the spoilers of the world and the day the armistice begins we see it deliberately letting the gun go and taking up in its hand at the very moment the real war of the war was beginning, a pocket pistol instead. because the war suddenly was everywhere instead of the north of france, it reduced to a peace basis. at the very moment when it had touched the imaginations of forty nations, at the very moment when it had people all over the world all listening to it and believing in it, at the very moment when the forty nations could have been turned on to any problem with it, it let the forty nations go. if i could imagine a hundred million people sitting in a theater as one man--a hundred million man-power man who could not see anything with his opera glass, if i were sitting next to him i would suggest his turning the screw to the right slowly. i would say, "do you see better or worse as you turn it to the right?" if i found he saw worse i would tell him to turn it to the left and then i would leave him to try between the two until he found it. the day after the armistice, this was the chance the red cross had. it had the chance to turn the screw for us, to avoid for us the national blank look. naturally after looking at the stage in the hall with our national blank look, it was not very long before everybody got up and went out. it was a focus--a hundred million man-power vision, even if it was only of bandages, that had made america a great nation a few minutes, and not unnaturally after a few weeks of armistice had passed by, keeping the focus, stopping the national blank look has become the great national daily hunger of our people. a hundred million people can be seen asking for it from us, every morning when they get up--asking for it as one man. to one who is interested in the economics of attention, and especially in getting the attention of nations, it is one of the most stupendous and amazing wastes of sheer spiritual and material energy the world has ever known--this spectacle of the way the red cross a few months ago with its mighty finger on the screw of the focus of the world, with its finger on the screw of our national opera glass, with its chance to keep a hundred million people from having a blank look, let its chance go. the idea of the air line league is that it shall take up where it stopped, the red cross vision--the red cross spirit. the idea of the air line league as a matter of fact was first invented as a future for the red cross. the red cross at the end of the war had said it wanted a future invented for it, and the first form my idea took (almost page for page in this book as the reader will find it) was that this new organization of a body for the people, i have in mind, should be started as a new division for the red cross. but i soon discovered that what i wanted from the red cross for my purpose was not the organization nor the equipment but the people--the rank and file of the people in the red cross who had made themselves the soul of it and who would make the soul of anything--particularly the men and women who partly before and partly after the armistice, had come to cool a little--had come to feel the lack of a compelling vision to set before the people of america, which if duly recognized and duly stated by the leaders of the red cross would have swept over all of us--would have kept us all actively engaged in it, could have drawn into daily active labor in the red cross, the day the armistice was signed, ten men and women for victory of a great people over themselves, where in the mere stress of merely beating germans, there had been one before. iv the call of a world the difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession. dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. then they began filling them. now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill. orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. a bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. to-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. the next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers--to keep them from walking too soon. the essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth. the first natural thing for the red cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs. the red cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs--with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. it would deal with the embryology of war. the germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself. it is when i am having a hard time getting on with stanley lee that i am likely to have a row with ivy lee. it is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. everything does. if a man understands himself he can understand anybody. if he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands. the great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. this is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. it is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. if i wanted to stop a war between ivy lee and me i would have to pick out a series of things to do to ivy lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him. then i would pick out in myself things that ivy lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when i study on them i will not want to do. up to ivy to do the same to me. this is a science. it is not merely a vision or a religion. removing the cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and self-study, but it is approximately exact. it is also a fascinating and contagious science. we master the embryology of war between persons--the embryology of war between classes, and then between nations. the principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of these problems will prove to be the principles of the others. if people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, i would change the figure. we are proposing to follow up at once, the red cross, which was run as a fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the air line league which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between nations get started. edward a. filene of boston in trying to have a successful department store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will getting new rapid transit for boston. he found he could not get rapid transit for boston without helping to get a new government and that he could not get a new government without helping to get a new boston. he then found he could not help get a new boston without getting new trade and industrial conditions in boston and that he could not help get new ideals working in trade and industry in boston without helping in the ideals of a nation. he then found he could not get a new nation without trying to help make several new nations. then came the international chamber of commerce. something like this seems to happen to nearly every man i know who really accomplishes anything. or any nation. frederick van eeden of holland began life as a painter with marked success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering why people were not getting out of paintings in holland--his own and other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a critic. he found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more people get more out of the best poetry? he then wrote one or two novels of high quality which holland was proud of and which were read in several languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as much as they did the poorer ones? he decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and not whole in body and mind--like the greeks, and became a physician. he thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first psycho-therapeutic hospital in holland. he then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the social and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under which they were conceived and born, and had to live. he then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in amsterdam and is now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express and fulfill their real selves in the world. any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express itself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it has to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds it is doing practically what frederick van eeden did. the only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help everybody else to. the red cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all classes had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty nations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causing the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world. the aches and pains of society with which since the war, the red cross so politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the things we daily do to each other to make the money. the vision of the common people in america recognizes this and recognized it instantly at the end of the war. the hearts of the men and women of america to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to instantly lose interest in a red cross which asks them to help run it as a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them. v missouri the best service america can render other nations to-day is be herself--fulfill and make the most of herself. senator reed of missouri would probably agree with me in this. where i differ with senator reed is in what america should propose to do to make the most of herself. senator reed of missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the senate wants america in the present distraction of nations to stop thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe. it seems to me that if america were to cut herself off from the rest of the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. she would just be like senator reed of missouri. nothing could be less safe for america just now than to be like senator reed of missouri. senator reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. in the senate of fifty states, reed says "i'm from missouri." in the congress of nations, reed says "america über alles." "the world for america." "america for missouri." "missouri for me!" for america just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from doing--is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. it seems more sensible for america--even from the point of view of looking out for herself--not to go down with senator reed and moon around in his stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps. patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on, to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for senator reed or for america in but one way. it's going to end in a plunge of the ship. it is going to end in senator reed's running out, and running up to the deck the last minute. i do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of senator reed of missouri, tying missouri like a millstone around his neck and then casting himself, missouri and all, into the sea, while it may have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a practical or business-like example for his country. i would like to show if i can that senator reed is wrong, and to present the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the air line league. the germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it) that democracy cannot be made to work. they sneered at us during the war and said to england, america and the rest of us that we could not make democracy work in running an army and keep up with germans in war, and they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in industry and keep up with germans in peace. forty nations half-believe that the germans are right about industrial democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing, a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and a good many people in america--extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the germans. if the germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for america to pay very much attention just now to her industries. if america is living in a world as insane as germany says it is, the one thing ahead for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before they murder ours. everything must be geared and geared at once to the germans' being right. or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to challenging the germans--to telling them that they are as fooled about what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it could do in war. the one thing we can do in america now to get the germans or anybody else to believe us about industrial democracy is to make american democracy in industry whip german militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor unions and in our own factories. then we will whip german militarism in industry out of the markets of the world. if the quickest way for the american people to get a decent world--a world we want to do business in, is to whip german militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip german militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work? what is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men? the fear of the united states senate. the fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the united states senate and other governments not to be afraid of war. the first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear. the first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. making democracy work in business is the first condition, for america and the world of having any business. it is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that i am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. the air line league is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes. the whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy--in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works. it is because the germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that germany is a second-class nation and that the german people have had to put up for forty years with being second-class human beings. they have a ruling majority of second-class human beings in germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-class human beings out of practically anybody--arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it. taking the line of least resistance--the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes america's being a second-class nation a matter of course. what we have always been hoping for in america is that in due time we are going to be a first-class nation--a nation crowded with men and women who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first class when they came, have been made first class by the way that all day every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another. vi a victory loan advertisement may , the boy who stuck his foot in a small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble pillars before the the victory arch and stuck his foot in. i went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. it was about an inch and a half thick. then i stood in the middle of the avenue, all new york boiling and swirling round me and looked up at the arch of victory--massive, majestic white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached! something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy. what he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid victory arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to--how deep the glory had struck in. i thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years. i am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. millions of americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. we want to poke through to the truth. we want something more than a theater property victory arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one! we want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest--to take down our lath and plaster arch and put it up in marble instead. we make this week a wager to the world,--a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to god that we are not a superficial people, that the american people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words--that we will chase peace up, that we will work victory down into the structure of all nations--into the eternal underpinning of a world. in the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning victory arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million germans marching through! we will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no small boy, no bolshevik nation can stick its foot in! * * * * * when i corrected the proof of this advertisement--it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last liberty loan in new york--it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the germans as it is now. and the arch of victory in madison square has melted away into roar. but the truth i have spoken has not melted away. what the air line league is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in. book v the technique of a nation's being born again i reconstruction i started this book taking the crowd for my hero--that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the people. i have proceeded upon two premises. a spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. it is a ghost trying to have a family. a body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. it is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. it is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family. some of my readers will remember a diagram in "crowds" in which i divided people off roughly into inventors artists hewers or or see-ers engineers those who work men who invent men who invent out and finish things to do. ways and means what the see-ers and make it possible and engineers to do them. have begun. i have based what i have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature. in the next few pages i am dealing not with the reconstruction but with the reconception of a nation. reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the american people. in the crisis that confronts america to-day not only the most easy, but the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great nation is to fall in love. i am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts--that is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an understanding and get together. i wish to state certain particular things i think are going to be done by the people--that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again. ii national biology a man in being born the first time is the invention of others. being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,--the spiritual invention of one's own life. being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time. all one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who have done it. when one is being born the first time one does not even know it. one is not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it. and nobody else could help it. when one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around can do, to help one do it. in when america was being born first, america did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. it has taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess. a nation is born the first time with its eyes shut. but in this terrible when america is being born again, she can only manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, naked before god, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and the unborn, and knowing herself,--slipping off her old self and putting on her new self. iii the air line league the first thing a spirit in this world usually does to find a body is to select a father and mother. the american people if it is to be embodied and have the satisfaction and power of making itself felt and expressing itself, can only do so by following the law of life. a hundred million people can only get connected with a body, acquire a presence--find itself as a whole, the way each one of the hundred million people did alone. in a nation's being born again three types of mind are necessarily involved. the minds in america that create or project, the inventors. the minds that bring up. the minds that conceive and bring to the birth. these three classes of spiritual forces are concerned in america in making the people stop being a ghost, in making their american people as an idea, physically fit. the first thing to be arranged for america to make the people quit being a ghost in the white house, is to form into three bodies or organizations, these three, groups of men--make these three groups of men class-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purpose in america--and have everybody in america conscious of them. i propose three organizations to stand for these three life-forces, three organizations which will act--each of which will act with the other two and will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, the law of life--of producing and reproducing the national life. the minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea for the people--the inventors, will act as one group. the minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring the idea to pass, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds that teach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea to life--will act as another. i propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and act together--that a nation may be conceived. i propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think out ways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that is conceived may be born. these two clubs will have their national headquarters together in a skyscraper hotel of their own in new york and will act together--in bringing an idea for the people into the world. the third club--twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the red cross--in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring it up and put it through. * * * * * what one's soul is for, i suppose, is that one can use it when one likes, to contemplate and to enjoy an idea. what one has a body for with reference to an idea is to take it up, try it out and put it through. the air line league proposes to coördinate these three functions and operate as a three in one club. the idea would be to call the first of the clubs, the club of inventors, the look-up club. the second, a club of how-men and engineers, the try-out club, and the third--the operating club of the vast body of the people taking direct action and putting the thing through locally and nationally would be called the put-through clan. the air line league through these three clubs will undertake to help the people to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a ghost in their own house. the great working majority of the american people--of the men and the women who made the red cross so effective during the war, which came to the rescue of the people of the nation with the people of other nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people are having and that the classes of people are having with one another. iv the look-up club looks up § . _for instance._ such a crisis as this nation has now, springfield, massachusetts, had once. springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance of being detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged in springfield and wanted to make springfield as prosperous as detroit, were practically told to go out to detroit and find the men who would have the imagination to lend them the money--to make springfield into a detroit. naturally when they found bankers with imagination in detroit they stayed there. what happened to springfield is what is going to happen to america if we do not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who have imagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, to know each other and act together. the twenty-five hundred dollars frank cousins of detroit recognized henry ford with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to henry ford for twenty-nine million dollars. people say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of this nation to-day turns on our national manpower. but what does our national man-power turn on? it turns on people's knowing and knowing in the nick of time, a man when they see one. man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers and crowds act together. sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with inventors or men of practical imagination. this is called conservatism. sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with leaders or men of imagination. but the fate of all classes turns upon our having men of creative imagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by men who furnish labor. the idea of the look-up club is that men of creative imagination shall be got together, shall be made class-conscious, shall feel and use their power themselves and put it where other people can use it. how much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved america if alexander graham bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, america's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones? if william g. mcadoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater new york, and was fighting to get people in new york to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to--one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved new york and saved mcadoo? how much time would a national club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the germans? why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as mcadoo had to? * * * * * if a hundred thousand silver dollars--just ordinary silver dollars--were put together in a row in new york on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them. but put one hundred thousand picked men--or men of exceptional power together in a row in new york--and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings? i wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars. this is one of the first things the look-up club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together. * * * * * i went out last night and walked up the great white way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men--the site of the new hotel--the little sleeping shelf in the roar of new york for the hundred thousand men to have on broadway. i stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and ---- told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. and now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by ---- the other day as worth four and a half million dollars. the same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone. the same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in new york. what can i manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to chicago to-morrow morning? all i could do alone would be to walk. as it is, i stand in line a minute at a window in the grand central station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper i move to chicago while i go to sleep. this power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what i am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others. what will we do, what ideas will we carry out? get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out? what is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. everybody who has ever done anything knows this. what we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values. the men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation. i am not writing to people--to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the look-up club--to ask them whether they think this idea of mine--of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a club, is going through or not. i am writing them and asking them if--if it is going through--they want to belong to it. very few men can speak with authority--even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. but any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pass. i speak up for myself in this book. anybody can see it. if every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants--we will all get what we want. the proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. all i really ask of each man who is nominated is, "if the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in america, do you want to be one of them? who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business--especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?" it is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things. the way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself. suddenly across a nation we look in a hundred thousand faces. § . _why the look-up club looks up._ the constitution does not provide for an imagination department for the united states government. it has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a department made up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeper and see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in our government. we have a judicial department to decide on whether what is born has a right to live--a legislative department to pass rules under on how it shall be obliged to live--and an executive department to make it mind--but the department to create and to conceive for the people is lacking. government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-aunt institution. government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction. government--contrary to the theory of the germans--from the point of view of sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being of men--the fate of men and the world--is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair--devoted to ready-made ideas like the red cross during the war. this is what is the matter with a government's posing in this or any other nation as a live body for the people. the spontaneous uprising of business men during the war--the spectacle of the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the breaking in of the national council of defense--the spontaneous combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like the red cross--all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual persons, and who then give body to them across the nation. its whole nature and action of a government tend to make government and most of the people in it mechanical. in the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature, this nation--if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively free origin and organization of their own. hence the look-up club coöperating with the try-out club to act as an informal imagination department for the united states. v the try-out club tries out § . _i_ + _you_ = _we._ if darius the great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as special commissioners for controlling the social evil in babylon, they would have made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have understood what it was all about. they would not have had the insight necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and go ahead. what makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives--his vision of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge his unselfishness gives--his imagination about what he wants for others, and pours the two visions together. the law of business is the law of biology--action--reaction--interaction. i + you = we. it is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit around and gossip about how bad it is for the germans to be so selfish. it is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is--and for labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor union. there are far worse things than selfishness in people. being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others. * * * * * this chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. when i was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me--a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw i might want it too and passed it to me. he summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the germans and the other peoples of the earth. with one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world. his selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it. his unselfishness made him see that i must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did. so he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together. incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as i was wishing somebody would before i handed it in) the idea i am trying to express in it. this in a small way is a perfect working model of what i call civilization. unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. it is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven. imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world. the appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them. a righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person--is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. what he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself. half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together. people in other nations are as selfish in their way as the germans are in theirs--capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. the fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want. it takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist--if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of god and the love of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone. this is what i call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship. i put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the try-out club, of the air line league, propose to act. the way for america to meet the german militaristic and competitive idea of business and of the business executive--the idea that brought on the war, is for america and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the germans before it is too late, a substitute for it. the american engineers of business or great executives--the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this substitute. § . _the engineer at work._ the crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor. i rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching--who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn. the fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money--the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded--and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. it lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization. * * * * * if men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of american industry now coming to an end. but of course in the crisis business is facing now, which turns on the putting forward of men who understand and can play masterfully upon the motives, temptations and powers of ordinary human nature the typical man we know at the mahogany desk, who has a machine imagination, who sees men as dots and dreams between piles of dollars and rows of machines, is a singularly helpless person and can only hold his own in his own business by giving way and putting forward in place of himself, men who are masters in human nature, experts and inventors in making men want to work. the difference between the business world that is passing out and the one that is coming in, is that the masters of the world who have been proud before, to be called the captains of industry, are going to think of themselves and want others to think of them as the fathers of industry. the man who orders can no longer order. people will only work and work hard for the man who fills them with new conceptions, who stirs the depths of their lives with desire and hope. the reason that reactionary capital is having trouble with labor, is that it is putting forward men who order instead of putting forward fathers and inventors. the reason that the i. w. w. and other labor organizations are having trouble with capital, is that their leaders are not inventors. they are tired conventional men governed by automatic preconceptions, merely doing over again more loudly and meanly against society, the things that capital has already tried and has had to give up because it could not make them work. only inventors--executives who invent and fertilize opportunity for others--men who invent ways of making men see values--men who create values and who present people with values they want to work out, are going to get anything--either money or work, from now on, out of anybody. § . _the engineer and the game._ the time has gone by when a man can say any longer he is not in business for the fun of it. he finds he cannot long compete with the men about him who are, with engineers and others who are in business for the great game of producing results, of doing difficult things, of testing their knowledge, their skill and their strength. making men want to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. a factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked men proud of their work. it is not going to be necessary to scold people into not being selfish, or whine people into loving their work. a man who is so thin-blooded that the one way he can get work out of himself is to make money--the man who grows rich by ordering, by gobbling, and by hiring gobblers and plodders, cannot function under the new conditions. the guarantee that we are going to have a civilization now, that business with joy in it and personal initiative and motive in the work itself, is going to take possession of the markets of the world is based on the fact that labor has to have its imagination touched in order to work efficiently, and an entirely new level and new type of man--the man who can touch men's imaginations, is being put forward in business to do it. the engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon institutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman. a business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day. § . _the american business sport._ if any man ever again in this world finds like methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, i suspect, what the best american business man already is--what i would call a fine all-round religious sport. sport has certain well-known disadvantages. so has religion. the man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both. to have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find. the typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. that is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. his business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. he dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in god, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that god has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist. it has looked especially reckless during the last four years for god to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. now is the time of all others, and germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works. there has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance america has now of dramatizing to germans, and dramatizing through the germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world. people shall not put up with mere leagues and truces, arbitration boards, fight-dove-tailings. they shall not sit at tables and twirl laws at people--to make them peaceful.... * * * * * the only men in modern business who can now hope to get to the top are the men who are in a position to hire men who do not work for wages. making men want to work is the secret of the engineer in production. the secret of modern industry is the secret of the man who loves his work. to the sporting man, the gentleman, the man who loves the game, the prize goes now in competition with gobblers and plodders. the engineer or winner instead of the compeller of men is going to draw out new kinds and new sizes of laboring men in industry at every point. the engineer we count on in the try-out club is the man who superimposes upon the normal and suitable motive in his business of being selfish enough to make money to keep the business up, the motive of the gentleman, the professional man, the artist, the engineer, the sport--the motive of doing a thing for its own sake, and because one likes it. the expression "i am not in business for the fun of it" is going by. what we are going to do with the mere half-alive profit-plodders--the mere wage gobblers, is not to improve them by making moral eyes at them, or discipline them by putting down lids of laws over them or by firing taxes at them. we are going to discipline men like these by driving them into the back streets of business, as anæmic, second-rate and inefficient men in bringing things to pass. a man who in a tremendous and absorbing adventure like real business is so thin-blooded or thick-headed that all he can get work out of himself for is money, will only be able to get the plodding kind of second-rate workers to work for him, _i.e._, he will be able to get only plodders who merely work for money, by paying higher wages than other people have to--by paying higher wages than they can earn. in other words, civilized business, business with joy in it and personal initiative and human interest in the work itself, is going to drive uncivilized plodding half-hearted business out of the markets of the world. the men who are expressing through the hearts of the people their best, more lasting and more powerful selves, in business, who are gathering around them other people who are doing it, the men who try out their best selves in business--who invent ways as executives to make their best selves work for them and for others, are having to-day before our eyes, the world placed in their hands. men who represent vital forces like these, are as solid, unconquerable in human life as the force of gravity, the multiplication table they are. they find themselves dominating like radium, penetrating like fresh air, drawing all things to them like the sky, the stars, like spring, like the love of women and of children and the love of christ. the idea of having imagination about a customer and studying a customer as a means of winning his trade, his personal enthusiasm and confidence, is not considered sentimental. having imagination about one's employees so that they will work in the same spirit as the other partners, is no longer considered sentimental except by the type of employer now being driven to the wall because he has no technique for making anybody want to work for him. as things go to-day it is the leader in industry who is trying to keep up a fine comfortable feeling of being a captain of industry--the man who feels he owns everything and owns everybody in sight, who is visionary and sentimental, who is the don quixote of business now. the employer who feels superior to individuals, who looks at men as dots and dreams--and who expects to deal with a man subconsciously and get on with him as if he were not there--the employer who is an absentee in soul and body, and who gives an order to his men and then goes off and leaves them like pumps, hydraulic rams, that of course cannot help slaving away for him until they are stopped--the employer who during the first stupid stages of our new machine-industry, has been allowed to be prominent for a time, now stands exposed as too wooden and incompetent to conduct the intimately personal, difficult and human institution a factory has got to be if it succeeds (in a country with men like ours) in producing goods. from now on the big man in business is the man who gets work out of people that money cannot buy. the man who cannot get the work that money cannot buy in a few years now, is not going to stand the ghost of a chance. people will not believe you if you tell them what the world was like when he did. * * * * * mastering others so that they have to do what one says is superficial, merely a momentarily successful-looking way a man has of being a failure. this master has been tried. he has failed. he is the half-inventor of bolshevism. the real master is not the man who masters men, but who makes them master themselves. the masterful man in getting out of people what he wants, is the man who makes the people want him to have what he wants--makes them keep giving it to him fresh out of their hearts every day. the wholesale national and international criticism the red cross workers made in the latter months of the red cross activities, of the touch-the-button and hand-down-the-order methods of many of the business men who controlled the activities at home and abroad--of the millions of workers in the red cross, has been itself a kind of national education in what certain types of american business men placed in power fell inadvertently into, in trying to treat millions of free people on the employer and employee plan. but these men and their whole idea are going by. we are getting down to the quick, to the personal and the human, to the sense all good workers have of listening and being listened to and of not being overridden. big business after this is going to be big in proportion as it makes people feel--employees and customers both, that they are listened to, that they are being dealt with as individual human beings and not as fractions of individuals, or as part of some big vague bloodless lump of humanity. studying one's customers so as to make them want to trade with one is here to stay. to speak of studying with the best expert skill in the country one's employees so as to make them want to work, as humanity, is not quite bright. it is not humanity. it is business. making people trade with one instead of making them want to trade with one is recognized as second-rate business. so is making people work for one instead of making them want to work. the business man who depends for his business, on customers, or on workers who want to get away and are going to the first minute they can, naturally goes under first. vi the put-through clan puts through § . _what._ we are a people who think in action. our way of making other nations think and of thinking ourselves is to do things. the people who swept into and took over the red cross, who dramatized the american people in the war abroad--are the people who are going to make war at home impossible. the big spiritual or material fact about the red cross is that it has been a dramatic organization, that for four years it has been an organization for acting out the feelings, desires, wills and beliefs of a great people toward men who were fighting for liberty. the red cross has been a great emotional epic play, an expression in action, of the heart and brain of a mighty nation. emotions by great peoples have been spectacular before, and they have been sentimental and they have been occupied with enjoying themselves. but in the red cross twenty million people have been as inspired as saint francis and as practical as a steel trust in the same breath. the vision of the future of the put-through clan that lies ahead is that it shall keep on dramatizing these qualities in the american character at home, selecting things to do which shall dramatize our people to one another, to themselves and to the people of other nations. * * * * * the way to make democracy work is for the people to use their brains, their spirit and their imagination to do team-work with the inventors and engineers who help express their democracy for them. the platform of the put-through clan is the right of all to be waited on. skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled capital. skilled capital has a right to skilled labor in return. the new and stupendous force in modern life from now on is to be the skilled consumer--the organization of the consumer-group to coöperate with skilled capital and skilled labor, to make it impossible as it is now, for unskilled capital, capital which has not the skill to win the public, or to win its own labor, and for unskilled labor, labor which cannot earn its money and takes it whether it earns it or not, to compel the consumer by force and by holdups to buy goods they do not want at prices they are not worth from men with whom they do not want to deal. the skilled consumer will organize his skill and deal with the people he wants. all the people of this country--the consumers (the real employers of all employers) have to do, is to whisper in one national whisper through a hundred thousand grocery stores and other stores what kind of employers and workmen, what kind of goods and factories they like, and the buyers and consumers of america instead of taking what is poked out at them because they have to, and being the fools and the slaves of capital and labor, will get with a whisper what they request, and we will return and will let employers and workmen return, to the status of human beings. § . _how._ the test of a man's truth is his technique. what mathias alexander believes about conscious control and making self-discipline work is true because he does not have to say it. he dramatizes it. alexander is right in his fundamental idea of giving conscious control to people through new brain tracks toward their bodies because they get up and walk away from him when they have been with him, with their new brain tracks on. new habits--new psycho-physical habits, like culebra cuts are put right through them. the man who conceives or invents may be wrong, the man who experiments or tries out, may need to be watched, but the man who puts through is inviolable. the program, the spirit and the function of the put-through clan in a town, is to embody truth so baldly and with such a shameless plainness that no matter how hard they try, people cannot tug away from it. * * * * * there are three courses we might take in the put-through clan in dealing with our town. ( ) we can stand for disciplining capital and labor into shape by passing laws and heaping up penalties. ( ) we can let them see how much better they can make things by sicking them on to each other and having them discipline each other. ( ) we can make fun of both of them until they make fun of themselves and each class begins disciplining itself. then general self-discipline will set in. we propose to indulge--each group of us in the put-through clan--the labor group in the town, the employer group and the public group, in self-disciplining ourselves, until the thing is made catching out of sheer shame and decency in others. § . _psycho-analysis._ the scientific basis for psycho-analysis for a town, or for a labor union, or for a republican or democratic party, is found in the facts that have been stated by mathias alexander in his book and demonstrated by his work. professor john dewey in his introduction to mr. alexander's book speaks of what mr. alexander stands for, as completed psycho-analysis. as alexander's technique for pulling one particular man, soul and body, together, is precisely the technique i have in mind for pulling a nation together, i want to dwell on it a moment longer before applying it to the put-through clan. the first thing a man is always fooled about is his own body and in everything else he is fooled about, he just branches out from that. the put-through clan proceeds upon the idea that this is as true of his political or social or industrial body to which he belongs as it is of his first one. reform must be self-reform first. if it is true that the majority of ideas and decisions most people think they make with their minds are really made for them and handed up to them by their bodies--if it is true that what people quite commonly use their minds for is to keep up appearances, to give rational-looking excuses and reasons for their wanting what their stomachs and livers and nerves make them want, the way to persuade people nowadays is to do what christ did--get their minds out from under the domination of their bodies. if it is true that when a man goes to his dentist with a toothache, he finds he does not know which side of his mouth it is on, it is likely to be still more true of all the rest of his ideas about himself--his ideas about his ideas. if everything about us, about most of us is more or less like this, as alexander says--wires or nerves all twisted, sensory impressions upside down, half of what is inside our bodies mislaid half the time, the way to change people's minds is to change them toward the bodies they are with and that they are nearest to, first. then we can branch out and educate others--even educate ourselves. millions of grown people, in religion, business and politics to-day in america can be seen thinking automatically of the world about them in the terms of themselves, in the terms of their own souls sadly mixed up with their own bodies. we all know such people. the world is just an extension, a kind of annex or wing, built out from themselves full of reflections from their own livers, and fitted up throughout with air castles, dungeons, twilights, sunrises, after-glows, from their own precious interior decorations and bowels and mercies. the basic fact about human nature the put-through clan acts on is the simplest thing in the world. we are always having moments of seeing it. we all see how true it is in babies we have personally known. we recognize it without a qualm in a baby, that his emotions and reflections about life, about time and eternity, and about things in general are just reflections of a milk bottle he has just had, or of a milk bottle he has not just had and wants to know why. i have often tried to translate a baby's cry in his crib, into english. as near as i can come to it, it is "i don't think my mother knows who i am!" what a baby is really doing is disciplining other people. not so very different after all from senator lodge pivoting as he has for six months a whole world on himself and on his having his own little way with it, disciplining the rest of the senate, forty nations and a president, and everybody in sight--except himself. if a patient nation could put him in a crib, everybody would understand. many people apparently are deceived by his beard, or by his degree at harvard, or other clothes. but it is the same thing. what is really happening to him--to senator lodge is really a kind of spiritual neuritis. he is cramped, or as the vulgar more perspicuously and therefore more fittingly and elegantly put it, his mind is stuck on himself. he is imbedded in his own mereness and now as anybody can see there is nothing that can be done by anybody with anything, not with a whole world for a crowbar, to pry lodge off himself. most of us know other people like this. most of us have moments and subjects on which as we have remembered afterwards we have needed to be pried off. the same is true, of course, of a political body like the republican or democratic party, or of a labor union. the best that most of us--whole towns of us--can do is to get up as we propose for a whole town to do in the put-through clan on the same platform, stand there cheerfully all together on the great general platform and admit in chorus sweetly, that we are all probably this blessed moment and every day being especially fooled more or less by ourselves about ourselves, about the things nearest to us--especially our own personal bodies and political and industrial souls and bodies. the only difference between people who are put into insane asylums and those of us who are still allowed from day to day a little longer to stay out, is that we can manage, if we try, some of us, to be more limber about calling ourselves fools in time. for all practical purposes in this world, it may be said that the people who are wise and deep about keeping themselves reminded that they may be crazy any minute, are sane. what happens to people--to most people when they are grown up is that they stop being simple and honest like a baby. but they all have practically the same essential thought when they are being disagreeable. they are trying to make the world around them toe the line to their own interior decorations. what they think, what they feel, what they do in the little back parlors of their own minds must be daubed on the ceiling of the world. the joy of toleration, of new ideas, of rows and tiers of their non-selves, and of their yet-selves reaching away around them that they can still know and share and can still take over and have the use of in addition to the mere self they already have, they hold off from. this is where the baby has the advantage of them. § . _psycho-analysis for a town._ when a man thinks of himself and wants other people to think of him as an institution--as a kind of church--of course it makes him very unhappy to believe he is wrong, but the minute he thinks of himself as a means to an end, thinks of his personality as a tool placed in his hand for getting what he wants or what a world wants--the minute a man thinks of himself as a kind of spirit-auger, or chisel of the soul, or as a can-opener to truth, which if it is a little changed one way or the other, or held differently, will suddenly work--changing himself toward himself, and believing what he would rather not, becomes like any other invention or discovery, a creative pleasure. in saying that the main thing the put-through clan is for in a town, is to act as town-headquarters for the town's seeing through itself, as a means of making the town the best, the happiest town in the state--as a means of making it a town that deserves anything it wants, i am merely saying that the act of self-invention--the act of recreation once entered into as a habit is so refreshing and so extraordinary in itself, and so practical in its results, that when people once see how it really works--when towns and parties and industrial groups get once started in self-discipline, in self-confession, in psycho-analysis and in taking advantage of opposite ideas--there is going to be an epidemic in this country, a flu of truth. a whole city or a whole town indulging in psycho-analysis finds it less embarrassing and not more embarrassing than one man does. when it becomes the thing for a city or for a capital or labor group to see through itself and then collect on the benefit of it, the main thought cities and labor unions and employee managers will have about it will be a wonder they had not thought of it and done it before. and it will be economical, too, if people take the seeing through them that has to be done by some one, and do it themselves. three per cent of the conveniences--the public x-ray machines for keeping people from being fooled about themselves will be enough. the minute we begin turning the x-ray outfit around and begin trying it modestly on ourselves, a small cheap outfit will do. it is a mere phonograph-record to say that nobody likes self-discipline. what people do not like, is trying it, or getting started. there is a sense in which it is possible for a town like northampton--twenty-five thousand people, to have--if it once gets started, almost an orgy of seeing what is the matter with it. it is easier to be humble in a crowd that is being humble, and a whole town disciplining itself instead of being more difficult to imagine, would be easier, once start the novelty of one man's doing it. why should people think that a man who is capable of disciplining himself is doing it because he thinks he ought to, or why should they be sorry for him? no one really thinks of being sorry for marconi or edison or wilbur wright, or bell, or any big inventor in business or even for a detective like sherlock holmes, the whole joy and efficiency of whose life is the way he steals a march on himself. the very essence and power of being an inventor or a detective or a discoverer, is the way it makes a man jump out around himself, the way he keeps on the qui vive not to believe what he likes, goes out and looks back into the windows he has looked out of all his life. people must not take the liberty of being sympathetic with a man who does this and of thinking he is being noble and doing right. it has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. i am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. i am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. i am offering self-discipline because it works. people who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. they must be leaving most of theirs out.... the psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor. the inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. the source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones. the spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself. in every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. the great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. self-discipline and self-discovery go together. there is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world. if one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. it explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action. § . _to-morrow._ i am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how i wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in america. i am recording a grim, matter-of-fact, irresistible, implacable law in the biology of progress. i am not nagging, teasing or apologizing. i am not saying what i say as religion or as the lord said unto moses, or even "as it seems to me." i am not dealing in what i want to have happen. i am dealing in truth as a force and not as a property. i am foretelling what has got to happen. people who do not believe it will have to get out of the way of it. the conscious control of capital, the conscious control of labor, the conscious control of the public group--the arrival and the victory of the men who get their way by self-control and who are invited by all to have control of others because they have control of themselves, is a law of nature. i am not preaching or teasing. i am not asking people's permission in this book for certain events. this book is not an attempt to answer the question, "what is day after to-morrow's news?" it is put forth as a prospectus of what has got to happen. the truth is taking hold of us and is seizing us all. it is for us to say. this book is a scenario of a play for a hundred million people to put on the stage, and for five hundred million people to act. § . _who._ people will be unfair to themselves and unfair to me and will cheat a nation if any attempt should ever be made to take this book as a program--a program for anybody--and not a spirit. the spirit is the program, and the people who naturally gather around the spirit and who secrete it will have to be the ones to embody and give it in the put-through clan, its local and its national expression. picked persons, picked out by all for their known temperament and gift for team-work--that is for their put-through spirit or spirit of thoroughness in getting the victory over themselves and combining themselves with others, will need to be the dominating people. the essence of the clan is that it is to be vivified and penetrated throughout with personality, and with respect for personality. this means automatically that the put-through clan is not going to be dominated by people who will make it a moral-advice, do-you-good, hand-you-down-welfare institution. the essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves. in the operation of the clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the clan is always going to be distinctly partial. it is never going to treat people alike. people are not--for the time being--alike and are going to be treated as they are. democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination--as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get. it is obvious that to begin with that the put-through clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups--the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return. this means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the put-through clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others. i am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative--possibly more possibly less of others in the clan. any scintilla or fleck of truth i can pick off from a revolutionary, i take but i will not take him. the same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. i want to know all he knows. if i take his truth i can use it, if i take him i will find him cumbersome. life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions. people who do not listen--extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the put-through clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work. it is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way. if people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen--to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others--people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous. people who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the put-through clan as the last people they will hurry with. extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings. * * * * * on the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the put-through clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people--to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited. the people who give the most return on the investment--the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response--in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first. i have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited. i would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want. spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms. revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people--who do not want to think. i am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. i am pointing out a fact to be acted on. tired people always want the same thing. they want a thing to stay as it is--or they want it to stay just as it is--upside down. the same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness--merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work. this is where the put-through clan of the air line league comes in. the put-through clan will throw the local and national influence of twenty million consumers on to the side of spirited or team-work capital and labor, and will discourage, make ridiculous and impossible, the scared fighting capital and the scared fighting labor with which we are now being troubled. the real line of demarcation in modern industry is not between capital and labor, but between spirited capital and labor that want to work, create and construct, on the one hand, and unspirited capital and labor, working as little and thinking as little as they can, on the other. the majority of revolutionaries are people who without taking any trouble to study or understand anything, or to change anything, just turn it thoughtlessly upside down--substitute their inefficiency for the other man's. extreme revolutionaries generally talk about freedom, but until they can get us to believe they are going to allow freedom to others, the world is not going to let them--of all people, have any. the bottom fact about revolutionary labor like revolutionary capital is that it is tired. revolutionary labor is not spirited. it is as soggy-minded, thoughtless and automatic to be a revolutionist to-day as it is to be a louis xvi. it takes originality to construct and to change things and change the hearts and minds of people and the spirit of a nation. anybody can be a revolutionist or a reactionary. all one has to do is to stop thinking and sag, or stop thinking and slash. * * * * * the mills of the gods grind slowly because they grind fine. the main difference between men and the gods is that when men do things on a large scale they are apt to slur things over and be mechanical, do things in huge empty swoops--pass over details and particular persons, and the gods when they do things on a large scale pay more attention to details, to microbes and to particular persons than ever. * * * * * in national issues of capital and labor, the opinions of employers and workmen who have worked out a way of meeting the crisis on a smaller scale, who understand one another on a five or six hundred scale instead of a two or three million scale, would be treated by the air line league as probably weighty and conclusive. those classes of employers and employees who in a marked degree have failed to have the brains to understand each other even in the flesh and at hand with both persons in view themselves, must expect to have their national opinions about national labor and national capital discounted by the clan. the put-through clan nationally will grade the listening and ranking of the demands of industrial groups upon the assumption that people who slur over what is next door are not apt to be deep about things that are further away. § . _the town fireplace._ the outstanding fact about our modern machine civilization and its troubles is that crowd-thinking has seized the people--that people see things and do things gregariously. we have herds of fractions of men, acting as fractions of men and not as human beings. each fraction is trying to get the whole country to be a fraction. being a fraction themselves they want a fraction of a country. ten differing men can get together and agree. ten differing crowds of men--of the same men, will get together and fight. crowds are self-hypnotized. a man who would not be hypnotized off into a fraction of a man alone, with enough men to help him becomes a thousandth or ten thousandth of a man in twenty minutes. if five crowds of a hundred thousand men each could sit down together around a fireplace and listen to the others--if each crowd of a hundred thousand could feel listened to absolutely--listened to by the other four hundred thousand, for one evening, democracy would be safe for the world in the morning. as it is, each crowd sits in madison square garden alone--holds a vast lonely reverie all alone, hypnotizes itself and then goes out and fights. of course there are the crowds on paper, too. ink-mobs roam the streets. crowds do not get on as individual persons do, because individual crowds cannot get physically and humanly together. it has been generally noted that the best radical labor leaders who come into definite personal contact with employers grow quite generally conservative and that the best conservative leaders become what would have once seemed to them radical when they really learn how to lead. why is it that when they begin to learn as leaders how things really are, they are so often impeached by the crowds they represent--by capital and labor? the moment there are conveniences for crowds--for the rank and file of crowds to catch up to their leaders, to see things whole, too--the moment we have the machinery for crowds being able to have the spiritual and personal experiences their leaders have with the other side, crowds will stop dismissing their leaders--the moment they see both sides, and get practical, too. the purpose of the local chapter of the put-through clan, is to find a means in each town of getting all crowds and groups together regularly as one group revealing themselves, listening and being listened to, and confiding themselves to team-thinking and to doing team-work together. the put-through clan headquarters in a town will be the town fireplace for crowds. it will be the warmest, liveliest, manliest, most genial resort in town--where all the live men and real men who seek real contacts and care about men who do, will get together. the refreshing and emancipating experience many men had in army camps will be carried on and become a daily force in the daily life of every town in america. § . _the sign on the world._ i looked up yesterday and saw a sign on a church in new york. i like it better every time i go by. this church is open all day every day for prayer, meditation and business. i have been wondering just who the man is who had the horse-sense and piety to take up the secret of business and the grip of religion both, telegraph them into ten words like this, and make a stone church say them at people a thousand a minute, on the busiest part of the busiest street in new york. whoever the man is, he stands for the business men we want for the put-through clan first. one of the first things the put-through clan is going to dramatize is this sign on the marble collegiate church. the men in america in the next twenty years who are going to carry everything before them in business, drive everybody and everything out of their way, take possession of the great streets and the great factories in the name of god and the people, are the men who practice daily the spirit of this sign, the men in business who refuse to go tumtytumming along in a kind of thoughtless inertia of motion, doing what everybody's doing in business--the men who turn one side (by whatever name they call it) to pray, to snuggle up to god and think. men who have success before them in business are the men who have the most imagination in business. imagination with most of us consists in taking time to see things before other people do, in connecting up what we do with its larger, deeper, more permanent relations, relating what we do to ourselves, to others, to our time and generation, to the things we have done before and to the things that must be done next. "prayer, meditation and business." it is wonderful how these words, when one comes on a man who does not say anything about it and puts them together, tone each other up. the first thing the put-through clan is going to do in a town in this present tipply and tragic world, is to stand by and help make known to everybody across a continent the men in business who stand by these words--who mix them so people cannot tell them apart. book vi what the people expect of the president i the big brother of the people if i were writing a book to be used during a presidential campaign, used as a handbook of the beliefs of the people--a book in the next few weeks for a nation to say yes or no to, for a great people to go before their conventions with, the first belief i would put down for the new president to run on would be the belief that every man in this country is a bigger, better and truer man than the present arrangements of our industrial and social life seem willing to let him express. we are all practically waiting in crowds to-day, all over this country--in held-in and held-back crowds, to act better than we look. this belief is the first belief--the first practical working belief the next president of this country should have about the people. putting this belief forward as a hardheaded every-day working belief about human nature in america, is going to be the way to get a president for our next president who shall release the spirit of the nation, and reveal to a world not only in promise but in action that the people of america are as great a people, as true, level-eyed and steady-hearted a people as the spent and weary peoples of europe have hoped we were. the trouble with america in her own eyes and the eyes of the world to-day, is not that we are not what has been hoped of us, but that the industrial machine we have heaped up on our backs, does not let us express ourselves to ourselves or to others as we really are. the first moment we find that as clear-cut conclusive and perfect arrangements are made for people's being good as are now being made for their being bad, the goodness in each man and in each class in america, which now takes the form of telling other men and other classes, they ought to be good--the goodness in each man which in our present system he bottles up until a more convenient season, or lets peter out into good advice, will under our new machine or our modified system, be allowed to the man himself. no man with things as they are now going, can feel quite safe just now with his own private goodness. he has to run to the labor unions or the manufacturers' association to make sure he has a right to be as good or as human or as reasonable as he wants to be. no man feels he can let himself go and be as good as he likes, because nobody else is doing it and because there is no provision for what happens to a man now, and happens to him quick, who is being more good than he has to be. the mean things we are doing on a large scale to one another just now in america, are not mean things it is our nature to do. we have let our machines get on top of us and wave our meanness at people over our heads. our machines which capital and labor have for expressing us as employers and workmen to one another, caricature us. all one has to do to see this, is to look about and observe the way in which our present machines of trusts and labor unions are working together to make a dollar worth fifty cents. the reason the dollar is only worth fifty cents is that nearly everybody who has anything to do with the dollar feels conscientiously that he owes it to himself and to his class to furnish as little work for a dollar as he dares and take a dollar for fifty cents' worth of work. each man sees this several times a day, but he belongs to a vast machine for getting something for nothing. every man knows in his heart that the cure for everybody's trying to get something for nothing is everybody's at once getting to work doing more than he has to for the money. then the american dollar will quit being worth fifty cents. why doesn't he do it? because the machinery he belongs with and that everybody belongs with consists of two great something-for-nothing machines. both of these stupendous machines of capital and labor are geared for backing in producing and not for going forward. all that has to be done with them is to run them the other way round and we have what we want. people on both sides admit in a vague anonymous scattered fashion that the way to meet a situation in which prices are too high is for everybody to produce more and to charge less for what he produces. but labor will not do this if capital does not do it. capital will not do this if labor does not do it. it cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him getting on with twice as much. the only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for mutual frank expression, confession and coöperation--mutual confession and coöperation by the men in each industry saying, "i will if you will," until we cover the nation. this is one of the first things anti-bolshevik capital and anti-bolshevik labor are going to stand for--the organizing and advertising in their own industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among men who produce. the men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too high wages in cotton mills, "we will make cheaper cotton for you, if you will make cheaper flour for us." it is not a matter of meanness in american human nature we are dealing with, it is a matter of agreement between men--hundreds and thousands and millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are trying to slink out of it. the thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without organizing a national "i will if you will" between capital and labor. the men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their hands, "we will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more." capital will say to labor, "if you will produce ten per cent more, we will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. for every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice the sacrifice." having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do not do twice as much of themselves. they will have machinery for being confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it. instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "i won't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "i will if you will." instead of proceeding from now on to assume that we are a mean people in america, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present one does our worst ones. there is one thing we propose to stand out for and that we do not intend to be wheedled out of, in our next two political conventions and during our next president's next four years, and that is that our two great machines in this country, our industrial one and our political one, shall be taken out of the hands of men who are fooled about themselves and who will not listen to others. we do not believe that there is anything essentially the matter with what is called our capitalistic system or our labor union system except men--the men who think they belong in the front ranks of capital and the front ranks of labor. the scared men and the men who are fooled about themselves in politics and business and who are trying to fool the rest of us, who are trying to make a great, simple, clean-hearted, clear-eyed, generous country like ours look and act every few weeks or every few days as if all the people in it could really do to express themselves to one another and to the world, was with lockouts, strikes, political deadlocks, minority holdups and party threats--shall be turned out of office by the people and huddled away out of sight. in our industrial and political expressing and acting machines on every hand we give notice we are going to pick men out, men who shall make our machines express us, our freedom, our justice, our steadiness of heart, and our belief in america, in ourselves, in one another, or our desire to listen to those who disagree with us, our human sporting instinct about our party and ourselves, and the victory of the people, the common sense and good will of common human nature in america and the world. to the great capitalists who instead of being fellow laborers, are still mooning absent-mindedly about in the last century, still prinking themselves as the owners of their world, and still thinking of themselves as the captains or military leaders of industry--to the labor union dukes and dictators that capitalists like this have created to fight them--the hundred million people appointed to run this country, give notice. * * * * * i would like if i could to publish this book with blank pages for a few million signatures--and a place for the new president or proposed president to sign, too. the presidential candidate we want, would have it in him to put his name down with the rest--with something like this, perhaps--"i do not say i could sign every paragraph in this book, but the general idea and program of organizing and giving body to the will of the people as expressed in this book--the spirit and direction of it and in the main the technique for getting it, i sign for." i believe that the american people when they know in reality, as they do know at heart, what i am believing in this book, would be inclined in looking up their candidate for president to pick out a president who would have written this book--the gist of it--if he had had time. at all events here it is--this program or handbook of the beliefs for a people. i put it forth as being more concrete than political party platforms are--and as a practical and plain way for a nation to look over a president, find him out, and follow him up. ii the man who carries the bunch of keys for the nation the crowds have to be unlocked to each other. the temperament of our president for the next four years, in its bearing on the mood of the nation, is to be the temperament of unlocking the crowds to each other. at present it looks as if our president for the next four years would be perhaps the loneliest president america ever had. when our next president, when he gets into the white house, looks at our people and hears what they say and watches what they do, he could not but have times of being lonely with the people. the people are lonely with one another. anybody can go out into the street anywhere in america to-night and be lonely about the peace treaty, the world war, or civil war. any man can take any crowded street and see for himself. he can pass miles of men who in their hearts are calling him a coward because he has one idea of how to defend america and they have another. if one were to take any ten blocks of broadway and let all the people walking along stop just where they are and begin talking with the men right next to them about what we ought to do in this war, they will begin thinking they are not americans, wanting to throw each other off over the edge of the country--partitioning each other off into mollycoddles, traitors, pussy-foots, safety-firsts, bullies, braggarts and bolshevists and pacifists--and while they might keep up appearances and try to be polite on the surface with strangers, that whole section of broadway would be mad all through for ten blocks. one would have ten blocks of feeling superior and despising people--every man looking askance at every other man for having a different idea of america from his idea of america. if the president were to steal along through the ten blocks and overhear the people, he would feel lonely with them. the only way not to feel lonely on ten blocks of broadway just now would be to put up signs and labels over doors of theaters and announce speakers and check people off as they go along, into separate audiences. the league of nations or the american federation of labor would sort out a thousand people on broadway and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, and the i. w. w. could sort out another thousand and coop them up in a hall to agree with each other, but if there ever were any way of holding down a whole hallful of people and making them listen hard to another whole hallful of people, all that would be left after a minute of listening would be each audience shouting pooh! pooh! to the other audience and saying "you are not america. we only are america!" this makes the president lonely. we elected him a few months ago to be president of all of us. it is slow work being president, being a good mixer, when there are ten groups of people who will not listen and who all turn on you and hate you, rend you if you try to get them to listen to each other. the way the president is going to meet this issue and insist until we all thank him for it--on being president of all of us, is with his temperament. iii the president's temperament if i were writing a book for the next president to run for president on--a thing i have guilty moments of hoping i am doing--the first thing i would arrange for in the book, would be to put down in it two platforms for him to run on--one platform on what he believes and the other platform--the way he believes it and gets other people to believe it. the way the next president we pick out, does his believing, the way he keeps from believing weakly what he wants to, and from being fooled about his party and about himself, the clean-cutness and honesty of his mind, the tone, the ring in which he believes in himself and gets other people to believe in him, is going to be, from the point of view of his getting for this country at home and abroad, what it wants, the most important thing about him. the most important part of the next president's platform is going to be, in the eyes of the people, his character, his temperament, the way his personal traits and habits dramatize what he says, the way he lives what he believes. the american people may not be shrewd about seers, or about historians or philosophers, but they are very likely any minute to be deep about people. when henry cabot lodge draws a rough sketch in chalk of history he wants a hundred million people to help him make, and when he is being fooled about it and is all out of perspective the people may defer to him, may feel mr. lodge is too deep for them, but the moment they see mr. lodge being fooled about himself, they find mr. lodge easy. in a trait in human nature like this, with which they are familiar every day, a hundred million people--without trying, are deep. if a hundred million people could sit down and write a book--a book or open letter addressed in the next two months to those two big vague, whoofy nobodies we call our political parties, and tell them in so many words the kind of president the people want and understand--the kind of president the people would sweep in unspeakably into the white house when they saw him, no matter what any politician said, i am inclined to believe it would be found--when the book by the hundred million people was out, that our people feel on the whole that we could not have anything better in our country for our next president than a man who would be a lawyer backwards. what the platform of personality we want our next president to have amounts to, is this--know everything a lawyer knows. have everything a lawyer has--and just turn it around and use it the other way and be another kind of man about it. the fate of america and the fate of the world may be said to be turning to-day on the degree during the next four years, during the next president's administration, the american people and all groups of the people, stop believing weakly what they want to believe and face the facts about themselves. in order to be efficient, in order to be free or even to have enough to eat, millions of american men and women of all groups and classes of the people have got to be capable and show that they are capable of changing their minds about themselves. everything we are hoping to do turns upon our recognizing as a people, standing out from the rest and pushing forward to lead us, men who know more than most of us know, men who are practiced in keeping their own minds open and can therefore open ours. instead of having for the next president of this country a man who braces people, who tightens people up in their convictions, or who drives the old beliefs they want to believe further down into them and makes them believe them harder, we are going to put in our demand for a president who is the engineer of the will of the people, who draws people out, who has the common sense, the reality, the sense of humor and the humanness to look facts and folks in the eyes, who keeps people on all sides who have dealings with him from being fooled about themselves, a man who makes people real when they are with him, who makes them when they even think of him, real with themselves and real with one another, and real in politics. i mean by a man's being real in politics, being a politician backwards, keeping open to facts acting and preferring to act as children and strong men act, with the deepness and directness of the child. the hundred million people in the book they would write if they had time, put in their demand for a big simple fellow human being in the white house, a man anybody can understand, a man who does things with people and gets things out of people because he makes people feel they know him. the political parties cannot help themselves the moment the people speak. they would rather slide in a man who does not see through them if they could, perhaps, but the great political party that sees first and sees best, that only a man who sees through it and who will go into the white house to keep on seeing through it, can be elected, will sweep this country as clean as a whistle. iv the president's religion i have always given homage as probably to the best men of their time, to the old monks of the middle ages, who climbed up on mountain tops and lived in monasteries alone with god. if i felt just as they felt about being superlatively religious and wanted to pick out and proceed to live the most deeply, intricately religious life i could think of i would refuse to look like a saint and be president of the american board of commissioners for foreign missions, and would pick out the most difficult business with the most difficult class of men to compete with in the united states. then i would go into it, put all my money and all my religion together into it. the principles and standards that actually obtain in competition constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. one might say coöperation of course, but what makes coöperation powerful and what selects the people who shall lead coöperation--what gives it character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him to find a way to do or not to do certain things--when he competes. competition--the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him--would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values--the real monastery of modern life. all any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail. there always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. the government, the police and the draft have to deal with them. as for the rest of us, competition--fair, manly, sporting competition, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make coöperation a noble as well as practical course of procedure. the way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state--to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business. if i were the rich young man in the new testament i would not have sold all my goods to feed the poor--as that particular person (being what he was) was advised to. i would hold on to my money--and found a religious order with it. i would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the temple. i would do it not by being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to be religious, _i.e._, my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and shortsighted, theirs. this is not the kind of thing that i happen to have the natural technique or gift to do--to found a live deep natural religious order like this, but there are thousands of men i know and that other men know in america, who have the natural typical american technique for putting their higher gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out before our eyes. the way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to lead in the business world to-day in establishing principles of competition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people. the way to be a president, the next four years, is to use the white house and all the resources of the government to coöperate with and back up this type of american business man. v the red flag and the white house the first qualification the next president should run for the presidency on is his vision or program for the nation with regard to backing up men in american life--democracy and the red flag. the first thing a president should see about the red flag is that the red flag is up to the people and not up to the white house--up to the people in five hundred thousand factories and offices and stores, up to the people on both sides of a hundred thousand counters, up to everybody who buys a paper of pins or a pound of cheese while they are buying it, up to everybody who buys a house or a watch or a cake of soap, a safety razor or a railroad, up to everybody while he is producing, while he is buying and selling, up to everybody individually and collectively to see that in every ten cents they spend in this country and every ten minutes they work in this country, the red flag--the civil war flag, is stamped on. only the people can head off the red flag--all of the people working on it on their daily job all of the time. the more our president believes that the work of dealing with the red flag in this country is up to the people the more he gets the people to believe it, puts the work off on the people, the better the work will be done, the further the red flag will be from getting hold of the country and the longer the president will be in the white house. we call our president our chief executive. what we put him in the white house and make him our chief executive for is that he shall have imagination about a hundred million people besides himself, that he shall have imagination about what the people can do and imagination about getting them to do it. an executive is a man whose work is making other people work. we call the place in which we have our president live the executive mansion. the best man to elect to live in it is the man who can make a hundred million people work. the end mr. wells has also written the following novels: love and mr. lewisham kipps mr. polly the wheels of chance the new machiavelli ann veronica tono bungay marriage bealby the passionate friends the wife of sir isaac harman the research magnificent mr. britling sees it through the soul of a bishop the following fantastic and imaginative romances: the war of the worlds the time machine the wonderful visit the island of dr. moreau the sea lady the sleeper awakes the food of the gods the war in the air the first men in the moon in the days of the comet the world set free and numerous short stories now collected in one volume under the title of the country of the blind a series of books upon social, religious and political questions: anticipations ( ) mankind in the making first and last things new worlds for old a modern utopia the future in america an englishman looks at the world what is coming? war and the future god the invisible king and two little books about children's play, called: floor games and little wars in the fourth year anticipations of a world peace by h. g. wells author of "mr. britling sees it through," "the war and the future," "what is coming?" "the war that will end war," "the world set free," "in the days of the comet," and "a modern utopia" preface in the latter half of a few of us were writing that this war was a "war of ideas." a phrase, "the war to end war," got into circulation, amidst much sceptical comment. it was a phrase powerful enough to sway many men, essentially pacifists, towards taking an active part in the war against german imperialism, but it was a phrase whose chief content was its aspiration. people were already writing in those early days of disarmament and of the abolition of the armament industry throughout the world; they realized fully the element of industrial belligerency behind the shining armour of imperialism, and they denounced the "krupp-kaiser" alliance. but against such writing and such thought we had to count, in those days, great and powerful realities. even to those who expressed these ideas there lay visibly upon them the shadow of impracticability; they were very "advanced" ideas in , very utopian. against them was an unbroken mass of mental habit and public tradition. while we talked of this "war to end war," the diplomatists of the powers allied against germany were busily spinning a disastrous web of greedy secret treaties, were answering aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing in the treacherous violence of germany only the justification for countervailing evil acts. to them it was only another war for "ascendancy." that was three years and a half ago, and since then this "war of ideas" has gone on to a phase few of us had dared hope for in those opening days. the russian revolution put a match to that pile of secret treaties and indeed to all the imperialist plans of the allies; in the end it will burn them all. the greatest of the western allies is now the united states of america, and the americans have come into this war simply for an idea. three years and a half ago a few of us were saying this was a war against the idea of imperialism, not german imperialism merely, but british and french and russian imperialism, and we were saying this not because it was so, but because we hoped to see it become so. to-day we can say so, because now it is so. in those days, moreover, we said this is the "war to end war," and we still did not know clearly how. we thought in terms of treaties and alliances. it is largely the detachment and practical genius of the great english-speaking nation across the atlantic that has carried the world on beyond and replaced that phrase by the phrase, "the league of nations," a phrase suggesting plainly the organization of a sufficient instrument by which war may be ended for ever. in talk of a world league of nations would have seemed, to the extremest pitch, "utopian." to-day the project has an air not only of being so practicable, but of being so urgent and necessary and so manifestly the sane thing before mankind that not to be busied upon it, not to be making it more widely known and better understood, not to be working out its problems and bringing it about, is to be living outside of the contemporary life of the world. for a book upon any other subject at the present time some apology may be necessary, but a book upon this subject is as natural a thing to produce now as a pair of skates in winter when the ice begins to bear. all we writers find ourselves engaged perforce in some part or other of a world-wide propaganda of this the most creative and hopeful of political ideas that has ever dawned upon the consciousness of mankind. with no concerted plan we feel called upon to serve it. and in no connection would one so like to think oneself un-original as in this connection. it would be a dismaying thing to realize that one were writing anything here which was not the possible thought of great multitudes of other people, and capable of becoming the common thought of mankind. one writes in such a book as this not to express oneself but to swell a chorus. the idea of the league of nations is so great a one that it may well override the pretensions and command the allegiance of kings; much more does it claim the self-subjugation of the journalistic writer. our innumerable books upon this great edifice of a world peace do not constitute a scramble for attention, but an attempt to express in every variety of phrase and aspect this one system of ideas which now possesses us all. in the same way the elementary facts and ideas of the science of chemistry might conceivably be put completely and fully into one text-book, but, as a matter of fact, it is far more convenient to tell that same story over in a thousand different forms, in a text-book for boys here, for a different sort or class of boy there, for adult students, for reference, for people expert in mathematics, for people unused to the scientific method, and so on. for the last year the writer has been doing what he can--and a number of other writers have been doing what they can--to bring about a united declaration of all the atlantic allies in favour of a league of nations, and to define the necessary nature of that league. he has, in the course of this work, written a series of articles upon the league and upon _the necessary sacrifices of preconceptions_ that the idea involves in the london press. he has also been trying to clear his own mind upon the real meaning of that ambiguous word "democracy," for which the league is to make the world "safe." the bulk of this book is made up of these discussions. for a very considerable number of readers, it may be well to admit here, it can have no possible interest; they will have come at these questions themselves from different angles and they will have long since got to their own conclusions. but there may be others whose angle of approach may be similar to the writer's, who may have asked some or most of the questions he has had to ask, and who may be actively interested in the answers and the working out of the answers he has made to these questions. for them this book is printed. h. g. wells. _may_, . it is a dangerous thing to recommend specific books out of so large and various a literature as the "league of nations" idea has already produced, but the reader who wishes to reach beyond the range of this book, or who does not like its tone and method, will probably find something to meet his needs and tastes better in marburg's "league of nations," a straightforward account of the american side of the movement by the former united states minister in belgium, on the one hand, or in the concluding parts of mr. fayle's "great settlement" ( ), a frankly sceptical treatment from the british imperialist point of view, on the other. an illuminating discussion, advocating peace treaties rather than a league, is sir walter phillimore's "three centuries of treaties." two excellent books from america, that chance to be on my table, are mr. goldsmith's "league to enforce peace" and "a world in ferment" by president nicholas murray butler. mater's "société des nations" (didier) is an able presentation of a french point of view. brailsford's "a league of nations" is already a classic of the movement in england, and a very full and thorough book; and hobson's "towards international government" is a very sympathetic contribution from the english liberal left; but the reader must understand that these two writers seem disposed to welcome a peace with an unrevolutionized germany, an idea to which, in common with most british people, i am bitterly opposed. walsh's "world rebuilt" is a good exhortation, and mugge's "parliament of man" is fresh and sane and able. the omnivorous reader will find good sense and quaint english in judge mejdell's "_jus gentium_," published in english by olsen's of christiania. there is an active league of nations society in dublin, as well as the london and washington ones, publishing pamphlets and conducting propaganda. all these books and pamphlets i have named happen to lie upon my study table as i write, but i have made no systematic effort to get together literature upon the subject, and probably there are just as many books as good of which i have never even heard. there must, i am sure, be statements of the league of nations idea forthcoming from various religious standpoints, but i do not know any sufficiently well to recommend them. it is incredible that neither the roman catholic church, the english episcopal church, nor any nonconformist body has made any effort as an organization to forward this essentially religious end of peace on earth. and also there must be german writings upon this same topic. i mention these diverse sources not in order to present a bibliography, but because i should be sorry to have the reader think that this little book pretends to state _the_ case rather than _a_ case for the league of nations. contents i. the way to concrete realization ii. the league must be representative iii. the necessary powers of the league iv. the labour view of middle africa v. getting the league idea clear in relation to imperialism vi. the war aims of the western allies compactly stated vii. the future of monarchy viii. the plain necessity for a league ix. democracy x. the recent struggle for proportional representation in great britain xi. the study and propaganda of democracy in the fourth year the league of free nations i the way to concrete realization more and more frequently does one hear this phrase, the league of nations, used to express the outline idea of the new world that will come out of the war. there can be no doubt that the phrase has taken hold of the imaginations of great multitudes of people: it is one of those creative phrases that may alter the whole destiny of mankind. but as yet it is still a very vague phrase, a cloudy promise of peace. i make no apology therefore, for casting my discussion of it in the most general terms. the idea is the idea of united human effort to put an end to wars; the first practical question, that must precede all others, is how far can we hope to get to a concrete realization of that? but first let me note the fourth word in the second title of this book. the common talk is of a "league of nations" merely. i follow the man who is, more than any other man, the leader of english political thought throughout the world to-day, president wilson, in inserting that significant adjective "free." we western allies know to-day what is involved in making bargains with governments that do not stand for their peoples; we have had all our russian deal, for example, repudiated and thrust back upon our hands; and it is clearly in his mind, as it must be in the minds of all reasonable men, that no mere "scrap of paper," with just a monarch's or a chancellor's endorsement, is a good enough earnest of fellowship in the league. it cannot be a diplomatist's league. the league of nations, if it is to have any such effect as people seem to hope from it, must be, in the first place, "understanded of the people." it must be supported by sustained, deliberate explanation, and by teaching in school and church and press of the whole mass of all the peoples concerned. i underline the adjective "free" here to set aside, once for all, any possible misconception that this modern idea of a league of nations has any affinity to that holy alliance of the diplomatists, which set out to keep the peace of europe so disastrously a century ago. later i will discuss the powers of the league. but before i come to that i would like to say a little about the more general question of its nature and authority. what sort of gathering will embody it? the suggestions made range from a mere advisory body, rather like the hague convention, which will merely pronounce on the rights and wrongs of any international conflict, to the idea of a sort of super-state, a parliament of mankind, a "super national" authority, practically taking over the sovereignty of the existing states and empires of the world. most people's ideas of the league fall between these extremes. they want the league to be something more than an ethical court, they want a league that will act, but on the other hand they shrink from any loss of "our independence." there seems to be a conflict here. there is a real need for many people to tidy up their ideas at this point. we cannot have our cake and eat it. if association is worth while, there must be some sacrifice of freedom to association. as a very distinguished colonial representative said to me the other day: "here we are talking of the freedom of small nations and the 'self-determination' of peoples, and at the same time of the council of the league of nations and all sorts of international controls. which do we want?" the answer, i think, is "both." it is a matter of more or less, of getting the best thing at the cost of the second-best. we may want to relax an old association in order to make a newer and wider one. it is quite understandable that peoples aware of a distinctive national character and involved in some big existing political complex, should wish to disentangle themselves from one group of associations in order to enter more effectively into another, a greater, and more satisfactory one. the finn or the pole, who has hitherto been a rather reluctant member of the synthesis of the russian empire, may well wish to end that attachment in order to become a free member of a worldwide brotherhood. the desire for free arrangement is not a desire for chaos. there is such a thing as untying your parcels in order to pack them better, and i do not see myself how we can possibly contemplate a great league of freedom and reason in the world without a considerable amount of such preliminary dissolution. it happens, very fortunately for the world, that a century and a quarter ago thirteen various and very jealous states worked out the problem of a union, and became--after an enormous, exhausting wrangle--the united states of america. now the way they solved their riddle was by delegating and giving over jealously specified sovereign powers and doing all that was possible to retain the residuum. they remained essentially sovereign states. new york, virginia, massachusetts, for example, remained legally independent. the practical fusion of these peoples into one people outran the legal bargain. it was only after long years of discussion that the point was conceded; it was indeed only after the civil war that the implications were fully established, that there resided a sovereignty in the american people as a whole, as distinguished from the peoples of the several states. this is a precedent that every one who talks about the league of nations should bear in mind. these states set up a congress and president in washington with strictly delegated powers. that congress and president they delegated to look after certain common interests, to deal with interstate trade, to deal with foreign powers, to maintain a supreme court of law. everything else--education, militia, powers of life and death--the states retained for themselves. to this day, for instance, the federal courts and the federal officials have no power to interfere to protect the lives or property of aliens in any part of the union outside the district of columbia. the state governments still see to that. the federal government has the legal right perhaps to intervene, but it is still chary of such intervention. and these states of the american union were at the outset so independent-spirited that they would not even adopt a common name. to this day they have no common name. we have to call them americans, which is a ridiculous name when we consider that canada, mexico, peru, brazil are all of them also in america. or else we have to call them virginians, californians, new englanders, and so forth. their legal and nominal separateness weighs nothing against the real fusion that their great league has now made possible. now, that clearly is a precedent of the utmost value in our schemes for this council of the league of nations. we must begin by delegating, as the states began by delegating. it is a far cry to the time when we shall talk and think of the sovereign people of the earth. that council of the league of nations will be a tie as strong, we hope, but certainly not so close and multiplex as the early tie of the states at washington. it will begin by having certain delegated powers and no others. it will be an "_ad hoc_" body. later its powers may grow as mankind becomes accustomed to it. but at first it will have, directly or mediately, all the powers that seem necessary to restrain the world from war--and unless i know nothing of patriotic jealousies it will have not a scrap of power more. the danger is much more that its powers will be insufficient than that they will be excessive. of that later. what i want to discuss here now is the constitution of this delegated body. i want to discuss that first in order to set aside out of the discussion certain fantastic notions that will otherwise get very seriously in our way. fantastic as they are, they have played a large part in reducing the hague tribunal to an ineffective squeak amidst the thunders of this war. a number of gentlemen scheming out world unity in studies have begun their proposals with the simple suggestion that each sovereign power should send one member to the projected parliament of mankind. this has a pleasant democratic air; one sovereign state, one vote. now let us run over a list of sovereign states and see to what this leads us. we find our list includes the british empire, with a population of four hundred millions, of which probably half can read and write some language or other; bogota with a population of a million, mostly poets; hayti with a population of a million and a third, almost entirely illiterate and liable at any time to further political disruption; andorra with a population of four or five thousand souls. the mere suggestion of equal representation between such "powers" is enough to make the british empire burst into a thousand (voting) fragments. a certain concession to population, one must admit, was made by the theorists; a state of over three millions got, if i remember rightly, two delegates, and if over twenty, three, and some of the small states were given a kind of intermittent appearance, they only came every other time or something of that sort; but at the hague things still remained in such a posture that three or four minute and backward states could outvote the british empire or the united states. therein lies the clue to the insignificance of the hague. such projects as these are idle projects and we must put them out of our heads; they are against nature; the great nations will not suffer them for a moment. but when we dismiss this idea of representation by states, we are left with the problem of the proportion of representation and of relative weight in the council of the league on our hands. it is the sort of problem that appeals terribly to the ingenious. we cannot solve it by making population a basis, because that will give a monstrous importance to the illiterate millions of india and china. ingenious statistical schemes have been framed in which the number of university graduates and the steel output come in as multipliers, but for my own part i am not greatly impressed by statistical schemes. at the risk of seeming something of a prussian, i would like to insist upon certain brute facts. the business of the league of nations is to keep the peace of the world and nothing else. no power will ever dare to break the peace of the world if the powers that are capable of making war under modern conditions say "_no_." and there are only four powers certainly capable at the present time of producing the men and materials needed for a modern war in sufficient abundance to go on fighting: britain, france, germany, and the united states. there are three others which are very doubtfully capable: italy, japan, and austria. russia i will mark--it is all that one can do with russia just now--with a note of interrogation. some day china may be war capable--i hope never, but it is a possibility. personally i don't think that any other power on earth would have a ghost of a chance to resist the will--if it could be an honestly united will--of the first-named four. all the rest fight by the sanction of and by association with these leaders. they can only fight because of the split will of the war-complete powers. some are forced to fight by that very division. no one can vie with me in my appreciation of the civilization of switzerland, sweden, or holland, but the plain fact of the case is that such powers are absolutely incapable of uttering an effective protest against war. far less so are your haytis and liberias. the preservation of the world-peace rests with the great powers and with the great powers alone. if they have the will for peace, it is peace. if they have not, it is conflict. the four powers i have named can now, if they see fit, dictate the peace of the world for ever. let us keep our grip on that. peace is the business of the great powers primarily. steel output, university graduates, and so forth may be convenient secondary criteria, may be useful ways of measuring war efficiency, but the meat and substance of the council of the league of nations must embody the wills of those leading peoples. they can give an enduring peace to the little nations and the whole of mankind. it can arrive in no other way. so i take it that the council of an ideal league of nations must consist chiefly of the representatives of the great belligerent powers, and that the representatives of the minor allies and of the neutrals--essential though their presence will be--must not be allowed to swamp the voices of these larger masses of mankind. and this state of affairs may come about more easily than logical, statistical-minded people may be disposed to think. our first impulse, when we discuss the league of nations idea, is to think of some very elaborate and definite scheme of members on the model of existing legislative bodies, called together one hardly knows how, and sitting in a specially built league of nations congress house. all schemes are more methodical than reality. we think of somebody, learned and "expert," in spectacles, with a thin clear voice, reading over the "projected constitution of a league of nations" to an attentive and respectful peace congress. but there is a more natural way to a league than that. instead of being made like a machine, the league of nations may come about like a marriage. the peace congress that must sooner or later meet may itself become, after a time, the council of a league of nations. the league of nations may come upon us by degrees, almost imperceptibly. i am strongly obsessed by the idea that that peace congress will necessarily become--and that it is highly desirable that it should become--a most prolonged and persistent gathering. why should it not become at length a permanent gathering, inviting representatives to aid its deliberations from the neutral states, and gradually adjusting itself to conditions of permanency? i can conceive no such peace congress as those that have settled up after other wars, settling up after this war. not only has the war been enormously bigger than any other war, but it has struck deeper at the foundations of social and economic life. i doubt if we begin to realize how much of the old system is dead to-day, how much has to be remade. since the beginnings of history there has been a credible promise of gold payments underneath our financial arrangements. it is now an incredible promise. the value of a pound note waves about while you look at it. what will happen to it when peace comes no man can tell. nor what will happen to the mark. the rouble has gone into the abyss. our giddy money specialists clutch their handfuls of paper and watch it flying down the steep. much as we may hate the germans, some of us will have to sit down with some of the enemy to arrange a common scheme for the preservation of credit in money. and i presume that it is not proposed to end this war in a wild scramble of buyers for such food as remains in the world. there is a shortage now, a greater shortage ahead of the world, and there will be shortages of supply at the source and transport in food and all raw materials for some years to come. the peace congress will have to sit and organize a share-out and distribution and reorganization of these shattered supplies. it will have to rhondda the nations. probably, too, we shall have to deal collectively with a pestilence before we are out of the mess. then there are such little jobs as the reconstruction of belgium and serbia. there are considerable rectifications of boundaries to be made. there are fresh states to be created, in poland and armenia for example. about all these smaller states, new and old, that the peace must call into being, there must be a system of guarantees of the most difficult and complicated sort. i do not see the press congress getting through such matters as these in a session of weeks or months. the idea the germans betrayed at brest, that things were going to be done in the versailles fashion by great moustached heroes frowning and drawing lines with a large black soldierly thumbnail across maps, is--old-fashioned. they have made their eastern treaties, it is true, in this mode, but they are still looking for some really responsible government to keep them now that they are made. from first to last clearly the main peace negotiations are going to follow unprecedented courses. this preliminary discussion of war aims by means of great public speeches, that has been getting more and more explicit now for many months, is quite unprecedented. apparently all the broad preliminaries are to be stated and accepted in the sight of all mankind before even an armistice occurs on the main, the western front. the german diplomatists hate this process. so do a lot of ours. so do some of the diplomatic frenchmen. the german junkers are dodging and lying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything they possibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of the council chamber, but that way there is no peace. and when at last germany says snip sufficiently to the allies' snap, and the peace congress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as its prelude. before it meets, the broad lines of the settlement will have been drawn plainly with the approval of the mass of mankind. ii the league must be representative a peace congress, growing permanent, then, may prove to be the most practical and convenient embodiment of this idea of a league of nations that has taken possession of the imagination of the world. a most necessary preliminary to a peace congress, with such possibilities inherent in it, must obviously be the meeting and organization of a preliminary league of the allied nations. that point i would now enlarge. half a world peace is better than none. there seems no reason whatever why the world should wait for the central powers before it begins this necessary work. mr. mccurdy has been asking lately, "why not the league of nations _now_?" that is a question a great number of people would like to echo very heartily. the nearer the allies can come to a league of free nations before the peace congress the more prospect there is that that body will approximate in nature to a league of nations for the whole world. in one most unexpected quarter the same idea has been endorsed. the king's speech on the prorogation of parliament this february was one of the most remarkable royal utterances that have ever been made from the british throne. there was less of the old-fashioned king and more of the modern president about it than the most republican-minded of us could have anticipated. for the first time in a king's speech we heard of the "democracies" of the world, and there was a clear claim that the allies at present fighting the central powers did themselves constitute a league of nations. but we must admit that at present they do so only in a very rhetorical sense. there is no real council of empowered representatives, and nothing in the nature of a united front has been prepared. unless we provide beforehand for something more effective, italy, france, the united states, japan, and this country will send separate groups of representatives, with separate instructions, unequal status, and very probably conflicting views upon many subjects, to the ultimate peace discussions. it is quite conceivable--it is a very serious danger--that at this discussion skilful diplomacy on the part of the central powers may open a cleft among the allies that has never appeared during the actual war. have the british settled, for example, with italy and france for the supply of metallurgical coal after the war? those countries must have it somehow. across the board germany can make some tempting bids in that respect. or take another question: have the british arrived at common views with france, belgium, portugal, and south africa about the administration of central africa? suppose germany makes sudden proposals affecting native labour that win over the portuguese and the boers? there are a score of such points upon which we shall find the allied representatives haggling with each other in the presence of the enemy if they have not been settled beforehand. it is the plainest common sense that we should be fixing up all such matters with our allies now, and knitting together a common front for the final deal with german imperialism. and these things are not to be done effectively and bindingly nowadays by official gentlemen in discreet undertones. they need to be done with the full knowledge and authority of the participating peoples. the russian example has taught the world the instability of diplomatic bargains in a time of such fundamental issues as the present. there is little hope and little strength in hole-and-corner bargainings between the officials or politicians who happen to be at the head of this or that nation for the time being. our labour people will not stand this sort of thing and they will not be bound by it. there will be the plain danger of repudiation for all arrangements made in that fashion. a gathering of somebody or other approved by the british foreign office and of somebody or other approved by the french foreign office, of somebody with vague powers from america, and so on and so on, will be an entirely ineffective gathering. but that is the sort of gathering of the allies we have been having hitherto, and that is the sort of gathering that is likely to continue unless there is a considerable expression of opinion in favour of something more representative and responsible. even our foreign office must be aware that in every country in the world there is now bitter suspicion of and keen hostility towards merely diplomatic representatives. one of the most significant features of the time is the evident desire of the labour movement in every european country to take part in a collateral conference of labour that shall meet when and where the peace congress does and deliberate and comment on its proceedings. for a year now the demand of the masses for such a labour conference has been growing. it marks a distrust of officialdom whose intensity officialdom would do well to ponder. but it is the natural consequence of, it is the popular attempt at a corrective to, the aloofness and obscurity that have hitherto been so evil a characteristic of international negotiations. i do not think labour and intelligent people anywhere are going to be fobbed off with an old-fashioned diplomatic gathering as being that league of free nations they demand. on the other hand, i do not contemplate this bi-cameral conference with the diplomatists trying to best and humbug the labour people as well as each other and the labour people getting more and more irritated, suspicious, and extremist, with anything but dread. the allied countries must go into the conference _solid_, and they can only hope to do that by heeding and incorporating labour ideas before they come to the conference. the only alternative that i can see to this unsatisfactory prospect of a peace congress sitting side by side with a dissentient and probably revolutionary labour and socialist convention--both gatherings with unsatisfactory credentials contradicting one another and drifting to opposite extremes--is that the delegates the allied powers send to the peace conference (the same delegates which, if they are wise, they will have previously sent to a preliminary league of allied nations to discuss their common action at the peace congress), should be elected _ad hoc_ upon democratic lines. i know that this will be a very shocking proposal to all our able specialists in foreign policy. they will talk at once about the "ignorance" of people like the labour leaders and myself about such matters, and so on. what do we know of the treaty of so-and-so that was signed in the year seventeen something?--and so on. to which the answer is that we ought not to have been kept ignorant of these things. a day will come when the foreign offices of all countries will have to recognize that what the people do not know of international agreements "ain't facts." a secret treaty is only binding upon the persons in the secret. but what i, as a sample common person, am not ignorant of is this: that the business that goes on at the peace congress will either make or mar the lives of everyone i care for in the world, and that somehow, by representative or what not, _i have to be there_. the peace congress deals with the blood and happiness of my children and the future of my world. speaking as one of the hundreds of millions of "rank outsiders" in public affairs, i do not mean to respect any peace treaty that may end this war unless i am honestly represented at its making. i think everywhere there is a tendency in people to follow the russian example to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which they have had no voice. i do not see that any genuine realization of the hopes with which all this talk about the league of nations is charged can be possible, unless the two bodies which should naturally lead up to the league of nations--that is to say, firstly, the conference of the allies, and then the peace congress--are elected bodies, speaking confidently for the whole mass of the peoples behind them. it may be a troublesome thing to elect them, but it will involve much more troublesome consequences if they are not elected. this, i think, is one of the considerations for which many people's minds are still unprepared. but unless we are to have over again after all this bloodshed and effort some such "peace with honour" foolery as we had performed by "dizzy" and salisbury at that fatal berlin conference in which this present war was begotten, we must sit up to this novel proposal of electoral representation in the peace negotiations. something more than common sense binds our statesmen to this idea. they are morally pledged to it. president wilson and our british and french spokesmen alike have said over and over again that they want to deal not with the hohenzollerns but with the german people. in other words, we have demanded elected representatives from the german people with whom we may deal, and how can we make a demand of that sort unless we on our part are already prepared to send our own elected representatives to meet them? it is up to us to indicate by our own practice how we on our side, professing as we do to act for democracies, to make democracy safe on the earth, and so on, intend to meet this new occasion. yet it has to be remarked that, so far, not one of the league of nations projects i have seen have included any practicable proposals for the appointment of delegates either to that ultimate body or to its two necessary predecessors, the council of the allies and the peace congress. it is evident that here, again, we are neglecting to get on with something of very urgent importance. i will venture, therefore, to say a word or two here about the possible way in which a modern community may appoint its international representatives. and here, again, i turn from any european precedents to that political outcome of the british mind, the constitution of the united states. (because we must always remember that while our political institutions in britain are a patch-up of feudalism, tudor, stuart, and hanoverian monarchist traditions and urgent merely european necessities, a patch-up that has been made quasi-democratic in a series of after-thoughts, the american constitution is a real, deliberate creation of the english-speaking intelligence.) the president of the united states, then, we have to note, is elected in a most extraordinary way, and in a way that has now the justification of very great successes indeed. on several occasions the united states has achieved indisputable greatness in its presidents, and very rarely has it failed to set up very leaderly and distinguished men. it is worth while, therefore, to inquire how this president is elected. he is neither elected directly by the people nor appointed by any legislative body. he is chosen by a special college elected by the people. this college exists to elect him; it meets, elects him, and disperses. (i will not here go into the preliminary complications that makes the election of a president follow upon a preliminary election of two presidential candidates. the point i am making here is that he is a specially selected man chosen _ad hoc_.) is there any reason why we should, not adopt this method in this new necessity we are under of sending representatives, first, to the long overdue and necessary allied council, then to the peace congress, and then to the hoped-for council of the league of nations? i am anxious here only to start for discussion the idea of an electoral representation of the nations upon these three bodies that must in succession set themselves to define, organize, and maintain the peace of the world. i do not wish to complicate the question by any too explicit advocacy of methods of election or the like. in the united states this college which elects the president is elected on the same register of voters as that which elects the senate and congress, and at the same time. but i suppose if we are to give a popular mandate to the three or five or twelve or twenty (or whatever number it is) men to whom we are going to entrust our empire's share in this great task of the peace negotiations, it will be more decisive of the will of the whole nation if the college that had to appoint them is elected at a special election. i suppose that the great british common-weals over-seas, at present not represented in parliament, would also and separately at the same time elect colleges to appoint their representatives. i suppose there would be at least one indian representative elected, perhaps by some special electoral conference of indian princes and leading men. the chief defect of the american presidential election is that as the old single vote method of election is employed it has to be fought on purely party lines. he is the select man of the democratic half, or of the republican half of the nation. he is not the select man of the whole nation. it would give a far more representative character to the electoral college if it could be elected by fair modern methods, if for this particular purpose parliamentary constituencies could be grouped and the clean scientific method of proportional representation could be used. but i suppose the party politician in this, as in most of our affairs, must still have his pound of our flesh--and we must reckon with him later for the bloodshed. these are all, however, secondary considerations. the above paragraph is, so to speak, in the nature of a footnote. the fundamental matter, if we are to get towards any realization of this ideal of a world peace sustained by a league of nations, is to get straight away to the conception of direct special electoral mandates in this matter. at present all the political luncheon and dinner parties in london are busy with smirking discussions of "who is to go?" the titled ladies are particularly busy. they are talking about it as if we poor, ignorant, tax-paying, blood-paying common people did not exist. "l. g.," they say, will of course "_insist_ on going," but there is much talk of the "old man." people are getting quite nice again about "the old man's feelings." it would be such a pretty thing to send him. but if "l. g." goes we want him to go with something more than a backing of intrigues and snatched authority. and i do not think the mass of people have any enthusiasm for the old man. it is difficult again--by the dinner-party standards--to know how lord curzon can be restrained. but we common people do not care if he is restrained to the point of extinction. probably there will be nobody who talks or understands russian among the british representatives. but, of course, the british governing class has washed its hands of the russians. they were always very difficult, and now they are "impossible, my dear, perfectly impossible." no! that sort of thing will not do now. this peace congress is too big a job for party politicians and society and county families. the bulk of british opinion cannot go on being represented for ever by president wilson. we cannot always look to the americans to express our ideas and do our work for democracy. the foolery of the berlin treaty must not be repeated. we cannot have another popular prime minister come triumphing back to england with a gross of pink spectacles--through which we may survey the prospect of the next great war. the league of free nations means something very big and solid; it is not a rhetorical phrase to be used to pacify a restless, distressed, and anxious public, and to be sneered out of existence when that use is past. when the popular mind now demands a league of free nations it demands a reality. the only way to that reality is through the direct participation of the nation as a whole in the settlement, and that is possible only through the direct election for this particular issue of representative and responsible men. iii the necessary powers of the league if this phrase, "the league of free nations," is to signify anything more than a rhetorical flourish, then certain consequences follow that have to be faced now. no man can join a partnership and remain an absolutely free man. you cannot bind yourself to do this and not to do that and to consult and act with your associates in certain eventualities without a loss of your sovereign freedom. people in this country and in france do not seem to be sitting up manfully to these necessary propositions. if this league of free nations is really to be an effectual thing for the preservation of the peace of the world it must possess power and exercise power, powers must be delegated to it. otherwise it will only help, with all other half-hearted good resolutions, to pave the road of mankind to hell. nothing in all the world so strengthens evil as the half-hearted attempts of good to make good. it scarcely needs repeating here--it has been so generally said--that no league of free nations can hope to keep the peace unless every member of it is indeed a free member, represented by duly elected persons. nobody, of course, asks to "dictate the internal government" of any country to that country. if germans, for instance, like to wallow in absolutism after the war they can do so. but if they or any other peoples wish to take part in a permanent league of free nations it is only reasonable to insist that so far as their representatives on the council go they must be duly elected under conditions that are by the standards of the general league satisfactorily democratic. that seems to be only the common sense of the matter. every court is a potential conspiracy against freedom, and the league cannot tolerate merely court appointments. if courts are to exist anywhere in the new world of the future, they will be wise to stand aloof from international meddling. of course if a people, after due provision for electoral representation, choose to elect dynastic candidates, that is an altogether different matter. and now let us consider what are the powers that must be delegated to this proposed council of a league of free nations, if that is really effectually to prevent war and to organize and establish and make peace permanent in the world. firstly, then, it must be able to adjudicate upon all international disputes whatever. its first function must clearly be that. before a war can break out there must be the possibility of a world decision upon its rights and wrongs. the league, therefore, will have as its primary function to maintain a supreme court, whose decisions will be final, before which every sovereign power may appear as plaintiff against any other sovereign power or group of powers. the plea, i take it, will always be in the form that the defendant power or powers is engaged in proceedings "calculated to lead to a breach of the peace," and calling upon the league for an injunction against such proceedings. i suppose the proceedings that can be brought into court in this way fall under such headings as these that follow; restraint of trade by injurious tariffs or suchlike differentiations or by interference with through traffic, improper treatment of the subjects _or their property_ (here i put a query) of the plaintiff nation in the defendant state, aggressive military or naval preparation, disorder spreading over the frontier, trespass (as, for instance, by airships), propaganda of disorder, espionage, permitting the organization of injurious activities, such as raids or piracy. clearly all such actions must come within the purview of any world-supreme court organized to prevent war. but in addition there is a more doubtful and delicate class of case, arising out of the discontent of patches of one race or religion in the dominions of another. how far may the supreme court of the world attend to grievances between subject and sovereign? such cases are highly probable, and no large, vague propositions about the "self-determination" of peoples can meet all the cases. in macedonia, for instance, there is a jumble of albanian, serbian, bulgarian, greek and rumanian villages always jostling one another and maintaining an intense irritation between the kindred nations close at hand. and quite a large number of areas and cities in the world, it has to be remembered, are not homogeneous at all. will the great nations of the world have the self-abnegation to permit a scattered subject population to appeal against the treatment of its ruling power to the supreme court? this is a much more serious interference with sovereignty than intervention in an external quarrel. could a greek village in bulgarian macedonia plead in the supreme court? could the armenians in constantinople, or the jews in roumania, or the poles in west prussia, or the negroes in georgia, or the indians in the transvaal make such an appeal? could any indian population in india appeal? personally i should like to see the power of the supreme court extend as far as this. i do not see how we can possibly prevent a kindred nation pleading for the scattered people of its own race and culture, or any nation presenting a case on behalf of some otherwise unrepresented people--the united states, for example, presenting a case on behalf of the armenians. but i doubt if many people have made up their minds yet to see the powers of the supreme court of the league of nations go so far as this. i doubt if, to begin with, it will be possible to provide for these cases. i would like to see it done, but i doubt if the majority of the sovereign peoples concerned will reconcile their national pride with the idea, at least so far as their own subject populations go. here, you see, i do no more than ask a question. it is a difficult one, and it has to be answered before we can clear the way to the league of free nations. but the supreme court, whether it is to have the wider or the narrower scope here suggested, would be merely the central function of the league of free nations. behind the decisions of the supreme court must lie power. and here come fresh difficulties for patriotic digestions. the armies and navies of the world must be at the disposal of the league of free nations, and that opens up a new large area of delegated authority. the first impulse of any power disposed to challenge the decisions of the supreme court will be, of course, to arm; and it is difficult to imagine how the league of free nations can exercise any practical authority unless it has power to restrain such armament. the league of free nations must, in fact, if it is to be a working reality, have power to define and limit the military and naval and aerial equipment of every country in the world. this means something more than a restriction of state forces. it must have power and freedom to investigate the military and naval and aerial establishments of all its constituent powers. it must also have effective control over every armament industry. and armament industries are not always easy to define. are aeroplanes, for example, armament? its powers, i suggest, must extend even to a restraint upon the belligerent propaganda which is the natural advertisement campaign of every armament industry. it must have the right, for example, to raise the question of the proprietorship of newspapers by armament interests. disarmament is, in fact, a necessary factor of any league of free nations, and you cannot have disarmament unless you are prepared to see the powers of the council of the league extend thus far. the very existence of the league presupposes that it and it alone is to have and to exercise military force. any other belligerency or preparation or incitement to belligerency becomes rebellion, and any other arming a threat of rebellion, in a world league of free nations. but here, again, has the general mind yet thought out all that is involved in this proposition? in all the great belligerent countries the armament industries are now huge interests with enormous powers. krupp's business alone is as powerful a thing in germany as the crown. in every country a heavily subsidized "patriotic" press will fight desperately against giving powers so extensive and thorough as those here suggested to an international body. so long, of course, as the league of free nations remains a project in the air, without body or parts, such a press will sneer at it gently as "utopian," and even patronize it kindly. but so soon as the league takes on the shape its general proposition makes logically necessary, the armament interest will take fright. then it is we shall hear the drum patriotic loud in defence of the human blood trade. are we to hand over these most intimate affairs of ours to "a lot of foreigners"? among these "foreigners" who will be appealed to to terrify the patriotic souls of the british will be the "americans." are we men of english blood and tradition to see our affairs controlled by such "foreigners" as wilson, lincoln, webster and washington? perish the thought! when they might be controlled by disraelis, wettins, mount-battens, and what not! and so on and so on. krupp's agents and the agents of the kindred firms in great britain and france will also be very busy with the national pride of france. in germany they have already created a colossal suspicion of england. here is a giant in the path.... but let us remember that it is only necessary to defeat the propaganda of this vile and dangerous industry in four great countries. and for the common citizen, touched on the tenderest part of his patriotic susceptibilities, there are certain irrefutable arguments. whether the ways of the world in the years to come are to be the paths of peace or the paths of war is not going to alter this essential fact, that the great educated world communities, with a social and industrial organization on a war-capable scale, are going to dominate human affairs. whether they spend their power in killing or in educating and creating, france, germany, however much we may resent it, the two great english-speaking communities, italy, japan china, and presently perhaps a renascent russia, are jointly going to control the destinies of mankind. whether that joint control comes through arms or through the law is a secondary consideration. to refuse to bring our affairs into a common council does not make us independent of foreigners. it makes us more dependent upon them, as a very little consideration will show. i am suggesting here that the league of free nations shall practically control the army, navy, air forces, and armament industry of every nation in the world. what is the alternative to that? to do as we please? no, the alternative is that any malignant country will be free to force upon all the rest just the maximum amount of armament it chooses to adopt. since france, we say, has been free in military matters. what has been the value of that freedom? the truth is, she has been the bond-slave of germany, bound to watch germany as a slave watches a master, bound to launch submarine for submarine and cast gun for gun, to sweep all her youth into her army, to subdue her trade, her literature, her education, her whole life to the necessity of preparations imposed upon her by her drill-master over the rhine. and michael, too, has been a slave to his imperial master for the self-same reason, for the reason that germany and france were both so proudly sovereign and independent. both countries have been slaves to kruppism and zabernism--_because they were sovereign and free_! so it will always be. so long as patriotic cant can keep the common man jealous of international controls over his belligerent possibilities, so long will he be the helpless slave of the foreign threat, and "peace" remain a mere name for the resting phase between wars. but power over the military resources of the world is by no means the limit of the necessary powers of an effective league of free nations. there are still more indigestible implications in the idea, and, since they have got to be digested sooner or later if civilization is not to collapse, there is no reason why we should not begin to bite upon them now. i was much interested to read the british press upon the alleged proposal of the german chancellor that we should give up (presumably to germany) gibraltar, malta, egypt, and suchlike key possessions. it seemed to excite several of our politicians extremely. i read over the german chancellor's speech very carefully, so far as it was available, and it is clear that he did not propose anything of the sort. wilfully or blindly our press and our demagogues screamed over a false issue. the chancellor was defending the idea of the germans remaining in belgium and lorraine because of the strategic and economic importance of those regions to germany, and he was arguing that before we english got into such a feverish state of indignation about that, we should first ask ourselves what we were doing in gibraltar, etc., etc. that is a different thing altogether. and it is an argument that is not to be disposed of by misrepresentation. the british have to think hard over this quite legitimate german _tu quoque_. it is no good getting into a patriotic bad temper and refusing to answer that question. we british people are so persuaded of the purity and unselfishness with which we discharge our imperial responsibilities, we have been so trained in imperial self-satisfaction, we know so certainly that all our subject nations call us blessed, that it is a little difficult for us to see just how the fact that we are, for example, so deeply rooted in egypt looks to an outside intelligence. of course the german imperialist idea is a wicked and aggressive idea, as lord robert cecil has explained; they want to set up all over the earth coaling stations and strategic points, _on the pattern of ours._ well, they argue, we are only trying to do what you british have done. if we are not to do so--because it is aggression and so on and so on--is not the time ripe for you to make some concessions to the public opinion of the world? that is the german argument. either, they say, tolerate this idea of a germany with advantageous posts and possessions round and about the earth, or reconsider your own position. well, at the risk of rousing much patriotic wrath, i must admit that i think we _have_ to reconsider our position. our argument is that in india, egypt, africa and elsewhere, we stand for order and civilization, we are the trustees of freedom, the agents of knowledge and efficiency. on the whole the record of british rule is a pretty respectable one; i am not ashamed of our record. nevertheless _the case is altering_. it is quite justifiable for us british, no doubt, if we do really play the part of honest trustees, to remain in egypt and in india under existing conditions; it is even possible for us to glance at the helplessness of arabia, palestine, and mesopotamia, as yet incapable of self-government, helpless as new-born infants. but our case, our only justifiable case, is that we are trustees because there is no better trustee possible. and the creation of a council of a league of free nations would be like the creation of a public trustee for the world. the creation of a league of free nations must necessarily be the creation of an authority that may legitimately call existing empires to give an account of their stewardship. for an unchecked fragmentary control of tropical and chaotic regions, it substitutes the possibility of a general authority. and this must necessarily alter the problems not only of the politically immature nations and the control of the tropics, but also of the regulation of the sea ways, the regulation of the coming air routes, and the distribution of staple products in the world. i will not go in detail over the items of this list, because the reader can fill in the essentials of the argument from what has gone before. i want simply to suggest how widely this project of a league of free nations swings when once you have let it swing freely in your mind! and if you do not let it swing freely in your mind, it remains nothing--a sentimental gesture. the plain truth is that the league of free nations, if it is to be a reality, if it is to effect a real pacification of the world, must do no less than supersede empire; it must end not only this new german imperialism, which is struggling so savagely and powerfully to possess the earth, but it must also wind up british imperialism and french imperialism, which do now so largely and inaggressively possess it. and, moreover, this idea queries the adjective of belgian, portuguese, french, and british central africa alike, just as emphatically as it queries "german." still more effectually does the league forbid those creations of the futurist imagination, the imperialism of italy and greece, which make such threatening gestures at the world of our children. are these incompatibilities understood? until people have faced the clear antagonism that exists between imperialism and internationalism, they have not begun to suspect the real significance of this project of the league of free nations. they have not begun to realize that peace also has its price. iv the labour view of middle africa i was recently privileged to hear the views of one of those titled and influential ladies--with a general education at about the fifth standard level, plus a little french, german, italian, and music--who do so much to make our england what it is at the present time, upon the labour idea of an international control of "tropical" africa. she was loud and derisive about the "ignorance" of labour. "what can _they_ know about foreign politics?" she said, with gestures to indicate her conception of _them_. i was moved to ask her what she would do about africa. "leave it to lord robert!" she said, leaning forward impressively. "_leave it to the people who know._" unhappily i share the evident opinion of labour that we are not blessed with any profoundly wise class of people who have definite knowledge and clear intentions about africa, that these "_people who know_" are mostly a pretentious bluff, and so, in spite of a very earnest desire to take refuge in my "ignorance" from the burthen of thinking about african problems, i find myself obliged, like most other people, to do so. in the interests of our country, our children, and the world, we common persons _have_ to have opinions about these matters. a muddle-up in africa this year may kill your son and mine in the course of the next decade. i know this is not a claim to be interested in things african, such as the promoter of a tropical railway or an oil speculator has; still it is a claim. and for the life of me i cannot see what is wrong about the labour proposals, or what alternative exists that can give even a hope of peace in and about africa. the gist of the labour proposal is an international control of africa between the zambesi and the sahara. this has been received with loud protests by men whose work one is obliged to respect, by sir harry, johnston, for example, and sir alfred sharpe, and with something approaching a shriek of hostility by mr. cunninghame graham. but i think these gentlemen have not perhaps given the labour proposal quite as much attention as they have spent upon the details of african conditions. i think they have jumped to conclusions at the mere sound of the word "international." there have been some gross failures in the past to set up international administrations in africa and the near east. and these gentlemen think at once of some new congo administration and of nondescript police forces commanded by cosmopolitan adventurers. (see joseph conrad's "out-post of civilization.") they think of internationalism with greedy great powers in the background outside the internationalized area, intriguing to create disorder and mischief with ideas of an ultimate annexation. but i doubt if such nightmares do any sort of justice to the labour intention. and the essential thing i would like to point out to these authorities upon african questions is that not one of them even hints at any other formula which covers the broad essentials of the african riddle. what are these broad essentials? what are the ends that _must_ be achieved if africa is not to continue a festering sore in the body of mankind? the first most obvious danger of africa is the militarization of the black. general smuts has pointed this out plainly. the negro makes a good soldier; he is hardy, he stands the sea, and he stands cold. (there was a negro in the little party which reached the north pole.) it is absolutely essential to the peace of the world that there should be no arming of the negroes beyond the minimum necessary for the policing of africa. but how is this to be watched and prevented if there is no overriding body representing civilization to say "stop" to the beginnings of any such militarization? i do not see how sir harry johnston, sir alfred sharpe, and the other authorities can object to at least an international african "disarmament commission" to watch, warn, and protest. at least they must concede that. but in practice this involves something else. a practical consequence of this disarmament idea must be an effective control of the importation of arms into the "tutelage" areas of africa. that rat at the dykes of civilization, that ultimate expression of political scoundrelism, the gun-runner, has to be kept under and stamped out in africa as everywhere. a disarmament commission that has no forces available to prevent the arms trade will be just another hague convention, just another vague, well-intentioned, futile gesture. and closely connected with this function of controlling the arms trade is another great necessity of africa under "tutelage," and that is the necessity of a common collective agreement not to demoralize the native population. that demoralization, physical and moral, has already gone far. the whole negro population of africa is now rotten with diseases introduced by arabs and europeans during the last century, and such african statesmen as sir harry johnston are eloquent upon the necessity of saving the blacks--and the baser whites--from the effects of trade gin and similar alluring articles of commerce. moreover, from africa there is always something new in the way of tropical diseases, and presently africa, if we let it continue to fester as it festers now, may produce an epidemic that will stand exportation to a temperate climate. a bacterium that may kill you or me in some novel and disgusting way may even now be developing in some congo muck-heap. so here is the need for another commission to look after the health of africa. that, too, should be of authority over all the area of "tutelage" africa. it is no good stamping out infectious disease in nyasaland while it is being bred in portuguese east africa. and if there is a disarmament commission already controlling the importation of arms, why should not that body also control at the same time the importation of trade gin and similar delicacies, and direct quarantine and such-like health regulations? but there is another question in africa upon which our "ignorant" labour class is far better informed than our dear old eighteenth-century upper class which still squats so firmly in our foreign and colonial offices, and that is the question of forced labour. we cannot tolerate any possibilities of the enslavement of black africa. long ago the united states found out the impossibility of having slave labour working in the same system with white. to cure that anomaly cost the united states a long and bloody war. the slave-owner, the exploiter of the black, becomes a threat and a nuisance to any white democracy. he brings back his loot to corrupt press and life at home. what happened in america in the midst of the last century between federals and confederates must not happen again on a larger scale between white europe and middle africa. slavery in africa, open or disguised, whether enforced by the lash or brought about by iniquitous land-stealing, strikes at the home and freedom of every european worker--_and labour knows this_. but how are we to prevent the enslavement and economic exploitation of the blacks if we have no general watcher of african conditions? we want a common law for africa, a general declaration of rights, of certain elementary rights, and we want a common authority to which the black man and the native tribe may appeal for justice. what is the good of trying to elevate the population of uganda and to give it a free and hopeful life if some other population close at hand is competing against the baganda worker under lash and tax? so here is a third aspect of our international commission, as a native protectorate and court of appeal! there is still a fourth aspect of the african question in which every mother's son in europe is closely interested, and that is the trade question. africa is the great source of many of the most necessary raw materials upon which our modern comforts and conveniences depend; more particularly is it the source of cheap fat in the form of palm oil. one of the most powerful levers in the hands of the allied democracies at the present time in their struggle against the imperial brigands of potsdam is the complete control we have now obtained over these essential supplies. we can, if we choose, cut off germany altogether from these vital economic necessities, if she does not consent to abandon militant imperialism for some more civilized form of government. we hope that this war will end in that renunciation, and that germany will re-enter the community of nations. but whether that is so or not, whether germany is or is not to be one of the interested parties in the african solution, the fact remains that it is impossible to contemplate a continuing struggle for the african raw material supply between the interested powers. sooner or later that means a renewal of war. international trade rivalry is, indeed, only war--_smouldering_. we need, and labour demands, a fair, frank treatment of african trade, and that can only be done by some overriding regulative power, a commission which, so far as i can see, might also be the same commission as that we have already hypothesized as being necessary to control the customs in order to prevent gun-running and the gin trade. that commission might very conveniently have a voice in the administration of the great waterways of africa (which often run through the possessions of several powers) and in the regulation of the big railway lines and air routes that will speedily follow the conclusion of peace. now this i take it is the gist of the labour proposal. this--and no more than this--is what is intended by the "international control of tropical africa." _i do not read that phrase as abrogating existing sovereignties in africa_. what is contemplated is a delegation of authority. every one should know, though unhappily the badness of our history teaching makes it doubtful if every one does know, that the federal government of the united states of america did not begin as a sovereign government, and has now only a very questionable sovereignty. each state was sovereign, and each state delegated certain powers to washington. that was the initial idea of the union. only later did the idea of a people of the states as a whole emerge. in the same way i understand the labour proposal as meaning that we should delegate to an african commission the middle african customs, the regulation of inter-state trade, inter-state railways and waterways, quarantine and health generally, and the establishment of a supreme court for middle african affairs. one or two minor matters, such as the preservation of rare animals, might very well fall under the same authority. upon that commission the interested nations, that is to say--putting them in alphabetical order--the africander, the briton, the belgian, the egyptian, the frenchman, the italian, the indian the portuguese--might all be represented in proportion to their interest. whether the german would come in is really a question for the german to consider; he can come in as a good european, he cannot come in as an imperialist brigand. whether, too, any other nations can claim to have an interest in african affairs, whether the commission would not be better appointed by a league of free nations than directly by the interested governments, and a number of other such questions, need not be considered here. here we are discussing only the main idea of the labour proposal. now beneath the supervision and restraint of such a delegated commission i do not see why the existing administrations of tutelage africa should not continue. i do not believe that the labour proposal contemplates any humiliating cession of european sovereignty. under that international commission the french flag may still wave in senegal and the british over the protected state of uganda. given a new spirit in germany i do not see why the german flag should not presently be restored in german east africa. but over all, standing for righteousness, patience, fair play for the black, and the common welfare of mankind would wave a new flag, the sun of africa representing the central african commission of the league of free nations. that is my vision of the labour project. it is something very different, i know, from the nightmare of an international police of cosmopolitan scoundrels in nondescript uniforms, hastening to loot and ravish his dear uganda and his beloved nigeria, which distresses the crumpled pillow of sir harry johnston. but if it is not the solution, then it is up to him and his fellow authorities to tell us what is the solution of the african riddle. v getting the league idea clear in relation to imperialism § it is idle to pretend that even at the present time the idea of the league of free nations has secure possession of the british mind. there is quite naturally a sustained opposition to it in all the fastnesses of aggressive imperialism. such papers as the _times_ and the _morning post_ remain hostile and obstructive to the expression of international ideas. most of our elder statesmen seem to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing during the years of wildest change the world has ever known. but in the general mind of the british peoples the movement of opinion from a narrow imperialism towards internationalism has been wide and swift. and it continues steadily. one can trace week by week and almost day by day the americanization of the british conception of the allied war aims. it may be interesting to reproduce here three communications upon this question made at different times by the present writer to the press. the circumstances of their publication are significant. the first is in substance identical with a letter which was sent to the _times_ late in may, , and rejected as being altogether too revolutionary. for nowadays the correspondence in the _times_ has ceased to be an impartial expression of public opinion. the correspondence of the _times_ is now apparently selected and edited in accordance with the views upon public policy held by the acting editor for the day. more and more has that paper become the organ of a sort of oxford imperialism, three or four years behind the times and very ripe and "expert." the letter is here given as it was finally printed in the issue of the _daily chronicle_ for june th, , under the heading, "wanted a statement of imperial policy." sir,--the time seems to have come for much clearer statements of outlook and intention from this country than it has hitherto been possible to make. the entry of america into the war and the banishment of autocracy and aggressive diplomacy from russia have enormously cleared the air, and the recent great speech of general smuts at the savoy hotel is probably only the first of a series of experiments in statement. it is desirable alike to clear our own heads, to unify our efforts, and to give the nations of the world some assurance and standard for our national conduct in the future, that we should now define the idea of our empire and its relation to the world outlook much more clearly than has ever hitherto been done. never before in the history of mankind has opinion counted for so much and persons and organizations for so little as in this war. never before has the need for clear ideas, widely understood and consistently sustained, been so commandingly vital. what do we mean by our empire, and what is its relation to that universal desire of mankind, the permanent rule of peace and justice in the world? the whole world will be the better for a very plain answer to that question. is it not time for us british not merely to admit to ourselves, but to assure the world that our empire as it exists to-day is a provisional thing, that in scarcely any part of the world do we regard it as more than an emergency arrangement, as a necessary association that must give place ultimately to the higher synthesis of a world league, that here we hold as trustees and there on account of strategic considerations that may presently disappear, and that though we will not contemplate the replacement of our flag anywhere by the flag of any other competing nation, though we do hope to hold together with our kin and with those who increasingly share our tradition and our language, nevertheless we are prepared to welcome great renunciations of our present ascendency and privileges in the interests of mankind as a whole. we need to make the world understand that we do not put our nation nor our empire before the commonwealth of man. unless presently we are to follow germany along the tragic path her national vanity and her world ambitions have made for her, that is what we have to make clear now. it is not only our duty to mankind, it is also the sane course for our own preservation. is it not the plain lesson of this stupendous and disastrous war that there is no way to secure civilization from destruction except by an impartial control and protection in the interests of the whole human race, a control representing the best intelligence of mankind, of these main causes of war. ( ) the politically undeveloped tropics; ( ) shipping and international trade; and ( ) small nationalities and all regions in a state of political impotence or confusion? it is our case against the germans that in all these three cases they have subordinated every consideration of justice and the general human welfare to a monstrous national egotism. that argument has a double edge. at present there is a vigorous campaign in america, russia, the neutral countries generally, to represent british patriotism as equally egotistic, and our purpose in this war as a mere parallel to the german purpose. in the same manner, though perhaps with less persistency, france and italy are also caricatured. we are supposed to be grabbing at mesopotamia and palestine, france at syria; italy is represented as pursuing a machiavellian policy towards the unfortunate greek republicans, with her eyes on the greek islands and greece in asia. is it not time that these base imputations were repudiated clearly and conclusively by our alliance? and is it not time that we began to discuss in much more frank and definite terms than has hitherto been done, the nature of the international arrangement that will be needed to secure the safety of such liberated populations as those of palestine, of the arab regions of the old turkish empire, of armenia, of reunited poland, and the like? i do not mean here mere diplomatic discussions and "understandings," i mean such full and plain statements as will be spread through the whole world and grasped and assimilated by ordinary people everywhere, statements by which we, as a people, will be prepared to stand or fall. almost as urgent is the need for some definite statement about africa. general smuts has warned not only the empire, but the whole world of the gigantic threat to civilization that lies in the present division of africa between various keenly competitive european powers, any one of which will be free to misuse the great natural resources at its disposal and to arm millions of black soldiers for aggression. a mere elimination of germany from africa will not solve that difficulty. what we have to eliminate is not this nation or that, but the system of national shoving and elbowing, the treatment of africa as the board for a game of beggar-my-neighbour-and-damn-the-niggers, in which a few syndicates, masquerading as national interests, snatch a profit to the infinite loss of all mankind. we want a lowering of barriers and a unification of interests, we want an international control of these disputed regions, to override nationalist exploitation. the whole world wants it. it is a chastened and reasonable world we live in to-day, and the time for white reason and the wide treatment of these problems is now. finally, the time is drawing near when the egyptian and the nations of india will ask us, "are things going on for ever here as they go on now, or are we to look for the time when we, too, like the africander, the canadian and the australian, will be your confessed and equal partners?" would it not be wise to answer that question in the affirmative before the voice in which it is asked grows thick with anger? in egypt, for example, we are either robbers very like--except for a certain difference in touch--the germans in belgium, or we are honourable trustees. it is our claim and pride to be honourable trustees. nothing so becomes a trustee as a cheerful openness of disposition. great britain has to table her world policy. it is a thing overdue. no doubt we have already a literature of liberal imperialism and a considerable accumulation of declarations by this statesman or that. but what is needed is a formulation much more representative, official and permanent than that, something that can be put beside president wilson's clear rendering of the american idea. we want all our peoples to understand, and we want all mankind to understand that our empire is not a net about the world in which the progress of mankind is entangled, but a self-conscious political system working side by side with the other democracies of the earth, preparing the way for, and prepared at last to sacrifice and merge itself in, the world confederation of free and equal peoples. § this letter was presently followed up by an article in the _daily news_, entitled "a reasonable man's peace." this article provoked a considerable controversy in the imperialist press, and it was reprinted as a pamphlet by a free trade organization, which distributed over , copies. it is particularly interesting to note, in view of what follows it, that it was attacked with great virulence in the _evening news_, the little fierce mud-throwing brother of the _daily mail_. the international situation at the present time is beyond question the most wonderful that the world has ever seen. there is not a country in the world in which the great majority of sensible people are not passionately desirous of peace, of an enduring peace, and--the war goes on. the conditions of peace can now be stated, in general terms that are as acceptable to a reasonable man in berlin as they are to a reasonable man in paris or london or petrograd or constantinople. there are to be no conquests, no domination of recalcitrant populations, no bitter insistence upon vindictive penalties, and there must be something in the nature of a world-wide league of nations to keep the peace securely in future, to "make the world safe for democracy," and maintain international justice. to that the general mind of the world has come to-day. why, then, does the waste and killing go on? why is not the peace conference sitting now? manifestly because a small minority of people in positions of peculiar advantage, in positions of trust and authority, and particularly the german reactionaries, prevent or delay its assembling. the answer which seems to suffice in all the allied countries is that the german imperial government--that the german imperial government alone--stands in the way, that its tradition is incurably a tradition of conquest and aggression, that until german militarism is overthrown, etc. few people in the allied countries will dispute that that is broadly true. but is it the whole and complete truth? is there nothing more to be done on our side? let us put a question that goes to the very heart of the problem. why does the great mass of the german people still cling to its incurably belligerent government? the answer to that question is not overwhelmingly difficult. the german people sticks to its militarist imperialism as mazeppa stuck to his horse; because it is bound to it, and the wolves pursue. the attentive student of the home and foreign propaganda literature of the german government will realize that the case made by german imperialism, the main argument by which it sticks to power, is this, that the allied governments are also imperialist, that they also aim at conquest and aggression, that for germany the choice is world empire or downfall and utter ruin. this is the argument that holds the german people stiffly united. for most men in most countries it would be a convincing argument, strong enough to override considerations of right and wrong. i find that i myself am of this way of thinking, that whether england has done right or wrong in the past--and i have sometimes criticized my country very bitterly--i will not endure the prospect of seeing her at the foot of some victorious foreign nation. neither will any german who matters. very few people would respect a german who did. but the case for the allies is that this great argument by which, and by which alone, the german imperial government keeps its grip upon the german people at the present time, and keeps them facing their enemies, is untrue. the allies declare that they do not want to destroy the german people, they do not want to cripple the german people; they want merely to see certain gaping wounds inflicted by germany repaired, and beyond that reasonable requirement they want nothing but to be assured, completely assured, absolutely assured, against any further aggressions on the part of germany. is that true? our leaders say so, and we believe them. we would not support them if we did not. and if it is true, have the statesmen of the allies made it as transparently and convincingly clear to the german people as possible? that is one of the supreme questions of the present time. we cannot too earnestly examine it. because in the answer to it lies the reason why so many men were killed yesterday on the eastern and western front, so many ships sunk, so much property destroyed, so much human energy wasted for ever upon mere destruction, and why to-morrow and the next day and the day after--through many months yet, perhaps--the same killing and destroying must still go on. in many respects this war has been an amazing display of human inadaptability. the military history of the war has still to be written, the grim story of machinery misunderstood, improvements resisted, antiquated methods persisted in; but the broad facts are already before the public mind. after three years of war the air offensive, the only possible decisive blow, is still merely talked of. not once nor twice only have the western allies had victory within their grasp--and failed to grip it. the british cavalry generals wasted the great invention of the tanks as a careless child breaks a toy. at least equally remarkable is the dragging inadaptability of european statecraft. everywhere the failure of ministers and statesmen to rise to the urgent definite necessities of the present time is glaringly conspicuous. they seem to be incapable even of thinking how the war may be brought to an end. they seem incapable of that plain speaking to the world audience which alone can bring about a peace. they keep on with the tricks and feints of a departed age. both on the side of the allies and on the side of the germans the declarations of public policy remain childishly vague and disingenuous, childishly "diplomatic." they chaffer like happy imbeciles while civilization bleeds to death. it was perhaps to be expected. few, if any, men of over five-and-forty completely readjust themselves to changed conditions, however novel and challenging the changes may be, and nearly all the leading figures in these affairs are elderly men trained in a tradition of diplomatic ineffectiveness, and now overworked and overstrained to a pitch of complete inelasticity. they go on as if it were still . could anything be more palpably shifty and unsatisfactory, more senile, more feebly artful, than the recent utterances of the german chancellor? and, on our own side-- let us examine the three leading points about this peace business in which this jaded statecraft is most apparent. let the reader ask himself the following questions:-- does he know what the allies mean to do with the problem of central africa? it is the clear common sense of the african situation that while these precious regions of raw material remain divided up between a number of competitive european imperialisms, each resolutely set upon the exploitation of its "possessions" to its own advantage and the disadvantage of the others, there can be no permanent peace in the world. there can be permanent peace in the world only when tropical and sub-tropical africa constitute a field free to the commercial enterprise of every one irrespective of nationality, when this is no longer an area of competition between nations. this is possible only under some supreme international control. it requires no special knowledge nor wisdom to see that. a schoolboy can see it. any one but a statesman absolutely flaccid with overstrain can see that. however difficult it may prove to work out in detail, such an international control _must_ therefore be worked out. the manifest solution of the problem of the german colonies in africa is neither to return them to her nor deprive her of them, but to give her a share in the pooled general control of mid-africa. in that way she can be deprived of all power for political mischief in africa without humiliation or economic injury. in that way, too, we can head off--and in no other way can we head off--the power for evil, the power of developing quarrels inherent in "imperialisms" other than german. but has the reader any assurance that this sane solution of the african problem has the support of the allied governments? at best he has only a vague persuasion. and consider how the matter looks "over there." the german government assures the german people that the allies intend to cut off germany from the african supply of raw material. that would mean the practical destruction of german economic life. it is something far more vital to the mass of germans than any question of belgium or alsace-lorraine. it is, therefore, one of the ideas most potent in nerving the overstrained german people to continue their fight. why are we, and why are the german people, not given some definite assurance in this matter? given reparation in europe, is germany to be allowed a fair share in the control and trade of a pooled and neutralized central africa? sooner or later we must come to some such arrangement. why not state it plainly now? a second question is equally essential to any really permanent settlement, and it is one upon which these eloquent but unsatisfactory mouthpieces of ours turn their backs with an equal resolution, and that is the fate of the ottoman empire. what in plain english are we up to there? whatever happens, that humpty dumpty cannot be put back as it was before the war. the idea of the german imperialist, the idea of our own little band of noisy but influential imperialist vulgarians, is evidently a game of grab, a perilous cutting up of these areas into jostling protectorates and spheres of influence, from which either the germans or the allies (according to the side you are on) are to be viciously shut out. on such a basis this war is a war to the death. neither germany, france, britain, italy, nor russia can live prosperously if its trade and enterprise is shut out from this cardinally important area. there is, therefore, no alternative, if we are to have a satisfactory permanent pacification of the world, but local self-development in these regions under honestly conceived international control of police and transit and trade. let it be granted that that will be a difficult control to organize. none the less it has to be attempted. it has to be attempted because _there is no other way of peace_. but once that conception has been clearly formulated, a second great motive why germany should continue fighting will have gone. the third great issue about which there is nothing but fog and uncertainty is the so-called "war after the war," the idea of a permanent economic alliance to prevent the economic recuperation of germany. upon that idea german imperialism, in its frantic effort to keep its tormented people fighting, naturally puts the utmost stress. the threat of war after the war robs the reasonable german of his last inducement to turn on his government and insist upon peace. shut out from all trade, unable to buy food, deprived of raw material, peace would be as bad for germany as war. he will argue naturally enough and reasonably enough that he may as well die fighting as starve. this is a far more vital issue to him than the belgian issue or poland or alsace-lorraine. our statesmen waste their breath and slight our intelligence when these foreground questions are thrust in front of the really fundamental matters. but as the mass of sensible people in every country concerned, in germany just as much as in france or great britain, know perfectly well, unimpeded trade is good for every one except a few rich adventurers, and restricted trade destroys limitless wealth and welfare for mankind to make a few private fortunes or secure an advantage for some imperialist clique. we want an end to this economic strategy, we want an end to this plotting of governmental cliques against the general welfare. in such offences germany has been the chief of sinners, but which among the belligerent nations can throw the first stone? here again the way to the world's peace, the only way to enduring peace, lies through internationalism, through an international survey of commercial treaties, through an international control of inter-state shipping and transport rates. unless the allied statesmen fail to understand the implications of their own general professions they mean that. but why do they not say it plainly? why do they not shout it so compactly and loudly that all germany will hear and understand? why do they justify imperialism to germany? why do they maintain a threatening ambiguity towards germany on all these matters? by doing so they leave germany no choice but a war of desperation. they underline and endorse the claim of german imperialism that this is a war for bare existence. they unify the german people. they prolong the war. § some weeks later i was able, at the invitation of the editor, to carry the controversy against imperialism into the _daily mail_, which has hitherto counted as a strictly imperialist paper. the article that follows was published in the _daily mail_ under the heading, "are we sticking to the point? a discussion of war aims." has this war-aims controversy really got down to essentials? is the purpose of this world conflict from first to last too complicated for brevity, or can we boil it down into a statement compact enough for a newspaper article? and if we can, why is there all this voluminous, uneasy, unquenchable disputation about war aims? as to the first question, i would say that the gist of the dispute between the central powers and the world can be written easily without undue cramping in an ordinary handwriting upon a postcard. it is the second question that needs answering. and the reason why the second question has to be asked and answered is this, that several of the allies, and particularly we british, are not being perfectly plain and simple-minded in our answer to the first, that there is a division among us and in our minds, and that our division is making us ambiguous in our behaviour, that it is weakening and dividing our action and strengthening and consolidating the enemy, and that unless we can drag this slurred-over division of aim and spirit into the light of day and _settle it now_, we are likely to remain double-minded to the end of the war, to split our strength while the war continues and to come out of the settlement at the end with nothing nearly worth the strain and sacrifice it has cost us. and first, let us deal with that postcard and say what is the essential aim of the war, the aim to which all other aims are subsidiary. it is, we have heard repeated again and again by every statesman of importance in every allied country, to defeat and destroy military imperialism, to make the world safe for ever against any such deliberate aggression as germany prepared for forty years and brought to a climax when she crossed the belgian frontier in . we want to make anything of that kind on the part of germany or of any other power henceforth impossible in this world. that is our great aim. whatever other objects may be sought in this war no responsible statesman dare claim them as anything but subsidiary to that; one can say, in fact, this is our sole aim, our other aims being but parts of it. better that millions should die now, we declare, than that hundreds of millions still unborn should go on living, generation after generation, under the black tyranny of this imperialist threat. there is our common agreement. so far, at any rate, we are united. the question i would put to the reader is this: are we all logically, sincerely, and fully carrying out the plain implications of this war aim? or are we to any extent muddling about with it in such a way as to confuse and disorganize our allies, weaken our internal will, and strengthen the enemy? now the plain meaning of this supreme declared war aim is that we are asking germany to alter her ways. we are asking germany to become a different germany. either germany has to be utterly smashed up and destroyed or else germany has to cease to be an aggressive military imperialism. the former alternative is dismissed by most responsible statesmen. they declare that they do not wish to destroy the german people or the german nationality or the civilized life of germany. i will not enlarge here upon the tedium and difficulties such an undertaking would present. i will dismiss it as being not only impossible, but also as an insanely wicked project. the second alternative, therefore, remains as our war aim. i do not see how the sloppiest reasoner can evade that. as we do not want to kill germany we must want to change germany. if we do not want to wipe germany off the face of the earth, then we want germany to become the prospective and trust-worthy friend of her fellow nations. and if words have any meaning at all, that is saying that we are fighting to bring about a revolution in germany. we want germany to become a democratically controlled state, such as is the united states to-day, with open methods and pacific intentions, instead of remaining a clenched fist. if we can bring that about we have achieved our war aim; if we cannot, then this struggle has been for us only such loss and failure as humanity has never known before. but do we, as a nation, stick closely to this clear and necessary, this only possible, meaning of our declared war aim? that great, clear-minded leader among the allies, that englishman who more than any other single man speaks for the whole english-speaking and western-thinking community, president wilson, has said definitely that this is his meaning. america, with him as her spokesman, is under no delusion; she is fighting consciously for a german revolution as the essential war aim. we in europe do not seem to be so lucid. i think myself we have been, and are still, fatally and disastrously not lucid. it is high time, and over, that we cleared our minds and got down to the essentials of the war. we have muddled about in blood and dirt and secondary issues long enough. we in britain are not clear-minded, i would point out, because we are double-minded. no good end is served by trying to ignore in the fancied interests of "unity" a division of spirit and intention that trips us up at every step. we are, we declare, fighting for a complete change in international methods, and we are bound to stick to the logical consequences of that. we have placed ourselves on the side of democratic revolution against autocratic monarchy, and we cannot afford to go on shilly-shallying with that choice. we cannot in these days of black or white play the part of lukewarm friends to freedom. i will not remind the reader here of the horrible vacillations and inconsistencies of policy in greece that have prolonged the war and cost us wealth and lives beyond measure, but president wilson himself has reminded us pungently enough and sufficiently enough of the follies and disingenuousness of our early treatment of the russian revolution. what i want to point out here is the supreme importance of a clear lead in this matter _now_ in order that we should state our war aims effectively. in every war there must be two sets of war aims kept in mind; we ought to know what we mean to do in the event of victory so complete that we can dictate what terms we choose, and we ought to know what, in the event of a not altogether conclusive tussle, are the minimum terms that we should consider justified us in a discontinuance of the tussle. now, unless our leading statesmen are humbugs and unless we are prepared to quarrel with america in the interests of the monarchist institutions of europe, we should, in the event of an overwhelming victory, destroy both the hohenzollern and hapsburg imperialisms, and that means, if it means anything at all and is not mere lying rhetoric, that we should insist upon germany becoming free and democratic, that is to say, in effect if not in form republican, and upon a series of national republics, polish, hungarian, serbo-croatian, bulgarian, and the like, in eastern europe, grouped together if possible into congenial groups--crowned republics it might be in some cases, in the case of the serb for example, but in no case too much crowned--that we should join with this renascent germany and with these thus liberalized powers and with our allies and with the neutrals in one great league of free nations, trading freely with one another, guaranteeing each other freedom, and maintaining a world-wide peace and disarmament and a new reign of law for mankind. if that is not what we are out for, then i do not understand what we are out for; there is dishonesty and trickery and diplomacy and foolery in the struggle, and i am no longer whole-hearted for such a half-hearted war. if after a complete victory we are to bolster up the hohenzollerns, hapsburgs, and their relations, set up a constellation of more cheating little subordinate kings, and reinstate that system of diplomacies and secret treaties and secret understandings, that endless drama of international threatening and plotting, that never-ending arming, that has led us after a hundred years of waste and muddle to the supreme tragedy of this war, then the world is not good enough for me and i shall be glad to close my eyes upon it. i am not alone in these sentiments. i believe that in writing thus i am writing the opinion of the great mass of reasonable british, french, italian, russian, and american men. i believe, too, that this is the desire also of great numbers of germans, and that they would, if they could believe us, gladly set aside their present rulers to achieve this plain common good for mankind. but, the reader will say, what evidence is there of any republican feeling in germany? that is always the objection made to any reasonable discussion of the war--and as most of us are denied access to german papers, it is difficult to produce quotations; and even when one does, there are plenty of fools to suggest and believe that the entire german press is an elaborate camouflage. yet in the german press there is far more criticism of militant imperialism than those who have no access to it can imagine. there is far franker criticism of militarism in germany than there is of reactionary toryism in this country, and it is more free to speak its mind. that, however, is a question by the way. it is not the main thing that i have to say here. what i have to say here is that in great britain--i will not discuss the affairs of any of our allies--there are groups and classes of people, not numerous, not representative, but placed in high and influential positions and capable of free and public utterance, who are secretly and bitterly hostile to this great war aim, which inspires all the allied peoples. these people are permitted to deny--our peculiar censorship does not hamper them--loudly and publicly that we are fighting for democracy and world freedom; "tosh," they say to our dead in the trenches, "you died for a mistake"; they jeer at this idea of a league of nations making an end to war, an idea that has inspired countless brave lads to face death and such pains and hardships as outdo even death itself; they perplex and irritate our allies by propounding schemes for some precious economic league of the british empire--that is to treat all "foreigners" with a common base selfishness and stupid hatred--and they intrigue with the most reactionary forces in russia. these british reactionaries openly, and with perfect impunity, represent our war as a thing as mean and shameful as germany's attack on belgium, and they do it because generosity and justice in the world is as terrible to them as dawn is to the creatures of the night. our tories blundered into this great war, not seeing whither it would take them. in particular it is manifest now by a hundred signs that they dread the fall of monarchy in germany and austria. far rather would they make the most abject surrenders to the kaiser than deal with a renascent republican germany. the recent letter of lord lansdowne, urging a peace with german imperialism, was but a feeler from the pacifist side of this most un-english, and unhappily most influential, section of our public life. lord lansdowne's letter was the letter of a peer who fears revolution more than national dishonour. but it is the truculent wing of this same anti-democratic movement that is far more active. while our sons suffer and die for their comforts and conceit, these people scheme to prevent any communication between the republican and socialist classes in germany and the allied population. at any cost this class of pampered and privileged traitors intend to have peace while the kaiser is still on his throne. if not they face a new world--in which their part will be small indeed. and with the utmost ingenuity they maintain a dangerous vagueness about the allied peace terms, _with the sole object of preventing a revolutionary movement in germany_. let me put it to the reader exactly why our failure to say plainly and exactly and conclusively what we mean to do about a score of points, and particularly about german economic life after the war, paralyses the penitents and friends and helpers that we could now find in germany. let me ask the reader to suppose himself a german in germany at the present time. of course if he was, he is sure that he would hate the kaiser as the source of this atrocious war, he would be bitterly ashamed of the belgian iniquity, of the submarine murders, and a score of such stains upon his national honour; and he would want to alter his national system and make peace. hundreds of thousands of germans are in that mood now. but as most of us have had to learn, a man may be bitterly ashamed of this or that incident in his country's history--what englishman, for instance, can be proud of glencoe?--he may disbelieve in half its institutions and still love his country far too much to suffer the thought of its destruction. i prefer to see my country right, but if it comes to the pinch and my country sins i will fight to save her from the destruction her sins may have brought upon her. that is the natural way of a man. but suppose a german wished to try to start a revolutionary movement in germany at the present time, have we given him any reason at all for supposing that a germany liberated and democratized, but, of course, divided and weakened as she would be bound to be in the process, would get better terms from the allies than a germany still facing them, militant, imperialist, and wicked? he would have no reason for believing anything of the sort. if we allies are honest, then if a revolution started in germany to-day we should if anything lower the price of peace to germany. but these people who pretend to lead us will state nothing of the sort. for them a revolution in germany would be the signal for putting up the price of peace. at any risk they are resolved that that german revolution shall not happen. your sane, good german, let me assert, is up against that as hard as if he was a wicked one. and so, poor devil, he has to put his revolutionary ideas away, they are hopeless ideas for him because of the power of the british reactionary, they are hopeless because of the line we as a nation take in this matter, and he has to go on fighting for his masters. a plain statement of our war aims that did no more than set out honestly and convincingly the terms the allies would make with a democratic republican germany--republican i say, because where a scrap of hohenzollern is left to-day there will be a fresh militarism to-morrow--would absolutely revolutionize the internal psychology of germany. we should no longer face a solid people. we should have replaced the false issue of germany and britain fighting for the hegemony of europe, the lie upon which the german government has always traded, and in which our extreme tory press has always supported the german government, by the true issue, which is freedom versus imperialism, the league of nations versus that net of diplomatic roguery and of aristocratic, plutocratic, and autocratic greed and conceit which dragged us all into this vast welter of bloodshed and loss. vi the war aims of the western allies here, quite compactly, is the plain statement of the essential cause and process of the war to which i would like to see the allied foreign offices subscribe, and which i would like to have placed plainly before the german mind. it embodies much that has been learnt and thought out since this war began, and i think it is much truer and more fundamental than that mere raging against german "militarism," upon which our politicians and press still so largely subsist. the enormous development of war methods and war material within the last fifty years has made war so horrible and destructive that it is impossible to contemplate a future for mankind from which it has not been eliminated; the increased facilities of railway, steamship, automobile travel and air navigation have brought mankind so close together that ordinary human life is no longer safe anywhere in the boundaries of the little states in which it was once secure. in some fashion it is now necessary to achieve sufficient human unity to establish a world peace and save the future of mankind. in one or other of two ways only is that unification possible. either men may set up a common league to keep the peace of the earth, or one state must ultimately become so great and powerful as to repeat for all the world what rome did for europe two thousand years ago. either we must have human unity by a league of existing states or by an imperial conquest. the former is now the declared aim of our country and its allies; the latter is manifestly the ambition of the present rulers of germany. whatever the complications may have been in the earlier stages of the war, due to treaties that are now dead letters and agreements that are extinct, the essential issue now before every man in the world is this: is the unity of mankind to be the unity of a common freedom, in which every race and nationality may participate with complete self-respect, playing its part, according to its character, in one great world community, or is it to be reached--and it can only be so reached through many generations of bloodshed and struggle still, even if it can be ever reached in this way at all--through conquest and a german hegemony? while the rulers of germany to-day are more openly aggressive and imperialist than they were in august, , the allies arrayed against them have made great progress in clearing up and realizing the instincts and ideals which brought them originally into the struggle. the german government offers the world to-day a warring future in which germany alone is to be secure and powerful and proud. _mankind will not endure that_. the allies offer the world more and more definitely the scheme of an organized league of free nations, a rule of law and justice about the earth. to fight for that and for no other conceivable end, the united states of america, with the full sympathy and co-operation of every state in the western hemisphere, has entered the war. the british empire, in the midst of the stress of the great war, has set up in dublin a convention of irishmen of all opinions with the fullest powers of deciding upon the future of their country. if ireland were not divided against herself she could be free and equal with england to-morrow. it is the open intention of great britain to develop representative government, where it has not hitherto existed, in india and egypt, to go on steadfastly increasing the share of the natives of these countries in the government of their own lands, until they too become free and equal members of the world league. neither france nor italy nor britain nor america has ever tampered with the shipping of other countries except in time of war, and the trade of the british empire has been impartially open to all the world. the extra-national "possessions," the so-called "subject nations" in the empires of britain, france, italy, and japan, are, in fact, possessions held in trust against the day when the league of free nations will inherit for mankind. is it to be union by conquest or is it to be union by league? for any sort of man except the german the question is, will you be a free citizen or will you be an underling to the german imperialism? for the german now the question is a far graver and more tragic one. for him it is this: "you belong to a people not now increasing very rapidly, a numerous people, but not so numerous as some of the great peoples of the world, a people very highly trained, very well drilled and well armed, perhaps as well trained and drilled and equipped as ever it will be. the collapse of russian imperialism has made you safe if now you can get peace, and you _can_ get a peace now that will neither destroy you nor humiliate you nor open up the prospect of fresh wars. the allies offer you such a peace. to accept it, we must warn you plainly, means refusing to go on with the manifest intentions of your present rulers, which are to launch you and your children and your children's children upon a career of struggle for war predominance, which may no doubt inflict untold deprivations and miseries upon the rest of mankind, but whose end in the long run, for germany and things german, can be only judgment and death." in such terms as these the oceanic allies could now state their war-will and carry the world straightway into a new phase of human history. they could but they do not. for alas! not one of them is free from the entanglements of past things; when we look for the wisdom of statesmen we find the cunning of politicians; when open speech and plain reason might save the world, courts, bureaucrats, financiers and profiteers conspire. vii the future of monarchy from the very outset of this war it was manifest to the clear-headed observer that only the complete victory of german imperialism could save the dynastic system in europe from the fate that it had challenged. that curious system had been the natural and unplanned development of the political complications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. two systems of monarchies, the bourbon system and the german, then ruled europe between them. with the latter was associated the tradition of the european unity under the roman empire; all the germanic monarchs had an itch to be called caesar. the kaiser of the austro-hungarian empire and the czar had, so to speak, the prior claim to the title. the prussian king set up as a caesar in ; queen victoria became the caesar of india (kaisir-i-hind) under the auspices of lord beaconsfield, and last and least, that most detestable of all coburgers, ferdinand of bulgaria, gave kaiserism a touch of quaint absurdity by setting up as czar of bulgaria. the weakening of the bourbon system by the french revolution and the napoleonic adventure cleared the way for the complete ascendancy of the germanic monarchies in spite of the breaking away of the united states from that system. after , a constellation of quasi-divine teutonic monarchs, of which the german emperor, the german queen victoria, the german czar, were the greatest stars, formed a caste apart, intermarried only among themselves, dominated the world and was regarded with a mystical awe by the ignorant and foolish in most european countries. the marriages, the funerals, the coronations, the obstetrics of this amazing breed of idols were matters of almost universal worship. the czar and queen victoria professed also to be the heads of religion upon earth. the court-centered diplomacies of the more firmly rooted monarchies steered all the great liberating movements of the nineteenth century into monarchical channels. italy was made a monarchy; greece, the motherland of republics, was handed over to a needy scion of the danish royal family; the sturdy peasants of bulgaria suffered from a kindred imposition. even norway was saddled with as much of a king as it would stand, as a condition of its independence. at the dawn of the twentieth century republican freedom seemed a remote dream beyond the confines of switzerland and france--and it had no very secure air in france. reactionary scheming has been an intermittent fever in the french republic for six and forty years. the french foreign office is still undemocratic in tradition and temper. but for the restless disloyalty of the hohenzollerns this german kingly caste might be dominating the world to this day. of course the stability of this teutonic dynastic system in europe--which will presently seem to the student of history so curious a halting-place upon the way to human unity--rested very largely upon the maintenance of peace. it was the failure to understand this on the part of the german and bulgarian rulers in particular that has now brought all monarchy to the question. the implicit theory that supported the intermarrying german royal families in europe was that their inter-relationship and their aloofness from their subjects was a mitigation of national and racial animosities. in the days when queen victoria was the grandmother of europe this was a plausible argument. king, czar and emperor, or emperor and emperor would meet, and it was understood that these meetings were the lubrication of european affairs. the monarchs married largely, conspicuously, and very expensively for our good. royal funerals, marriages, christenings, coronations, and jubilees interrupted traffic and stimulated trade everywhere. they seemed to give a _raison d'être_ for mankind. it is the emperor william and the czar ferdinand who have betrayed not only humanity but their own strange caste by shattering all these pleasant illusions. the wisdom of kant is justified, and we know now that kings cause wars. it needed the shock of the great war to bring home the wisdom of that old scotchman of königsberg to the mind of the ordinary man. moreover in support of the dynastic system was the fact that it did exist as the system in possession, and all prosperous and intelligent people are chary of disturbing existing things. life is full of vestigial structures, and it is a long way to logical perfection. let us keep on, they would argue, with what we have. and another idea which, rightly or wrongly, made men patient with the emperors and kings was an exaggerated idea of the insecurity of republican institutions. you can still hear very old dull men say gravely that "kings are better than pronunciamentos"; there was an article upon greece to this effect quite recently in that uncertain paper _the new statesman_. then a kind of illustrative gesture would be made to the south american republics, although the internal disturbances of the south american republics have diminished to very small dimensions in the last three decades and although pronunciamentos rarely disturb the traffic in switzerland, the united states, or france. but there can be no doubt that the influence of the germanic monarchy up to the death of queen victoria upon british thought was in the direction of estrangement from the two great modern republics and in the direction of assistance and propitiation to germany. we surrendered heligoland, we made great concessions to german colonial ambitions, we allowed ourselves to be jockeyed into a phase of dangerous hostility to france. a practice of sneering at things american has died only very recently out of english journalism and literature, as any one who cares to consult the bound magazines of the 'seventies and 'eighties may soon see for himself. it is well too in these days not to forget colonel marchand, if only to remember that such a clash must never recur. but in justice to our monarchy we must remember that after the death of queen victoria, the spirit, if not the forms, of british kingship was greatly modified by the exceptional character and ability of king edward vii. he was curiously anti-german in spirit; he had essentially democratic instincts; in a few precious years he restored good will between france and great britain. it is no slight upon his successor to doubt whether any one could have handled the present opportunities and risks of monarchy in great britain as edward could have handled them. because no doubt if monarchy is to survive in the british empire it must speedily undergo the profoundest modification. the old state of affairs cannot continue. the european dynastic system, based upon the intermarriage of a group of mainly german royal families, is dead to-day; it is freshly dead, but it is as dead as the rule of the incas. it is idle to close our eyes to this fact. the revolution in russia, the setting up of a republic in china, demonstrating the ripeness of the east for free institutions, the entry of the american republics into world politics--these things slam the door on any idea of working back to the old nineteenth-century system. people calls to people. "no peace with the hohenzollerns" is a cry that carries with it the final repudiation of emperors and kings. the man in the street will assure you he wants no diplomatic peace. beyond the unstable shapes of the present the political forms of the future rise now so clearly that they are the common talk of men. kant's lucid thought told us long ago that the peace of the world demanded a world union of republics. that is a commonplace remark now in every civilized community. the stars in their courses, the logic of circumstances, the everyday needs and everyday intelligence of men, all these things march irresistibly towards a permanent world peace based on democratic republicanism. the question of the future of monarchy is not whether it will be able to resist and overcome that trend; it has as little chance of doing that as the lama of thibet has of becoming emperor of the earth. it is whether it will resist openly, become the centre and symbol of a reactionary resistance, and have to be abolished and swept away altogether everywhere, as the romanoffs have already been swept away in russia, or whether it will be able in this country and that to adapt itself to the necessities of the great age that dawns upon mankind, to take a generous and helpful attitude towards its own modification, and so survive, for a time at any rate, in that larger air. it is the fashion for the apologists of monarchy in the british empire to speak of the british system as a crowned republic. that is an attractive phrase to people of republican sentiments. it is quite conceivable that the british empire may be able to make that phrase a reality and that the royal line may continue, a line of hereditary presidents, with some of the ancient trappings and something of the picturesque prestige that, as the oldest monarchy in europe, it has to-day. two kings in europe have already gone far towards realizing this conception of a life president; both the king of italy and the king of norway live as simply as if they were in the white house and are far more accessible. along that line the british monarchy must go if it is not to go altogether. will it go along those lines? there are many reasons for hoping that it will do so. the _times_ has styled the crown the "golden link" of the empire. australians and canadians, it was argued, had little love for the motherland but the greatest devotion to the sovereign, and still truer was this of indians, egyptians, and the like. it might be easy to press this theory of devotion too far, but there can be little doubt that the british crown does at present stand as a symbol of unity over diversity such as no other crown, unless it be that of austria-hungary, can be said to do. the british crown is not like other crowns; it may conceivably take a line of its own and emerge--possibly a little more like a hat and a little less like a crown--from trials that may destroy every other monarchial system in the world. now many things are going on behind the scenes, many little indications peep out upon the speculative watcher and vanish again; but there is very little that is definite to go upon at the present time to determine how far the monarchy will rise to the needs of this great occasion. certain acts and changes, the initiative to which would come most gracefully from royalty itself, could be done at this present time. they may be done quite soon. upon the doing of them wait great masses of public opinion. the first of these things is for the british monarchy to sever itself definitely from the german dynastic system, with which it is so fatally entangled by marriage and descent, and to make its intention of becoming henceforth more and more british in blood as well as spirit, unmistakably plain. this idea has been put forth quite prominently in the _times_. the king has been asked to give his countenance to the sweeping away of all those restrictions first set up by george the third, upon the marriage of the royal princes with british, french and american subjects. the british empire is very near the limit of its endurance of a kingly caste of germans. the choice of british royalty between its peoples and its cousins cannot be indefinitely delayed. were it made now publicly and boldly, there can be no doubt that the decision would mean a renascence of monarchy, a considerable outbreak of royalist enthusiasm in the empire. there are times when a king or queen must need be dramatic and must a little anticipate occasions. it is not seemly to make concessions perforce; kings may not make obviously unwilling surrenders; it is the indecisive kings who lose their crowns. no doubt the anglicization of the royal family by national marriages would gradually merge that family into the general body of the british peerage. its consequent loss of distinction might be accompanied by an associated fading out of function, until the king became at last hardly more functional than was the late duke of norfolk as premier peer. possibly that is the most desirable course from many points of view. it must be admitted that the abandonment of marriages within the royal caste and a bold attempt to introduce a strain of british blood in the royal family does not in itself fulfil all that is needed if the british king is indeed to become the crowned president of his people and the nominal and accepted leader of the movement towards republican institutions. a thing that is productive of an enormous amount of republican talk in great britain is the suspicion--i believe an ill-founded suspicion--that there are influences at work at court antagonistic to republican institutions in friendly states and that there is a disposition even to sacrifice the interests of the liberal allies to dynastic sympathies. these things are not to be believed, but it would be a feat of vast impressiveness if there were something like a royal and public repudiation of the weaknesses of cousinship. the behaviour of the allies towards that great balkan statesman venizelos, the sacrificing of the friendly greek republicans in favour of the manifestly treacherous king of greece, has produced the deepest shame and disgust in many quarters that are altogether friendly, that are even warmly "loyal" to the british monarchy. and in a phase of tottering thrones it is very undesirable that the british habit of asylum should be abused. we have already in england the dethroned monarch of a friendly republic; he is no doubt duly looked after. in the future there may be a shaking of the autumnal boughs and a shower of emperors and kings. we do not want great britain to become a hotbed of reactionary plotting and the starting-point of restoration raids into the territories of emancipated peoples. this is particularly desirable if presently, after the kaiser's death--which by all the statistics of hohenzollern mortality cannot be delayed now for many years--the present crown prince goes a-wandering. we do not want any german ex-monarchs; sweden is always open to them and friendly, and to sweden they ought to go; and particularly do british people dread an irruption of hohenzollerns or coburgers. almost as undesirable would be the arrival of the czar and czarina. it is supremely important that no wind of suspicion should blow between us and the freedom of russia. after the war even more than during the war will the enemy be anxious to sow discord between the great russian-speaking and english-speaking democracies. quite apart from the scandal of their inelegant domesticities, the establishment of the czar and czarina in england with frequent and easy access to our royal family may be extraordinarily unfortunate for the british monarchy. i will confess a certain sympathy for the czar myself. he is not an evil figure, he is not a strong figure, but he has that sort of weakness, that failure in decision, which trails revolution in its wake. he has ended one dynasty already. the british royal family owes it to itself, that he bring not the infection of his misfortunes to windsor. the security of the british monarchy lies in such a courageous severance of its destinies from the teutonic dynastic system. will it make that severance? there i share an almost universal ignorance. the loyalty of the british is not to what kings are too prone to call "my person," not to a chosen and admired family, but to a renascent mankind. we have fought in this war for belgium, for france, for general freedom, for civilization and the whole future of mankind, far more than for ourselves. we have not fought for a king. we are discovering in that spirit of human unity that lies below the idea of a league of free nations the real invisible king of our heart and race. but we will very gladly go on with our task under a nominal king unless he hampers us in the task that grows ever more plainly before us. ... that, i think, is a fair statement of british public opinion on this question. but every day when i am in london i walk past buckingham palace to lunch at my club, and i look at that not very expressive façade and wonder--and we all wonder--what thoughts are going on behind it and what acts are being conceived there. out of it there might yet come some gesture of acceptance magnificent enough to set beside president wilson's magnificent declaration of war. ... these are things in the scales of fate. i will not pretend to be able to guess even which way the scales will swing. viii the plain necessity for a league great as the sacrifices of prejudice and preconception which any effective realization of this idea of a league of free nations will demand, difficult as the necessary delegations of sovereignty must be, none the less are such sacrifices and difficulties unavoidable. people in france and italy and great britain and germany alike have to subdue their minds to the realization that some such league is now a necessity for them if their peace and national life are to continue. there is no prospect before them but either some such league or else great humiliation and disastrous warfare driving them down towards social dissolution; and for the united states it is only a question of a little longer time before the same alternatives have to be faced. whether this war ends in the complete defeat of germany and german imperialism, or in a revolutionary modernization of germany, or in a practical triumph for the hohenzollerns, are considerations that affect the nature and scope of the league, but do not affect its essential necessity. in the first two cases the league of free nations will be a world league including germany as a principal partner, in the latter case the league of free nations will be a defensive league standing steadfast against the threat of a world imperialism, and watching and restraining with one common will the homicidal maniac in its midst. but in all these cases there can be no great alleviation of the evils that now blacken and threaten to ruin human life altogether, unless all the civilized and peace-seeking peoples of the world are pledged and locked together under a common law and a common world policy. there must rather be an intensification of these evils. there must be wars more evil than this war continuing this war, and more destructive of civilized life. there can be no peace and hope for our race but an organized peace and hope, armed against disturbance as a state is armed against mad, ferocious, and criminal men. now, there are two chief arguments, running one into the other, for the necessity of merging our existing sovereignties into a greater and, if possible, a world-wide league. the first is the present geographical impossibility of nearly all the existing european states and empires; and the second is the steadily increasing disproportion between the tortures and destructions inflicted by modern warfare and any possible advantages that may arise from it. underlying both arguments is the fact that modern developments of mechanical science have brought the nations of europe together into too close a proximity. this present war, more than anything else, is a violent struggle between old political ideas and new antagonistic conditions. it is the unhappy usage of our schools and universities to study the history of mankind only during periods of mechanical unprogressiveness. the historical ideas of europe range between the time when the greeks were going about the world on foot or horseback or in galleys or sailing ships to the days when napoleon, wellington, and nelson were going about at very much the same pace in much the same vehicles and vessels. at the advent of steam and electricity the muse of history holds her nose and shuts her eyes. science will study and get the better of a modern disease, as, for example, sleeping sickness, in spite of the fact that it has no classical standing; but our history schools would be shocked at the bare idea of studying the effect of modern means of communication upon administrative areas, large or small. this defect in our historical training has made our minds politically sluggish. we fail to adapt readily enough. in small things and great alike we are trying to run the world in areas marked out in or before the eighteenth century, regardless of the fact that a man or an army or an aeroplane can get in a few minutes or a few hours to points that it would have taken days or weeks to reach under the old foot-and-horse conditions. that matters nothing to the learned men who instruct our statesmen and politicians. it matters everything from the point of view of social and economic and political life. and the grave fact to consider is that all the great states of europe, except for the unification of italy and germany, are still much of the size and in much the same boundaries that made them strong and safe in the eighteenth century, that is to say, in the closing years of the foot-horse period. the british empire grew and was organized under those conditions, and had to modify itself only a little to meet the needs of steam shipping. all over the world are its linked possessions and its ports and coaling stations and fastnesses on the trade routes. and british people still look at the red-splashed map of the world with the profoundest self-satisfaction, blind to the swift changes that are making that scattered empire--if it is to remain an isolated system--almost the most dangerous conceivable. let me ask the british reader who is disposed to sneer at the league of nations and say he is very well content with the empire, thank you, to get his atlas and consider one or two propositions. and, first, let him think of aviation. i can assure him, because upon this matter i have some special knowledge, that long-distance air travel for men, for letters and light goods and for bombs, is continually becoming more practicable. but the air routes that air transport will follow must go over a certain amount of land, for this reason that every few hundred miles at the longest the machine must come down for petrol. a flying machine with a safe non-stop range of miles is still a long way off. it may indeed be permanently impracticable because there seems to be an upward limit to the size of an aeroplane engine. and now will the reader take the map of the world and study the air routes from london to the rest of the empire? he will find them perplexing--if he wants them to be "all-red." happily this is not a british difficulty only. will he next study the air routes from paris to the rest of the french possessions? and, finally, will he study the air routes out of germany to anywhere? the germans are as badly off as any people. but we are all badly off. so far as world air transit goes any country can, if it chooses, choke any adjacent country. directly any trade difficulty breaks out, any country can begin a vexatious campaign against its neighbour's air traffic. it can oblige it to alight at the frontier, to follow prescribed routes, to land at specified places on those routes and undergo examinations that will waste precious hours. but so far as i can see, no european statesman, german or allied, have begun to give their attention to this amazing difficulty. without a great pooling of air control, either a world-wide pooling or a pooling at least of the atlantic-mediterranean allies in one air league, the splendid peace possibilities of air transport--and they are indeed splendid--must remain very largely a forbidden possibility to mankind. and as a second illustration of the way in which changing conditions are altering political questions, let the reader take his atlas and consider the case of that impregnable fastness, that great naval station, that key to the mediterranean, gibraltar. british boys are brought up on gibraltar and the gibraltar idea. to the british imagination gibraltar is almost as sacred a national symbol as the lions in trafalgar square. now, in his atlas the reader will almost certainly find an inset map of this valuable possession, coloured bright red. the inset map will have attached to it a small scale of miles. from that he will be able to satisfy himself that there is not an inch of the rock anywhere that is not within five miles or less of spanish land, and that there is rather more than a semicircle of hills round the rock within a range of seven or eight miles. that is much less than the range of a sixteen-inch gun. in other words, the spaniards are in a position to knock gibraltar to bits whenever they want to do so, or to smash and sink any ships in its harbour. they can hit it on every side. consider, moreover, that there are long sweeps of coast north, south, and west of the rock, from which torpedoes could be discharged at any ship that approached. inquire further where on the rock an aeroplane can land. and having ascertained these things, ask yourself what is the present value of gibraltar? i will not multiply disagreeable instances of this sort, though it would be easy enough to do so in the case both of france and italy as well as of great britain. i give them as illustrations of the way in which everywhere old securities and old arrangements must be upset by the greater range of modern things. let us get on to more general conditions. there is not a capital city in europe that twenty years from now will not be liable to a bombing raid done by hundreds or even thousands of big aeroplanes, upon or even before a declaration of war, and there is not a line of sea communication that will not be as promptly interrupted by the hostile submarine. i point these things out here only to carry home the fact that the ideas of sovereign isolation and detachment that were perfectly valid in , the self-sufficient empire, imperial zollverein and all that stuff, and damn the foreigner! are now, because of the enormous changes in range of action and facility of locomotion that have been going on, almost as wild--or would be if we were not so fatally accustomed to them--and quite as dangerous, as the idea of setting up a free and sovereign state in the isle of dogs. all the european empires are becoming vulnerable at every point. surely the moral is obvious. the only wise course before the allied european powers now is to put their national conceit in their pockets and to combine to lock up their foreign policy, their trade interests, and all their imperial and international interests into a league so big as to be able to withstand the most sudden and treacherous of blows. and surely the only completely safe course for them and mankind--hard and nearly impossible though it may seem at the present juncture--is for them to lock up into one unity with a democratized germany and with all the other states of the earth into one peace-maintaining league. if the reader will revert again to his atlas he will see very clearly that a strongly consolidated league of free nations, even if it consisted only of our present allies, would in itself form a combination with so close a system of communication about the world, and so great an economic advantage, that in the long run it could oblige germany and the rest of the world to come in to its council. divided the oceanic allies are, to speak plainly, geographical rags and nakedness; united they are a world. to set about organizing that league now, with its necessary repudiation on the part of britain, france, and italy, of a selfish and, it must be remembered in the light of these things i have but hinted at here, a _now hopelessly unpracticable imperialism_, would, i am convinced, lead quite rapidly to a great change of heart in germany and to a satisfactory peace. but even if i am wrong in that, then all the stronger is the reason for binding, locking and uniting the allied powers together. it is the most dangerous of delusions for each and all of them to suppose that either britain, france or italy can ever stand alone again and be secure. and turning now to the other aspect of these consequences of the development of material science, it is too often assumed that this war is being as horrible and destructive as war can be. there never was so great a delusion. this war has only begun to be horrible. no doubt it is much more horrible and destructive than any former war, but even in comparison with the full possibilities of known and existing means of destruction it is still a mild war. perhaps it will never rise to its full possibilities. at the present stage there is not a combatant, except perhaps america, which is not now practising a pinching economy of steel and other mechanical material. the germans are running short of first-class flying men, and if we and our allies continue to press the air attack, and seek out and train our own vastly greater resources of first quality young airmen, the germans may come as near to being "driven out of the air" as is possible. i am a firmer believer than ever i was in the possibility of a complete victory over germany--through and by the air. but the occasional dropping of a big bomb or so in london is not to be taken as anything but a minimum display of what air war can do. in a little while now our alliance should be in a position to commence day and night continuous attacks upon the rhine towns. not hour-long raids such as london knows, but week-long raids. then and then only shall we be able to gauge the really horrible possibilities of the air war. they are in our hands and not in the hands of the germans. in addition the germans are at a huge disadvantage in their submarine campaign. their submarine campaign is only the feeble shadow of what a submarine campaign might be. turning again to the atlas the reader can see for himself that the german and austrian submarines are obliged to come out across very narrow fronts. a fence of mines less than three hundred miles long and two hundred feet deep would, for example, completely bar their exit through the north sea. the u-boats run the gauntlet of that long narrow sea and pay a heavy toll to it. if only our admiralty would tell the german public what that toll is now, there would come a time when german seamen would no longer consent to go down in them. consider, however, what a submarine campaign would be for great britain if instead of struggling through this bottle-neck it were conducted from the coast of norway, where these pests might harbour in a hundred fiords. consider too what this weapon may be in twenty years' time in the hands of a country in the position of the united states. great britain, if she is not altogether mad, will cease to be an island as soon as possible after the war, by piercing the channel tunnel--how different our transport problem would be if we had that now!--but such countries as australia, new zealand, and japan, directly they are involved in the future in a war against any efficient naval power with an unimpeded sea access, will be isolated forthwith. i cannot conceive that any of the great ocean powers will rest content until such a tremendous possibility of blockade as the submarine has created is securely vested in the hands of a common league beyond any power of sudden abuse. it must always be remembered that this war is a mechanical war conducted by men whose discipline renders them uninventive, who know little or nothing of mechanism, who are for the most part struggling blindly to get things back to the conditions for which they were trained, to napoleonic conditions, with infantry and cavalry and comparatively light guns, the so-called "war of manoeuvres." it is like a man engaged in a desperate duel who keeps on trying to make it a game of cricket. most of these soldiers detest every sort of mechanical device; the tanks, for example, which, used with imagination, might have given the british and french overwhelming victory on the western front, were subordinated to the usual cavalry "break through" idea. i am not making any particular complaint against the british and french generals in saying this. it is what must happen to any country which entrusts its welfare to soldiers. a soldier has to be a severely disciplined man, and a severely disciplined man cannot be a versatile man, and on the whole the british army has been as receptive to novelties as any. the german generals have done no better; indeed, they have not done so well as the generals of the allies in this respect. but after the war, if the world does not organize rapidly for peace, then as resources accumulate a little, the mechanical genius will get to work on the possibilities of these ideas that have merely been sketched out in this war. we shall get big land ironclads which will smash towns. we shall get air offensives--let the experienced london reader think of an air raid going on hour after hour, day after day--that will really burn out and wreck towns, that will drive people mad by the thousand. we shall get a very complete cessation of sea transit. even land transit may be enormously hampered by aerial attack. i doubt if any sort of social order will really be able to stand the strain of a fully worked out modern war. we have still, of course, to feel the full shock effects even of this war. most of the combatants are going on, as sometimes men who have incurred grave wounds will still go on for a time--without feeling them. the educational, biological, social, economic punishment that has already been taken by each of the european countries is, i feel, very much greater than we yet realize. russia, the heaviest and worst-trained combatant, has indeed shown the effects and is down and sick, but in three years' time all europe will know far better than it does now the full price of this war. and the shock effects of the next war will have much the same relation to the shock effects of this, as the shock of breaking a finger-nail has to the shock of crushing in a body. in russia to-day we have seen, not indeed social revolution, not the replacement of one social order by another, but disintegration. let not national conceit blind us. germany, france, italy, britain are all slipping about on that same slope down which russia has slid. which goes first, it is hard to guess, or whether we shall all hold out to some kind of peace. at present the social discipline of france and britain seems to be at least as good as that of germany, and the _morale_ of the rhineland and bavaria has probably to undergo very severe testing by systematized and steadily increasing air punishment as this year goes on. the next war--if a next war comes--will see all germany, from end to end, vulnerable to aircraft.... such are the two sets of considerations that will, i think, ultimately prevail over every prejudice and every difficulty in the way of the league of free nations. existing states have become impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties. the new conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. it becomes more and more plainly a choice between the league of free nations and a famished race of men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the smouldering ruins of civilization. in the end i believe that the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism, to the latter alternative. it may take obstinate men a few more years yet of blood and horror to learn this lesson, but for my own part i cherish an obstinate belief in the potential reasonableness of mankind. ix democracy all the talk, all the aspiration and work that is making now towards this conception of a world securely at peace, under the direction of a league of free nations, has interwoven with it an idea that is often rather felt than understood, the idea of democracy. not only is justice to prevail between race and race and nation and nation, but also between man and man; there is to be a universal respect for human life throughout the earth; the world, in the words of president wilson, is to be made "safe for democracy." i would like to subject that word to a certain scrutiny to see whether the things we are apt to think and assume about it correspond exactly with the feeling of the word. i would like to ask what, under modern conditions, does democracy mean, and whether we have got it now anywhere in the world in its fulness and completion. and to begin with i must have a quarrel with the word itself. the eccentricities of modern education make us dependent for a number of our primary political terms upon those used by the thinkers of the small greek republics of ancient times before those petty states collapsed, through sheer political ineptitude, before the macedonians. they thought in terms of states so small that it was possible to gather all the citizens together for the purposes of legislation. these states were scarcely more than what we english might call sovereign urban districts. fast communications were made by runners; even the policeman with a bicycle of the modern urban district was beyond the scope of the greek imagination. there were no railways, telegraphs, telephones, books or newspapers, there was no need for the state to maintain a system of education, and the affairs of the state were so simple that they could be discussed and decided by the human voice and open voting in an assembly of all the citizens. that is what democracy, meant. in andorra, or perhaps in canton uri, such democracy may still be possible; in any other modern state it cannot exist. the opposite term to it was oligarchy, in which a small council of men controlled the affairs of the state. oligarchy, narrowed down to one man, became monarchy. if you wished to be polite to an oligarchy you called it an aristocracy; if you wished to point out that a monarch was rather by way of being self-appointed, you called him a tyrant. an oligarchy with a property qualification was a plutocracy. now the modern intelligence, being under a sort of magic slavery to the ancient greeks, has to adapt all these terms to the problems of states so vast and complex that they have the same relation to the greek states that the anatomy of a man has to the anatomy of a jellyfish. they are not only greater in extent and denser in population, but they are increasingly innervated by more and more rapid means of communication and excitement. in the classical past--except for such special cases as the feeding of rome with egyptian corn--trade was a traffic in luxuries or slaves, war a small specialized affair of infantry and horsemen in search of slaves and loot, and empire the exaction of tribute. the modern state must conduct its enormous businesses through a system of ministries; its vital interests go all round the earth; nothing that any ancient greek would have recognized as democracy is conceivable in a great modern state. it is absolutely necessary, if we are to get things clear in our minds about what democracy really means in relation to modern politics, first to make a quite fresh classification in order to find what items there really are to consider, and then to inquire which seem to correspond more or less closely in spirit with our ideas about ancient democracy. now there are two primary classes of idea about government in the modern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity of the common man. we may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideas and wishes about the state and the world, or we may suppose that he isn't. we may believe that the common man can govern, or we may believe that he can't. we may think further along the first line that he is so wise and good and right that we only have to get out of his way for him to act rightly and for the good of all mankind, or we may doubt it. and if we doubt that we may still believe that, though perhaps "you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time," the common man, expressing himself by a majority vote, still remains the secure source of human wisdom. but next, while we may deny this universal distribution of political wisdom, we may, if we are sufficiently under the sway of modern ideas about collective psychology, believe that it is necessary to poke up the political indifference and inability of the common man as much as possible, to thrust political ideas and facts upon him, to incite him to a watchful and critical attitude towards them, and above all to secure his assent to the proceedings of the able people who are managing public affairs. or finally, we may treat him as a thing to be ruled and not consulted. let me at this stage make out a classificatory diagram of these elementary ideas of government in a modern country. class i. it is supposed that the common man _can_ govern: ( ) without further organization (anarchy); ( ) through a majority vote by delegates. class ii. it is supposed that the common man _cannot_ govern, and that government therefore must be through the agency of able persons who may be classified under one of the following sub-heads, either as ( ) persons elected by the common man because he believes them to be persons able to govern--just as he chooses his doctors as persons able to secure health, and his electrical engineers as persons able to attend to his tramways, lighting, etc., etc.; ( ) persons of a special class, as, for example, persons born and educated to rule (e.g. _aristocracy_), or rich business adventurers _(plutocracy)_ who rule without consulting the common man at all. to which two sub-classes we may perhaps add a sort of intermediate stage between them, namely: ( ) persons elected by a special class of voter. monarchy may be either a special case of class ii.( ), ( ) or ( ), in which the persons who rule have narrowed down in number to one person, and the duration of monarchy may be either for life or a term of years. these two classes and the five sub-classes cover, i believe, all the elementary political types in our world. now in the constitution of a modern state, because of the conflict and confusion of ideas, all or most of these five sub-classes may usually be found intertwined. the british constitution, for instance, is a complicated tangle of arrangements, due to a struggle between the ideas of class i.( ), class ii.( ), tending to become class ii.( ) and class ii.( ) in both its aristocratic and monarchist forms. the american constitution is largely dominated by class i.( ), from which it breaks away in the case of the president to a short-term monarchist aspect of class ii.( ). i will not elaborate this classification further. i have made it here in order to render clear first, that what we moderns mean by democracy is not what the greeks meant at all, that is to say, direct government by the assembly of all the citizens, and secondly and more important, that the word "democracy" is being used very largely in current discussion, so that it is impossible to say in any particular case whether the intention is class i.( ) or class ii.( ), and that we have to make up our minds whether we mean, if i may coin two phrases, "delegate democracy" or "selective democracy," or some definite combination of these two, when we talk about "democracy," before we can get on much beyond a generous gesture of equality and enfranchisement towards our brother man. the word is being used, in fact, confusingly for these two quite widely different things. now, it seems to me that though there has been no very clear discussion of the issue between those two very opposite conceptions of democracy, largely because of the want of proper distinctive terms, there has nevertheless been a wide movement of public opinion away from "delegate democracy" and towards "selective democracy." people have gone on saying "democracy," while gradually changing its meaning from the former to the latter. it is notable in great britain, for example, that while there has been no perceptible diminution in our faith in democracy, there has been a growing criticism of "party" and "politicians," and a great weakening in the power and influence of representatives and representative institutions. there has been a growing demand for personality and initiative in elected persons. the press, which was once entirely subordinate politically to parliamentary politics, adopts an attitude towards parliament and party leaders nowadays which would have seemed inconceivable insolence in the days of lord palmerston. and there has been a vigorous agitation in support of electoral methods which are manifestly calculated to subordinate "delegated" to "selected" men. the movement for electoral reform in great britain at the present time is one of quite fundamental importance in the development of modern democracy. the case of the reformers is that heretofore modern democracy has not had a fair opportunity of showing its best possibilities to the world, because the methods of election have persistently set aside the better types of public men, or rather of would-be public men, in favour of mere party hacks. that is a story common to britain and the american democracies, but in america it was expressed in rather different terms and dealt with in a less analytical fashion than it has been in great britain. it was not at first clearly understood that the failure of democracy to produce good government came through the preference of "delegated" over "selected" men, the idea of delegation did in fact dominate the minds of both electoral reformers and electoral conservatives alike, and the earlier stages of the reform movement in great britain were inspired not so much by the idea of getting a better type of representative as by the idea of getting a fairer representation of minorities. it was only slowly that the idea that sensible men do not usually belong to any political "party" took hold. it is only now being realized that what sensible men desire in a member of parliament is honour and capacity rather than a mechanical loyalty to a "platform." they do not want to dictate to their representative; they want a man they can trust as their representative. in the fifties and sixties of the last century, in which this electoral reform movement began and the method of proportional representation was thought out, it was possible for the reformers to work untroubled upon the assumption that if a man was not necessarily born a "... little liber-al, or else a little conservative," he must at least be a liberal-unionist or a conservative free-trader. but seeking a fair representation for party minorities, these reformers produced a system of voting at once simple and incapable of manipulation, that leads straight, not to the representation of small parties, but to a type of democratic government by selected best men. before giving the essential features of that system, it may be well to state in its simplest form the evils at which the reform aims. an election, the reformers point out, is not the simple matter it appears to be at the first blush. methods of voting can be manipulated in various ways, and nearly every method has its own liability to falsification. we may take for illustration the commonest, simplest case--the case that is the perplexity of every clear-thinking voter under british or american conditions--the case of a constituency in which every elector has one vote, and which returns one representative to parliament. the naive theory on which people go is that all the possible candidates are put up, that each voter votes for the one he likes best, and that the best man wins. the bitter experience is that hardly ever are there more than two candidates, and still more rarely is either of these the best man possible. suppose, for example, the constituency is mainly conservative. a little group of pothouse politicians, wire-pullers, busybodies, local journalists, and small lawyers, working for various monetary interests, have "captured" the local conservative organization. they have time and energy to capture it, because they have no other interest in life except that. it is their "business," and honest men are busy with other duties. for reasons that do not appear these local "workers" put up an unknown mr. goldbug as the official conservative candidate. he professes a generally conservative view of things, but few people are sure of him and few people trust him. against him the weaker (and therefore still more venal) liberal organization now puts up a mr. kentshire (formerly wurstberg) to represent the broader thought and finer generosities of the english mind. a number of conservative gentlemen, generally too busy about their honest businesses to attend the party "smokers" and the party cave, realize suddenly that they want goldbug hardly more than they want wurstberg. they put up their long-admired, trusted, and able friend mr. sanity as an independent conservative. every one knows the trouble that follows. mr. sanity is "going to split the party vote." the hesitating voter is told, with considerable truth, that a vote given for mr. sanity is a vote given for wurstberg. at any price the constituency does not want wurstberg. so at the eleventh hour mr. sanity is induced to withdraw, and mr. goldbug goes into parliament to misrepresent this constituency. and so with most constituencies, and the result is a legislative body consisting largely of men of unknown character and obscure aims, whose only credential is the wearing of a party label. they come into parliament not to forward the great interests they ostensibly support, but with an eye to the railway jobbery, corporation business, concessions and financial operations that necessarily go on in and about the national legislature. that in its simplest form is the dilemma of democracy. the problem that has confronted modern democracy since its beginning has not really been the representation of organized minorities--they are very well able to look after themselves--but _the protection of the unorganized mass of busily occupied, fairly intelligent men from the tricks of the specialists who work the party machines_. we know mr. sanity, we want mr. sanity, but we are too busy to watch the incessant intrigues to oust him in favour of the obscurely influential people, politically docile, who are favoured by the organization. we want an organizer-proof method of voting. it is in answer to this demand, as the outcome of a most careful examination of the ways in which voting may be protected from the exploitation of those who _work_ elections, that the method of proportional representation with a single transferable vote has been evolved. it is organizer-proof. it defies the caucus. if you do not like mr. goldbug you can put up and vote for mr. sanity, giving mr. goldbug your second choice, in the most perfect confidence that in any case your vote cannot help to return mr. wurstberg. with proportional representation with a single transferable vote (this specification is necessary, because there are also the inferior imitations of various election-riggers figuring as proportional representation), it is _impossible to prevent the effective candidature of independent men of repute beside the official candidates_. the method of voting under the proportional representation system has been ignorantly represented as complex. it is really almost ideally simple. you mark the list of candidates with numbers in the order of your preference. for example, you believe a to be absolutely the best man for parliament; you mark him . but b you think is the next best man; you mark him . that means that if a gets an enormous amount of support, ever so many more votes than he requires for his return, your vote will not be wasted. only so much of your vote as is needed will go to a; the rest will go to b. or, on the other hand, if a has so little support that his chances are hopeless, you will not have thrown your vote away upon him; it will go to b. similarly you may indicate a third, a fourth, and a fifth choice; if you like you may mark every name on your paper with a number to indicate the order of your preferences. and that is all the voter has to do. the reckoning and counting of the votes presents not the slightest difficulty to any one used to the business of computation. silly and dishonest men, appealing to still sillier audiences, have got themselves and their audiences into humorous muddles over this business, but the principles are perfectly plain and simple. let me state them here; they can be fully and exactly stated, with various ornaments, comments, arguments, sarcastic remarks, and digressions, in seventy lines of this type. it will be evident that, in any election under this system, any one who has got a certain proportion of no. votes will be elected. if, for instance, five people have to be elected and , voters vote, then any one who has got first votes or more _must_ be elected. votes is in that case enough to elect a candidate. this sufficient number of votes is called the _quota_, and any one who has more than that number of votes has obviously got more votes than is needful for election. so, to begin with, the voting papers are classified according to their first votes, and any candidates who have got more than a quota of first votes are forthwith declared elected. but most of these elected men would under the old system waste votes because they would have too many; for manifestly a candidate who gets more than the quota of votes _needs only a fraction of each of these votes to return him_. if, for instance, he gets double the quota he needs only half each vote. he takes that fraction, therefore, under this new and better system, and the rest of each vote is entered on to no. upon that voting paper. and so on. now this is an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilled computer, and it is quite easily checked by any other accountant and skilled computer. a reader with a bad arithmetical education, ignorant of the very existence of such a thing as a slide rule, knowing nothing of account keeping, who thinks of himself working out the resultant fractions with a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper in a bad light, may easily think of this transfer of fractions as a dangerous and terrifying process. it is, for a properly trained man, the easiest, exactest job conceivable. the cash register people will invent machines to do it for you while you wait. what happens, then, is that every candidate with more than a quota, beginning with the top candidate, sheds a traction of each vote he has received, down the list, and the next one sheds his surplus fraction in the same way, and so on until candidates lower in the list, who are at first below the quota, fill up to it. when all the surplus votes of the candidates at the head of the list have been disposed of, then the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list are dealt with. the second votes on their voting papers are treated as whole votes and distributed up the list, and so on. it will be plain to the quick-minded that, towards the end, there will be a certain chasing about of little fractions of votes, and a slight modification of the quota due to voting papers having no second or third preferences marked upon them, a chasing about that it will be difficult for an untrained intelligence to follow. _but untrained intelligences are not required to follow it_. for the skilled computer these things offer no difficulty at all. and they are not difficulties of principle but of manipulation. one might as well refuse to travel in a taxicab until the driver had explained the magneto as refuse to accept the principle of proportional representation by the single transferable vote until one had remedied all the deficiencies of one's arithmetical education. the fundamental principle of the thing, that a candidate who gets more votes than he wants is made to hand on a fraction of each vote to the voter's second choice, and that a candidate whose chances are hopeless is made to hand on the whole vote to the voter's second choice, so that practically only a small number of votes are ineffective, is within the compass of the mind of a boy of ten. but simple as this method is, it completely kills the organization and manipulation of voting. it completely solves the goldbug-wurstberg- sanity problem. it is knave-proof--short of forging, stealing, or destroying voting papers. a man of repute, a leaderly man, may defy all the party organizations in existence and stand beside and be returned over the head of a worthless man, though the latter be smothered with party labels. that is the gist of this business. the difference in effect between proportional representation and the old method of voting must ultimately be to change the moral and intellectual quality of elected persons profoundly. people are only beginning to realize the huge possibilities of advance inherent in this change of political method. it means no less than a revolution from "delegate democracy" to "selective democracy." now, i will not pretend to be anything but a strong partizan in this matter. when i speak of "democracy" i mean "selective democracy." i believe that "delegate democracy" is already provably a failure in the world, and that the reason why to-day, after three and a half years of struggle, we are still fighting german autocracy and fighting with no certainty of absolute victory, is because the affairs of the three great atlantic democracies have been largely in the hands not of selected men but of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party machine, of dodges rather than initiatives, second-rate men. when lord haldane, defending his party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation for the eventuality of the great war, pleaded that they had no "mandate" from the country to do anything of the sort, he did more than commit political suicide, he bore conclusive witness against the whole system which had made him what he was. neither britain nor france in this struggle has produced better statesmen nor better generals than the german autocracy. the british and french foreign offices are old monarchist organizations still. to this day the british and french politicians haggle and argue with the german ministers upon petty points and debating society advantages, smart and cunning, while the peoples perish. the one man who has risen to the greatness of this great occasion, the man who is, in default of any rival, rapidly becoming the leader of the world towards peace, is neither a delegate politician nor the choice of a monarch and his councillors. he is the one authoritative figure in these transactions whose mind has not been subdued either by long discipline in the party machine or by court intrigue, who has continued his education beyond those early twenties when the mind of the "budding politician" ceases to expand, who has thought, and thought things out, who is an educated man among dexterous under-educated specialists. by something very like a belated accident in the framing of the american constitution, the president of the united states is more in the nature of a selected man than any other conspicuous figure at the present time. he is specially elected by a special electoral college after an elaborate preliminary selection of candidates by the two great party machines. and be it remembered that mr. wilson is not the first great president the united states have had, he is one of a series of figures who tower over their european contemporaries. the united states have had many advantageous circumstances to thank for their present ascendancy in the world's affairs: isolation from militarist pressure for a century and a quarter, a vast virgin continent, plenty of land, freedom from centralization, freedom from titles and social vulgarities, common schools, a real democratic spirit in its people, and a great enthusiasm for universities; but no single advantage has been so great as this happy accident which has given it a specially selected man as its voice and figurehead in the world's affairs. in the average congressman, in the average senator, as ostrogorski's great book so industriously demonstrated, the united states have no great occasion for pride. neither the senate nor the house of representatives seem to rise above the level of the british houses of parliament, with a government unable to control the rebel forces of ulster, unable to promote or dismiss generals without an outcry, weakly amenable to the press, and terrifyingly incapable of great designs. it is to the united states of america we must look now if the world is to be made "safe for democracy." it is to the method of selection, as distinguished from delegation, that we must look if democracy is to be saved from itself. x the recent struggle for proportional representation in great britain british political life resists cleansing with all the vigour of a dirty little boy. it is nothing to your politician that the economic and social organization of all the world, is strained almost to the pitch of collapse, and that it is vitally important to mankind that everywhere the whole will and intelligence of the race should be enlisted in the great tasks of making a permanent peace and reconstructing the shattered framework of society. these are remote, unreal considerations to the politician. what is the world to him? he has scarcely heard of it. he has been far too busy as a politician. he has been thinking of smart little tricks in the lobby and brilliant exploits at question time. he has been thinking of jobs and appointments, of whether mr. asquith is likely to "come back" and how far it is safe to bank upon l. g. his one supreme purpose is to keep affairs in the hands of his own specialized set, to keep the old obscure party game going, to rig his little tricks behind a vast, silly camouflage of sham issues, to keep out able men and disinterested men, the public mind, and the general intelligence, from any effective interference with his disastrous manipulations of the common weal. i do not see how any intelligent and informed man can have followed the recent debates in the house of commons upon proportional representation without some gusts of angry contempt. they were the most pitiful and alarming demonstration of the intellectual and moral quality of british public life at the present time. from the wire-pullers of the fabian society and from the party organizers of both liberal and tory party alike, and from the knowing cards, the pothouse shepherds, and jobbing lawyers who "work" the constituencies, comes the chief opposition to this straightening out of our electoral system so urgently necessary and so long overdue. they have fought it with a zeal and efficiency that is rarely displayed in the nation's interest. from nearly every outstanding man outside that little inner world of political shams and dodges, who has given any attention to the question, comes, on the other hand, support for this reform. even the great party leaders, mr. balfour and mr. asquith, were in its favour. one might safely judge this question by considering who are the advocates on either side. but the best arguments for proportional representation arise out of its opponents' speeches, and to these i will confine my attention now. consider lord harcourt--heir to the most sacred traditions of the party game--hurling scorn at a project that would introduce "faddists, mugwumps," and so on and so on--in fact independent thinking men--into the legislature. consider the value of lord curzon's statement that london "rose in revolt" against the project. do you remember that day, dear reader, when the streets of london boiled with passionate men shouting, "no proportional representation! down with proportional representation"? you don't. nor do i. but what happened was that the guinea-pigs and solicitors and nobodies, the party hacks who form the bulk of london's misrepresentation in the house of commons, stampeded in terror against a proposal that threatened to wipe them out and replace them by known and responsible men. london, alas! does not seem to care how its members are elected. what londoner knows anything about his member? hundreds of thousands of londoners do not even know which of the ridiculous constituencies into which the politicians have dismembered our london they are in. only as i was writing this in my flat in st. james's court, westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was representing me in the councils of the nation while i write.... after some slight difficulty i ascertained that my representative is a mr. burdett coutts, who was, in the romantic eighties, mr. ashmead-bartlett. and by a convenient accident i find that the other day he moved to reject the proportional representation amendment made by the house of lords to the representation of the people bill, so that i am able to look up the debate in hansard and study my opinions as he represented them and this question at one and the same time. and, taking little things first, i am proud and happy to discover that the member for me was the only participator in the debate who, in the vulgar and reprehensible phrase, "threw a dead cat," or, in polite terms, displayed classical learning. my member said, "_timeo danaos et dona ferentes_," with a rather graceful compliment to the labour conference at nottingham. "i could not help thinking to myself," said my member, "that at that conference there must have been many men of sufficient classical reading to say to themselves, '_timeo danaos et dona ferentes_.'" in which surmise he was quite right. except perhaps for "_tempus fugit,"_ "_verbum sap._," "_arma virumque_," and "_quis custodiet_," there is no better known relic of antiquity. but my member went a little beyond my ideas when he said: "we are asked to enter upon a method of legislation which can bear no other description than that of law-making in the dark," because i think it can bear quite a lot of other descriptions. this was, however, the artistic prelude to a large, vague, gloomy dissertation about nothing very definite, a muddling up of the main question with the minor issue of a schedule of constituencies involved in the proposal. the other parts of my member's speech do not, i confess, fill me with the easy confidence i would like to feel in my proxy. let me extract a few gems of eloquence from the speech of this voice which speaks for me, and give also the only argument he advanced that needs consideration. "history repeats itself," he said, "very often in curious ways as to facts, but generally with very different results." that, honestly, i like. it is a sentence one can read over several times. but he went on to talk of the entirely different scheme for minority representation, which was introduced into the reform bill of , and there i am obliged to part company with him. that was a silly scheme for giving two votes to each voter in a three-member constituency. it has about as much resemblance to the method of scientific voting under discussion as a bath-chair has to an aeroplane. "but that measure of minority representation led to a baneful invention," my representative went on to say, "and left behind it a hateful memory in the birmingham caucus. i well remember that when i stood for parliament thirty-two years ago _we had no better platform weapon than repeating over and over again in a sentence the name of mr. schnadhorst,_ and i am not sure that it would not serve the same purpose now. under that system the work of the caucus was, of course, far simpler than it will be if this system ever comes into operation. all the caucus had to do under that measure was to divide the electors into three groups and with three candidates, a., b., and c., to order one group to vote for a. and b., another for b. and c., and the third for a. and c., and they carried the whole of their candidates and kept them for many years. but the multiplicity of ordinal preferences, second, third, fourth, fifth, up to tenth, which the single transferable vote system would involve, will require a more scientific handling in party interests, and neither party will be able to face an election with any hope of success without the assistance of the most drastic form of caucus and _without its orders being carried out by the electors_." now, i swear by heaven that, lowly creature as i am, a lost vote, a nothing, voiceless and helpless in public affairs, i am not going to stand the imputation that that sort of reasoning represents the average mental quality of westminster--outside parliament, that is. most of my neighbours in st. james's court, for example, have quite large pieces of head above their eyebrows. read these above sentences over and ponder their significance--so far as they have any significance. never mind my keen personal humiliation at this display of the mental calibre of my representative, but consider what the mental calibre of a house must be that did not break out into loud guffaws at such a passage. the line of argument is about as lucid as if one reasoned that because one can break a window with a stone it is no use buying a telescope. and it remains entirely a matter for speculation whether my member is arguing that a caucus _can_ rig an election carried on under the proportional representation system or that it cannot. at the first blush it seems to read as if he intended the former. but be careful! did he? let me suggest that in that last sentence he really expresses the opinion that it cannot. it can be read either way. electors under modern conditions are not going to obey the "orders" of even the "most drastic caucus"--whatever a "drastic caucus" may be. why should they? in the birmingham instance it was only a section of the majority, voting by wards, in an election on purely party lines, which "obeyed" in order to keep out the minority party candidate. i think myself that my member's mind waggled. perhaps his real thoughts shone out through an argument not intended to betray them. what he did say as much as he said anything was that under proportional representation, elections are going to be very troublesome and difficult for party candidates. if that was his intention, then, after all, i forgive him much. i think that and more than that. i think that they are going to make party candidates who are merely party candidates impossible. that is exactly what we reformers are after. then i shall get a representative more to my taste than mr. burdett coutts. but let me turn now to the views of other people's representatives. perhaps the most damning thing ever said against the present system, damning because of its empty absurdity, was uttered by sir thomas whittaker. he was making the usual exaggerations of the supposed difficulties of the method. he said english people didn't like such "complications." they like a "straight fight between two men." think of it! a straight fight! for more than a quarter-century i have been a voter, usually with votes in two or three constituencies, and never in all that long political life have i seen a single straight fight in an election, but only the dismallest sham fights it is possible to conceive. thrice only in all that time have i cast a vote for a man whom i respected. on all other occasions the election that mocked my citizenship was either an arranged walk-over for one party or the other, or i had a choice between two unknown persons, mysteriously selected as candidates by obscure busy people with local interests in the constituency. every intelligent person knows that this is the usual experience of a free and independent voter in england. the "fight" of an ordinary parliamentary election in england is about as "straight" as the business of a thimble rigger. and consider just what these "complications" are of which the opponents of proportional representation chant so loudly. in the sham election of to-day, which the politicians claim gives them a mandate to muddle up our affairs, the voter puts a x against the name of the least detestable of the two candidates that are thrust upon him. under the proportional representation method there will be a larger constituency, a larger list of candidates, and a larger number of people to be elected, and he will put i against the name of the man he most wants to be elected, against his second choice, and if he likes he may indulge in marking a third, or even a further choice. he may, if he thinks fit, number off the whole list of candidates. that is all he will have to do. that is the stupendous intricacy of the method that flattens out the minds of lord harcourt and sir thomas whittaker. and as for the working of it, if you must go into that, all that happens is that if your first choice gets more votes than he needs for his return, he takes only the fraction of your vote that he requires, and the rest of the vote goes on to your number . if isn't in need of all of it, the rest goes on to . and so on. that is the profound mathematical mystery, that is the riddle beyond the wit of westminster, which overpowers these fine intelligences and sets them babbling of "senior wranglers." each time there is a debate on this question in the house, member after member hostile to the proposal will play the ignorant fool and pretend to be confused himself, and will try to confuse others, by deliberately clumsy statements of these most elementary ideas. surely if there were no other argument for a change of type in the house, these poor knitted brows, these public perspirations of the gentry who "cannot understand p.r.," should suffice. but let us be just; it is not all pretence; the inability of mr. austen chamberlain to grasp the simple facts before him was undoubtedly genuine. he followed mr. burdett coutts, in support of mr. burdett coutts, with the most christian disregard of the nasty things mr. burdett coutts had seemed to be saying about the birmingham caucus from which he sprang. he had a childish story to tell of how voters would not give their first votes to their real preferences, because they would assume he "would get in in any case"--god knows why. of course on the assumption that the voter behaves like an idiot, anything is possible. and never apparently having heard of fractions, this great birmingham leader was unable to understand that a voter who puts against a candidate's name votes for that candidate anyhow. he could not imagine any feeling on the part of the voter that no. was his man. a vote is a vote to this simple rather than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible. read this-- "birmingham," he said, referring to a schedule under consideration, "is to be cut into three constituencies of four members each. i am to have a constituency of , electors, i suppose. how many thousand inhabitants i do not know. _every effort will be made to prevent any of those electors knowing--in fact, it would be impossible for any of them to know--whether they voted for me or not, or at any rate whether they effectively voted for me or not, or whether the vote which they wished to give to me was really diverted to somebody else_." only in a house of habitually inattentive men could any one talk such nonsense without reproof, but i look in vain through hansard's record of this debate for a single contemptuous reference to mr. chamberlain's obtuseness. and the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of the time and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the new method came in. he was the perfect figure of the parochially important person in a state of defensive excitement. no doubt his speech appealed to many in the house. of course lord harcourt was quite right in saying that the character of the average house of commons member will be changed by proportional representation. it will. it will make the election of obscure and unknown men, of carpet-bag candidates who work a constituency as a hawker works a village, of local pomposities and village-pump "leaders" almost impossible. it will replace such candidates by better known and more widely known men. it will make the house of commons so much the more a real gathering of the nation, so much the more a house of representative men. (lord harcourt's "faddists and mugwumps.") and it is perfectly true as mr. ramsay macdonald (also an opponent) declares, that proportional representation means constituencies so big that it will be impossible for a poor man to cultivate and work them. that is unquestionable. but, mark another point, it will also make it useless, as mr. chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate and work them. all this cultivating and working, all this going about and making things right with this little jobber here, that contractor there, all the squaring of small political clubs and organizations, all the subscription blackmail and charity bribery, that now makes a parliamentary candidature so utterly rotten an influence upon public life, will be killed dead by proportional representation. you cannot job men into parliament by proportional representation. proportional representation lets in the outsider. it lets in the common, unassigned voter who isn't in the local clique. that is the clue to nearly all this opposition of the politicians. it makes democracy possible for the first time in modern history. and that poor man of mr. ramsay macdonald's imagination, instead of cadging about a constituency in order to start politician, will have to make good in some more useful way--as a leader of the workers in their practical affairs, for example--before people will hear of him and begin to believe in him. the opposition to proportional representation of mr. sidney webb and his little circle is a trifle more "scientific" in tone than these naive objections of the common run of antagonist, but underlying it is the same passionate desire to keep politics a close game for the politician and to bar out the politically unspecialized man. there is more conceit and less jobbery behind the criticisms of this type of mind. it is an opposition based on the idea that the common man is a fool who does not know what is good for him. so he has to be stampeded. politics, according to this school, is a sort of cattle-driving. the webbites do not deny the broad facts of the case. our present electoral system, with our big modern constituencies of thousands of voters, leads to huge turnovers of political power with a relatively small shifting of public opinion. it makes a mock of public opinion by caricature, and parliament becomes the distorting mirror of the nation. under some loud false issue a few score of thousands of votes turn over, and in goes this party or that with a big sham majority. this the webbites admit. but they applaud it. it gives us, they say, "a strong government." public opinion, the intelligent man outside the house, is ruled out of the game. he has no power of intervention at all. the artful little fabian politicians rub their hands and say, "_now_ we can get to work with the wires! no one can stop us." and when the public complains of the results, there is always the repartee, "_you_ elected them." but the fabian psychology is the psychology of a very small group of pedants who believe that fair ends may be reached by foul means. it is much easier and more natural to serve foul ends by foul means. in practice it is not tricky benevolence but tricky bargaining among the interests that will secure control of the political wires. that is a bad enough state of affairs in ordinary times, but in times of tragic necessity like the present men will not be mocked in this way. life is going to be very intense in the years ahead of us. if we go right on to another caricature parliament, with perhaps half a hundred leading men in it and the rest hacks and nobodies, the baffled and discontented outsiders in the streets may presently be driven to rioting and the throwing of bombs. unless, indeed, the insurrection of the outsiders takes a still graver form, and the press, which has ceased entirely to be a party press in great britain, helps some adventurous prime minister to flout and set aside the lower house altogether. there is neither much moral nor much physical force behind the house of commons at the present time. the argument of the fabian opponents to proportional representation is frankly that the strongest government is got in a house of half a hundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of the parliament driven sheep. but the whole mischief of the present system is that the obscure members of parliament are not sheep; they are a crowd of little-minded, second-rate men just as greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us. they vote straight indeed on all the main party questions, they obey their whips like sheep then; but there is a great bulk of business in parliament outside the main party questions, and obedience is not without its price. these are matters vitally affecting our railways and ships and communications generally, the food and health of the people, armaments, every sort of employment, the appointment of public servants, the everyday texture of all our lives. then the nobody becomes somebody, the party hack gets busy, the rat is in the granary.... in these recent debates in the house of commons one can see every stock trick of the wire-puller in operation. particularly we have the old dodge of the man who is "in theory quite in sympathy with proportional representation, but ..." it is, he declares regretfully, too late. it will cause delay. difficult to make arrangements. later on perhaps. and so on. it is never too late for a vital issue. upon the speedy adoption of proportional representation depends, as mr. balfour made plain in an admirable speech, whether the great occasions of the peace and after the peace are to be handled by a grand council of all that is best and most leaderlike in the nation, or whether they are to be left to a few leaders, apparently leading, but really profoundly swayed by the obscure crowd of politicians and jobbers behind them. are the politicians to hamper and stifle us in this supreme crisis of our national destinies or are we british peoples to have a real control of our own affairs in this momentous time? are men of light and purpose to have a voice in public affairs or not? proportional representation is supremely a test question. it is a question that no adverse decision in the house of commons can stifle. there are too many people now who grasp its importance and significance. every one who sets a proper value upon purity in public life and the vitality of democratic institutions will, i am convinced, vote and continue to vote across every other question against the antiquated, foul, and fraudulent electoral methods that have hitherto robbed democracy of three-quarters of its efficiency. xi the study and propaganda of democracy in the preceding chapter i have dealt with the discussion of proportional representation in the british house of commons in order to illustrate the intellectual squalor amidst which public affairs have to be handled at the present time, even in a country professedly "democratic." i have taken this one discussion as a sample to illustrate the present imperfection of our democratic instrument. all over the world, in every country, great multitudes of intelligent and serious people are now inspired by the idea of a new order of things in the world, of a world-wide establishment of peace and mutual aid between nation and nation and man and man. but, chiefly because of the elementary crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly anywhere at present, except at washington, do these great ideas and this world-wide will find expression. amidst the other politicians and statesmen of the world president wilson towers up with an effect almost divine. but it is no ingratitude to him to say that he is not nearly so exceptional a being among educated men as he is among the official leaders of mankind. everywhere now one may find something of the wilson purpose and intelligence, but nearly everywhere it is silenced or muffled or made ineffective by the political advantage of privileged or of violent and adventurous inferior men. he is "one of us," but it is his good fortune to have got his head out of the sack that is about the heads of most of us. in the official world, in the world of rulers and representatives and "statesmen," he almost alone, speaks for the modern intelligence. this general stifling of the better intelligence of the world and its possible release to expression and power, seems to me to be the fundamental issue underlying all the present troubles of mankind. we cannot get on while everywhere fools and vulgarians hold the levers that can kill, imprison, silence and starve men. we cannot get on with false government and we cannot get on with mob government; we must have right government. the intellectual people of the world have a duty of co-operation they have too long neglected. the modernization of political institutions, the study of these institutions until we have worked out and achieved the very best and most efficient methods whereby the whole community of mankind may work together under the direction of its chosen intelligences, is the common duty of every one who has a brain for the service. and before everything else we have to realize this crudity and imperfection in what we call "democracy" at the present time. democracy is still chiefly an aspiration, it is a spirit, it is an idea; for the most part its methods are still to seek. and still more is this "league of free nations" as yet but an aspiration. let us not underrate the task before us. only the disinterested devotion of hundreds of thousands of active brains in school, in pulpit, in book and press and assembly can ever bring these redeeming conceptions down to the solid earth to rule. all round the world there is this same obscuration of the real intelligence of men. in germany, human good will and every fine mind are subordinated to political forms that have for a mouthpiece a chancellor with his brains manifestly addled by the theories of _welt-politik_ and the bismarckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad kaiser. nevertheless there comes even from germany muffled cries for a new age. a grinning figure like a bloodstained punch is all that speaks for the best brains in bulgaria. yes. we western allies know all that by heart; but, after all, the immediate question for each one of us is, "_what speaks for me?_" so far as official political forms go i myself am as ineffective as any right-thinking german or bulgarian could possibly be. i am more ineffective than a galician pole or a bohemian who votes for his nationalist representative. politically i am a negligible item in the constituency of this mr. burdett coutts into whose brain we have been peeping. politically i am less than a waistcoat button on that quaint figure. and that is all i am--except that i revolt. i have written of it so far as if it were just a joke. but indeed bad and foolish political institutions cannot be a joke. sooner or later they prove themselves to be tragedy. this war is that. it is yesterday's lazy, tolerant, "sense of humour" wading out now into the lakes of blood it refused to foresee. it is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day the nationalisms, the suspicions and hatreds, the cants and policies, and dead phrases that sway men represent the current intelligence of mankind. they are merely the evidences of its disorganization. even now we _know_ we could do far better. give mankind but a generation or so of peace and right education and this world could mock at the poor imaginations that conceived a millennium. but we have to get intelligences together, we have to canalize thought before it can work and produce its due effects. to that end, i suppose, there has been a vast amount of mental activity among us political "negligibles." for my own part i have thought of the idea of god as the banner of human unity and justice, and i have made some tentatives in that direction, but men, i perceive, have argued themselves mean and petty about religion. at the word "god" passions bristle. the word "god" does not unite men, it angers them. but i doubt if god cares greatly whether we call him god or no. his service is the service of man. this double idea of the league of free nations, linked with the idea of democracy as universal justice, is free from the jealousy of the theologians and great enough for men to unite upon everywhere. i know how warily one must reckon with the spite of the priest, but surely these ideas may call upon the teachers of all the great world religions for their support. the world is full now of confused propaganda, propaganda of national ideas, of traditions of hate, of sentimental and degrading loyalties, of every sort of error that divides and tortures and slays mankind. all human institutions are made of propaganda, are sustained by propaganda and perish when it ceases; they must be continually explained and re-explained to the young and the negligent. and for this new world of democracy and the league of free nations to which all reasonable men are looking, there must needs be the greatest of all propagandas. for that cause every one must become a teacher and a missionary. "persuade to it and make the idea of it and the necessity for it plain," that is the duty of every school teacher, every tutor, every religious teacher, every writer, every lecturer, every parent, every trusted friend throughout the world. for it, too, every one must become a student, must go on with the task of making vague intentions into definite intentions, of analyzing and destroying obstacles, of mastering the ten thousand difficulties of detail.... i am a man who looks now towards the end of life; fifty-one years have i scratched off from my calendar, another slips by, and i cannot tell how many more of the sparse remainder of possible years are really mine. i live in days of hardship and privation, when it seems more natural to feel ill than well; without holidays or rest or peace; friends and the sons of my friends have been killed; death seems to be feeling always now for those i most love; the newspapers that come in to my house tell mostly of blood and disaster, of drownings and slaughterings, of cruelties and base intrigues. yet never have i been so sure that there is a divinity in man and that a great order of human life, a reign of justice and world-wide happiness, of plenty, power, hope, and gigantic creative effort, lies close at hand. even now we have the science and the ability available for a universal welfare, though it is scattered about the world like a handful of money dropped by a child; even now there exists all the knowledge that is needed to make mankind universally free and human life sweet and noble. we need but the faith for it, and it is at hand; we need but the courage to lay our hands upon it and in a little space of years it can be ours. the end. democracy in america by alexis de tocqueville translated by henry reeve book two: influence of democracy on progress of opinion in the united states. de tocqueville's preface to the second part the americans live in a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested to them certain laws and a certain political character. this same state of society has, moreover, engendered amongst them a multitude of feelings and opinions which were unknown amongst the elder aristocratic communities of europe: it has destroyed or modified all the relations which before existed, and established others of a novel kind. the--aspect of civil society has been no less affected by these changes than that of the political world. the former subject has been treated of in the work on the democracy of america, which i published five years ago; to examine the latter is the object of the present book; but these two parts complete each other, and form one and the same work. i must at once warn the reader against an error which would be extremely prejudicial to me. when he finds that i attribute so many different consequences to the principle of equality, he may thence infer that i consider that principle to be the sole cause of all that takes place in the present age: but this would be to impute to me a very narrow view. a multitude of opinions, feelings, and propensities are now in existence, which owe their origin to circumstances unconnected with or even contrary to the principle of equality. thus if i were to select the united states as an example, i could easily prove that the nature of the country, the origin of its inhabitants, the religion of its founders, their acquired knowledge, and their former habits, have exercised, and still exercise, independently of democracy, a vast influence upon the thoughts and feelings of that people. different causes, but no less distinct from the circumstance of the equality of conditions, might be traced in europe, and would explain a great portion of the occurrences taking place amongst us. i acknowledge the existence of all these different causes, and their power, but my subject does not lead me to treat of them. i have not undertaken to unfold the reason of all our inclinations and all our notions: my only object is to show in what respects the principle of equality has modified both the former and the latter. some readers may perhaps be astonished that--firmly persuaded as i am that the democratic revolution which we are witnessing is an irresistible fact against which it would be neither desirable nor wise to struggle--i should often have had occasion in this book to address language of such severity to those democratic communities which this revolution has brought into being. my answer is simply, that it is because i am not an adversary of democracy, that i have sought to speak of democracy in all sincerity. men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends: for this reason i have spoken it. i was persuaded that many would take upon themselves to announce the new blessings which the principle of equality promises to mankind, but that few would dare to point out from afar the dangers with which it threatens them. to those perils therefore i have turned my chief attention, and believing that i had discovered them clearly, i have not had the cowardice to leave them untold. i trust that my readers will find in this second part that impartiality which seems to have been remarked in the former work. placed as i am in the midst of the conflicting opinions between which we are divided, i have endeavored to suppress within me for a time the favorable sympathies or the adverse emotions with which each of them inspires me. if those who read this book can find a single sentence intended to flatter any of the great parties which have agitated my country, or any of those petty factions which now harass and weaken it, let such readers raise their voices to accuse me. the subject i have sought to embrace is immense, for it includes the greater part of the feelings and opinions to which the new state of society has given birth. such a subject is doubtless above my strength, and in treating it i have not succeeded in satisfying myself. but, if i have not been able to reach the goal which i had in view, my readers will at least do me the justice to acknowledge that i have conceived and followed up my undertaking in a spirit not unworthy of success. a. de t. march, section i: influence of democracy on the action of intellect in the united states. chapter i: philosophical method among the americans i think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the united states. the americans have no philosophical school of their own; and they care but little for all the schools into which europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them. nevertheless it is easy to perceive that almost all the inhabitants of the united states conduct their understanding in the same manner, and govern it by the same rules; that is to say, that without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules of a philosophical method, they are in possession of one, common to the whole people. to evade the bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise, and doing better; to seek the reason of things for one's self, and in one's self alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to aim at the substance through the form;--such are the principal characteristics of what i shall call the philosophical method of the americans. but if i go further, and if i seek amongst these characteristics that which predominates over and includes almost all the rest, i discover that in most of the operations of the mind, each american appeals to the individual exercise of his own understanding alone. america is therefore one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied, and where the precepts of descartes are best applied. nor is this surprising. the americans do not read the works of descartes, because their social condition deters them from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims because this very social condition naturally disposes their understanding to adopt them. in the midst of the continual movement which agitates a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken; every man readily loses the trace of the ideas of his forefathers or takes no care about them. nor can men living in this state of society derive their belief from the opinions of the class to which they belong, for, so to speak, there are no longer any classes, or those which still exist are composed of such mobile elements, that their body can never exercise a real control over its members. as to the influence which the intelligence of one man has on that of another, it must necessarily be very limited in a country where the citizens, placed on the footing of a general similitude, are all closely seen by each other; and where, as no signs of incontestable greatness or superiority are perceived in any one of them, they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. it is not only confidence in this or that man which is then destroyed, but the taste for trusting the ipse dixit of any man whatsoever. everyone shuts himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point to judge the world. the practice which obtains amongst the americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. as they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural. as it is on their own testimony that they are accustomed to rely, they like to discern the object which engages their attention with extreme clearness; they therefore strip off as much as possible all that covers it, they rid themselves of whatever separates them from it, they remove whatever conceals it from sight, in order to view it more closely and in the broad light of day. this disposition of the mind soon leads them to contemn forms, which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth. the americans then have not required to extract their philosophical method from books; they have found it in themselves. the same thing may be remarked in what has taken place in europe. this same method has only been established and made popular in europe in proportion as the condition of society has become more equal, and men have grown more like each other. let us consider for a moment the connection of the periods in which this change may be traced. in the sixteenth century the reformers subjected some of the dogmas of the ancient faith to the scrutiny of private judgment; but they still withheld from it the judgment of all the rest. in the seventeenth century, bacon in the natural sciences, and descartes in the study of philosophy in the strict sense of the term, abolished recognized formulas, destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the schools. the philosophers of the eighteenth century, generalizing at length the same principle, undertook to submit to the private judgment of each man all the objects of his belief. who does not perceive that luther, descartes, and voltaire employed the same method, and that they differed only in the greater or less use which they professed should be made of it? why did the reformers confine themselves so closely within the circle of religious ideas? why did descartes, choosing only to apply his method to certain matters, though he had made it fit to be applied to all, declare that men might judge for themselves in matters philosophical but not in matters political? how happened it that in the eighteenth century those general applications were all at once drawn from this same method, which descartes and his predecessors had either not perceived or had rejected? to what, lastly, is the fact to be attributed, that at this period the method we are speaking of suddenly emerged from the schools, to penetrate into society and become the common standard of intelligence; and that, after it had become popular among the french, it has been ostensibly adopted or secretly followed by all the nations of europe? the philosophical method here designated may have been engendered in the sixteenth century--it may have been more accurately defined and more extensively applied in the seventeenth; but neither in the one nor in the other could it be commonly adopted. political laws, the condition of society, and the habits of mind which are derived from these causes, were as yet opposed to it. it was discovered at a time when men were beginning to equalize and assimilate their conditions. it could only be generally followed in ages when those conditions had at length become nearly equal, and men nearly alike. the philosophical method of the eighteenth century is then not only french, but it is democratic; and this explains why it was so readily admitted throughout europe, where it has contributed so powerfully to change the face of society. it is not because the french have changed their former opinions, and altered their former manners, that they have convulsed the world; but because they were the first to generalize and bring to light a philosophical method, by the assistance of which it became easy to attack all that was old, and to open a path to all that was new. if it be asked why, at the present day, this same method is more rigorously followed and more frequently applied by the french than by the americans, although the principle of equality be no less complete, and of more ancient date, amongst the latter people, the fact may be attributed to two circumstances, which it is essential to have clearly understood in the first instance. it must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to anglo-american society. in the united states religion is therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all the feelings of patriotism; whence it derives a peculiar force. to this powerful reason another of no less intensity may be added: in american religion has, as it were, laid down its own limits. religious institutions have remained wholly distinct from political institutions, so that former laws have been easily changed whilst former belief has remained unshaken. christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in america; and, i would more particularly remark, that its sway is not only that of a philosophical doctrine which has been adopted upon inquiry, but of a religion which is believed without discussion. in the united states christian sects are infinitely diversified and perpetually modified; but christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it. the americans, having admitted the principal doctrines of the christian religion without inquiry, are obliged to accept in like manner a great number of moral truths originating in it and connected with it. hence the activity of individual analysis is restrained within narrow limits, and many of the most important of human opinions are removed from the range of its influence. the second circumstance to which i have alluded is the following: the social condition and the constitution of the americans are democratic, but they have not had a democratic revolution. they arrived upon the soil they occupy in nearly the condition in which we see them at the present day; and this is of very considerable importance. there are no revolutions which do not shake existing belief, enervate authority, and throw doubts over commonly received ideas. the effect of all revolutions is therefore, more or less, to surrender men to their own guidance, and to open to the mind of every man a void and almost unlimited range of speculation. when equality of conditions succeeds a protracted conflict between the different classes of which the elder society was composed, envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, pride, and exaggerated self-confidence are apt to seize upon the human heart, and plant their sway there for a time. this, independently of equality itself, tends powerfully to divide men--to lead them to mistrust the judgment of others, and to seek the light of truth nowhere but in their own understandings. everyone then attempts to be his own sufficient guide, and makes it his boast to form his own opinions on all subjects. men are no longer bound together by ideas, but by interests; and it would seem as if human opinions were reduced to a sort of intellectual dust, scattered on every side, unable to collect, unable to cohere. thus, that independence of mind which equality supposes to exist, is never so great, nor ever appears so excessive, as at the time when equality is beginning to establish itself, and in the course of that painful labor by which it is established. that sort of intellectual freedom which equality may give ought, therefore, to be very carefully distinguished from the anarchy which revolution brings. each of these two things must be severally considered, in order not to conceive exaggerated hopes or fears of the future. i believe that the men who will live under the new forms of society will make frequent use of their private judgment; but i am far from thinking that they will often abuse it. this is attributable to a cause of more general application to all democratic countries, and which, in the long run, must needs restrain in them the independence of individual speculation within fixed, and sometimes narrow, limits. i shall proceed to point out this cause in the next chapter. chapter ii: of the principal source of belief among democratic nations at different periods dogmatical belief is more or less abundant. it arises in different ways, and it may change its object or its form; but under no circumstances will dogmatical belief cease to exist, or, in other words, men will never cease to entertain some implicit opinions without trying them by actual discussion. if everyone undertook to form his own opinions and to seek for truth by isolated paths struck out by himself alone, it is not to be supposed that any considerable number of men would ever unite in any common belief. but obviously without such common belief no society can prosper--say rather no society can subsist; for without ideas held in common, there is no common action, and without common action, there may still be men, but there is no social body. in order that society should exist, and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is required that all the minds of the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas; and this cannot be the case, unless each of them sometimes draws his opinions from the common source, and consents to accept certain matters of belief at the hands of the community. if i now consider man in his isolated capacity, i find that dogmatical belief is not less indispensable to him in order to live alone, than it is to enable him to co-operate with his fellow-creatures. if man were forced to demonstrate to himself all the truths of which he makes daily use, his task would never end. he would exhaust his strength in preparatory exercises, without advancing beyond them. as, from the shortness of his life, he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to accomplish this, he is reduced to take upon trust a number of facts and opinions which he has not had either the time or the power to verify himself, but which men of greater ability have sought out, or which the world adopts. on this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own thoughts; nor is he led to proceed in this manner by choice so much as he is constrained by the inflexible law of his condition. there is no philosopher of such great parts in the world, but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people, and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. this is not only necessary but desirable. a man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. his task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. his intellect would be at once independent and powerless. he must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. it is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom. a principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has. the independence of individual minds may be greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured. i have shown in the preceding chapter how the equality of conditions leads men to entertain a sort of instinctive incredulity of the supernatural, and a very lofty and often exaggerated opinion of the human understanding. the men who live at a period of social equality are not therefore easily led to place that intellectual authority to which they bow either beyond or above humanity. they commonly seek for the sources of truth in themselves, or in those who are like themselves. this would be enough to prove that at such periods no new religion could be established, and that all schemes for such a purpose would be not only impious but absurd and irrational. it may be foreseen that a democratic people will not easily give credence to divine missions; that they will turn modern prophets to a ready jest; and they that will seek to discover the chief arbiter of their belief within, and not beyond, the limits of their kind. when the ranks of society are unequal, and men unlike each other in condition, there are some individuals invested with all the power of superior intelligence, learning, and enlightenment, whilst the multitude is sunk in ignorance and prejudice. men living at these aristocratic periods are therefore naturally induced to shape their opinions by the superior standard of a person or a class of persons, whilst they are averse to recognize the infallibility of the mass of the people. the contrary takes place in ages of equality. the nearer the citizens are drawn to the common level of an equal and similar condition, the less prone does each man become to place implicit faith in a certain man or a certain class of men. but his readiness to believe the multitude increases, and opinion is more than ever mistress of the world. not only is common opinion the only guide which private judgment retains amongst a democratic people, but amongst such a people it possesses a power infinitely beyond what it has elsewhere. at periods of equality men have no faith in one another, by reason of their common resemblance; but this very resemblance gives them almost unbounded confidence in the judgment of the public; for it would not seem probable, as they are all endowed with equal means of judging, but that the greater truth should go with the greater number. when the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows, and to place himself in contrast to so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. the same equality which renders him independent of each of his fellow-citizens taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number. the public has therefore among a democratic people a singular power, of which aristocratic nations could never so much as conceive an idea; for it does not persuade to certain opinions, but it enforces them, and infuses them into the faculties by a sort of enormous pressure of the minds of all upon the reason of each. in the united states the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust; and if we look to it very narrowly, it will be perceived that religion herself holds her sway there, much less as a doctrine of revelation than as a commonly received opinion. the fact that the political laws of the americans are such that the majority rules the community with sovereign sway, materially increases the power which that majority naturally exercises over the mind. for nothing is more customary in man than to recognize superior wisdom in the person of his oppressor. this political omnipotence of the majority in the united states doubtless augments the influence which public opinion would obtain without it over the mind of each member of the community; but the foundations of that influence do not rest upon it. they must be sought for in the principle of equality itself, not in the more or less popular institutions which men living under that condition may give themselves. the intellectual dominion of the greater number would probably be less absolute amongst a democratic people governed by a king than in the sphere of a pure democracy, but it will always be extremely absolute; and by whatever political laws men are governed in the ages of equality, it may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become a species of religion there, and the majority its ministering prophet. thus intellectual authority will be different, but it will not be diminished; and far from thinking that it will disappear, i augur that it may readily acquire too much preponderance, and confine the action of private judgment within narrower limits than are suited either to the greatness or the happiness of the human race. in the principle of equality i very clearly discern two tendencies; the one leading the mind of every man to untried thoughts, the other inclined to prohibit him from thinking at all. and i perceive how, under the dominion of certain laws, democracy would extinguish that liberty of the mind to which a democratic social condition is favorable; so that, after having broken all the bondage once imposed on it by ranks or by men, the human mind would be closely fettered to the general will of the greatest number. if the absolute power of the majority were to be substituted by democratic nations, for all the different powers which checked or retarded overmuch the energy of individual minds, the evil would only have changed its symptoms. men would not have found the means of independent life; they would simply have invented (no easy task) a new dress for servitude. there is--and i cannot repeat it too often--there is in this matter for profound reflection for those who look on freedom as a holy thing, and who hate not only the despot, but despotism. for myself, when i feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, i care but little to know who oppresses me; and i am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke, because it is held out to me by the arms of a million of men. chapter iii: why the americans display more readiness and more taste for general ideas than their forefathers, the english. the deity does not regard the human race collectively. he surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is composed, and he discerns in each man the resemblances which assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences which distinguish him from them. god, therefore, stands in no need of general ideas; that is to say, he is never sensible of the necessity of collecting a considerable number of analogous objects under the same form for greater convenience in thinking. such is, however, not the case with man. if the human mind were to attempt to examine and pass a judgment on all the individual cases before it, the immensity of detail would soon lead it astray and bewilder its discernment: in this strait, man has recourse to an imperfect but necessary expedient, which at once assists and demonstrates his weakness. having superficially considered a certain number of objects, and remarked their resemblance, he assigns to them a common name, sets them apart, and proceeds onwards. general ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect; for there are in nature no beings exactly alike, no things precisely identical, nor any rules indiscriminately and alike applicable to several objects at once. the chief merit of general ideas is, that they enable the human mind to pass a rapid judgment on a great many objects at once; but, on the other hand, the notions they convey are never otherwise than incomplete, and they always cause the mind to lose as much in accuracy as it gains in comprehensiveness. as social bodies advance in civilization, they acquire the knowledge of new facts, and they daily lay hold almost unconsciously of some particular truths. the more truths of this kind a man apprehends, the more general ideas is he naturally led to conceive. a multitude of particular facts cannot be seen separately, without at last discovering the common tie which connects them. several individuals lead to the perception of the species; several species to that of the genus. hence the habit and the taste for general ideas will always be greatest amongst a people of ancient cultivation and extensive knowledge. but there are other reasons which impel men to generalize their ideas, or which restrain them from it. the americans are much more addicted to the use of general ideas than the english, and entertain a much greater relish for them: this appears very singular at first sight, when it is remembered that the two nations have the same origin, that they lived for centuries under the same laws, and that they still incessantly interchange their opinions and their manners. this contrast becomes much more striking still, if we fix our eyes on our own part of the world, and compare together the two most enlightened nations which inhabit it. it would seem as if the mind of the english could only tear itself reluctantly and painfully away from the observation of particular facts, to rise from them to their causes; and that it only generalizes in spite of itself. amongst the french, on the contrary, the taste for general ideas would seem to have grown to so ardent a passion, that it must be satisfied on every occasion. i am informed, every morning when i wake, that some general and eternal law has just been discovered, which i never heard mentioned before. there is not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at discovering truths applicable to a great kingdom, and who is very ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in compressing the human race into the compass of an article. so great a dissimilarity between two very enlightened nations surprises me. if i again turn my attention to england, and observe the events which have occurred there in the last half-century, i think i may affirm that a taste for general ideas increases in that country in proportion as its ancient constitution is weakened. the state of civilization is therefore insufficient by itself to explain what suggests to the human mind the love of general ideas, or diverts it from them. when the conditions of men are very unequal, and inequality itself is the permanent state of society, individual men gradually become so dissimilar that each class assumes the aspect of a distinct race: only one of these classes is ever in view at the same instant; and losing sight of that general tie which binds them all within the vast bosom of mankind, the observation invariably rests not on man, but on certain men. those who live in this aristocratic state of society never, therefore, conceive very general ideas respecting themselves, and that is enough to imbue them with an habitual distrust of such ideas, and an instinctive aversion of them. he, on the contrary, who inhabits a democratic country, sees around him, one very hand, men differing but little from each other; he cannot turn his mind to any one portion of mankind, without expanding and dilating his thought till it embrace the whole. all the truths which are applicable to himself, appear to him equally and similarly applicable to each of his fellow-citizens and fellow-men. having contracted the habit of generalizing his ideas in the study which engages him most, and interests him more than others, he transfers the same habit to all his pursuits; and thus it is that the craving to discover general laws in everything, to include a great number of objects under the same formula, and to explain a mass of facts by a single cause, becomes an ardent, and sometimes an undiscerning, passion in the human mind. nothing shows the truth of this proposition more clearly than the opinions of the ancients respecting their slaves. the most profound and capacious minds of rome and greece were never able to reach the idea, at once so general and so simple, of the common likeness of men, and of the common birthright of each to freedom: they strove to prove that slavery was in the order of nature, and that it would always exist. nay, more, everything shows that those of the ancients who had passed from the servile to the free condition, many of whom have left us excellent writings, did themselves regard servitude in no other light. all the great writers of antiquity belonged to the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy established and uncontested before their eyes. their mind, after it had expanded itself in several directions, was barred from further progress in this one; and the advent of jesus christ upon earth was required to teach that all the members of the human race are by nature equal and alike. in the ages of equality all men are independent of each other, isolated and weak. the movements of the multitude are not permanently guided by the will of any individuals; at such times humanity seems always to advance of itself. in order, therefore, to explain what is passing in the world, man is driven to seek for some great causes, which, acting in the same manner on all our fellow-creatures, thus impel them all involuntarily to pursue the same track. this again naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas, and superinduces a taste for them. i have already shown in what way the equality of conditions leads every man to investigate truths for himself. it may readily be perceived that a method of this kind must insensibly beget a tendency to general ideas in the human mind. when i repudiate the traditions of rank, profession, and birth; when i escape from the authority of example, to seek out, by the single effort of my reason, the path to be followed, i am inclined to derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself; which leads me necessarily, and almost unconsciously, to adopt a great number of very general notions. all that i have here said explains the reasons for which the english display much less readiness and taste or the generalization of ideas than their american progeny, and still less again than their french neighbors; and likewise the reason for which the english of the present day display more of these qualities than their forefathers did. the english have long been a very enlightened and a very aristocratic nation; their enlightened condition urged them constantly to generalize, and their aristocratic habits confined them to particularize. hence arose that philosophy, at once bold and timid, broad and narrow, which has hitherto prevailed in england, and which still obstructs and stagnates in so many minds in that country. independently of the causes i have pointed out in what goes before, others may be discerned less apparent, but no less efficacious, which engender amongst almost every democratic people a taste, and frequently a passion, for general ideas. an accurate distinction must be taken between ideas of this kind. some are the result of slow, minute, and conscientious labor of the mind, and these extend the sphere of human knowledge; others spring up at once from the first rapid exercise of the wits, and beget none but very superficial and very uncertain notions. men who live in ages of equality have a great deal of curiosity and very little leisure; their life is so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that but little time remains to them for thought. such men are prone to general ideas because they spare them the trouble of studying particulars; they contain, if i may so speak, a great deal in a little compass, and give, in a little time, a great return. if then, upon a brief and inattentive investigation, a common relation is thought to be detected between certain obtects, inquiry is not pushed any further; and without examining in detail how far these different objects differ or agree, they are hastily arranged under one formulary, in order to pass to another subject. one of the distinguishing characteristics of a democratic period is the taste all men have at such ties for easy success and present enjoyment. this occurs in the pursuits of the intellect as well as in all others. most of those who live at a time of equality are full of an ambition at once aspiring and relaxed: they would fain succeed brilliantly and at once, but they would be dispensed from great efforts to obtain success. these conflicting tendencies lead straight to the research of general ideas, by aid of which they flatter themselves that they can figure very importantly at a small expense, and draw the attention of the public with very little trouble. and i know not whether they be wrong in thinking thus. for their readers are as much averse to investigating anything to the bottom as they can be themselves; and what is generally sought in the productions of the mind is easy pleasure and information without labor. if aristocratic nations do not make sufficient use of general ideas, and frequently treat them with inconsiderate disdain, it is true, on the other hand, that a democratic people is ever ready to carry ideas of this kind to excess, and to espouse the with injudicious warmth. chapter iv: why the americans have never been so eager as the french for general ideas in political matters i observed in the last chapter, that the americans show a less decided taste for general ideas than the french; this is more especially true in political matters. although the americans infuse into their legislation infinitely more general ideas than the english, and although they pay much more attention than the latter people to the adjustment of the practice of affairs to theory, no political bodies in the united states have ever shown so warm an attachment to general ideas as the constituent assembly and the convention in france. at no time has the american people laid hold on ideas of this kind with the passionate energy of the french people in the eighteenth century, or displayed the same blind confidence in the value and absolute truth of any theory. this difference between the americans and the french originates in several causes, but principally in the following one. the americans form a democratic people, which has always itself directed public affairs. the french are a democratic people, who, for a long time, could only speculate on the best manner of conducting them. the social condition of france led that people to conceive very general ideas on the subject of government, whilst its political constitution prevented it from correcting those ideas by experiment, and from gradually detecting their insufficiency; whereas in america the two things constantly balance and correct each other. it may seem, at first sight, that this is very much opposed to what i have said before, that democratic nations derive their love of theory from the excitement of their active life. a more attentive examination will show that there is nothing contradictory in the proposition. men living in democratic countries eagerly lay hold of general ideas because they have but little leisure, and because these ideas spare them the trouble of studying particulars. this is true; but it is only to be understood to apply to those matters which are not the necessary and habitual subjects of their thoughts. mercantile men will take up very eagerly, and without any very close scrutiny, all the general ideas on philosophy, politics, science, or the arts, which may be presented to them; but for such as relate to commerce, they will not receive them without inquiry, or adopt them without reserve. the same thing applies to statesmen with regard to general ideas in politics. if, then, there be a subject upon which a democratic people is peculiarly liable to abandon itself, blindly and extravagantly, to general ideas, the best corrective that can be used will be to make that subject a part of the daily practical occupation of that people. the people will then be compelled to enter upon its details, and the details will teach them the weak points of the theory. this remedy may frequently be a painful one, but its effect is certain. thus it happens, that the democratic institutions which compel every citizen to take a practical part in the government, moderate that excessive taste for general theories in politics which the principle of equality suggests. chapter v: of the manner in which religion in the united states avails itself of democratic tendencies i have laid it down in a preceding chapter that men cannot do without dogmatical belief; and even that it is very much to be desired that such belief should exist amongst them. i now add, that of all the kinds of dogmatical belief the most desirable appears to me to be dogmatical belief in matters of religion; and this is a very clear inference, even from no higher consideration than the interests of this world. there is hardly any human action, however particular a character be assigned to it, which does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow-creatures. nor can anything prevent these ideas from being the common spring from which everything else emanates. men are therefore immeasurably interested in acquiring fixed ideas of god, of the soul, and of their common duties to their creator and to their fellow-men; for doubt on these first principles would abandon all their actions to the impulse of chance, and would condemn them to live, to a certain extent, powerless and undisciplined. this is then the subject on which it is most important for each of us to entertain fixed ideas; and unhappily it is also the subject on which it is most difficult for each of us, left to himself, to settle his opinions by the sole force of his reason. none but minds singularly free from the ordinary anxieties of life--minds at once penetrating, subtle, and trained by thinking--can even with the assistance of much time and care, sound the depth of these most necessary truths. and, indeed, we see that these philosophers are themselves almost always enshrouded in uncertainties; that at every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors. studies of this nature are far above the average capacity of men; and even if the majority of mankind were capable of such pursuits, it is evident that leisure to cultivate them would still be wanting. fixed ideas of god and human nature are indispensable to the daily practice of men's lives; but the practice of their lives prevents them from acquiring such ideas. the difficulty appears to me to be without a parallel. amongst the sciences there are some which are useful to the mass of mankind, and which are within its reach; others can only be approached by the few, and are not cultivated by the many, who require nothing beyond their more remote applications: but the daily practice of the science i speak of is indispensable to all, although the study of it is inaccessible to the far greater number. general ideas respecting god and human nature are therefore the ideas above all others which it is most suitable to withdraw from the habitual action of private judgment, and in which there is most to gain and least to lose by recognizing a principle of authority. the first object and one of the principal advantages of religions, is to furnish to each of these fundamental questions a solution which is at once clear, precise, intelligible to the mass of mankind, and lasting. there are religions which are very false and very absurd; but it may be affirmed, that any religion which remains within the circle i have just traced, without aspiring to go beyond it (as many religions have attempted to do, for the purpose of enclosing on every side the free progress of the human mind), imposes a salutary restraint on the intellect; and it must be admitted that, if it do not save men in another world, such religion is at least very conducive to their happiness and their greatness in this. this is more especially true of men living in free countries. when the religion of a people is destroyed, doubt gets hold of the highest portions of the intellect, and half paralyzes all the rest of its powers. every man accustoms himself to entertain none but confused and changing notions on the subjects most interesting to his fellow-creatures and himself. his opinions are ill-defended and easily abandoned: and, despairing of ever resolving by himself the hardest problems of the destiny of man, he ignobly submits to think no more about them. such a condition cannot but enervate the soul, relax the springs of the will, and prepare a people for servitude. nor does it only happen, in such a case, that they allow their freedom to be wrested from them; they frequently themselves surrender it. when there is no longer any principle of authority in religion any more than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of this unbounded independence. the constant agitation of all surrounding things alarms and exhausts them. as everything is at sea in the sphere of the intellect, they determine at least that the mechanism of society should be firm and fixed; and as they cannot resume their ancient belief, they assume a master. for my own part, i doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire public freedom. and i am inclined to think, that if faith be wanting in him, he must serve; and if he be free, he must believe. perhaps, however, this great utility of religions is still more obvious amongst nations where equality of conditions prevails than amongst others. it must be acknowledged that equality, which brings great benefits into the world, nevertheless suggests to men (as will be shown hereafter) some very dangerous propensities. it tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man's attention upon himself; and it lays open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification. the greatest advantage of religion is to inspire diametrically contrary principles. there is no religion which does not place the object of man's desires above and beyond the treasures of earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul to regions far above those of the senses. nor is there any which does not impose on man some sort of duties to his kind, and thus draws him at times from the contemplation of himself. this occurs in religions the most false and dangerous. religious nations are therefore naturally strong on the very point on which democratic nations are weak; which shows of what importance it is for men to preserve their religion as their conditions become more equal. i have neither the right nor the intention of examining the supernatural means which god employs to infuse religious belief into the heart of man. i am at this moment considering religions in a purely human point of view: my object is to inquire by what means they may most easily retain their sway in the democratic ages upon which we are entering. it has been shown that, at times of general cultivation and equality, the human mind does not consent to adopt dogmatical opinions without reluctance, and feels their necessity acutely in spiritual matters only. this proves, in the first place, that at such times religions ought, more cautiously than at any other, to confine themselves within their own precincts; for in seeking to extend their power beyond religious matters, they incur a risk of not being believed at all. the circle within which they seek to bound the human intellect ought therefore to be carefully traced, and beyond its verge the mind should be left in entire freedom to its own guidance. mahommed professed to derive from heaven, and he has inserted in the koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. the gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to god and to each other--beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. this alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods. but in continuation of this branch of the subject, i find that in order for religions to maintain their authority, humanly speaking, in democratic ages, they must not only confine themselves strictly within the circle of spiritual matters: their power also depends very much on the nature of the belief they inculcate, on the external forms they assume, and on the obligations they impose. the preceding observation, that equality leads men to very general and very extensive notions, is principally to be understood as applied to the question of religion. men living in a similar and equal condition in the world readily conceive the idea of the one god, governing every man by the same laws, and granting to every man future happiness on the same conditions. the idea of the unity of mankind constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the creator; whilst, on the contrary, in a state of society where men are broken up into very unequal ranks, they are apt to devise as many deities as there are nations, castes, classes, or families, and to trace a thousand private roads to heaven. it cannot be denied that christianity itself has felt, to a certain extent, the influence which social and political conditions exercise on religious opinions. at the epoch at which the christian religion appeared upon earth, providence, by whom the world was doubtless prepared for its coming, had gathered a large portion of the human race, like an immense flock, under the sceptre of the caesars. the men of whom this multitude was composed were distinguished by numerous differences; but they had thus much in common, that they all obeyed the same laws, and that every subject was so weak and insignificant in relation to the imperial potentate, that all appeared equal when their condition was contrasted with his. this novel and peculiar state of mankind necessarily predisposed men to listen to the general truths which christianity teaches, and may serve to explain the facility and rapidity with which they then penetrated into the human mind. the counterpart of this state of things was exhibited after the destruction of the empire. the roman world being then as it were shattered into a thousand fragments, each nation resumed its pristine individuality. an infinite scale of ranks very soon grew up in the bosom of these nations; the different races were more sharply defined, and each nation was divided by castes into several peoples. in the midst of this common effort, which seemed to be urging human society to the greatest conceivable amount of voluntary subdivision, christianity did not lose sight of the leading general ideas which it had brought into the world. but it appeared, nevertheless, to lend itself, as much as was possible, to those new tendencies to which the fractional distribution of mankind had given birth. men continued to worship an only god, the creator and preserver of all things; but every people, every city, and, so to speak, every man, thought to obtain some distinct privilege, and win the favor of an especial patron at the foot of the throne of grace. unable to subdivide the deity, they multiplied and improperly enhanced the importance of the divine agents. the homage due to saints and angels became an almost idolatrous worship amongst the majority of the christian world; and apprehensions might be entertained for a moment lest the religion of christ should retrograde towards the superstitions which it had subdued. it seems evident, that the more the barriers are removed which separate nation from nation amongst mankind, and citizen from citizen amongst a people, the stronger is the bent of the human mind, as if by its own impulse, towards the idea of an only and all-powerful being, dispensing equal laws in the same manner to every man. in democratic ages, then, it is more particularly important not to allow the homage paid to secondary agents to be confounded with the worship due to the creator alone. another truth is no less clear--that religions ought to assume fewer external observances in democratic periods than at any others. in speaking of philosophical method among the americans, i have shown that nothing is more repugnant to the human mind in an age of equality than the idea of subjection to forms. men living at such times are impatient of figures; to their eyes symbols appear to be the puerile artifice which is used to conceal or to set off truths, which should more naturally be bared to the light of open day: they are unmoved by ceremonial observances, and they are predisposed to attach a secondary importance to the details of public worship. those whose care it is to regulate the external forms of religion in a democratic age should pay a close attention to these natural propensities of the human mind, in order not unnecessarily to run counter to them. i firmly believe in the necessity of forms, which fix the human mind in the contemplation of abstract truths, and stimulate its ardor in the pursuit of them, whilst they invigorate its powers of retaining them steadfastly. nor do i suppose that it is possible to maintain a religion without external observances; but, on the other hand, i am persuaded that, in the ages upon which we are entering, it would be peculiarly dangerous to multiply them beyond measure; and that they ought rather to be limited to as much as is absolutely necessary to perpetuate the doctrine itself, which is the substance of religions of which the ritual is only the form. *a a religion which should become more minute, more peremptory, and more surcharged with small observances at a time in which men are becoming more equal, would soon find itself reduced to a band of fanatical zealots in the midst of an infidel people. [footnote a: in all religions there are some ceremonies which are inherent in the substance of the faith itself, and in these nothing should, on any account, be changed. this is especially the case with roman catholicism, in which the doctrine and the form are frequently so closely united as to form one point of belief.] i anticipate the objection, that as all religions have general and eternal truths for their object, they cannot thus shape themselves to the shifting spirit of every age without forfeiting their claim to certainty in the eyes of mankind. to this i reply again, that the principal opinions which constitute belief, and which theologians call articles of faith, must be very carefully distinguished from the accessories connected with them. religions are obliged to hold fast to the former, whatever be the peculiar spirit of the age; but they should take good care not to bind themselves in the same manner to the latter at a time when everything is in transition, and when the mind, accustomed to the moving pageant of human affairs, reluctantly endures the attempt to fix it to any given point. the fixity of external and secondary things can only afford a chance of duration when civil society is itself fixed; under any other circumstances i hold it to be perilous. we shall have occasion to see that, of all the passions which originate in, or are fostered by, equality, there is one which it renders peculiarly intense, and which it infuses at the same time into the heart of every man: i mean the love of well-being. the taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic ages. it may be believed that a religion which should undertake to destroy so deep seated a passion, would meet its own destruction thence in the end; and if it attempted to wean men entirely from the contemplation of the good things of this world, in order to devote their faculties exclusively to the thought of another, it may be foreseen that the soul would at length escape from its grasp, to plunge into the exclusive enjoyment of present and material pleasures. the chief concern of religions is to purify, to regulate, and to restrain the excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men feel at periods of equality; but they would err in attempting to control it completely or to eradicate it. they will not succeed in curing men of the love of riches: but they may still persuade men to enrich themselves by none but honest means. this brings me to a final consideration, which comprises, as it were, all the others. the more the conditions of men are equalized and assimilated to each other, the more important is it for religions, whilst they carefully abstain from the daily turmoil of secular affairs, not needlessly to run counter to the ideas which generally prevail, and the permanent interests which exist in the mass of the people. for as public opinion grows to be more and more evidently the first and most irresistible of existing powers, the religious principle has no external support strong enough to enable it long to resist its attacks. this is not less true of a democratic people, ruled by a despot, than in a republic. in ages of equality, kings may often command obedience, but the majority always commands belief: to the majority, therefore, deference is to be paid in whatsoever is not contrary to the faith. i showed in my former volumes how the american clergy stand aloof from secular affairs. this is the most obvious, but it is not the only, example of their self-restraint. in america religion is a distinct sphere, in which the priest is sovereign, but out of which he takes care never to go. within its limits he is the master of the mind; beyond them, he leaves men to themselves, and surrenders them to the independence and instability which belong to their nature and their age. i have seen no country in which christianity is clothed with fewer forms, figures, and observances than in the united states; or where it presents more distinct, more simple, or more general notions to the mind. although the christians of america are divided into a multitude of sects, they all look upon their religion in the same light. this applies to roman catholicism as well as to the other forms of belief. there are no romish priests who show less taste for the minute individual observances for extraordinary or peculiar means of salvation, or who cling more to the spirit, and less to the letter of the law, than the roman catholic priests of the united states. nowhere is that doctrine of the church, which prohibits the worship reserved to god alone from being offered to the saints, more clearly inculcated or more generally followed. yet the roman catholics of america are very submissive and very sincere. another remark is applicable to the clergy of every communion. the american ministers of the gospel do not attempt to draw or to fix all the thoughts of man upon the life to come; they are willing to surrender a portion of his heart to the cares of the present; seeming to consider the goods of this world as important, although as secondary, objects. if they take no part themselves in productive labor, they are at least interested in its progression, and ready to applaud its results; and whilst they never cease to point to the other world as the great object of the hopes and fears of the believer, they do not forbid him honestly to court prosperity in this. far from attempting to show that these things are distinct and contrary to one another, they study rather to find out on what point they are most nearly and closely connected. all the american clergy know and respect the intellectual supremacy exercised by the majority; they never sustain any but necessary conflicts with it. they take no share in the altercations of parties, but they readily adopt the general opinions of their country and their age; and they allow themselves to be borne away without opposition in the current of feeling and opinion by which everything around them is carried along. they endeavor to amend their contemporaries, but they do not quit fellowship with them. public opinion is therefore never hostile to them; it rather supports and protects them; and their belief owes its authority at the same time to the strength which is its own, and to that which they borrow from the opinions of the majority. thus it is that, by respecting all democratic tendencies not absolutely contrary to herself, and by making use of several of them for her own purposes, religion sustains an advantageous struggle with that spirit of individual independence which is her most dangerous antagonist. chapter vi: of the progress of roman catholicism in the united states america is the most democratic country in the world, and it is at the same time (according to reports worthy of belief) the country in which the roman catholic religion makes most progress. at first sight this is surprising. two things must here be accurately distinguished: equality inclines men to wish to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in the power which governs society. men living in democratic ages are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and uniform. religious powers not radiating from a common centre are naturally repugnant to their minds; and they almost as readily conceive that there should be no religion, as that there should be several. at the present time, more than in any preceding one, roman catholics are seen to lapse into infidelity, and protestants to be converted to roman catholicism. if the roman catholic faith be considered within the pale of the church, it would seem to be losing ground; without that pale, to be gaining it. nor is this circumstance difficult of explanation. the men of our days are naturally disposed to believe; but, as soon as they have any religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent propensity which urges them unconsciously towards catholicism. many of the doctrines and the practices of the romish church astonish them; but they feel a secret admiration for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them. if catholicism could at length withdraw itself from the political animosities to which it has given rise, i have hardly any doubt but that the same spirit of the age, which appears to be so opposed to it, would become so favorable as to admit of its great and sudden advancement. one of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic. thus there have ever been, and will ever be, men who, after having submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from its influence, and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience. but i am inclined to believe that the number of these thinkers will be less in democratic than in other ages; and that our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts--some relinquishing christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the church of rome. chapter vii: of the cause of a leaning to pantheism amongst democratic nations i shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general ideas manifests itself in politics; but i would point out, at the present stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. it cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our age. the writings of a part of europe bear visible marks of it: the germans introduce it into philosophy, and the french into literature. most of the works of imagination published in france contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors. this appears to me not only to proceed from an accidental, but from a permanent cause. when the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. at such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once; and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. the idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a creator; still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including god and the universe in one great whole. if there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense being, which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man--nay, rather because it destroys that individuality--will have secret charms for men living in democracies. all their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt it. it naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds. amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavors to explain the universe, i believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. against it all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should struggle and combine. chapter viii: the principle of equality suggests to the americans the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of man equality suggests to the human mind several ideas which would not have originated from any other source, and it modifies almost all those previously entertained. i take as an example the idea of human perfectibility, because it is one of the principal notions that the intellect can conceive, and because it constitutes of itself a great philosophical theory, which is every instant to be traced by its consequences in the practice of human affairs. although man has many points of resemblance with the brute creation, one characteristic is peculiar to himself--he improves: they are incapable of improvement. mankind could not fail to discover this difference from its earliest period. the idea of perfectibility is therefore as old as the world; equality did not give birth to it, although it has imparted to it a novel character. when the citizens of a community are classed according to their rank, their profession, or their birth, and when all men are constrained to follow the career which happens to open before them, everyone thinks that the utmost limits of human power are to be discerned in proximity to himself, and none seeks any longer to resist the inevitable law of his destiny. not indeed that an aristocratic people absolutely contests man's faculty of self-improvement, but they do not hold it to be indefinite; amelioration they conceive, but not change: they imagine that the future condition of society may be better, but not essentially different; and whilst they admit that mankind has made vast strides in improvement, and may still have some to make, they assign to it beforehand certain impassable limits. thus they do not presume that they have arrived at the supreme good or at absolute truth (what people or what man was ever wild enough to imagine it?) but they cherish a persuasion that they have pretty nearly reached that degree of greatness and knowledge which our imperfect nature admits of; and as nothing moves about them they are willing to fancy that everything is in its fit place. then it is that the legislator affects to lay down eternal laws; that kings and nations will raise none but imperishable monuments; and that the present generation undertakes to spare generations to come the care of regulating their destinies. in proportion as castes disappear and the classes of society approximate--as manners, customs, and laws vary, from the tumultuous intercourse of men--as new facts arise--as new truths are brought to light--as ancient opinions are dissipated, and others take their place--the image of an ideal perfection, forever on the wing, presents itself to the human mind. continual changes are then every instant occurring under the observation of every man: the position of some is rendered worse; and he learns but too well, that no people and no individual, how enlightened soever they may be, can lay claim to infallibility;--the condition of others is improved; whence he infers that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement. his reverses teach him that none may hope to have discovered absolute good--his success stimulates him to the never-ending pursuit of it. thus, forever seeking--forever falling, to rise again--often disappointed, but not discouraged--he tends unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long track which humanity has yet to tread. it can hardly be believed how many facts naturally flow from the philosophical theory of the indefinite perfectibility of man, or how strong an influence it exercises even on men who, living entirely for the purposes of action and not of thought, seem to conform their actions to it, without knowing anything about it. i accost an american sailor, and i inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years. in these words, which fell accidentally and on a particular subject from a man of rude attainments, i recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people directs all its concerns. aristocratic nations are naturally too apt to narrow the scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations to expand it beyond compass. chapter ix: the example of the americans does not prove that a democratic people can have no aptitude and no taste for science, literature, or art it must be acknowledged that amongst few of the civilized nations of our time have the higher sciences made less progress than in the united states; and in few have great artists, fine poets, or celebrated writers been more rare. many europeans, struck by this fact, have looked upon it as a natural and inevitable result of equality; and they have supposed that if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions were ever to prevail over the whole earth, the human mind would gradually find its beacon-lights grow dim, and men would relapse into a period of darkness. to reason thus is, i think, to confound several ideas which it is important to divide and to examine separately: it is to mingle, unintentionally, what is democratic with what is only american. the religion professed by the first emigrants, and bequeathed by them to their descendants, simple in its form of worship, austere and almost harsh in its principles, and hostile to external symbols and to ceremonial pomp, is naturally unfavorable to the fine arts, and only yields a reluctant sufferance to the pleasures of literature. the americans are a very old and a very enlightened people, who have fallen upon a new and unbounded country, where they may extend themselves at pleasure, and which they may fertilize without difficulty. this state of things is without a parallel in the history of the world. in america, then, every one finds facilities, unknown elsewhere, for making or increasing his fortune. the spirit of gain is always on the stretch, and the human mind, constantly diverted from the pleasures of imagination and the labors of the intellect, is there swayed by no impulse but the pursuit of wealth. not only are manufacturing and commercial classes to be found in the united states, as they are in all other countries; but what never occurred elsewhere, the whole community is simultaneously engaged in productive industry and commerce. i am convinced that, if the americans had been alone in the world, with the freedom and the knowledge acquired by their forefathers, and the passions which are their own, they would not have been slow to discover that progress cannot long be made in the application of the sciences without cultivating the theory of them; that all the arts are perfected by one another: and, however absorbed they might have been by the pursuit of the principal object of their desires, they would speedily have admitted, that it is necessary to turn aside from it occasionally, in order the better to attain it in the end. the taste for the pleasures of the mind is moreover so natural to the heart of civilized man, that amongst the polite nations, which are least disposed to give themselves up to these pursuits, a certain number of citizens are always to be found who take part in them. this intellectual craving, when once felt, would very soon have been satisfied. but at the very time when the americans were naturally inclined to require nothing of science but its special applications to the useful arts and the means of rendering life comfortable, learned and literary europe was engaged in exploring the common sources of truth, and in improving at the same time all that can minister to the pleasures or satisfy the wants of man. at the head of the enlightened nations of the old world the inhabitants of the united states more particularly distinguished one, to which they were closely united by a common origin and by kindred habits. amongst this people they found distinguished men of science, artists of skill, writers of eminence, and they were enabled to enjoy the treasures of the intellect without requiring to labor in amassing them. i cannot consent to separate america from europe, in spite of the ocean which intervenes. i consider the people of the united states as that portion of the english people which is commissioned to explore the wilds of the new world; whilst the rest of the nation, enjoying more leisure and less harassed by the drudgery of life, may devote its energies to thought, and enlarge in all directions the empire of the mind. the position of the americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. their strictly puritanical origin--their exclusively commercial habits--even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts--the proximity of europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism--a thousand special causes, of which i have only been able to point out the most important--have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the american upon purely practical objects. his passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the united states earthward: his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. let us cease then to view all democratic nations under the mask of the american people, and let us attempt to survey them at length with their own proper features. it is possible to conceive a people not subdivided into any castes or scale of ranks; in which the law, recognizing no privileges, should divide inherited property into equal shares; but which, at the same time, should be without knowledge and without freedom. nor is this an empty hypothesis: a despot may find that it is his interest to render his subjects equal and to leave them ignorant, in order more easily to keep them slaves. not only would a democratic people of this kind show neither aptitude nor taste for science, literature, or art, but it would probably never arrive at the possession of them. the law of descent would of itself provide for the destruction of fortunes at each succeeding generation; and new fortunes would be acquired by none. the poor man, without either knowledge or freedom, would not so much as conceive the idea of raising himself to wealth; and the rich man would allow himself to be degraded to poverty, without a notion of self-defence. between these two members of the community complete and invincible equality would soon be established. no one would then have time or taste to devote himself to the pursuits or pleasures of the intellect; but all men would remain paralyzed by a state of common ignorance and equal servitude. when i conceive a democratic society of this kind, i fancy myself in one of those low, close, and gloomy abodes, where the light which breaks in from without soon faints and fades away. a sudden heaviness overpowers me, and i grope through the surrounding darkness, to find the aperture which will restore me to daylight and the air. but all this is not applicable to men already enlightened who retain their freedom, after having abolished from amongst them those peculiar and hereditary rights which perpetuated the tenure of property in the hands of certain individuals or certain bodies. when men living in a democratic state of society are enlightened, they readily discover that they are confined and fixed within no limits which constrain them to take up with their present fortune. they all therefore conceive the idea of increasing it; if they are free, they all attempt it, but all do not succeed in the same manner. the legislature, it is true, no longer grants privileges, but they are bestowed by nature. as natural inequality is very great, fortunes become unequal as soon as every man exerts all his faculties to get rich. the law of descent prevents the establishment of wealthy families; but it does not prevent the existence of wealthy individuals. it constantly brings back the members of the community to a common level, from which they as constantly escape: and the inequality of fortunes augments in proportion as knowledge is diffused and liberty increased. a sect which arose in our time, and was celebrated for its talents and its extravagance, proposed to concentrate all property into the hands of a central power, whose function it should afterwards be to parcel it out to individuals, according to their capacity. this would have been a method of escaping from that complete and eternal equality which seems to threaten democratic society. but it would be a simpler and less dangerous remedy to grant no privilege to any, giving to all equal cultivation and equal independence, and leaving everyone to determine his own position. natural inequality will very soon make way for itself, and wealth will spontaneously pass into the hands of the most capable. free and democratic communities, then, will always contain a considerable number of people enjoying opulence or competency. the wealthy will not be so closely linked to each other as the members of the former aristocratic class of society: their propensities will be different, and they will scarcely ever enjoy leisure as secure or as complete: but they will be far more numerous than those who belonged to that class of society could ever be. these persons will not be strictly confined to the cares of practical life, and they will still be able, though in different degrees, to indulge in the pursuits and pleasures of the intellect. in those pleasures they will indulge; for if it be true that the human mind leans on one side to the narrow, the practical, and the useful, it naturally rises on the other to the infinite, the spiritual, and the beautiful. physical wants confine it to the earth; but, as soon as the tie is loosened, it will unbend itself again. not only will the number of those who can take an interest in the productions of the mind be enlarged, but the taste for intellectual enjoyment will descend, step by step, even to those who, in aristocratic societies, seem to have neither time nor ability to in indulge in them. when hereditary wealth, the privileges of rank, and the prerogatives of birth have ceased to be, and when every man derives his strength from himself alone, it becomes evident that the chief cause of disparity between the fortunes of men is the mind. whatever tends to invigorate, to extend, or to adorn the mind, instantly rises to great value. the utility of knowledge becomes singularly conspicuous even to the eyes of the multitude: those who have no taste for its charms set store upon its results, and make some efforts to acquire it. in free and enlightened democratic ages, there is nothing to separate men from each other or to retain them in their peculiar sphere; they rise or sink with extreme rapidity. all classes live in perpetual intercourse from their great proximity to each other. they communicate and intermingle every day--they imitate and envy one other: this suggests to the people many ideas, notions, and desires which it would never have entertained if the distinctions of rank had been fixed and society at rest. in such nations the servant never considers himself as an entire stranger to the pleasures and toils of his master, nor the poor man to those of the rich; the rural population assimilates itself to that of the towns, and the provinces to the capital. no one easily allows himself to be reduced to the mere material cares of life; and the humblest artisan casts at times an eager and a furtive glance into the higher regions of the intellect. people do not read with the same notions or in the same manner as they do in an aristocratic community; but the circle of readers is unceasingly expanded, till it includes all the citizens. as soon as the multitude begins to take an interest in the labors of the mind, it finds out that to excel in some of them is a powerful method of acquiring fame, power, or wealth. the restless ambition which equality begets instantly takes this direction as it does all others. the number of those who cultivate science, letters, and the arts, becomes immense. the intellectual world starts into prodigious activity: everyone endeavors to open for himself a path there, and to draw the eyes of the public after him. something analogous occurs to what happens in society in the united states, politically considered. what is done is often imperfect, but the attempts are innumerable; and, although the results of individual effort are commonly very small, the total amount is always very large. it is therefore not true to assert that men living in democratic ages are naturally indifferent to science, literature, and the arts: only it must be acknowledged that they cultivate them after their own fashion, and bring to the task their own peculiar qualifications and deficiencies. chapter x: why the americans are more addicted to practical than to theoretical science if a democratic state of society and democratic institutions do not stop the career of the human mind, they incontestably guide it in one direction in preference to another. their effects, thus circumscribed, are still exceedingly great; and i trust i may be pardoned if i pause for a moment to survey them. we had occasion, in speaking of the philosophical method of the american people, to make several remarks which must here be turned to account. equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything for himself: it gives him, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms. these general tendencies are principally discernible in the peculiar subject of this chapter. those who cultivate the sciences amongst a democratic people are always afraid of losing their way in visionary speculation. they mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and the study of facts with their own senses. as they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow-man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man's authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to point out the weaker points of their neighbors' opinions. scientific precedents have very little weight with them; they are never long detained by the subtilty of the schools, nor ready to accept big words for sterling coin; they penetrate, as far as they can, into the principal parts of the subject which engages them, and they expound them in the vernacular tongue. scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a safer course, but a less lofty one. the mind may, as it appears to me, divide science into three parts. the first comprises the most theoretical principles, and those more abstract notions whose application is either unknown or very remote. the second is composed of those general truths which still belong to pure theory, but lead, nevertheless, by a straight and short road to practical results. methods of application and means of execution make up the third. each of these different portions of science may be separately cultivated, although reason and experience show that none of them can prosper long, if it be absolutely cut off from the two others. in america the purely practical part of science is admirably understood, and careful attention is paid to the theoretical portion which is immediately requisite to application. on this head the americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind. but hardly anyone in the united states devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge. in this respect the americans carry to excess a tendency which is, i think, discernible, though in a less degree, amongst all democratic nations. nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences, or of the more elevated departments of science, than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society. we do not find there, as amongst an aristocratic people, one class which clings to a state of repose because it is well off; and another which does not venture to stir because it despairs of improving its condition. everyone is actively in motion: some in quest of power, others of gain. in the midst of this universal tumult--this incessant conflict of jarring interests--this continual stride of men after fortune--where is that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect? how can the mind dwell upon any single point, when everything whirls around it, and man himself is swept and beaten onwards by the heady current which rolls all things in its course? but the permanent agitation which subsists in the bosom of a peaceable and established democracy, must be distinguished from the tumultuous and revolutionary movements which almost always attend the birth and growth of democratic society. when a violent revolution occurs amongst a highly civilized people, it cannot fail to give a sudden impulse to their feelings and their opinions. this is more particularly true of democratic revolutions, which stir up all the classes of which a people is composed, and beget, at the same time, inordinate ambition in the breast of every member of the community. the french made most surprising advances in the exact sciences at the very time at which they were finishing the destruction of the remains of their former feudal society; yet this sudden fecundity is not to be attributed to democracy, but to the unexampled revolution which attended its growth. what happened at that period was a special incident, and it would be unwise to regard it as the test of a general principle. great revolutions are not more common amongst democratic nations than amongst others: i am even inclined to believe that they are less so. but there prevails amongst those populations a small distressing motion--a sort of incessant jostling of men--which annoys and disturbs the mind, without exciting or elevating it. men who live in democratic communities not only seldom indulge in meditation, but they naturally entertain very little esteem for it. a democratic state of society and democratic institutions plunge the greater part of men in constant active life; and the habits of mind which are suited to an active life, are not always suited to a contemplative one. the man of action is frequently obliged to content himself with the best he can get, because he would never accomplish his purpose if he chose to carry every detail to perfection. he has perpetually occasion to rely on ideas which he has not had leisure to search to the bottom; for he is much more frequently aided by the opportunity of an idea than by its strict accuracy; and, in the long run, he risks less in making use of some false principles, than in spending his time in establishing all his principles on the basis of truth. the world is not led by long or learned demonstrations; a rapid glance at particular incidents, the daily study of the fleeting passions of the multitude, the accidents of the time, and the art of turning them to account, decide all its affairs. in the ages in which active life is the condition of almost everyone, men are therefore generally led to attach an excessive value to the rapid bursts and superficial conceptions of the intellect; and, on the other hand, to depreciate below their true standard its slower and deeper labors. this opinion of the public influences the judgment of the men who cultivate the sciences; they are persuaded that they may succeed in those pursuits without meditation, or deterred from such pursuits as demand it. there are several methods of studying the sciences. amongst a multitude of men you will find a selfish, mercantile, and trading taste for the discoveries of the mind, which must not be confounded with that disinterested passion which is kindled in the heart of the few. a desire to utilize knowledge is one thing; the pure desire to know is another. i do not doubt that in a few minds and far between, an ardent, inexhaustible love of truth springs up, self-supported, and living in ceaseless fruition without ever attaining the satisfaction which it seeks. this ardent love it is--this proud, disinterested love of what is true--which raises men to the abstract sources of truth, to draw their mother-knowledge thence. if pascal had had nothing in view but some large gain, or even if he had been stimulated by the love of fame alone, i cannot conceive that he would ever have been able to rally all the powers of his mind, as he did, for the better discovery of the most hidden things of the creator. when i see him, as it were, tear his soul from the midst of all the cares of life to devote it wholly to these researches, and, prematurely snapping the links which bind the frame to life, die of old age before forty, i stand amazed, and i perceive that no ordinary cause is at work to produce efforts so extra-ordinary. the future will prove whether these passions, at once so rare and so productive, come into being and into growth as easily in the midst of democratic as in aristocratic communities. for myself, i confess that i am slow to believe it. in aristocratic society, the class which gives the tone to opinion, and has the supreme guidance of affairs, being permanently and hereditarily placed above the multitude, naturally conceives a lofty idea of itself and of man. it loves to invent for him noble pleasures, to carve out splendid objects for his ambition. aristocracies often commit very tyrannical and very inhuman actions; but they rarely entertain grovelling thoughts; and they show a kind of haughty contempt of little pleasures, even whilst they indulge in them. the effect is greatly to raise the general pitch of society. in aristocratic ages vast ideas are commonly entertained of the dignity, the power, and the greatness of man. these opinions exert their influence on those who cultivate the sciences, as well as on the rest of the community. they facilitate the natural impulse of the mind to the highest regions of thought, and they naturally prepare it to conceive a sublime--nay, almost a divine--love of truth. men of science at such periods are consequently carried away by theory; and it even happens that they frequently conceive an inconsiderate contempt for the practical part of learning. "archimedes," says plutarch, "was of so lofty a spirit, that he never condescended to write any treatise on the manner of constructing all these engines of offence and defence. and as he held this science of inventing and putting together engines, and all arts generally speaking which tended to any useful end in practice, to be vile, low, and mercenary, he spent his talents and his studious hours in writing of those things only whose beauty and subtilty had in them no admixture of necessity." such is the aristocratic aim of science; in democratic nations it cannot be the same. the greater part of the men who constitute these nations are extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical gratification. as they are always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing it. to minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. it is chiefly from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to scientific pursuits--that it understands, and that it respects them. in aristocratic ages, science is more particularly called upon to furnish gratification to the mind; in democracies, to the body. you may be sure that the more a nation is democratic, enlightened, and free, the greater will be the number of these interested promoters of scientific genius, and the more will discoveries immediately applicable to productive industry confer gain, fame, and even power on their authors. for in democracies the working class takes a part in public affairs; and public honors, as well as pecuniary remuneration, may be awarded to those who deserve them. in a community thus organized it may easily be conceived that the human mind may be led insensibly to the neglect of theory; and that it is urged, on the contrary, with unparalleled vehemence to the applications of science, or at least to that portion of theoretical science which is necessary to those who make such applications. in vain will some innate propensity raise the mind towards the loftier spheres of the intellect; interest draws it down to the middle zone. there it may develop all its energy and restless activity, there it may engender all its wonders. these very americans, who have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics, have introduced into navigation an engine which changes the aspect of the world. assuredly i do not content that the democratic nations of our time are destined to witness the extinction of the transcendent luminaries of man's intelligence, nor even that no new lights will ever start into existence. at the age at which the world has now arrived, and amongst so many cultivated nations, perpetually excited by the fever of productive industry, the bonds which connect the different parts of science together cannot fail to strike the observation; and the taste for practical science itself, if it be enlightened, ought to lead men not to neglect theory. in the midst of such numberless attempted applications of so many experiments, repeated every day, it is almost impossible that general laws should not frequently be brought to light; so that great discoveries would be frequent, though great inventors be rare. i believe, moreover, in the high calling of scientific minds. if the democratic principle does not, on the one hand, induce men to cultivate science for its own sake, on the other it enormously increases the number of those who do cultivate it. nor is it credible that, from amongst so great a multitude no speculative genius should from time to time arise, inflamed by the love of truth alone. such a one, we may be sure, would dive into the deepest mysteries of nature, whatever be the spirit of his country or his age. he requires no assistance in his course--enough that he be not checked in it. all that i mean to say is this:--permanent inequality of conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arrogant and sterile research of abstract truths; whilst the social condition and the institutions of democracy prepare them to seek the immediate and useful practical results of the sciences. this tendency is natural and inevitable: it is curious to be acquainted with it, and it may be necessary to point it out. if those who are called upon to guide the nations of our time clearly discerned from afar off these new tendencies, which will soon be irresistible, they would understand that, possessing education and freedom, men living in democratic ages cannot fail to improve the industrial part of science; and that henceforward all the efforts of the constituted authorities ought to be directed to support the highest branches of learning, and to foster the nobler passion for science itself. in the present age the human mind must be coerced into theoretical studies; it runs of its own accord to practical applications; and, instead of perpetually referring it to the minute examination of secondary effects, it is well to divert it from them sometimes, in order to raise it up to the contemplation of primary causes. because the civilization of ancient rome perished in consequence of the invasion of the barbarians, we are perhaps too apt to think that civilization cannot perish in any other manner. if the light by which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by degrees, and expire of itself. by dint of close adherence to mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from them would be ill-pursued. new methods could no longer be invented, and men would continue to apply, without intelligence, and without art, scientific processes no longer understood. when europeans first arrived in china, three hundred years ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there; and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. at a later period they discovered some traces of the higher branches of science which were lost. the nation was absorbed in productive industry: the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer existed there. this served to explain the strangely motionless state in which they found the minds of this people. the chinese, in following the track of their forefathers, had forgotten the reasons by which the latter had been guided. they still used the formula, without asking for its meaning: they retained the instrument, but they no longer possessed the art of altering or renewing it. the chinese, then, had lost the power of change; for them to improve was impossible. they were compelled, at all times and in all points, to imitate their predecessors, lest they should stray into utter darkness, by deviating for an instant from the path already laid down for them. the source of human knowledge was all but dry; and though the stream still ran on, it could neither swell its waters nor alter its channel. notwithstanding this, china had subsisted peaceably for centuries. the invaders who had conquered the country assumed the manners of the inhabitants, and order prevailed there. a sort of physical prosperity was everywhere discernible: revolutions were rare, and war was, so to speak, unknown. it is then a fallacy to flatter ourselves with the reflection that the barbarians are still far from us; for if there be some nations which allow civilization to be torn from their grasp, there are others who trample it themselves under their feet. chapter xi: of the spirit in which the americans cultivate the arts it would be to waste the time of my readers and my own if i strove to demonstrate how the general mediocrity of fortunes, the absence of superfluous wealth, the universal desire of comfort, and the constant efforts by which everyone attempts to procure it, make the taste for the useful predominate over the love of the beautiful in the heart of man. democratic nations, amongst which all these things exist, will therefore cultivate the arts which serve to render life easy, in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. they will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful. but i propose to go further; and after having pointed out this first feature, to sketch several others. it commonly happens that in the ages of privilege the practice of almost all the arts becomes a privilege; and that every profession is a separate walk, upon which it is not allowable for everyone to enter. even when productive industry is free, the fixed character which belongs to aristocratic nations gradually segregates all the persons who practise the same art, till they form a distinct class, always composed of the same families, whose members are all known to each other, and amongst whom a public opinion of their own and a species of corporate pride soon spring up. in a class or guild of this kind, each artisan has not only his fortune to make, but his reputation to preserve. he is not exclusively swayed by his own interest, or even by that of his customer, but by that of the body to which he belongs; and the interest of that body is, that each artisan should produce the best possible workmanship. in aristocratic ages, the object of the arts is therefore to manufacture as well as possible--not with the greatest despatch, or at the lowest rate. when, on the contrary, every profession is open to all--when a multitude of persons are constantly embracing and abandoning it--and when its several members are strangers to each other, indifferent, and from their numbers hardly seen amongst themselves; the social tie is destroyed, and each workman, standing alone, endeavors simply to gain the greatest possible quantity of money at the least possible cost. the will of the customer is then his only limit. but at the same time a corresponding revolution takes place in the customer also. in countries in which riches as well as power are concentrated and retained in the hands of the few, the use of the greater part of this world's goods belongs to a small number of individuals, who are always the same. necessity, public opinion, or moderate desires exclude all others from the enjoyment of them. as this aristocratic class remains fixed at the pinnacle of greatness on which it stands, without diminution or increase, it is always acted upon by the same wants and affected by them in the same manner. the men of whom it is composed naturally derive from their superior and hereditary position a taste for what is extremely well made and lasting. this affects the general way of thinking of the nation in relation to the arts. it often occurs, among such a people, that even the peasant will rather go without the object he covets, than procure it in a state of imperfection. in aristocracies, then, the handicraftsmen work for only a limited number of very fastidious customers: the profit they hope to make depends principally on the perfection of their workmanship. such is no longer the case when, all privileges being abolished, ranks are intermingled, and men are forever rising or sinking upon the ladder of society. amongst a democratic people a number of citizens always exist whose patrimony is divided and decreasing. they have contracted, under more prosperous circumstances, certain wants, which remain after the means of satisfying such wants are gone; and they are anxiously looking out for some surreptitious method of providing for them. on the other hand, there are always in democracies a large number of men whose fortune is upon the increase, but whose desires grow much faster than their fortunes: and who gloat upon the gifts of wealth in anticipation, long before they have means to command them. such men eager to find some short cut to these gratifications, already almost within their reach. from the combination of these causes the result is, that in democracies there are always a multitude of individuals whose wants are above their means, and who are very willing to take up with imperfect satisfaction rather than abandon the object of their desires. the artisan readily understands these passions, for he himself partakes in them: in an aristocracy he would seek to sell his workmanship at a high price to the few; he now conceives that the more expeditious way of getting rich is to sell them at a low price to all. but there are only two ways of lowering the price of commodities. the first is to discover some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them: the second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of less value. amongst a democratic population, all the intellectual faculties of the workman are directed to these two objects: he strives to invent methods which may enable him not only to work better, but quicker and cheaper; or, if he cannot succeed in that, to diminish the intrinsic qualities of the thing he makes, without rendering it wholly unfit for the use for which it is intended. when none but the wealthy had watches, they were almost all very good ones: few are now made which are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket. thus the democratic principle not only tends to direct the human mind to the useful arts, but it induces the artisan to produce with greater rapidity a quantity of imperfect commodities, and the consumer to content himself with these commodities. not that in democracies the arts are incapable of producing very commendable works, if such be required. this may occasionally be the case, if customers appear who are ready to pay for time and trouble. in this rivalry of every kind of industry--in the midst of this immense competition and these countless experiments, some excellent workmen are formed who reach the utmost limits of their craft. but they have rarely an opportunity of displaying what they can do; they are scrupulously sparing of their powers; they remain in a state of accomplished mediocrity, which condemns itself, and, though it be very well able to shoot beyond the mark before it, aims only at what it hits. in aristocracies, on the contrary, workmen always do all they can; and when they stop, it is because they have reached the limit of their attainments. when i arrive in a country where i find some of the finest productions of the arts, i learn from this fact nothing of the social condition or of the political constitution of the country. but if i perceive that the productions of the arts are generally of an inferior quality, very abundant and very cheap, i am convinced that, amongst the people where this occurs, privilege is on the decline, and that ranks are beginning to intermingle, and will soon be confounded together. the handicraftsmen of democratic ages endeavor not only to bring their useful productions within the reach of the whole community, but they strive to give to all their commodities attractive qualities which they do not in reality possess. in the confusion of all ranks everyone hopes to appear what he is not, and makes great exertions to succeed in this object. this sentiment indeed, which is but too natural to the heart of man, does not originate in the democratic principle; but that principle applies it to material objects. to mimic virtue is of every age; but the hypocrisy of luxury belongs more particularly to the ages of democracy. to satisfy these new cravings of human vanity the arts have recourse to every species of imposture: and these devices sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose. imitation diamonds are now made which may be easily mistaken for real ones; as soon as the art of fabricating false diamonds shall have reached so high a degree of perfection that they cannot be distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both one and the other will be abandoned, and become mere pebbles again. this leads me to speak of those arts which are called the fine arts, by way of distinction. i do not believe that it is a necessary effect of a democratic social condition and of democratic institutions to diminish the number of men who cultivate the fine arts; but these causes exert a very powerful influence on the manner in which these arts are cultivated. many of those who had already contracted a taste for the fine arts are impoverished: on the other hand, many of those who are not yet rich begin to conceive that taste, at least by imitation; and the number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers become more scarce. something analogous to what i have already pointed out in the useful arts then takes place in the fine arts; the productions of artists are more numerous, but the merit of each production is diminished. no longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended to than reality. in aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones. in the former, statues are raised of bronze; in the latter, they are modelled in plaster. when i arrived for the first time at new york, by that part of the atlantic ocean which is called the narrows, i was surprised to perceive along the shore, at some distance from the city, a considerable number of little palaces of white marble, several of which were built after the models of ancient architecture. when i went the next day to inspect more closely the building which had particularly attracted my notice, i found that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted wood. all the edifices which i had admired the night before were of the same kind. the social condition and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover, certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which it is easy to point out. they frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the soul to fix them exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought: in a word, they put the real in the place of the ideal. i doubt whether raphael studied the minutest intricacies of the mechanism of the human body as thoroughly as the draughtsmen of our own time. he did not attach the same importance to rigorous accuracy on this point as they do, because he aspired to surpass nature. he sought to make of man something which should be superior to man, and to embellish beauty's self. david and his scholars were, on the contrary, as good anatomists as they were good painters. they wonderfully depicted the models which they had before their eyes, but they rarely imagined anything beyond them: they followed nature with fidelity: whilst raphael sought for something better than nature. they have left us an exact portraiture of man; but he discloses in his works a glimpse of the divinity. this remark as to the manner of treating a subject is no less applicable to the choice of it. the painters of the middle ages generally sought far above themselves, and away from their own time, for mighty subjects, which left to their imagination an unbounded range. our painters frequently employ their talents in the exact imitation of the details of private life, which they have always before their eyes; and they are forever copying trivial objects, the originals of which are only too abundant in nature. chapter xii: why the americans raise some monuments so insignificant, and others so important i have just observed, that in democratic ages monuments of the arts tend to become more numerous and less important. i now hasten to point out the exception to this rule. in a democratic community individuals are very powerless; but the state which represents them all, and contains them all in its grasp, is very powerful. nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation; nowhere does the nation itself appear greater, or does the mind more easily take in a wide general survey of it. in democratic communities the imagination is compressed when men consider themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think of the state. hence it is that the same men who live on a small scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic splendor in the erection of their public monuments. the americans traced out the circuit of an immense city on the site which they intended to make their capital, but which, up to the present time, is hardly more densely peopled than pontoise, though, according to them, it will one day contain a million of inhabitants. they have already rooted up trees for ten miles round, lest they should interfere with the future citizens of this imaginary metropolis. they have erected a magnificent palace for congress in the centre of the city, and have given it the pompous name of the capitol. the several states of the union are every day planning and erecting for themselves prodigious undertakings, which would astonish the engineers of the great european nations. thus democracy not only leads men to a vast number of inconsiderable productions; it also leads them to raise some monuments on the largest scale: but between these two extremes there is a blank. a few scattered remains of enormous buildings can therefore teach us nothing of the social condition and the institutions of the people by whom they were raised. i may add, though the remark leads me to step out of my subject, that they do not make us better acquainted with its greatness, its civilization, and its real prosperity. whensoever a power of any kind shall be able to make a whole people co-operate in a single undertaking, that power, with a little knowledge and a great deal of time, will succeed in obtaining something enormous from the co-operation of efforts so multiplied. but this does not lead to the conclusion that the people was very happy, very enlightened, or even very strong. the spaniards found the city of mexico full of magnificent temples and vast palaces; but that did not prevent cortes from conquering the mexican empire with foot soldiers and sixteen horses. if the romans had been better acquainted with the laws of hydraulics, they would not have constructed all the aqueducts which surround the ruins of their cities--they would have made a better use of their power and their wealth. if they had invented the steam-engine, perhaps they would not have extended to the extremities of their empire those long artificial roads which are called roman roads. these things are at once the splendid memorials of their ignorance and of their greatness. a people which should leave no other vestige of its track than a few leaden pipes in the earth and a few iron rods upon its surface, might have been more the master of nature than the romans. chapter xiii: literary characteristics of democratic ages when a traveller goes into a bookseller's shop in the united states, and examines the american books upon the shelves, the number of works appears extremely great; whilst that of known authors appears, on the contrary, to be extremely small. he will first meet with a number of elementary treatises, destined to teach the rudiments of human knowledge. most of these books are written in europe; the americans reprint them, adapting them to their own country. next comes an enormous quantity of religious works, bibles, sermons, edifying anecdotes, controversial divinity, and reports of charitable societies; lastly, appears the long catalogue of political pamphlets. in america, parties do not write books to combat each others' opinions, but pamphlets which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity, and then expire. in the midst of all these obscure productions of the human brain are to be found the more remarkable works of that small number of authors, whose names are, or ought to be, known to europeans. although america is perhaps in our days the civilized country in which literature is least attended to, a large number of persons are nevertheless to be found there who take an interest in the productions of the mind, and who make them, if not the study of their lives, at least the charm of their leisure hours. but england supplies these readers with the larger portion of the books which they require. almost all important english books are republished in the united states. the literary genius of great britain still darts its rays into the recesses of the forests of the new world. there is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of shakespeare. i remember that i read the feudal play of henry v for the first time in a loghouse. not only do the americans constantly draw upon the treasures of english literature, but it may be said with truth that they find the literature of england growing on their own soil. the larger part of that small number of men in the united states who are engaged in the composition of literary works are english in substance, and still more so in form. thus they transport into the midst of democracy the ideas and literary fashions which are current amongst the aristocratic nation they have taken for their model. they paint with colors borrowed from foreign manners; and as they hardly ever represent the country they were born in as it really is, they are seldom popular there. the citizens of the united states are themselves so convinced that it is not for them that books are published, that before they can make up their minds upon the merit of one of their authors, they generally wait till his fame has been ratified in england, just as in pictures the author of an original is held to be entitled to judge of the merit of a copy. the inhabitants of the united states have then at present, properly speaking, no literature. the only authors whom i acknowledge as american are the journalists. they indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. other authors are aliens; they are to the americans what the imitators of the greeks and romans were to us at the revival of learning--an object of curiosity, not of general sympathy. they amuse the mind, but they do not act upon the manners of the people. i have already said that this state of things is very far from originating in democracy alone, and that the causes of it must be sought for in several peculiar circumstances independent of the democratic principle. if the americans, retaining the same laws and social condition, had had a different origin, and had been transported into another country, i do not question that they would have had a literature. even as they now are, i am convinced that they will ultimately have one; but its character will be different from that which marks the american literary productions of our time, and that character will be peculiarly its own. nor is it impossible to trace this character beforehand. i suppose an aristocratic people amongst whom letters are cultivated; the labors of the mind, as well as the affairs of state, are conducted by a ruling class in society. the literary as well as the political career is almost entirely confined to this class, or to those nearest to it in rank. these premises suffice to give me a key to all the rest. when a small number of the same men are engaged at the same time upon the same objects, they easily concert with one another, and agree upon certain leading rules which are to govern them each and all. if the object which attracts the attention of these men is literature, the productions of the mind will soon be subjected by them to precise canons, from which it will no longer be allowable to depart. if these men occupy a hereditary position in the country, they will be naturally inclined, not only to adopt a certain number of fixed rules for themselves, but to follow those which their forefathers laid down for their own guidance; their code will be at once strict and traditional. as they are not necessarily engrossed by the cares of daily life--as they have never been so, any more than their fathers were before them--they have learned to take an interest, for several generations back, in the labors of the mind. they have learned to understand literature as an art, to love it in the end for its own sake, and to feel a scholar-like satisfaction in seeing men conform to its rules. nor is this all: the men of whom i speak began and will end their lives in easy or in affluent circumstances; hence they have naturally conceived a taste for choice gratifications, and a love of refined and delicate pleasures. nay more, a kind of indolence of mind and heart, which they frequently contract in the midst of this long and peaceful enjoyment of so much welfare, leads them to put aside, even from their pleasures, whatever might be too startling or too acute. they had rather be amused than intensely excited; they wish to be interested, but not to be carried away. now let us fancy a great number of literary performances executed by the men, or for the men, whom i have just described, and we shall readily conceive a style of literature in which everything will be regular and prearranged. the slightest work will be carefully touched in its least details; art and labor will be conspicuous in everything; each kind of writing will have rules of its own, from which it will not be allowed to swerve, and which distinguish it from all others. style will be thought of almost as much importance as thought; and the form will be no less considered than the matter: the diction will be polished, measured, and uniform. the tone of the mind will be always dignified, seldom very animated; and writers will care more to perfect what they produce than to multiply their productions. it will sometimes happen that the members of the literary class, always living amongst themselves and writing for themselves alone, will lose sight of the rest of the world, which will infect them with a false and labored style; they will lay down minute literary rules for their exclusive use, which will insensibly lead them to deviate from common-sense, and finally to transgress the bounds of nature. by dint of striving after a mode of parlance different from the vulgar, they will arrive at a sort of aristocratic jargon, which is hardly less remote from pure language than is the coarse dialect of the people. such are the natural perils of literature amongst aristocracies. every aristocracy which keeps itself entirely aloof from the people becomes impotent--a fact which is as true in literature as it is in politics. *a [footnote a: all this is especially true of the aristocratic countries which have been long and peacefully subject to a monarchical government. when liberty prevails in an aristocracy, the higher ranks are constantly obliged to make use of the lower classes; and when they use, they approach them. this frequently introduces something of a democratic spirit into an aristocratic community. there springs up, moreover, in a privileged body, governing with energy and an habitually bold policy, a taste for stir and excitement which must infallibly affect all literary performances.] let us now turn the picture and consider the other side of it; let us transport ourselves into the midst of a democracy, not unprepared by ancient traditions and present culture to partake in the pleasures of the mind. ranks are there intermingled and confounded; knowledge and power are both infinitely subdivided, and, if i may use the expression, scattered on every side. here then is a motley multitude, whose intellectual wants are to be supplied. these new votaries of the pleasures of the mind have not all received the same education; they do not possess the same degree of culture as their fathers, nor any resemblance to them--nay, they perpetually differ from themselves, for they live in a state of incessant change of place, feelings, and fortunes. the mind of each member of the community is therefore unattached to that of his fellow-citizens by tradition or by common habits; and they have never had the power, the inclination, nor the time to concert together. it is, however, from the bosom of this heterogeneous and agitated mass that authors spring; and from the same source their profits and their fame are distributed. i can without difficulty understand that, under these circumstances, i must expect to meet in the literature of such a people with but few of those strict conventional rules which are admitted by readers and by writers in aristocratic ages. if it should happen that the men of some one period were agreed upon any such rules, that would prove nothing for the following period; for amongst democratic nations each new generation is a new people. amongst such nations, then, literature will not easily be subjected to strict rules, and it is impossible that any such rules should ever be permanent. in democracies it is by no means the case that all the men who cultivate literature have received a literary education; and most of those who have some tinge of belles-lettres are either engaged in politics, or in a profession which only allows them to taste occasionally and by stealth the pleasures of the mind. these pleasures, therefore, do not constitute the principal charm of their lives; but they are considered as a transient and necessary recreation amidst the serious labors of life. such man can never acquire a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the art of literature to appreciate its more delicate beauties; and the minor shades of expression must escape them. as the time they can devote to letters is very short, they seek to make the best use of the whole of it. they prefer books which may be easily procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood. they ask for beauties, self-proffered and easily enjoyed; above all, they must have what is unexpected and new. accustomed to the struggle, the crosses, and the monotony of practical life, they require rapid emotions, startling passages--truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up, and to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of a subject. why should i say more? or who does not understand what is about to follow, before i have expressed it? taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art; its form will, on the contrary, ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised. style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose--almost always vehement and bold. authors will aim at rapidity of execution, more than at perfection of detail. small productions will be more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought--frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. the object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste. here and there, indeed, writers will doubtless occur who will choose a different track, and who will, if they are gifted with superior abilities, succeed in finding readers, in spite of their defects or their better qualities; but these exceptions will be rare, and even the authors who shall so depart from the received practice in the main subject of their works, will always relapse into it in some lesser details. i have just depicted two extreme conditions: the transition by which a nation passes from the former to the latter is not sudden but gradual, and marked with shades of very various intensity. in the passage which conducts a lettered people from the one to the other, there is almost always a moment at which the literary genius of democratic nations has its confluence with that of aristocracies, and both seek to establish their joint sway over the human mind. such epochs are transient, but very brilliant: they are fertile without exuberance, and animated without confusion. the french literature of the eighteenth century may serve as an example. i should say more than i mean if i were to assert that the literature of a nation is always subordinate to its social condition and its political constitution. i am aware that, independently of these causes, there are several others which confer certain characteristics on literary productions; but these appear to me to be the chief. the relations which exist between the social and political condition of a people and the genius of its authors are always very numerous: whoever knows the one is never completely ignorant of the other. chapter xiv: the trade of literature democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the trading classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature. in aristocracies, readers are fastidious and few in number; in democracies, they are far more numerous and far less difficult to please. the consequence is, that among aristocratic nations, no one can hope to succeed without immense exertions, and that these exertions may bestow a great deal of fame, but can never earn much money; whilst among democratic nations, a writer may flatter himself that he will obtain at a cheap rate a meagre reputation and a large fortune. for this purpose he need not be admired; it is enough that he is liked. the ever-increasing crowd of readers, and their continual craving for something new, insure the sale of books which nobody much esteems. in democratic periods the public frequently treat authors as kings do their courtiers; they enrich, and they despise them. what more is needed by the venal souls which are born in courts, or which are worthy to live there? democratic literature is always infested with a tribe of writers who look upon letters as a mere trade: and for some few great authors who adorn it you may reckon thousands of idea-mongers. chapter xv: the study of greek and latin literature peculiarly useful in democratic communities what was called the people in the most democratic republics of antiquity, was very unlike what we designate by that term. in athens, all the citizens took part in public affairs; but there were only , citizens to more than , inhabitants. all the rest were slaves, and discharged the greater part of those duties which belong at the present day to the lower or even to the middle classes. athens, then, with her universal suffrage, was after all merely an aristocratic republic in which all the nobles had an equal right to the government. the struggle between the patricians and plebeians of rome must be considered in the same light: it was simply an intestine feud between the elder and younger branches of the same family. all the citizens belonged, in fact, to the aristocracy, and partook of its character. it is moreover to be remarked, that amongst the ancients books were always scarce and dear; and that very great difficulties impeded their publication and circulation. these circumstances concentrated literary tastes and habits amongst a small number of men, who formed a small literary aristocracy out of the choicer spirits of the great political aristocracy. accordingly nothing goes to prove that literature was ever treated as a trade amongst the greeks and romans. these peoples, which not only constituted aristocracies, but very polished and free nations, of course imparted to their literary productions the defects and the merits which characterize the literature of aristocratic ages. and indeed a very superficial survey of the literary remains of the ancients will suffice to convince us, that if those writers were sometimes deficient in variety, or fertility in their subjects, or in boldness, vivacity, or power of generalization in their thoughts, they always displayed exquisite care and skill in their details. nothing in their works seems to be done hastily or at random: every line is written for the eye of the connoisseur, and is shaped after some conception of ideal beauty. no literature places those fine qualities, in which the writers of democracies are naturally deficient, in bolder relief than that of the ancients; no literature, therefore, ought to be more studied in democratic ages. this study is better suited than any other to combat the literary defects inherent in those ages; as for their more praiseworthy literary qualities, they will spring up of their own accord, without its being necessary to learn to acquire them. it is important that this point should be clearly understood. a particular study may be useful to the literature of a people, without being appropriate to its social and political wants. if men were to persist in teaching nothing but the literature of the dead languages in a community where everyone is habitually led to make vehement exertions to augment or to maintain his fortune, the result would be a very polished, but a very dangerous, race of citizens. for as their social and political condition would give them every day a sense of wants which their education would never teach them to supply, they would perturb the state, in the name of the greeks and romans, instead of enriching it by their productive industry. it is evident that in democratic communities the interest of individuals, as well as the security of the commonwealth, demands that the education of the greater number should be scientific, commercial, and industrial, rather than literary. greek and latin should not be taught in all schools; but it is important that those who by their natural disposition or their fortune are destined to cultivate letters or prepared to relish them, should find schools where a complete knowledge of ancient literature may be acquired, and where the true scholar may be formed. a few excellent universities would do more towards the attainment of this object than a vast number of bad grammar schools, where superfluous matters, badly learned, stand in the way of sound instruction in necessary studies. all who aspire to literary excellence in democratic nations, ought frequently to refresh themselves at the springs of ancient literature: there is no more wholesome course for the mind. not that i hold the literary productions of the ancients to be irreproachable; but i think that they have some especial merits, admirably calculated to counterbalance our peculiar defects. they are a prop on the side on which we are in most danger of falling. chapter xvi: the effect of democracy on language if the reader has rightly understood what i have already said on the subject of literature in general, he will have no difficulty in comprehending that species of influence which a democratic social condition and democratic institutions may exercise over language itself, which is the chief instrument of thought. american authors may truly be said to live more in england than in their own country; since they constantly study the english writers, and take them every day for their models. but such is not the case with the bulk of the population, which is more immediately subjected to the peculiar causes acting upon the united states. it is not then to the written, but to the spoken language that attention must be paid, if we would detect the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy. englishmen of education, and more competent judges than i can be myself of the nicer shades of expression, have frequently assured me that the language of the educated classes in the united states is notably different from that of the educated classes in great britain. they complain not only that the americans have brought into use a number of new words--the difference and the distance between the two countries might suffice to explain that much--but that these new words are more especially taken from the jargon of parties, the mechanical arts, or the language of trade. they assert, in addition to this, that old english words are often used by the americans in new acceptations; and lastly, that the inhabitants of the united states frequently intermingle their phraseology in the strangest manner, and sometimes place words together which are always kept apart in the language of the mother-country. these remarks, which were made to me at various times by persons who appeared to be worthy of credit, led me to reflect upon the subject; and my reflections brought me, by theoretical reasoning, to the same point at which my informants had arrived by practical observation. in aristocracies, language must naturally partake of that state of repose in which everything remains. few new words are coined, because few new things are made; and even if new things were made, they would be designated by known words, whose meaning has been determined by tradition. if it happens that the human mind bestirs itself at length, or is roused by light breaking in from without, the novel expressions which are introduced are characterized by a degree of learning, intelligence, and philosophy, which shows that they do not originate in a democracy. after the fall of constantinople had turned the tide of science and literature towards the west, the french language was almost immediately invaded by a multitude of new words, which had all greek or latin roots. an erudite neologism then sprang up in france which was confined to the educated classes, and which produced no sensible effect, or at least a very gradual one, upon the people. all the nations of europe successively exhibited the same change. milton alone introduced more than six hundred words into the english language, almost all derived from the latin, the greek, or the hebrew. the constant agitation which prevails in a democratic community tends unceasingly, on the contrary, to change the character of the language, as it does the aspect of affairs. in the midst of this general stir and competition of minds, a great number of new ideas are formed, old ideas are lost, or reappear, or are subdivided into an infinite variety of minor shades. the consequence is, that many words must fall into desuetude, and others must be brought into use. democratic nations love change for its own sake; and this is seen in their language as much as in their politics. even when they do not need to change words, they sometimes feel a wish to transform them. the genius of a democratic people is not only shown by the great number of words they bring into use, but also by the nature of the ideas these new words represent. amongst such a people the majority lays down the law in language as well as in everything else; its prevailing spirit is as manifest in that as in other respects. but the majority is more engaged in business than in study--in political and commercial interests than in philosophical speculation or literary pursuits. most of the words coined or adopted for its use will therefore bear the mark of these habits; they will mainly serve to express the wants of business, the passions of party, or the details of the public administration. in these departments the language will constantly spread, whilst on the other hand it will gradually lose ground in metaphysics and theology. as to the source from which democratic nations are wont to derive their new expressions, and the manner in which they go to work to coin them, both may easily be described. men living in democratic countries know but little of the language which was spoken at athens and at rome, and they do not care to dive into the lore of antiquity to find the expression they happen to want. if they have sometimes recourse to learned etymologies, vanity will induce them to search at the roots of the dead languages; but erudition does not naturally furnish them with its resources. the most ignorant, it sometimes happens, will use them most. the eminently democratic desire to get above their own sphere will often lead them to seek to dignify a vulgar profession by a greek or latin name. the lower the calling is, and the more remote from learning, the more pompous and erudite is its appellation. thus the french rope-dancers have transformed themselves into acrobates and funambules. in the absence of knowledge of the dead languages, democratic nations are apt to borrow words from living tongues; for their mutual intercourse becomes perpetual, and the inhabitants of different countries imitate each other the more readily as they grow more like each other every day. but it is principally upon their own languages that democratic nations attempt to perpetrate innovations. from time to time they resume forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language of daily life. many expressions which originally belonged to the technical language of a profession or a party, are thus drawn into general circulation. the most common expedient employed by democratic nations to make an innovation in language consists in giving some unwonted meaning to an expression already in use. this method is very simple, prompt, and convenient; no learning is required to use it aright, and ignorance itself rather facilitates the practice; but that practice is most dangerous to the language. when a democratic people doubles the meaning of a word in this way, they sometimes render the signification which it retains as ambiguous as that which it acquires. an author begins by a slight deflection of a known expression from its primitive meaning, and he adapts it, thus modified, as well as he can to his subject. a second writer twists the sense of the expression in another way; a third takes possession of it for another purpose; and as there is no common appeal to the sentence of a permanent tribunal which may definitely settle the signification of the word, it remains in an ambiguous condition. the consequence is that writers hardly ever appear to dwell upon a single thought, but they always seem to point their aim at a knot of ideas, leaving the reader to judge which of them has been hit. this is a deplorable consequence of democracy. i had rather that the language should be made hideous with words imported from the chinese, the tartars, or the hurons, than that the meaning of a word in our own language should become indeterminate. harmony and uniformity are only secondary beauties in composition; many of these things are conventional, and, strictly speaking, it is possible to forego them; but without clear phraseology there is no good language. the principle of equality necessarily introduces several other changes into language. in aristocratic ages, when each nation tends to stand aloof from all others and likes to have distinct characteristics of its own, it often happens that several peoples which have a common origin become nevertheless estranged from each other, so that, without ceasing to understand the same language, they no longer all speak it in the same manner. in these ages each nation is divided into a certain number of classes, which see but little of each other, and do not intermingle. each of these classes contracts, and invariably retains, habits of mind peculiar to itself, and adopts by choice certain words and certain terms, which afterwards pass from generation to generation, like their estates. the same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a language of the rich--a language of the citizen and a language of the nobility--a learned language and a vulgar one. the deeper the divisions, and the more impassable the barriers of society become, the more must this be the case. i would lay a wager, that amongst the castes of india there are amazing variations of language, and that there is almost as much difference between the language of the pariah and that of the brahmin as there is in their dress. when, on the contrary, men, being no longer restrained by ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse--when castes are destroyed, and the classes of society are recruited and intermixed with each other, all the words of a language are mingled. those which are unsuitable to the greater number perish; the remainder form a common store, whence everyone chooses pretty nearly at random. almost all the different dialects which divided the idioms of european nations are manifestly declining; there is no patois in the new world, and it is disappearing every day from the old countries. the influence of this revolution in social conditions is as much felt in style as it is in phraseology. not only does everyone use the same words, but a habit springs up of using them without discrimination. the rules which style had set up are almost abolished: the line ceases to be drawn between expressions which seem by their very nature vulgar, and other which appear to be refined. persons springing from different ranks of society carry the terms and expressions they are accustomed to use with them, into whatever circumstances they may pass; thus the origin of words is lost like the origin of individuals, and there is as much confusion in language as there is in society. i am aware that in the classification of words there are rules which do not belong to one form of society any more than to another, but which are derived from the nature of things. some expressions and phrases are vulgar, because the ideas they are meant to express are low in themselves; others are of a higher character, because the objects they are intended to designate are naturally elevated. no intermixture of ranks will ever efface these differences. but the principle of equality cannot fail to root out whatever is merely conventional and arbitrary in the forms of thought. perhaps the necessary classification which i pointed out in the last sentence will always be less respected by a democratic people than by any other, because amongst such a people there are no men who are permanently disposed by education, culture, and leisure to study the natural laws of language, and who cause those laws to be respected by their own observance of them. i shall not quit this topic without touching on a feature of democratic languages, which is perhaps more characteristic of them than any other. it has already been shown that democratic nations have a taste, and sometimes a passion, for general ideas, and that this arises from their peculiar merits and defects. this liking for general ideas is displayed in democratic languages by the continual use of generic terms or abstract expressions, and by the manner in which they are employed. this is the great merit and the great imperfection of these languages. democratic nations are passionately addicted to generic terms or abstract expressions, because these modes of speech enlarge thought, and assist the operations of the mind by enabling it to include several objects in a small compass. a french democratic writer will be apt to say capacites in the abstract for men of capacity, and without particularizing the objects to which their capacity is applied: he will talk about actualities to designate in one word the things passing before his eyes at the instant; and he will comprehend under the term eventualities whatever may happen in the universe, dating from the moment at which he speaks. democratic writers are perpetually coining words of this kind, in which they sublimate into further abstraction the abstract terms of the language. nay, more, to render their mode of speech more succinct, they personify the subject of these abstract terms, and make it act like a real entity. thus they would say in french, "la force des choses veut que les capacites gouvernent." i cannot better illustrate what i mean than by my own example. i have frequently used the word "equality" in an absolute sense--nay, i have personified equality in several places; thus i have said that equality does such and such things, or refrains from doing others. it may be affirmed that the writers of the age of louis xiv would not have used these expressions: they would never have thought of using the word "equality" without applying it to some particular object; and they would rather have renounced the term altogether than have consented to make a living personage of it. these abstract terms which abound in democratic languages, and which are used on every occasion without attaching them to any particular fact, enlarge and obscure the thoughts they are intended to convey; they render the mode of speech more succinct, and the idea contained in it less clear. but with regard to language, democratic nations prefer obscurity to labor. i know not indeed whether this loose style has not some secret charm for those who speak and write amongst these nations. as the men who live there are frequently left to the efforts of their individual powers of mind, they are almost always a prey to doubt; and as their situation in life is forever changing, they are never held fast to any of their opinions by the certain tenure of their fortunes. men living in democratic countries are, then, apt to entertain unsettled ideas, and they require loose expressions to convey them. as they never know whether the idea they express to-day will be appropriate to the new position they may occupy to-morrow, they naturally acquire a liking for abstract terms. an abstract term is like a box with a false bottom: you may put in it what ideas you please, and take them out again without being observed. amongst all nations, generic and abstract terms form the basis of language. i do not, therefore, affect to expel these terms from democratic languages; i simply remark that men have an especial tendency, in the ages of democracy, to multiply words of this kind--to take them always by themselves in their most abstract acceptation, and to use them on all occasions, even when the nature of the discourse does not require them. chapter xvii: of some of the sources of poetry amongst democratic nations various different significations have been given to the word "poetry." it would weary my readers if i were to lead them into a discussion as to which of these definitions ought to be selected: i prefer telling them at once that which i have chosen. in my opinion, poetry is the search and the delineation of the ideal. the poet is he who, by suppressing a part of what exists, by adding some imaginary touches to the picture, and by combining certain real circumstances, but which do not in fact concurrently happen, completes and extends the work of nature. thus the object of poetry is not to represent what is true, but to adorn it, and to present to the mind some loftier imagery. verse, regarded as the ideal beauty of language, may be eminently poetical; but verse does not, of itself, constitute poetry. i now proceed to inquire whether, amongst the actions, the sentiments, and the opinions of democratic nations, there are any which lead to a conception of ideal beauty, and which may for this reason be considered as natural sources of poetry. it must in the first place, be acknowledged that the taste for ideal beauty, and the pleasure derived from the expression of it, are never so intense or so diffused amongst a democratic as amongst an aristocratic people. in aristocratic nations it sometimes happens that the body goes on to act as it were spontaneously, whilst the higher faculties are bound and burdened by repose. amongst these nations the people will very often display poetic tastes, and sometimes allow their fancy to range beyond and above what surrounds them. but in democracies the love of physical gratification, the notion of bettering one's condition, the excitement of competition, the charm of anticipated success, are so many spurs to urge men onwards in the active professions they have embraced, without allowing them to deviate for an instant from the track. the main stress of the faculties is to this point. the imagination is not extinct; but its chief function is to devise what may be useful, and to represent what is real. the principle of equality not only diverts men from the description of ideal beauty--it also diminishes the number of objects to be described. aristocracy, by maintaining society in a fixed position, is favorable to the solidity and duration of positive religions, as well as to the stability of political institutions. it not only keeps the human mind within a certain sphere of belief, but it predisposes the mind to adopt one faith rather than another. an aristocratic people will always be prone to place intermediate powers between god and man. in this respect it may be said that the aristocratic element is favorable to poetry. when the universe is peopled with supernatural creatures, not palpable to the senses but discovered by the mind, the imagination ranges freely, and poets, finding a thousand subjects to delineate, also find a countless audience to take an interest in their productions. in democratic ages it sometimes happens, on the contrary, that men are as much afloat in matters of belief as they are in their laws. scepticism then draws the imagination of poets back to earth, and confines them to the real and visible world. even when the principle of equality does not disturb religious belief, it tends to simplify it, and to divert attention from secondary agents, to fix it principally on the supreme power. aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. in this respect aristocracy is far more favorable to poetry; for things commonly grow larger and more obscure as they are more remote; and for this twofold reason they are better suited to the delineation of the ideal. after having deprived poetry of the past, the principle of equality robs it in part of the present. amongst aristocratic nations there are a certain number of privileged personages, whose situation is, as it were, without and above the condition of man; to these, power, wealth, fame, wit, refinement, and distinction in all things appear peculiarly to belong. the crowd never sees them very closely, or does not watch them in minute details; and little is needed to make the description of such men poetical. on the other hand, amongst the same people, you will meet with classes so ignorant, low, and enslaved, that they are no less fit objects for poetry from the excess of their rudeness and wretchedness, than the former are from their greatness and refinement. besides, as the different classes of which an aristocratic community is composed are widely separated, and imperfectly acquainted with each other, the imagination may always represent them with some addition to, or some subtraction from, what they really are. in democratic communities, where men are all insignificant and very much alike, each man instantly sees all his fellows when he surveys himself. the poets of democratic ages can never, therefore, take any man in particular as the subject of a piece; for an object of slender importance, which is distinctly seen on all sides, will never lend itself to an ideal conception. thus the principle of equality; in proportion as it has established itself in the world, has dried up most of the old springs of poetry. let us now attempt to show what new ones it may disclose. when scepticism had depopulated heaven, and the progress of equality had reduced each individual to smaller and better known proportions, the poets, not yet aware of what they could substitute for the great themes which were departing together with the aristocracy, turned their eyes to inanimate nature. as they lost sight of gods and heroes, they set themselves to describe streams and mountains. thence originated in the last century, that kind of poetry which has been called, by way of distinction, the descriptive. some have thought that this sort of delineation, embellished with all the physical and inanimate objects which cover the earth, was the kind of poetry peculiar to democratic ages; but i believe this to be an error, and that it only belongs to a period of transition. i am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man, and fixes it on man alone. democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature; but they are only excited in reality by a survey of themselves. here, and here alone, the true sources of poetry amongst such nations are to be found; and it may be believed that the poets who shall neglect to draw their inspirations hence, will lose all sway over the minds which they would enchant, and will be left in the end with none but unimpassioned spectators of their transports. i have shown how the ideas of progression and of the indefinite perfectibility of the human race belong to democratic ages. democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. here then is the wildest range open to the genius of poets, which allows them to remove their performances to a sufficient distance from the eye. democracy shuts the past against the poet, but opens the future before him. as all the citizens who compose a democratic community are nearly equal and alike, the poet cannot dwell upon any one of them; but the nation itself invites the exercise of his powers. the general similitude of individuals, which renders any one of them taken separately an improper subject of poetry, allows poets to include them all in the same imagery, and to take a general survey of the people itself. democractic nations have a clearer perception than any others of their own aspect; and an aspect so imposing is admirably fitted to the delineation of the ideal. i readily admit that the americans have no poets; i cannot allow that they have no poetic ideas. in europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of america, but the americans themselves never think about them: they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature, and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests which surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. their eyes are fixed upon another sight: the american people views its own march across these wilds--drying swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. this magnificent image of themselves does not meet the gaze of the americans at intervals only; it may be said to haunt every one of them in his least as well as in his most important actions, and to be always flitting before his mind. nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the united states. but amongst the thoughts which it suggests there is always one which is full of poetry, and that is the hidden nerve which gives vigor to the frame. in aristocratic ages each people, as well as each individual, is prone to stand separate and aloof from all others. in democratic ages, the extreme fluctuations of men and the impatience of their desires keep them perpetually on the move; so that the inhabitants of different countries intermingle, see, listen to, and borrow from each other's stores. it is not only then the members of the same community who grow more alike; communities are themselves assimilated to one another, and the whole assemblage presents to the eye of the spectator one vast democracy, each citizen of which is a people. this displays the aspect of mankind for the first time in the broadest light. all that belongs to the existence of the human race taken as a whole, to its vicissitudes and to its future, becomes an abundant mine of poetry. the poets who lived in aristocratic ages have been eminently successful in their delineations of certain incidents in the life of a people or a man; but none of them ever ventured to include within his performances the destinies of mankind--a task which poets writing in democratic ages may attempt. at that same time at which every man, raising his eyes above his country, begins at length to discern mankind at large, the divinity is more and more manifest to the human mind in full and entire majesty. if in democratic ages faith in positive religions be often shaken, and the belief in intermediate agents, by whatever name they are called, be overcast; on the other hand men are disposed to conceive a far broader idea of providence itself, and its interference in human affairs assumes a new and more imposing appearance to their eyes. looking at the human race as one great whole, they easily conceive that its destinies are regulated by the same design; and in the actions of every individual they are led to acknowledge a trace of that universal and eternal plan on which god rules our race. this consideration may be taken as another prolific source of poetry which is opened in democratic ages. democratic poets will always appear trivial and frigid if they seek to invest gods, demons, or angels, with corporeal forms, and if they attempt to draw them down from heaven to dispute the supremacy of earth. but if they strive to connect the great events they commemorate with the general providential designs which govern the universe, and, without showing the finger of the supreme governor, reveal the thoughts of the supreme mind, their works will be admired and understood, for the imagination of their contemporaries takes this direction of its own accord. it may be foreseen in the like manner that poets living in democratic ages will prefer the delineation of passions and ideas to that of persons and achievements. the language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to ideal conceptions. these things are not poetical in themselves; and, if it were otherwise, they would cease to be so, because they are too familiar to all those to whom the poet would speak of them. this forces the poet constantly to search below the external surface which is palpable to the senses, in order to read the inner soul: and nothing lends itself more to the delineation of the ideal than the scrutiny of the hidden depths in the immaterial nature of man. i need not to ramble over earth and sky to discover a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of greatness and littleness infinite, of intense gloom and of amazing brightness--capable at once of exciting pity, admiration, terror, contempt. i find that object in myself. man springs out of nothing, crosses time, and disappears forever in the bosom of god; he is seen but for a moment, staggering on the verge of the two abysses, and there he is lost. if man were wholly ignorant of himself, he would have no poetry in him; for it is impossible to describe what the mind does not conceive. if man clearly discerned his own nature, his imagination would remain idle, and would have nothing to add to the picture. but the nature of man is sufficiently disclosed for him to apprehend something of himself; and sufficiently obscure for all the rest to be plunged in thick darkness, in which he gropes forever--and forever in vain--to lay hold on some completer notion of his being. amongst a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legendary lays or the memorials of old traditions. the poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings in whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he present virtues and vices in the mask of frigid personification, which are better received under their own features. all these resources fail him; but man remains, and the poet needs no more. the destinies of mankind--man himself, taken aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence of nature and of god, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities, and inconceivable wretchedness--will become the chief, if not the sole theme of poetry amongst these nations. experience may confirm this assertion, if we consider the productions of the greatest poets who have appeared since the world has been turned to democracy. the authors of our age who have so admirably delineated the features of faust, childe harold, rene, and jocelyn, did not seek to record the actions of an individual, but to enlarge and to throw light on some of the obscurer recesses of the human heart. such are the poems of democracy. the principle of equality does not then destroy all the subjects of poetry: it renders them less numerous, but more vast. chapter xviii: of the inflated style of american writers and orators i have frequently remarked that the americans, who generally treat of business in clear, plain language, devoid of all ornament, and so extremely simple as to be often coarse, are apt to become inflated as soon as they attempt a more poetical diction. they then vent their pomposity from one end of a harangue to the other; and to hear them lavish imagery on every occasion, one might fancy that they never spoke of anything with simplicity. the english are more rarely given to a similar failing. the cause of this may be pointed out without much difficulty. in democratic communities each citizen is habitually engaged in the contemplation of a very puny object, namely himself. if he ever raises his looks higher, he then perceives nothing but the immense form of society at large, or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. his ideas are all either extremely minute and clear, or extremely general and vague: what lies between is an open void. when he has been drawn out of his own sphere, therefore, he always expects that some amazing object will be offered to his attention; and it is on these terms alone that he consents to tear himself for an instant from the petty complicated cares which form the charm and the excitement of his life. this appears to me sufficiently to explain why men in democracies, whose concerns are in general so paltry, call upon their poets for conceptions so vast and descriptions so unlimited. the authors, on their part, do not fail to obey a propensity of which they themselves partake; they perpetually inflate their imaginations, and expanding them beyond all bounds, they not unfrequently abandon the great in order to reach the gigantic. by these means they hope to attract the observation of the multitude, and to fix it easily upon themselves: nor are their hopes disappointed; for as the multitude seeks for nothing in poetry but subjects of very vast dimensions, it has neither the time to measure with accuracy the proportions of all the subjects set before it, nor a taste sufficiently correct to perceive at once in what respect they are out of proportion. the author and the public at once vitiate one another. we have just seen that amongst democratic nations, the sources of poetry are grand, but not abundant. they are soon exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters. i do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove too insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; i rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the clouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions. i fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beings of their brain may sometimes make us regret the world of reality. chapter xix: some observations on the drama amongst democratic nations when the revolution which subverts the social and political state of an aristocratic people begins to penetrate into literature, it generally first manifests itself in the drama, and it always remains conspicuous there. the spectator of a dramatic piece is, to a certain extent, taken by surprise by the impression it conveys. he has no time to refer to his memory, or to consult those more able to judge than himself. it does not occur to him to resist the new literary tendencies which begin to be felt by him; he yields to them before he knows what they are. authors are very prompt in discovering which way the taste of the public is thus secretly inclined. they shape their productions accordingly; and the literature of the stage, after having served to indicate the approaching literary revolution, speedily completes its accomplishment. if you would judge beforehand of the literature of a people which is lapsing into democracy, study its dramatic productions. the literature of the stage, moreover, even amongst aristocratic nations, constitutes the most democratic part of their literature. no kind of literary gratification is so much within the reach of the multitude as that which is derived from theatrical representations. neither preparation nor study is required to enjoy them: they lay hold on you in the midst of your prejudices and your ignorance. when the yet untutored love of the pleasures of the mind begins to affect a class of the community, it instantly draws them to the stage. the theatres of aristocratic nations have always been filled with spectators not belonging to the aristocracy. at the theatre alone the higher ranks mix with the middle and the lower classes; there alone do the former consent to listen to the opinion of the latter, or at least to allow them to give an opinion at all. at the theatre, men of cultivation and of literary attainments have always had more difficulty than elsewhere in making their taste prevail over that of the people, and in preventing themselves from being carried away by the latter. the pit has frequently made laws for the boxes. if it be difficult for an aristocracy to prevent the people from getting the upper hand in the theatre, it will readily be understood that the people will be supreme there when democratic principles have crept into the laws and manners--when ranks are intermixed--when minds, as well as fortunes, are brought more nearly together--and when the upper class has lost, with its hereditary wealth, its power, its precedents, and its leisure. the tastes and propensities natural to democratic nations, in respect to literature, will therefore first be discernible in the drama, and it may be foreseen that they will break out there with vehemence. in written productions, the literary canons of aristocracy will be gently, gradually, and, so to speak, legally modified; at the theatre they will be riotously overthrown. the drama brings out most of the good qualities, and almost all the defects, inherent in democratic literature. democratic peoples hold erudition very cheap, and care but little for what occurred at rome and athens; they want to hear something which concerns themselves, and the delineation of the present age is what they demand. when the heroes and the manners of antiquity are frequently brought upon the stage, and dramatic authors faithfully observe the rules of antiquated precedent, that is enough to warrant a conclusion that the democratic classes have not yet got the upper hand of the theatres. racine makes a very humble apology in the preface to the "britannicus" for having disposed of junia amongst the vestals, who, according to aulus gellius, he says, "admitted no one below six years of age nor above ten." we may be sure that he would neither have accused himself of the offence, nor defended himself from censure, if he had written for our contemporaries. a fact of this kind not only illustrates the state of literature at the time when it occurred, but also that of society itself. a democratic stage does not prove that the nation is in a state of democracy, for, as we have just seen, even in aristocracies it may happen that democratic tastes affect the drama; but when the spirit of aristocracy reigns exclusively on the stage, the fact irrefragably demonstrates that the whole of society is aristocratic; and it may be boldly inferred that the same lettered and learned class which sways the dramatic writers commands the people and governs the country. the refined tastes and the arrogant bearing of an aristocracy will rarely fail to lead it, when it manages the stage, to make a kind of selection in human nature. some of the conditions of society claim its chief interest; and the scenes which delineate their manners are preferred upon the stage. certain virtues, and even certain vices, are thought more particularly to deserve to figure there; and they are applauded whilst all others are excluded. upon the stage, as well as elsewhere, an aristocratic audience will only meet personages of quality, and share the emotions of kings. the same thing applies to style: an aristocracy is apt to impose upon dramatic authors certain modes of expression which give the key in which everything is to be delivered. by these means the stage frequently comes to delineate only one side of man, or sometimes even to represent what is not to be met with in human nature at all--to rise above nature and to go beyond it. in democratic communities the spectators have no such partialities, and they rarely display any such antipathies: they like to see upon the stage that medley of conditions, of feelings, and of opinions, which occurs before their eyes. the drama becomes more striking, more common, and more true. sometimes, however, those who write for the stage in democracies also transgress the bounds of human nature--but it is on a different side from their predecessors. by seeking to represent in minute detail the little singularities of the moment and the peculiar characteristics of certain personages, they forget to portray the general features of the race. when the democratic classes rule the stage, they introduce as much license in the manner of treating subjects as in the choice of them. as the love of the drama is, of all literary tastes, that which is most natural to democratic nations, the number of authors and of spectators, as well as of theatrical representations, is constantly increasing amongst these communities. a multitude composed of elements so different, and scattered in so many different places, cannot acknowledge the same rules or submit to the same laws. no concurrence is possible amongst judges so numerous, who know not when they may meet again; and therefore each pronounces his own sentence on the piece. if the effect of democracy is generally to question the authority of all literary rules and conventions, on the stage it abolishes them altogether, and puts in their place nothing but the whim of each author and of each public. the drama also displays in an especial manner the truth of what i have said before in speaking more generally of style and art in democratic literature. in reading the criticisms which were occasioned by the dramatic productions of the age of louis xiv, one is surprised to remark the great stress which the public laid on the probability of the plot, and the importance which was attached to the perfect consistency of the characters, and to their doing nothing which could not be easily explained and understood. the value which was set upon the forms of language at that period, and the paltry strife about words with which dramatic authors were assailed, are no less surprising. it would seem that the men of the age of louis xiv attached very exaggerated importance to those details, which may be perceived in the study, but which escape attention on the stage. for, after all, the principal object of a dramatic piece is to be performed, and its chief merit is to affect the audience. but the audience and the readers in that age were the same: on quitting the theatre they called up the author for judgment to their own firesides. in democracies, dramatic pieces are listened to, but not read. most of those who frequent the amusements of the stage do not go there to seek the pleasures of the mind, but the keen emotions of the heart. they do not expect to hear a fine literary work, but to see a play; and provided the author writes the language of his country correctly enough to be understood, and that his characters excite curiosity and awaken sympathy, the audience are satisfied. they ask no more of fiction, and immediately return to real life. accuracy of style is therefore less required, because the attentive observance of its rules is less perceptible on the stage. as for the probability of the plot, it is incompatible with perpetual novelty, surprise, and rapidity of invention. it is therefore neglected, and the public excuses the neglect. you may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules. the americans very broadly display all the different propensities which i have here described when they go to the theatres; but it must be acknowledged that as yet a very small number of them go to theatres at all. although playgoers and plays have prodigiously increased in the united states in the last forty years, the population indulges in this kind of amusement with the greatest reserve. this is attributable to peculiar causes, which the reader is already acquainted with, and of which a few words will suffice to remind him. the puritans who founded the american republics were not only enemies to amusements, but they professed an especial abhorrence for the stage. they considered it as an abominable pastime; and as long as their principles prevailed with undivided sway, scenic performances were wholly unknown amongst them. these opinions of the first fathers of the colony have left very deep marks on the minds of their descendants. the extreme regularity of habits and the great strictness of manners which are observable in the united states, have as yet opposed additional obstacles to the growth of dramatic art. there are no dramatic subjects in a country which has witnessed no great political catastrophes, and in which love invariably leads by a straight and easy road to matrimony. people who spend every day in the week in making money, and the sunday in going to church, have nothing to invite the muse of comedy. a single fact suffices to show that the stage is not very popular in the united states. the americans, whose laws allow of the utmost freedom and even license of language in all other respects, have nevertheless subjected their dramatic authors to a sort of censorship. theatrical performances can only take place by permission of the municipal authorities. this may serve to show how much communities are like individuals; they surrender themselves unscrupulously to their ruling passions, and afterwards take the greatest care not to yield too much to the vehemence of tastes which they do not possess. no portion of literature is connected by closer or more numerous ties with the present condition of society than the drama. the drama of one period can never be suited to the following age, if in the interval an important revolution has changed the manners and the laws of the nation. the great authors of a preceding age may be read; but pieces written for a different public will not be followed. the dramatic authors of the past live only in books. the traditional taste of certain individuals, vanity, fashion, or the genius of an actor may sustain or resuscitate for a time the aristocratic drama amongst a democracy; but it will speedily fall away of itself--not overthrown, but abandoned. chapter xx: characteristics of historians in democratic ages historians who write in aristocratic ages are wont to refer all occurrences to the particular will or temper of certain individuals; and they are apt to attribute the most important revolutions to very slight accidents. they trace out the smallest causes with sagacity, and frequently leave the greatest unperceived. historians who live in democratic ages exhibit precisely opposite characteristics. most of them attribute hardly any influence to the individual over the destiny of the race, nor to citizens over the fate of a people; but, on the other hand, they assign great general causes to all petty incidents. these contrary tendencies explain each other. when the historian of aristocratic ages surveys the theatre of the world, he at once perceives a very small number of prominent actors, who manage the whole piece. these great personages, who occupy the front of the stage, arrest the observation, and fix it on themselves; and whilst the historian is bent on penetrating the secret motives which make them speak and act, the rest escape his memory. the importance of the things which some men are seen to do, gives him an exaggerated estimate of the influence which one man may possess; and naturally leads him to think, that in order to explain the impulses of the multitude, it is necessary to refer them to the particular influence of some one individual. when, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent of one another, and each of them is individually weak, no one is seen to exert a great, or still less a lasting power, over the community. at first sight, individuals appear to be absolutely devoid of any influence over it; and society would seem to advance alone by the free and voluntary concurrence of all the men who compose it. this naturally prompts the mind to search for that general reason which operates upon so many men's faculties at the same time, and turns them simultaneously in the same direction. i am very well convinced that even amongst democratic nations, the genius, the vices, or the virtues of certain individuals retard or accelerate the natural current of a people's history: but causes of this secondary and fortuitous nature are infinitely more various, more concealed, more complex, less powerful, and consequently less easy to trace in periods of equality than in ages of aristocracy, when the task of the historian is simply to detach from the mass of general events the particular influences of one man or of a few men. in the former case the historian is soon wearied by the toil; his mind loses itself in this labyrinth; and, in his inability clearly to discern or conspicuously to point out the influence of individuals, he denies their existence. he prefers talking about the characteristics of race, the physical conformation of the country, or the genius of civilization, which abridges his own labors, and satisfies his reader far better at less cost. m. de lafayette says somewhere in his "memoirs" that the exaggerated system of general causes affords surprising consolations to second-rate statesmen. i will add, that its effects are not less consolatory to second-rate historians; it can always furnish a few mighty reasons to extricate them from the most difficult part of their work, and it indulges the indolence or incapacity of their minds, whilst it confers upon them the honors of deep thinking. for myself, i am of opinion that at all times one great portion of the events of this world are attributable to general facts, and another to special influences. these two kinds of cause are always in operation: their proportion only varies. general facts serve to explain more things in democratic than in aristocratic ages, and fewer things are then assignable to special influences. at periods of aristocracy the reverse takes place: special influences are stronger, general causes weaker--unless indeed we consider as a general cause the fact itself of the inequality of conditions, which allows some individuals to baffle the natural tendencies of all the rest. the historians who seek to describe what occurs in democratic societies are right, therefore, in assigning much to general causes, and in devoting their chief attention to discover them; but they are wrong in wholly denying the special influence of individuals, because they cannot easily trace or follow it. the historians who live in democratic ages are not only prone to assign a great cause to every incident, but they are also given to connect incidents together, so as to deduce a system from them. in aristocratic ages, as the attention of historians is constantly drawn to individuals, the connection of events escapes them; or rather, they do not believe in any such connection. to them the clew of history seems every instant crossed and broken by the step of man. in democratic ages, on the contrary, as the historian sees much more of actions than of actors, he may easily establish some kind of sequency and methodical order amongst the former. ancient literature, which is so rich in fine historical compositions, does not contain a single great historical system, whilst the poorest of modern literatures abound with them. it would appear that the ancient historians did not make sufficient use of those general theories which our historical writers are ever ready to carry to excess. those who write in democratic ages have another more dangerous tendency. when the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often happens that the world goes on to move, though the moving agent is no longer discoverable. as it becomes extremely difficult to discern and to analyze the reasons which, acting separately on the volition of each member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the old mass, men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary, and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them. but even when the general fact which governs the private volition of all individuals is supposed to be discovered upon the earth, the principle of human free-will is not secure. a cause sufficiently extensive to affect millions of men at once, and sufficiently strong to bend them all together in the same direction, may well seem irresistible: having seen that mankind do yield to it, the mind is close upon the inference that mankind cannot resist it. historians who live in democratic ages, then, not only deny that the few have any power of acting upon the destiny of a people, but they deprive the people themselves of the power of modifying their own condition, and they subject them either to an inflexible providence, or to some blind necessity. according to them, each nation is indissolubly bound by its position, its origin, its precedents, and its character, to a certain lot which no efforts can ever change. they involve generation in generation, and thus, going back from age to age, and from necessity to necessity, up to the origin of the world, they forge a close and enormous chain, which girds and binds the human race. to their minds it is not enough to show what events have occurred: they would fain show that events could not have occurred otherwise. they take a nation arrived at a certain stage of its history, and they affirm that it could not but follow the track which brought it thither. it is easier to make such an assertion than to show by what means the nation might have adopted a better course. in reading the historians of aristocratic ages, and especially those of antiquity, it would seem that, to be master of his lot, and to govern his fellow-creatures, man requires only to be master of himself. in perusing the historical volumes which our age has produced, it would seem that man is utterly powerless over himself and over all around him. the historians of antiquity taught how to command: those of our time teach only how to obey; in their writings the author often appears great, but humanity is always diminutive. if this doctrine of necessity, which is so attractive to those who write history in democratic ages, passes from authors to their readers, till it infects the whole mass of the community and gets possession of the public mind, it will soon paralyze the activity of modern society, and reduce christians to the level of the turks. i would moreover observe, that such principles are peculiarly dangerous at the period at which we are arrived. our contemporaries are but too prone to doubt of the human free-will, because each of them feels himself confined on every side by his own weakness; but they are still willing to acknowledge the strength and independence of men united in society. let not this principle be lost sight of; for the great object in our time is to raise the faculties of men, not to complete their prostration. chapter xxi: of parliamentary eloquence in the united states amongst aristocratic nations all the members of the community are connected with and dependent upon each other; the graduated scale of different ranks acts as a tie, which keeps everyone in his proper place and the whole body in subordination. something of the same kind always occurs in the political assemblies of these nations. parties naturally range themselves under certain leaders, whom they obey by a sort of instinct, which is only the result of habits contracted elsewhere. they carry the manners of general society into the lesser assemblage. in democratic countries it often happens that a great number of citizens are tending to the same point; but each one only moves thither, or at least flatters himself that he moves, of his own accord. accustomed to regulate his doings by personal impulse alone, he does not willingly submit to dictation from without. this taste and habit of independence accompany him into the councils of the nation. if he consents to connect himself with other men in the prosecution of the same purpose, at least he chooses to remain free to contribute to the common success after his own fashion. hence it is that in democratic countries parties are so impatient of control, and are never manageable except in moments of great public danger. even then, the authority of leaders, which under such circumstances may be able to make men act or speak, hardly ever reaches the extent of making them keep silence. amongst aristocratic nations the members of political assemblies are at the same time members of the aristocracy. each of them enjoys high established rank in his own right, and the position which he occupies in the assembly is often less important in his eyes than that which he fills in the country. this consoles him for playing no part in the discussion of public affairs, and restrains him from too eagerly attempting to play an insignificant one. in america, it generally happens that a representative only becomes somebody from his position in the assembly. he is therefore perpetually haunted by a craving to acquire importance there, and he feels a petulant desire to be constantly obtruding his opinions upon the house. his own vanity is not the only stimulant which urges him on in this course, but that of his constituents, and the continual necessity of propitiating them. amongst aristocratic nations a member of the legislature is rarely in strict dependence upon his constituents: he is frequently to them a sort of unavoidable representative; sometimes they are themselves strictly dependent upon him; and if at length they reject him, he may easily get elected elsewhere, or, retiring from public life, he may still enjoy the pleasures of splendid idleness. in a democratic country like the united states a representative has hardly ever a lasting hold on the minds of his constituents. however small an electoral body may be, the fluctuations of democracy are constantly changing its aspect; it must, therefore, be courted unceasingly. he is never sure of his supporters, and, if they forsake him, he is left without a resource; for his natural position is not sufficiently elevated for him to be easily known to those not close to him; and, with the complete state of independence prevailing among the people, he cannot hope that his friends or the government will send him down to be returned by an electoral body unacquainted with him. the seeds of his fortune are, therefore, sown in his own neighborhood; from that nook of earth he must start, to raise himself to the command of a people and to influence the destinies of the world. thus it is natural that in democratic countries the members of political assemblies think more of their constituents than of their party, whilst in aristocracies they think more of their party than of their constituents. but what ought to be said to gratify constituents is not always what ought to be said in order to serve the party to which representatives profess to belong. the general interest of a party frequently demands that members belonging to it should not speak on great questions which they understand imperfectly; that they should speak but little on those minor questions which impede the great ones; lastly, and for the most part, that they should not speak at all. to keep silence is the most useful service that an indifferent spokesman can render to the commonwealth. constituents, however, do not think so. the population of a district sends a representative to take a part in the government of a country, because they entertain a very lofty notion of his merits. as men appear greater in proportion to the littleness of the objects by which they are surrounded, it may be assumed that the opinion entertained of the delegate will be so much the higher as talents are more rare among his constituents. it will therefore frequently happen that the less constituents have to expect from their representative, the more they will anticipate from him; and, however incompetent he may be, they will not fail to call upon him for signal exertions, corresponding to the rank they have conferred upon him. independently of his position as a legislator of the state, electors also regard their representative as the natural patron of the constituency in the legislature; they almost consider him as the proxy of each of his supporters, and they flatter themselves that he will not be less zealous in defense of their private interests than of those of the country. thus electors are well assured beforehand that the representative of their choice will be an orator; that he will speak often if he can, and that in case he is forced to refrain, he will strive at any rate to compress into his less frequent orations an inquiry into all the great questions of state, combined with a statement of all the petty grievances they have themselves to complain to; so that, though he be not able to come forward frequently, he should on each occasion prove what he is capable of doing; and that, instead of perpetually lavishing his powers, he should occasionally condense them in a small compass, so as to furnish a sort of complete and brilliant epitome of his constituents and of himself. on these terms they will vote for him at the next election. these conditions drive worthy men of humble abilities to despair, who, knowing their own powers, would never voluntarily have come forward. but thus urged on, the representative begins to speak, to the great alarm of his friends; and rushing imprudently into the midst of the most celebrated orators, he perplexes the debate and wearies the house. all laws which tend to make the representative more dependent on the elector, not only affect the conduct of the legislators, as i have remarked elsewhere, but also their language. they exercise a simultaneous influence on affairs themselves, and on the manner in which affairs are discussed. there is hardly a member of congress who can make up his mind to go home without having despatched at least one speech to his constituents; nor who will endure any interruption until he has introduced into his harangue whatever useful suggestions may be made touching the four-and-twenty states of which the union is composed, and especially the district which he represents. he therefore presents to the mind of his auditors a succession of great general truths (which he himself only comprehends, and expresses, confusedly), and of petty minutia, which he is but too able to discover and to point out. the consequence is that the debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, and that they seem rather to drag their slow length along than to advance towards a distinct object. some such state of things will, i believe, always arise in the public assemblies of democracies. propitious circumstances and good laws might succeed in drawing to the legislature of a democratic people men very superior to those who are returned by the americans to congress; but nothing will ever prevent the men of slender abilities who sit there from obtruding themselves with complacency, and in all ways, upon the public. the evil does not appear to me to be susceptible of entire cure, because it not only originates in the tactics of that assembly, but in its constitution and in that of the country. the inhabitants of the united states seem themselves to consider the matter in this light; and they show their long experience of parliamentary life not by abstaining from making bad speeches, but by courageously submitting to hear them made. they are resigned to it, as to an evil which they know to be inevitable. we have shown the petty side of political debates in democratic assemblies--let us now exhibit the more imposing one. the proceedings within the parliament of england for the last one hundred and fifty years have never occasioned any great sensation out of that country; the opinions and feelings expressed by the speakers have never awakened much sympathy, even amongst the nations placed nearest to the great arena of british liberty; whereas europe was excited by the very first debates which took place in the small colonial assemblies of america at the time of the revolution. this was attributable not only to particular and fortuitous circumstances, but to general and lasting causes. i can conceive nothing more admirable or more powerful than a great orator debating on great questions of state in a democratic assembly. as no particular class is ever represented there by men commissioned to defend its own interests, it is always to the whole nation, and in the name of the whole nation, that the orator speaks. this expands his thoughts, and heightens his power of language. as precedents have there but little weight-as there are no longer any privileges attached to certain property, nor any rights inherent in certain bodies or in certain individuals, the mind must have recourse to general truths derived from human nature to resolve the particular question under discussion. hence the political debates of a democratic people, however small it may be, have a degree of breadth which frequently renders them attractive to mankind. all men are interested by them, because they treat of man, who is everywhere the same. amongst the greatest aristocratic nations, on the contrary, the most general questions are almost always argued on some special grounds derived from the practice of a particular time, or the rights of a particular class; which interest that class alone, or at most the people amongst whom that class happens to exist. it is owing to this, as much as to the greatness of the french people, and the favorable disposition of the nations who listen to them, that the great effect which the french political debates sometimes produce in the world, must be attributed. the orators of france frequently speak to mankind, even when they are addressing their countrymen only. section : influence of democracy on the feelings of americans chapter i: why democratic nations show a more ardent and enduring love of equality than of liberty the first and most intense passion which is engendered by the equality of conditions is, i need hardly say, the love of that same equality. my readers will therefore not be surprised that i speak of its before all others. everybody has remarked that in our time, and especially in france, this passion for equality is every day gaining ground in the human heart. it has been said a hundred times that our contemporaries are far more ardently and tenaciously attached to equality than to freedom; but as i do not find that the causes of the fact have been sufficiently analyzed, i shall endeavor to point them out. it is possible to imagine an extreme point at which freedom and equality would meet and be confounded together. let us suppose that all the members of the community take a part in the government, and that each of them has an equal right to take a part in it. as none is different from his fellows, none can exercise a tyrannical power: men will be perfectly free, because they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly equal, because they will be entirely free. to this ideal state democratic nations tend. such is the completest form that equality can assume upon earth; but there are a thousand others which, without being equally perfect, are not less cherished by those nations. the principle of equality may be established in civil society, without prevailing in the political world. equal rights may exist of indulging in the same pleasures, of entering the same professions, of frequenting the same places--in a word, of living in the same manner and seeking wealth by the same means, although all men do not take an equal share in the government. a kind of equality may even be established in the political world, though there should be no political freedom there. a man may be the equal of all his countrymen save one, who is the master of all without distinction, and who selects equally from among them all the agents of his power. several other combinations might be easily imagined, by which very great equality would be united to institutions more or less free, or even to institutions wholly without freedom. although men cannot become absolutely equal unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other. the taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for equality, are, in fact, two different things; and i am not afraid to add that, amongst democratic nations, they are two unequal things. upon close inspection, it will be seen that there is in every age some peculiar and preponderating fact with which all others are connected; this fact almost always gives birth to some pregnant idea or some ruling passion, which attracts to itself, and bears away in its course, all the feelings and opinions of the time: it is like a great stream, towards which each of the surrounding rivulets seems to flow. freedom has appeared in the world at different times and under various forms; it has not been exclusively bound to any social condition, and it is not confined to democracies. freedom cannot, therefore, form the distinguishing characteristic of democratic ages. the peculiar and preponderating fact which marks those ages as its own is the equality of conditions; the ruling passion of men in those periods is the love of this equality. ask not what singular charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to equality rather than to the other advantages which society holds out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the age they live in; that, of itself, is enough to explain that they prefer it to all the rest. but independently of this reason there are several others, which will at all times habitually lead men to prefer equality to freedom. if a people could ever succeed in destroying, or even in diminishing, the equality which prevails in its own body, this could only be accomplished by long and laborious efforts. its social condition must be modified, its laws abolished, its opinions superseded, its habits changed, its manners corrupted. but political liberty is more easily lost; to neglect to hold it fast is to allow it to escape. men therefore not only cling to equality because it is dear to them; they also adhere to it because they think it will last forever. that political freedom may compromise in its excesses the tranquillity, the property, the lives of individuals, is obvious to the narrowest and most unthinking minds. but, on the contrary, none but attentive and clear-sighted men perceive the perils with which equality threatens us, and they commonly avoid pointing them out. they know that the calamities they apprehend are remote, and flatter themselves that they will only fall upon future generations, for which the present generation takes but little thought. the evils which freedom sometimes brings with it are immediate; they are apparent to all, and all are more or less affected by them. the evils which extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are only seen at intervals, and at the moment at which they become most violent habit already causes them to be no longer felt. the advantages which freedom brings are only shown by length of time; and it is always easy to mistake the cause in which they originate. the advantages of equality are instantaneous, and they may constantly be traced from their source. political liberty bestows exalted pleasures, from time to time, upon a certain number of citizens. equality every day confers a number of small enjoyments on every man. the charms of equality are every instant felt, and are within the reach of all; the noblest hearts are not insensible to them, and the most vulgar souls exult in them. the passion which equality engenders must therefore be at once strong and general. men cannot enjoy political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never obtain it without great exertions. but the pleasures of equality are self-proffered: each of the petty incidents of life seems to occasion them, and in order to taste them nothing is required but to live. democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for it swells to the height of fury. this occurs at the moment when the old social system, long menaced, completes its own destruction after a last intestine struggle, and when the barriers of rank are at length thrown down. at such times men pounce upon equality as their booty, and they cling to it as to some precious treasure which they fear to lose. the passion for equality penetrates on every side into men's hearts, expands there, and fills them entirely. tell them not that by this blind surrender of themselves to an exclusive passion they risk their dearest interests: they are deaf. show them not freedom escaping from their grasp, whilst they are looking another way: they are blind--or rather, they can discern but one sole object to be desired in the universe. what i have said is applicable to all democratic nations: what i am about to say concerns the french alone. amongst most modern nations, and especially amongst all those of the continent of europe, the taste and the idea of freedom only began to exist and to extend themselves at the time when social conditions were tending to equality, and as a consequence of that very equality. absolute kings were the most efficient levellers of ranks amongst their subjects. amongst these nations equality preceded freedom: equality was therefore a fact of some standing when freedom was still a novelty: the one had already created customs, opinions, and laws belonging to it, when the other, alone and for the first time, came into actual existence. thus the latter was still only an affair of opinion and of taste, whilst the former had already crept into the habits of the people, possessed itself of their manners, and given a particular turn to the smallest actions of their lives. can it be wondered that the men of our own time prefer the one to the other? i think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. but for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. they will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism--but they will not endure aristocracy. this is true at all times, and especially true in our own. all men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible passion, will be overthrown and destroyed by it. in our age, freedom cannot be established without it, and despotism itself cannot reign without its support. chapter ii: of individualism in democratic countries i have shown how it is that in ages of equality every man seeks for his opinions within himself: i am now about to show how it is that, in the same ages, all his feelings are turned towards himself alone. individualism *a is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world. individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures; and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in the deficiencies of the mind as in the perversity of the heart. egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism. egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another: individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions. [footnote a: [i adopt the expression of the original, however strange it may seem to the english ear, partly because it illustrates the remark on the introduction of general terms into democratic language which was made in a preceding chapter, and partly because i know of no english word exactly equivalent to the expression. the chapter itself defines the meaning attached to it by the author.--translator's note.]] amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become as it were contemporaneous. a man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. he willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow-citizens. as the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more tangible and more cherished than the country at large. as in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves. it is true that in those ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men. in democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed. amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. as each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another. aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it. as social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. they owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. chapter iii: individualism stronger at the close of a democratic revolution than at other periods the period when the construction of democratic society upon the ruins of an aristocracy has just been completed, is especially that at which this separation of men from one another, and the egotism resulting from it, most forcibly strike the observation. democratic communities not only contain a large number of independent citizens, but they are constantly filled with men who, having entered but yesterday upon their independent condition, are intoxicated with their new power. they entertain a presumptuous confidence in their strength, and as they do not suppose that they can henceforward ever have occasion to claim the assistance of their fellow-creatures, they do not scruple to show that they care for nobody but themselves. an aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle, in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society. these passions survive the victory, and traces of them may be observed in the midst of the democratic confusion which ensues. those members of the community who were at the top of the late gradations of rank cannot immediately forget their former greatness; they will long regard themselves as aliens in the midst of the newly composed society. they look upon all those whom this state of society has made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone. those, on the contrary, who were formerly at the foot of the social scale, and who have been brought up to the common level by a sudden revolution, cannot enjoy their newly acquired independence without secret uneasiness; and if they meet with some of their former superiors on the same footing as themselves, they stand aloof from them with an expression of triumph and of fear. it is, then, commonly at the outset of democratic society that citizens are most disposed to live apart. democracy leads men not to draw near to their fellow-creatures; but democratic revolutions lead them to shun each other, and perpetuate in a state of equality the animosities which the state of inequality engendered. the great advantage of the americans is that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so. chapter iv: that the americans combat the effects of individualism by free institutions despotism, which is of a very timorous nature, is never more secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all is influence is commonly exerted for that purpose. no vice of the human heart is so acceptable to it as egotism: a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other. he does not ask them to assist him in governing the state; it is enough that they do not aspire to govern it themselves. he stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the prosperity of the community, and, perverting the natural meaning of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy for any but themselves. thus the vices which despotism engenders are precisely those which equality fosters. these two things mutually and perniciously complete and assist each other. equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie; despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former predisposes them not to consider their fellow-creatures, the latter makes general indifference a sort of public virtue. despotism then, which is at all times dangerous, is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages. it is easy to see that in those same ages men stand most in need of freedom. when the members of a community are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own interests, and snatched at times from self-observation. as soon as a man begins to treat of public affairs in public, he begins to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow-men as he had at first imagined, and that, in order to obtain their support, he must often lend them his co-operation. when the public is supreme, there is no man who does not feel the value of public goodwill, or who does not endeavor to court it by drawing to himself the esteem and affection of those amongst whom he is to live. many of the passions which congeal and keep asunder human hearts, are then obliged to retire and hide below the surface. pride must be dissembled; disdain dares not break out; egotism fears its own self. under a free government, as most public offices are elective, the men whose elevated minds or aspiring hopes are too closely circumscribed in private life, constantly feel that they cannot do without the population which surrounds them. men learn at such times to think of their fellow-men from ambitious motives; and they frequently find it, in a manner, their interest to forget themselves. i may here be met by an objection derived from electioneering intrigues, the meannesses of candidates, and the calumnies of their opponents. these are opportunities for animosity which occur the oftener the more frequent elections become. such evils are doubtless great, but they are transient; whereas the benefits which attend them remain. the desire of being elected may lead some men for a time to violent hostility; but this same desire leads all men in the long run mutually to support each other; and if it happens that an election accidentally severs two friends, the electoral system brings a multitude of citizens permanently together, who would always have remained unknown to each other. freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference. the americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it. the legislators of america did not suppose that a general representation of the whole nation would suffice to ward off a disorder at once so natural to the frame of democratic society, and so fatal: they also thought that it would be well to infuse political life into each portion of the territory, in order to multiply to an infinite extent opportunities of acting in concert for all the members of the community, and to make them constantly feel their mutual dependence on each other. the plan was a wise one. the general affairs of a country only engage the attention of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them. but if the object be to have the local affairs of a district conducted by the men who reside there, the same persons are always in contact, and they are, in a manner, forced to be acquainted, and to adapt themselves to one another. it is difficult to draw a man out of his own circle to interest him in the destiny of the state, because he does not clearly understand what influence the destiny of the state can have upon his own lot. but if it be proposed to make a road cross the end of his estate, he will see at a glance that there is a connection between this small public affair and his greatest private affairs; and he will discover, without its being shown to him, the close tie which unites private to general interest. thus, far more may be done by intrusting to the citizens the administration of minor affairs than by surrendering to them the control of important ones, towards interesting them in the public welfare, and convincing them that they constantly stand in need one of the other in order to provide for it. a brilliant achievement may win for you the favor of a people at one stroke; but to earn the love and respect of the population which surrounds you, a long succession of little services rendered and of obscure good deeds--a constant habit of kindness, and an established reputation for disinterestedness--will be required. local freedom, then, which leads a great number of citizens to value the affection of their neighbors and of their kindred, perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. in the united states the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every day. they know that the rich in democracies always stand in need of the poor; and that in democratic ages you attach a poor man to you more by your manner than by benefits conferred. the magnitude of such benefits, which sets off the difference of conditions, causes a secret irritation to those who reap advantage from them; but the charm of simplicity of manners is almost irresistible: their affability carries men away, and even their want of polish is not always displeasing. this truth does not take root at once in the minds of the rich. they generally resist it as long as the democratic revolution lasts, and they do not acknowledge it immediately after that revolution is accomplished. they are very ready to do good to the people, but they still choose to keep them at arm's length; they think that is sufficient, but they are mistaken. they might spend fortunes thus without warming the hearts of the population around them;--that population does not ask them for the sacrifice of their money, but of their pride. it would seem as if every imagination in the united states were upon the stretch to invent means of increasing the wealth and satisfying the wants of the public. the best-informed inhabitants of each district constantly use their information to discover new truths which may augment the general prosperity; and if they have made any such discoveries, they eagerly surrender them to the mass of the people. when the vices and weaknesses, frequently exhibited by those who govern in america, are closely examined, the prosperity of the people occasions--but improperly occasions--surprise. elected magistrates do not make the american democracy flourish; it flourishes because the magistrates are elective. it would be unjust to suppose that the patriotism and the zeal which every american displays for the welfare of his fellow-citizens are wholly insincere. although private interest directs the greater part of human actions in the united states as well as elsewhere, it does not regulate them all. i must say that i have often seen americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and i have remarked a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to each other. the free institutions which the inhabitants of the united states possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society. they every instant impress upon his mind the notion that it is the duty, as well as the interest of men, to make themselves useful to their fellow-creatures; and as he sees no particular ground of animosity to them, since he is never either their master or their slave, his heart readily leans to the side of kindness. men attend to the interests of the public, first by necessity, afterwards by choice: what was intentional becomes an instinct; and by dint of working for the good of one's fellow citizens, the habit and the taste for serving them is at length acquired. many people in france consider equality of conditions as one evil, and political freedom as a second. when they are obliged to yield to the former, they strive at least to escape from the latter. but i contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy--namely, political freedom. chapter v: of the use which the americans make of public associations in civil life i do not propose to speak of those political associations--by the aid of which men endeavor to defend themselves against the despotic influence of a majority--or against the aggressions of regal power. that subject i have already treated. if each citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes more feeble, and consequently more incapable of preserving his freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow-citizens for the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would unavoidably increase together with equality. those associations only which are formed in civil life, without reference to political objects, are here adverted to. the political associations which exist in the united states are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. they have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds--religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. the americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. if it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in france, or a man of rank in england, in the united states you will be sure to find an association. i met with several kinds of associations in america, of which i confess i had no previous notion; and i have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the united states succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it. i have since travelled over england, whence the americans have taken some of their laws and many of their customs; and it seemed to me that the principle of association was by no means so constantly or so adroitly used in that country. the english often perform great things singly; whereas the americans form associations for the smallest undertakings. it is evident that the former people consider association as a powerful means of action, but the latter seem to regard it as the only means they have of acting. thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have in our time carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires, and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes. is this the result of accident? or is there in reality any necessary connection between the principle of association and that of equality? aristocratic communities always contain, amongst a multitude of persons who by themselves are powerless, a small number of powerful and wealthy citizens, each of whom can achieve great undertakings single-handed. in aristocratic societies men do not need to combine in order to act, because they are strongly held together. every wealthy and powerful citizen constitutes the head of a permanent and compulsory association, composed of all those who are dependent upon him, or whom he makes subservient to the execution of his designs. amongst democratic nations, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow-men to lend him their assistance. they all, therefore, fall into a state of incapacity, if they do not learn voluntarily to help each other. if men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy; but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered. a people amongst which individuals should lose the power of achieving great things single-handed, without acquiring the means of producing them by united exertions, would soon relapse into barbarism. unhappily, the same social condition which renders associations so necessary to democratic nations, renders their formation more difficult amongst those nations than amongst all others. when several members of an aristocracy agree to combine, they easily succeed in doing so; as each of them brings great strength to the partnership, the number of its members may be very limited; and when the members of an association are limited in number, they may easily become mutually acquainted, understand each other, and establish fixed regulations. the same opportunities do not occur amongst democratic nations, where the associated members must always be very numerous for their association to have any power. i am aware that many of my countrymen are not in the least embarrassed by this difficulty. they contend that the more enfeebled and incompetent the citizens become, the more able and active the government ought to be rendered, in order that society at large may execute what individuals can no longer accomplish. they believe this answers the whole difficulty, but i think they are mistaken. a government might perform the part of some of the largest american companies; and several states, members of the union, have already attempted it; but what political power could ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the american citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association? it is easy to foresee that the time is drawing near when man will be less and less able to produce, of himself alone, the commonest necessaries of life. the task of the governing power will therefore perpetually increase, and its very efforts will extend it every day. the more it stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects which unceasingly engender each other. will the administration of the country ultimately assume the management of all the manufacturers, which no single citizen is able to carry on? and if a time at length arrives, when, in consequence of the extreme subdivision of landed property, the soil is split into an infinite number of parcels, so that it can only be cultivated by companies of husbandmen, will it be necessary that the head of the government should leave the helm of state to follow the plough? the morals and the intelligence of a democratic people would be as much endangered as its business and manufactures, if the government ever wholly usurped the place of private companies. feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed by no other means than by the reciprocal influence of men upon each other. i have shown that these influences are almost null in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created, and this can only be accomplished by associations. when the members of an aristocratic community adopt a new opinion, or conceive a new sentiment, they give it a station, as it were, beside themselves, upon the lofty platform where they stand; and opinions or sentiments so conspicuous to the eyes of the multitude are easily introduced into the minds or hearts of all around. in democratic countries the governing power alone is naturally in a condition to act in this manner; but it is easy to see that its action is always inadequate, and often dangerous. a government can no more be competent to keep alive and to renew the circulation of opinions and feelings amongst a great people, than to manage all the speculations of productive industry. no sooner does a government attempt to go beyond its political sphere and to enter upon this new track, than it exercises, even unintentionally, an insupportable tyranny; for a government can only dictate strict rules, the opinions which it favors are rigidly enforced, and it is never easy to discriminate between its advice and its commands. worse still will be the case if the government really believes itself interested in preventing all circulation of ideas; it will then stand motionless, and oppressed by the heaviness of voluntary torpor. governments therefore should not be the only active powers: associations ought, in democratic nations, to stand in lieu of those powerful private individuals whom the equality of conditions has swept away. as soon as several of the inhabitants of the united states have taken up an opinion or a feeling which they wish to promote in the world, they look out for mutual assistance; and as soon as they have found each other out, they combine. from that moment they are no longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve for an example, and whose language is listened to. the first time i heard in the united states that , men had bound themselves publicly to abstain from spirituous liquors, it appeared to me more like a joke than a serious engagement; and i did not at once perceive why these temperate citizens could not content themselves with drinking water by their own firesides. i at last understood that , americans, alarmed by the progress of drunkenness around them, had made up their minds to patronize temperance. they acted just in the same way as a man of high rank who should dress very plainly, in order to inspire the humbler orders with a contempt of luxury. it is probable that if these , men had lived in france, each of them would singly have memorialized the government to watch the public-houses all over the kingdom. nothing, in my opinion, is more deserving of our attention than the intellectual and moral associations of america. the political and industrial associations of that country strike us forcibly; but the others elude our observation, or if we discover them, we understand them imperfectly, because we have hardly ever seen anything of the kind. it must, however, be acknowledged that they are as necessary to the american people as the former, and perhaps more so. in democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made. amongst the laws which rule human societies there is one which seems to be more precise and clear than all others. if men are to remain civilized, or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased. chapter vi: of the relation between public associations and newspapers when men are no longer united amongst themselves by firm and lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the cooperation of any great number of them, unless you can persuade every man whose concurrence you require that this private interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the rest. this can only be habitually and conveniently effected by means of a newspaper; nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment. a newspaper is an adviser who does not require to be sought, but who comes of his own accord, and talks to you briefly every day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs. newspapers therefore become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal, and individualism more to be feared. to suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. i shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together in very ill-digested schemes; but if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity. the evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure. the effect of a newspaper is not only to suggest the same purpose to a great number of persons, but also to furnish means for executing in common the designs which they may have singly conceived. the principal citizens who inhabit an aristocratic country discern each other from afar; and if they wish to unite their forces, they move towards each other, drawing a multitude of men after them. it frequently happens, on the contrary, in democratic countries, that a great number of men who wish or who want to combine cannot accomplish it, because as they are very insignificant and lost amidst the crowd, they cannot see, and know not where to find, one another. a newspaper then takes up the notion or the feeling which had occurred simultaneously, but singly, to each of them. all are then immediately guided towards this beacon; and these wandering minds, which had long sought each other in darkness, at length meet and unite. the newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united. in order that an association amongst a democratic people should have any power, it must be a numerous body. the persons of whom it is composed are therefore scattered over a wide extent, and each of them is detained in the place of his domicile by the narrowness of his income, or by the small unremitting exertions by which he earns it. means then must be found to converse every day without seeing each other, and to take steps in common without having met. thus hardly any democratic association can do without newspapers. there is consequently a necessary connection between public associations and newspapers: newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers; and if it has been correctly advanced that associations will increase in number as the conditions of men become more equal, it is not less certain that the number of newspapers increases in proportion to that of associations. thus it is in america that we find at the same time the greatest number of associations and of newspapers. this connection between the number of newspapers and that of associations leads us to the discovery of a further connection between the state of the periodical press and the form of the administration in a country; and shows that the number of newspapers must diminish or increase amongst a democratic people, in proportion as its administration is more or less centralized. for amongst democratic nations the exercise of local powers cannot be intrusted to the principal members of the community as in aristocracies. those powers must either be abolished, or placed in the hands of very large numbers of men, who then in fact constitute an association permanently established by law for the purpose of administering the affairs of a certain extent of territory; and they require a journal, to bring to them every day, in the midst of their own minor concerns, some intelligence of the state of their public weal. the more numerous local powers are, the greater is the number of men in whom they are vested by law; and as this want is hourly felt, the more profusely do newspapers abound. the extraordinary subdivision of administrative power has much more to do with the enormous number of american newspapers than the great political freedom of the country and the absolute liberty of the press. if all the inhabitants of the union had the suffrage--but a suffrage which should only extend to the choice of their legislators in congress--they would require but few newspapers, because they would only have to act together on a few very important but very rare occasions. but within the pale of the great association of the nation, lesser associations have been established by law in every country, every city, and indeed in every village, for the purposes of local administration. the laws of the country thus compel every american to co-operate every day of his life with some of his fellow-citizens for a common purpose, and each one of them requires a newspaper to inform him what all the others are doing. i am of opinion that a democratic people, *a without any national representative assemblies, but with a great number of small local powers, would have in the end more newspapers than another people governed by a centralized administration and an elective legislation. what best explains to me the enormous circulation of the daily press in the united states, is that amongst the americans i find the utmost national freedom combined with local freedom of every kind. there is a prevailing opinion in france and england that the circulation of newspapers would be indefinitely increased by removing the taxes which have been laid upon the press. this is a very exaggerated estimate of the effects of such a reform. newspapers increase in numbers, not according to their cheapness, but according to the more or less frequent want which a great number of men may feel for intercommunication and combination. [footnote a: i say a democratic people: the administration of an aristocratic people may be the reverse of centralized, and yet the want of newspapers be little felt, because local powers are then vested in the hands of a very small number of men, who either act apart, or who know each other and can easily meet and come to an understanding.] in like manner i should attribute the increasing influence of the daily press to causes more general than those by which it is commonly explained. a newspaper can only subsist on the condition of publishing sentiments or principles common to a large number of men. a newspaper therefore always represents an association which is composed of its habitual readers. this association may be more or less defined, more or less restricted, more or less numerous; but the fact that the newspaper keeps alive, is a proof that at least the germ of such an association exists in the minds of its readers. this leads me to a last reflection, with which i shall conclude this chapter. the more equal the conditions of men become, and the less strong men individually are, the more easily do they give way to the current of the multitude, and the more difficult is it for them to adhere by themselves to an opinion which the multitude discard. a newspaper represents an association; it may be said to address each of its readers in the name of all the others, and to exert its influence over them in proportion to their individual weakness. the power of the newspaper press must therefore increase as the social conditions of men become more equal. chapter vii: connection of civil and political associations there is only one country on the face of the earth where the citizens enjoy unlimited freedom of association for political purposes. this same country is the only one in the world where the continual exercise of the right of association has been introduced into civil life, and where all the advantages which civilization can confer are procured by means of it. in all the countries where political associations are prohibited, civil associations are rare. it is hardly probable that this is the result of accident; but the inference should rather be, that there is a natural, and perhaps a necessary, connection between these two kinds of associations. certain men happen to have a common interest in some concern--either a commercial undertaking is to be managed, or some speculation in manufactures to be tried; they meet, they combine, and thus by degrees they become familiar with the principle of association. the greater is the multiplicity of small affairs, the more do men, even without knowing it, acquire facility in prosecuting great undertakings in common. civil associations, therefore, facilitate political association: but, on the other hand, political association singularly strengthens and improves associations for civil purposes. in civil life every man may, strictly speaking, fancy that he can provide for his own wants; in politics, he can fancy no such thing. when a people, then, have any knowledge of public life, the notion of association, and the wish to coalesce, present themselves every day to the minds of the whole community: whatever natural repugnance may restrain men from acting in concert, they will always be ready to combine for the sake of a party. thus political life makes the love and practice of association more general; it imparts a desire of union, and teaches the means of combination to numbers of men who would have always lived apart. politics not only give birth to numerous associations, but to associations of great extent. in civil life it seldom happens that any one interest draws a very large number of men to act in concert; much skill is required to bring such an interest into existence: but in politics opportunities present themselves every day. now it is solely in great associations that the general value of the principle of association is displayed. citizens who are individually powerless, do not very clearly anticipate the strength which they may acquire by uniting together; it must be shown to them in order to be understood. hence it is often easier to collect a multitude for a public purpose than a few persons; a thousand citizens do not see what interest they have in combining together--ten thousand will be perfectly aware of it. in politics men combine for great undertakings; and the use they make of the principle of association in important affairs practically teaches them that it is their interest to help each other in those of less moment. a political association draws a number of individuals at the same time out of their own circle: however they may be naturally kept asunder by age, mind, and fortune, it places them nearer together and brings them into contact. once met, they can always meet again. men can embark in few civil partnerships without risking a portion of their possessions; this is the case with all manufacturing and trading companies. when men are as yet but little versed in the art of association, and are unacquainted with its principal rules, they are afraid, when first they combine in this manner, of buying their experience dear. they therefore prefer depriving themselves of a powerful instrument of success to running the risks which attend the use of it. they are, however, less reluctant to join political associations, which appear to them to be without danger, because they adventure no money in them. but they cannot belong to these associations for any length of time without finding out how order is maintained amongst a large number of men, and by what contrivance they are made to advance, harmoniously and methodically, to the same object. thus they learn to surrender their own will to that of all the rest, and to make their own exertions subordinate to the common impulse--things which it is not less necessary to know in civil than in political associations. political associations may therefore be considered as large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association. but even if political association did not directly contribute to the progress of civil association, to destroy the former would be to impair the latter. when citizens can only meet in public for certain purposes, they regard such meetings as a strange proceeding of rare occurrence, and they rarely think at all about it. when they are allowed to meet freely for all purposes, they ultimately look upon public association as the universal, or in a manner the sole means, which men can employ to accomplish the different purposes they may have in view. every new want instantly revives the notion. the art of association then becomes, as i have said before, the mother of action, studied and applied by all. when some kinds of associations are prohibited and others allowed, it is difficult to distinguish the former from the latter, beforehand. in this state of doubt men abstain from them altogether, and a sort of public opinion passes current which tends to cause any association whatsoever to be regarded as a bold and almost an illicit enterprise. *a [footnote a: this is more especially true when the executive government has a discretionary power of allowing or prohibiting associations. when certain associations are simply prohibited by law, and the courts of justice have to punish infringements of that law, the evil is far less considerable. then every citizen knows beforehand pretty nearly what he has to expect. he judges himself before he is judged by the law, and, abstaining from prohibited associations, he embarks in those which are legally sanctioned. it is by these restrictions that all free nations have always admitted that the right of association might be limited. but if the legislature should invest a man with a power of ascertaining beforehand which associations are dangerous and which are useful, and should authorize him to destroy all associations in the bud or allow them to be formed, as nobody would be able to foresee in what cases associations might be established and in what cases they would be put down, the spirit of association would be entirely paralyzed. the former of these laws would only assail certain associations; the latter would apply to society itself, and inflict an injury upon it. i can conceive that a regular government may have recourse to the former, but i do not concede that any government has the right of enacting the latter.] it is therefore chimerical to suppose that the spirit of association, when it is repressed on some one point, will nevertheless display the same vigor on all others; and that if men be allowed to prosecute certain undertakings in common, that is quite enough for them eagerly to set about them. when the members of a community are allowed and accustomed to combine for all purposes, they will combine as readily for the lesser as for the more important ones; but if they are only allowed to combine for small affairs, they will be neither inclined nor able to effect it. it is in vain that you will leave them entirely free to prosecute their business on joint-stock account: they will hardly care to avail themselves of the rights you have granted to them; and, after having exhausted your strength in vain efforts to put down prohibited associations, you will be surprised that you cannot persuade men to form the associations you encourage. i do not say that there can be no civil associations in a country where political association is prohibited; for men can never live in society without embarking in some common undertakings: but i maintain that in such a country civil associations will always be few in number, feebly planned, unskillfully managed, that they will never form any vast designs, or that they will fail in the execution of them. this naturally leads me to think that freedom of association in political matters is not so dangerous to public tranquillity as is supposed; and that possibly, after having agitated society for some time, it may strengthen the state in the end. in democratic countries political associations are, so to speak, the only powerful persons who aspire to rule the state. accordingly, the governments of our time look upon associations of this kind just as sovereigns in the middle ages regarded the great vassals of the crown: they entertain a sort of instinctive abhorrence of them, and they combat them on all occasions. they bear, on the contrary, a natural goodwill to civil associations, because they readily discover that, instead of directing the minds of the community to public affairs, these institutions serve to divert them from such reflections; and that, by engaging them more and more in the pursuit of objects which cannot be attained without public tranquillity, they deter them from revolutions. but these governments do not attend to the fact that political associations tend amazingly to multiply and facilitate those of a civil character, and that in avoiding a dangerous evil they deprive themselves of an efficacious remedy. when you see the americans freely and constantly forming associations for the purpose of promoting some political principle, of raising one man to the head of affairs, or of wresting power from another, you have some difficulty in understanding that men so independent do not constantly fall into the abuse of freedom. if, on the other hand, you survey the infinite number of trading companies which are in operation in the united states, and perceive that the americans are on every side unceasingly engaged in the execution of important and difficult plans, which the slightest revolution would throw into confusion, you will readily comprehend why people so well employed are by no means tempted to perturb the state, nor to destroy that public tranquillity by which they all profit. is it enough to observe these things separately, or should we not discover the hidden tie which connects them? in their political associations, the americans of all conditions, minds, and ages, daily acquire a general taste for association, and grow accustomed to the use of it. there they meet together in large numbers, they converse, they listen to each other, and they are mutually stimulated to all sorts of undertakings. they afterwards transfer to civil life the notions they have thus acquired, and make them subservient to a thousand purposes. thus it is by the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom that the americans learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less formidable. if a certain moment in the existence of a nation be selected, it is easy to prove that political associations perturb the state, and paralyze productive industry; but take the whole life of a people, and it may perhaps be easy to demonstrate that freedom of association in political matters is favorable to the prosperity and even to the tranquillity of the community. i said in the former part of this work, "the unrestrained liberty of political association cannot be entirely assimilated to the liberty of the press. the one is at the same time less necessary and more dangerous than the other. a nation may confine it within certain limits without ceasing to be mistress of itself; and it may sometimes be obliged to do so in order to maintain its own authority." and further on i added: "it cannot be denied that the unrestrained liberty of association for political purposes is the last degree of liberty which a people is fit for. if it does not throw them into anarchy, it perpetually brings them, as it were, to the verge of it." thus i do not think that a nation is always at liberty to invest its citizens with an absolute right of association for political purposes; and i doubt whether, in any country or in any age, it be wise to set no limits to freedom of association. a certain nation, it is said, could not maintain tranquillity in the community, cause the laws to be respected, or establish a lasting government, if the right of association were not confined within narrow limits. these blessings are doubtless invaluable, and i can imagine that, to acquire or to preserve them, a nation may impose upon itself severe temporary restrictions: but still it is well that the nation should know at what price these blessings are purchased. i can understand that it may be advisable to cut off a man's arm in order to save his life; but it would be ridiculous to assert that he will be as dexterous as he was before he lost it. chapter viii: the americans combat individualism by the principle of interest rightly understood when the world was managed by a few rich and powerful individuals, these persons loved to entertain a lofty idea of the duties of man. they were fond of professing that it is praiseworthy to forget one's self, and that good should be done without hope of reward, as it is by the deity himself. such were the standard opinions of that time in morals. i doubt whether men were more virtuous in aristocratic ages than in others; but they were incessantly talking of the beauties of virtue, and its utility was only studied in secret. but since the imagination takes less lofty flights and every man's thoughts are centred in himself, moralists are alarmed by this idea of self-sacrifice, and they no longer venture to present it to the human mind. they therefore content themselves with inquiring whether the personal advantage of each member of the community does not consist in working for the good of all; and when they have hit upon some point on which private interest and public interest meet and amalgamate, they are eager to bring it into notice. observations of this kind are gradually multiplied: what was only a single remark becomes a general principle; and it is held as a truth that man serves himself in serving his fellow-creatures, and that his private interest is to do good. i have already shown, in several parts of this work, by what means the inhabitants of the united states almost always manage to combine their own advantage with that of their fellow-citizens: my present purpose is to point out the general rule which enables them to do so. in the united states hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue; but they maintain that virtue is useful, and prove it every day. the american moralists do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their fellow-creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices; but they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made. they have found out that in their country and their age man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force; and losing all hope of stopping that force, they turn all their thoughts to the direction of it. they therefore do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous. i shall not here enter into the reasons they allege, which would divert me from my subject: suffice it to say that they have convinced their fellow-countrymen. montaigne said long ago: "were i not to follow the straight road for its straightness, i should follow it for having found by experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track." the doctrine of interest rightly understood is not, then, new, but amongst the americans of our time it finds universal acceptance: it has become popular there; you may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say. it is as often to be met with on the lips of the poor man as of the rich. in europe the principle of interest is much grosser than it is in america, but at the same time it is less common, and especially it is less avowed; amongst us, men still constantly feign great abnegation which they no longer feel. the americans, on the contrary, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state. in this respect i think they frequently fail to do themselves justice; for in the united states, as well as elsewhere, people are sometimes seen to give way to those disinterested and spontaneous impulses which are natural to man; but the americans seldom allow that they yield to emotions of this kind; they are more anxious to do honor to their philosophy than to themselves. i might here pause, without attempting to pass a judgment on what i have described. the extreme difficulty of the subject would be my excuse, but i shall not avail myself of it; and i had rather that my readers, clearly perceiving my object, should refuse to follow me than that i should leave them in suspense. the principle of interest rightly understood is not a lofty one, but it is clear and sure. it does not aim at mighty objects, but it attains without excessive exertion all those at which it aims. as it lies within the reach of all capacities, everyone can without difficulty apprehend and retain it. by its admirable conformity to human weaknesses, it easily obtains great dominion; nor is that dominion precarious, since the principle checks one personal interest by another, and uses, to direct the passions, the very same instrument which excites them. the principle of interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. by itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous, but it disciplines a number of citizens in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and, if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. if the principle of interest rightly understood were to sway the whole moral world, extraordinary virtues would doubtless be more rare; but i think that gross depravity would then also be less common. the principle of interest rightly understood perhaps prevents some men from rising far above the level of mankind; but a great number of other men, who were falling far below it, are caught and restrained by it. observe some few individuals, they are lowered by it; survey mankind, it is raised. i am not afraid to say that the principle of interest, rightly understood, appears to me the best suited of all philosophical theories to the wants of the men of our time, and that i regard it as their chief remaining security against themselves. towards it, therefore, the minds of the moralists of our age should turn; even should they judge it to be incomplete, it must nevertheless be adopted as necessary. i do not think upon the whole that there is more egotism amongst us than in america; the only difference is, that there it is enlightened--here it is not. every american will sacrifice a portion of his private interests to preserve the rest; we would fain preserve the whole, and oftentimes the whole is lost. everybody i see about me seems bent on teaching his contemporaries, by precept and example, that what is useful is never wrong. will nobody undertake to make them understand how what is right may be useful? no power upon earth can prevent the increasing equality of conditions from inclining the human mind to seek out what is useful, or from leading every member of the community to be wrapped up in himself. it must therefore be expected that personal interest will become more than ever the principal, if not the sole, spring of men's actions; but it remains to be seen how each man will understand his personal interest. if the members of a community, as they become more equal, become more ignorant and coarse, it is difficult to foresee to what pitch of stupid excesses their egotism may lead them; and no one can foretell into what disgrace and wretchedness they would plunge themselves, lest they should have to sacrifice something of their own well-being to the prosperity of their fellow-creatures. i do not think that the system of interest, as it is professed in america, is, in all its parts, self-evident; but it contains a great number of truths so evident that men, if they are but educated, cannot fail to see them. educate, then, at any rate; for the age of implicit self-sacrifice and instinctive virtues is already flitting far away from us, and the time is fast approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order itself will not be able to exist without education. chapter ix: that the americans apply the principle of interest rightly understood to religious matters if the principle of interest rightly understood had nothing but the present world in view, it would be very insufficient; for there are many sacrifices which can only find their recompense in another; and whatever ingenuity may be put forth to demonstrate the utility of virtue, it will never be an easy task to make that man live aright who has no thoughts of dying. it is therefore necessary to ascertain whether the principle of interest rightly understood is easily compatible with religious belief. the philosophers who inculcate this system of morals tell men, that to be happy in this life they must watch their own passions and steadily control their excess; that lasting happiness can only be secured by renouncing a thousand transient gratifications; and that a man must perpetually triumph over himself, in order to secure his own advantage. the founders of almost all religions have held the same language. the track they point out to man is the same, only that the goal is more remote; instead of placing in this world the reward of the sacrifices they impose, they transport it to another. nevertheless i cannot believe that all those who practise virtue from religious motives are only actuated by the hope of a recompense. i have known zealous christians who constantly forgot themselves, to work with greater ardor for the happiness of their fellow-men; and i have heard them declare that all they did was only to earn the blessings of a future state. i cannot but think that they deceive themselves; i respect them too much to believe them. christianity indeed teaches that a man must prefer his neighbor to himself, in order to gain eternal life; but christianity also teaches that men ought to benefit their fellow-creatures for the love of god. a sublime expression! man, searching by his intellect into the divine conception, and seeing that order is the purpose of god, freely combines to prosecute the great design; and whilst he sacrifices his personal interests to this consummate order of all created things, expects no other recompense than the pleasure of contemplating it. i do not believe that interest is the sole motive of religious men: but i believe that interest is the principal means which religions themselves employ to govern men, and i do not question that this way they strike into the multitude and become popular. it is not easy clearly to perceive why the principle of interest rightly understood should keep aloof from religious opinions; and it seems to me more easy to show why it should draw men to them. let it be supposed that, in order to obtain happiness in this world, a man combats his instinct on all occasions and deliberately calculates every action of his life; that, instead of yielding blindly to the impetuosity of first desires, he has learned the art of resisting them, and that he has accustomed himself to sacrifice without an effort the pleasure of a moment to the lasting interest of his whole life. if such a man believes in the religion which he professes, it will cost him but little to submit to the restrictions it may impose. reason herself counsels him to obey, and habit has prepared him to endure them. if he should have conceived any doubts as to the object of his hopes, still he will not easily allow himself to be stopped by them; and he will decide that it is wise to risk some of the advantages of this world, in order to preserve his rights to the great inheritance promised him in another. "to be mistaken in believing that the christian religion is true," says pascal, "is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!" the americans do not affect a brutal indifference to a future state; they affect no puerile pride in despising perils which they hope to escape from. they therefore profess their religion without shame and without weakness; but there generally is, even in their zeal, something so indescribably tranquil, methodical, and deliberate, that it would seem as if the head, far more than the heart, brought them to the foot of the altar. the americans not only follow their religion from interest, but they often place in this world the interest which makes them follow it. in the middle ages the clergy spoke of nothing but a future state; they hardly cared to prove that a sincere christian may be a happy man here below. but the american preachers are constantly referring to the earth; and it is only with great difficulty that they can divert their attention from it. to touch their congregations, they always show them how favorable religious opinions are to freedom and public tranquillity; and it is often difficult to ascertain from their discourses whether the principal object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the other world, or prosperity in this. chapter x: of the taste for physical well-being in america in america the passion for physical well-being is not always exclusive, but it is general; and if all do not feel it in the same manner, yet it is felt by all. carefully to satisfy all, even the least wants of the body, and to provide the little conveniences of life, is uppermost in every mind. something of an analogous character is more and more apparent in europe. amongst the causes which produce these similar consequences in both hemispheres, several are so connected with my subject as to deserve notice. when riches are hereditarily fixed in families, there are a great number of men who enjoy the comforts of life without feeling an exclusive taste for those comforts. the heart of man is not so much caught by the undisturbed possession of anything valuable as by the desire, as yet imperfectly satisfied, of possessing it, and by the incessant dread of losing it. in aristocratic communities, the wealthy, never having experienced a condition different from their own, entertain no fear of changing it; the existence of such conditions hardly occurs to them. the comforts of life are not to them the end of life, but simply a way of living; they regard them as existence itself--enjoyed, but scarcely thought of. as the natural and instinctive taste which all men feel for being well off is thus satisfied without trouble and without apprehension, their faculties are turned elsewhere, and cling to more arduous and more lofty undertakings, which excite and engross their minds. hence it is that, in the midst of physical gratifications, the members of an aristocracy often display a haughty contempt of these very enjoyments, and exhibit singular powers of endurance under the privation of them. all the revolutions which have ever shaken or destroyed aristocracies, have shown how easily men accustomed to superfluous luxuries can do without the necessaries of life; whereas men who have toiled to acquire a competency can hardly live after they have lost it. if i turn my observation from the upper to the lower classes, i find analogous effects produced by opposite causes. amongst a nation where aristocracy predominates in society, and keeps it stationary, the people in the end get as much accustomed to poverty as the rich to their opulence. the latter bestow no anxiety on their physical comforts, because they enjoy them without an effort; the former do not think of things which they despair of obtaining, and which they hardly know enough of to desire them. in communities of this kind, the imagination of the poor is driven to seek another world; the miseries of real life inclose it around, but it escapes from their control, and flies to seek its pleasures far beyond. when, on the contrary, the distinctions of ranks are confounded together and privileges are destroyed--when hereditary property is subdivided, and education and freedom widely diffused, the desire of acquiring the comforts of the world haunts the imagination of the poor, and the dread of losing them that of the rich. many scanty fortunes spring up; those who possess them have a sufficient share of physical gratifications to conceive a taste for these pleasures--not enough to satisfy it. they never procure them without exertion, and they never indulge in them without apprehension. they are therefore always straining to pursue or to retain gratifications so delightful, so imperfect, so fugitive. if i were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who are stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth or the mediocrity of their fortune, i could discover none more peculiarly appropriate to their condition than this love of physical prosperity. the passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes: with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it preponderates. from them it mounts into the higher orders of society, and descends into the mass of the people. i never met in america with any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately withheld from him. on the other hand, i never perceived amongst the wealthier inhabitants of the united states that proud contempt of physical gratifications which is sometimes to be met with even in the most opulent and dissolute aristocracies. most of these wealthy persons were once poor; they have felt the sting of want; they were long a prey to adverse fortunes; and now that the victory is won, the passions which accompanied the contest have survived it: their minds are, as it were, intoxicated by the small enjoyments which they have pursued for forty years. not but that in the united states, as elsewhere, there are a certain number of wealthy persons who, having come into their property by inheritance, possess, without exertion, an opulence they have not earned. but even these men are not less devotedly attached to the pleasures of material life. the love of well-being is now become the predominant taste of the nation; the great current of man's passions runs in that channel, and sweeps everything along in its course. chapter xi: peculiar effects of the love of physical gratifications in democratic ages it may be supposed, from what has just been said, that the love of physical gratifications must constantly urge the americans to irregularities in morals, disturb the peace of families, and threaten the security of society at large. such is not the case: the passion for physical gratifications produces in democracies effects very different from those which it occasions in aristocratic nations. it sometimes happens that, wearied with public affairs and sated with opulence, amidst the ruin of religious belief and the decline of the state, the heart of an aristocracy may by degrees be seduced to the pursuit of sensual enjoyments only. at other times the power of the monarch or the weakness of the people, without stripping the nobility of their fortune, compels them to stand aloof from the administration of affairs, and whilst the road to mighty enterprise is closed, abandons them to the inquietude of their own desires; they then fall back heavily upon themselves, and seek in the pleasures of the body oblivion of their former greatness. when the members of an aristocratic body are thus exclusively devoted to the pursuit of physical gratifications, they commonly concentrate in that direction all the energy which they derive from their long experience of power. such men are not satisfied with the pursuit of comfort; they require sumptuous depravity and splendid corruption. the worship they pay the senses is a gorgeous one; and they seem to vie with each other in the art of degrading their own natures. the stronger, the more famous, and the more free an aristocracy has been, the more depraved will it then become; and however brilliant may have been the lustre of its virtues, i dare predict that they will always be surpassed by the splendor of its vices. the taste for physical gratifications leads a democratic people into no such excesses. the love of well-being is there displayed as a tenacious, exclusive, universal passion; but its range is confined. to build enormous palaces, to conquer or to mimic nature, to ransack the world in order to gratify the passions of a man, is not thought of: but to add a few roods of land to your field, to plant an orchard, to enlarge a dwelling, to be always making life more comfortable and convenient, to avoid trouble, and to satisfy the smallest wants without effort and almost without cost. these are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world, and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven. this, it may be said, can only be applicable to those members of the community who are in humble circumstances; wealthier individuals will display tastes akin to those which belonged to them in aristocratic ages. i contest the proposition: in point of physical gratifications, the most opulent members of a democracy will not display tastes very different from those of the people; whether it be that, springing from the people, they really share those tastes, or that they esteem it a duty to submit to them. in democratic society the sensuality of the public has taken a moderate and tranquil course, to which all are bound to conform: it is as difficult to depart from the common rule by one's vices as by one's virtues. rich men who live amidst democratic nations are therefore more intent on providing for their smallest wants than for their extraordinary enjoyments; they gratify a number of petty desires, without indulging in any great irregularities of passion: thus they are more apt to become enervated than debauched. the especial taste which the men of democratic ages entertain for physical enjoyments is not naturally opposed to the principles of public order; nay, it often stands in need of order that it may be gratified. nor is it adverse to regularity of morals, for good morals contribute to public tranquillity and are favorable to industry. it may even be frequently combined with a species of religious morality: men wish to be as well off as they can in this world, without foregoing their chance of another. some physical gratifications cannot be indulged in without crime; from such they strictly abstain. the enjoyment of others is sanctioned by religion and morality; to these the heart, the imagination, and life itself are unreservedly given up; till, in snatching at these lesser gifts, men lose sight of those more precious possessions which constitute the glory and the greatness of mankind. the reproach i address to the principle of equality, is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those which are allowed. by these means, a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action. chapter xii: causes of fanatical enthusiasm in some americans although the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the american people, certain momentary outbreaks occur, when their souls seem suddenly to burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained, and to soar impetuously towards heaven. in all the states of the union, but especially in the half-peopled country of the far west, wandering preachers may be met with who hawk about the word of god from place to place. whole families--old men, women, and children--cross rough passes and untrodden wilds, coming from a great distance, to join a camp-meeting, where they totally forget for several days and nights, in listening to these discourses, the cares of business and even the most urgent wants of the body. here and there, in the midst of american society, you meet with men, full of a fanatical and almost wild enthusiasm, which hardly exists in europe. from time to time strange sects arise, which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. religious insanity is very common in the united states. nor ought these facts to surprise us. it was not man who implanted in himself the taste for what is infinite and the love of what is immortal: those lofty instincts are not the offspring of his capricious will; their steadfast foundation is fixed in human nature, and they exist in spite of his efforts. he may cross and distort them--destroy them he cannot. the soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense. if ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some men. they would drift at large in the world of spirits, for fear of remaining shackled by the close bondage of the body. it is not then wonderful if, in the midst of a community whose thoughts tend earthward, a small number of individuals are to be found who turn their looks to heaven. i should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance amongst a people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare. it is said that the deserts of the thebaid were peopled by the persecutions of the emperors and the massacres of the circus; i should rather say that it was by the luxuries of rome and the epicurean philosophy of greece. if their social condition, their present circumstances, and their laws did not confine the minds of the americans so closely to the pursuit of worldly welfare, it is probable that they would display more reserve and more experience whenever their attention is turned to things immaterial, and that they would check themselves without difficulty. but they feel imprisoned within bounds which they will apparently never be allowed to pass. as soon as they have passed these bounds, their minds know not where to fix themselves, and they often rush unrestrained beyond the range of common-sense. chapter xiii: causes of the restless spirit of americans in the midst of their prosperity in certain remote corners of the old world you may still sometimes stumble upon a small district which seems to have been forgotten amidst the general tumult, and to have remained stationary whilst everything around it was in motion. the inhabitants are for the most part extremely ignorant and poor; they take no part in the business of the country, and they are frequently oppressed by the government; yet their countenances are generally placid, and their spirits light. in america i saw the freest and most enlightened men, placed in the happiest circumstances which the world affords: it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and i thought them serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. the chief reason of this contrast is that the former do not think of the ills they endure--the latter are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess. it is strange to see with what feverish ardor the americans pursue their own welfare; and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it. a native of the united states clings to this world's goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach, that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. he clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications. in the united states a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. if his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the united states, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days, to shake off his happiness. death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing. at first sight there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance. the spectacle itself is however as old as the world; the novelty is to see a whole people furnish an exemplification of it. their taste for physical gratifications must be regarded as the original source of that secret inquietude which the actions of the americans betray, and of that inconstancy of which they afford fresh examples every day. he who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach it, to grasp it, and to enjoy it. the recollection of the brevity of life is a constant spur to him. besides the good things which he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others which death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. this thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret, and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to change his plans and his abode. if in addition to the taste for physical well-being a social condition be superadded, in which the laws and customs make no condition permanent, here is a great additional stimulant to this restlessness of temper. men will then be seen continually to change their track, for fear of missing the shortest cut to happiness. it may readily be conceived that if men, passionately bent upon physical gratifications, desire eagerly, they are also easily discouraged: as their ultimate object is to enjoy, the means to reach that object must be prompt and easy, or the trouble of acquiring the gratification would be greater than the gratification itself. their prevailing frame of mind then is at once ardent and relaxed, violent and enervated. death is often less dreaded than perseverance in continuous efforts to one end. the equality of conditions leads by a still straighter road to several of the effects which i have here described. when all the privileges of birth and fortune are abolished, when all professions are accessible to all, and a man's own energies may place him at the top of any one of them, an easy and unbounded career seems open to his ambition, and he will readily persuade himself that he is born to no vulgar destinies. but this is an erroneous notion, which is corrected by daily experience. the same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes, renders all the citizens less able to realize them: it circumscribes their powers on every side, whilst it gives freer scope to their desires. not only are they themselves powerless, but they are met at every step by immense obstacles, which they did not at first perceive. they have swept away the privileges of some of their fellow-creatures which stood in their way, but they have opened the door to universal competition: the barrier has changed its shape rather than its position. when men are nearly alike, and all follow the same track, it is very difficult for any one individual to walk quick and cleave a way through the dense throng which surrounds and presses him. this constant strife between the propensities springing from the equality of conditions and the means it supplies to satisfy them, harasses and wearies the mind. it is possible to conceive men arrived at a degree of freedom which should completely content them; they would then enjoy their independence without anxiety and without impatience. but men will never establish any equality with which they can be contented. whatever efforts a people may make, they will never succeed in reducing all the conditions of society to a perfect level; and even if they unhappily attained that absolute and complete depression, the inequality of minds would still remain, which, coming directly from the hand of god, will forever escape the laws of man. however democratic then the social state and the political constitution of a people may be, it is certain that every member of the community will always find out several points about him which command his own position; and we may foresee that his looks will be doggedly fixed in that direction. when inequality of conditions is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye: when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. hence the desire of equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete. amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. it perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. at every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. they are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die. to these causes must be attributed that strange melancholy which oftentimes will haunt the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance, and that disgust at life which sometimes seizes upon them in the midst of calm and easy circumstances. complaints are made in france that the number of suicides increases; in america suicide is rare, but insanity is said to be more common than anywhere else. these are all different symptoms of the same disease. the americans do not put an end to their lives, however disquieted they may be, because their religion forbids it; and amongst them materialism may be said hardly to exist, notwithstanding the general passion for physical gratification. the will resists--reason frequently gives way. in democratic ages enjoyments are more intense than in the ages of aristocracy, and especially the number of those who partake in them is larger: but, on the other hand, it must be admitted that man's hopes and his desires are oftener blasted, the soul is more stricken and perturbed, and care itself more keen. chapter xiv: taste for physical gratifications united in america to love of freedom and attention to public affairs when a democratic state turns to absolute monarchy, the activity which was before directed to public and to private affairs is all at once centred upon the latter: the immediate consequence is, for some time, great physical prosperity; but this impulse soon slackens, and the amount of productive industry is checked. i know not if a single trading or manufacturing people can be cited, from the tyrians down to the florentines and the english, who were not a free people also. there is therefore a close bond and necessary relation between these two elements--freedom and productive industry. this proposition is generally true of all nations, but especially of democratic nations. i have already shown that men who live in ages of equality continually require to form associations in order to procure the things they covet; and, on the other hand, i have shown how great political freedom improves and diffuses the art of association. freedom, in these ages, is therefore especially favorable to the production of wealth; nor is it difficult to perceive that despotism is especially adverse to the same result. the nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling. despotism of this kind, though it does not trample on humanity, is directly opposed to the genius of commerce and the pursuits of industry. thus the men of democratic ages require to be free in order more readily to procure those physical enjoyments for which they are always longing. it sometimes happens, however, that the excessive taste they conceive for these same enjoyments abandons them to the first master who appears. the passion for worldly welfare then defeats itself, and, without perceiving it, throws the object of their desires to a greater distance. there is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. when the taste for physical gratifications amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon. in their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune, they lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all. it is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. the discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome annoyance, which diverts them from their occupations and business. if they be required to elect representatives, to support the government by personal service, to meet on public business, they have no time--they cannot waste their precious time in useless engagements: such idle amusements are unsuited to serious men who are engaged with the more important interests of life. these people think they are following the principle of self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very rude one; and the better to look after what they call their business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters. as the citizens who work do not care to attend to public business, and as the class which might devote its leisure to these duties has ceased to exist, the place of the government is, as it were, unfilled. if at that critical moment some able and ambitious man grasps the supreme power, he will find the road to every kind of usurpation open before him. if he does but attend for some time to the material prosperity of the country, no more will be demanded of him. above all he must insure public tranquillity: men who are possessed by the passion of physical gratification generally find out that the turmoil of freedom disturbs their welfare, before they discover how freedom itself serves to promote it. if the slightest rumor of public commotion intrudes into the petty pleasures of private life, they are aroused and alarmed by it. the fear of anarchy perpetually haunts them, and they are always ready to fling away their freedom at the first disturbance. i readily admit that public tranquillity is a great good; but at the same time i cannot forget that all nations have been enslaved by being kept in good order. certainly it is not to be inferred that nations ought to despise public tranquillity; but that state ought not to content them. a nation which asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart--the slave of its own well-being, awaiting but the hand that will bind it. by such a nation the despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual. when the bulk of the community is engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. at such times it is not rare to see upon the great stage of the world, as we see at our theatres, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone are in action whilst all are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice; they change the laws, and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country; and then men wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall. hitherto the americans have fortunately escaped all the perils which i have just pointed out; and in this respect they are really deserving of admiration. perhaps there is no country in the world where fewer idle men are to be met with than in america, or where all who work are more eager to promote their own welfare. but if the passion of the americans for physical gratifications is vehement, at least it is not indiscriminating; and reason, though unable to restrain it, still directs its course. an american attends to his private concerns as if he were alone in the world, and the next minute he gives himself up to the common weal as if he had forgotten them. at one time he seems animated by the most selfish cupidity, at another by the most lively patriotism. the human heart cannot be thus divided. the inhabitants of the united states alternately display so strong and so similar a passion for their own welfare and for their freedom, that it may be supposed that these passions are united and mingled in some part of their character. and indeed the americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard of their welfare: they are attached to the one by the other. they by no means think that they are not called upon to take a part in the public weal; they believe, on the contrary, that their chief business is to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet, and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions which they have acquired. chapter xv: that religious belief sometimes turns the thoughts of the americans to immaterial pleasures in the united states, on the seventh day of every week, the trading and working life of the nation seems suspended; all noises cease; a deep tranquillity, say rather the solemn calm of meditation, succeeds the turmoil of the week, and the soul resumes possession and contemplation of itself. upon this day the marts of traffic are deserted; every member of the community, accompanied by his children, goes to church, where he listens to strange language which would seem unsuited to his ear. he is told of the countless evils caused by pride and covetousness: he is reminded of the necessity of checking his desires, of the finer pleasures which belong to virtue alone, and of the true happiness which attends it. on his return home, he does not turn to the ledgers of his calling, but he opens the book of holy scripture; there he meets with sublime or affecting descriptions of the greatness and goodness of the creator, of the infinite magnificence of the handiwork of god, of the lofty destinies of man, of his duties, and of his immortal privileges. thus it is that the american at times steals an hour from himself; and laying aside for a while the petty passions which agitate his life, and the ephemeral interests which engross it, he strays at once into an ideal world, where all is great, eternal, and pure. i have endeavored to point out in another part of this work the causes to which the maintenance of the political institutions of the americans is attributable; and religion appeared to be one of the most prominent amongst them. i am now treating of the americans in an individual capacity, and i again observe that religion is not less useful to each citizen than to the whole state. the americans show, by their practice, that they feel the high necessity of imparting morality to democratic communities by means of religion. what they think of themselves in this respect is a truth of which every democratic nation ought to be thoroughly persuaded. i do not doubt that the social and political constitution of a people predisposes them to adopt a certain belief and certain tastes, which afterwards flourish without difficulty amongst them; whilst the same causes may divert a people from certain opinions and propensities, without any voluntary effort, and, as it were, without any distinct consciousness, on their part. the whole art of the legislator is correctly to discern beforehand these natural inclinations of communities of men, in order to know whether they should be assisted, or whether it may not be necessary to check them. for the duties incumbent on the legislator differ at different times; the goal towards which the human race ought ever to be tending is alone stationary; the means of reaching it are perpetually to be varied. if i had been born in an aristocratic age, in the midst of a nation where the hereditary wealth of some, and the irremediable penury of others, should equally divert men from the idea of bettering their condition, and hold the soul as it were in a state of torpor fixed on the contemplation of another world, i should then wish that it were possible for me to rouse that people to a sense of their wants; i should seek to discover more rapid and more easy means for satisfying the fresh desires which i might have awakened; and, directing the most strenuous efforts of the human mind to physical pursuits, i should endeavor to stimulate it to promote the well-being of man. if it happened that some men were immoderately incited to the pursuit of riches, and displayed an excessive liking for physical gratifications, i should not be alarmed; these peculiar symptoms would soon be absorbed in the general aspect of the people. the attention of the legislators of democracies is called to other cares. give democratic nations education and freedom, and leave them alone. they will soon learn to draw from this world all the benefits which it can afford; they will improve each of the useful arts, and will day by day render life more comfortable, more convenient, and more easy. their social condition naturally urges them in this direction; i do not fear that they will slacken their course. but whilst man takes delight in this honest and lawful pursuit of his wellbeing, it is to be apprehended that he may in the end lose the use of his sublimest faculties; and that whilst he is busied in improving all around him, he may at length degrade himself. here, and here only, does the peril lie. it should therefore be the unceasing object of the legislators of democracies, and of all the virtuous and enlightened men who live there, to raise the souls of their fellow-citizens, and keep them lifted up towards heaven. it is necessary that all who feel an interest in the future destinies of democratic society should unite, and that all should make joint and continual efforts to diffuse the love of the infinite, a sense of greatness, and a love of pleasures not of earth. if amongst the opinions of a democratic people any of those pernicious theories exist which tend to inculcate that all perishes with the body, let men by whom such theories are professed be marked as the natural foes of such a people. the materialists are offensive to me in many respects; their doctrines i hold to be pernicious, and i am disgusted at their arrogance. if their system could be of any utility to man, it would seem to be by giving him a modest opinion of himself. but these reasoners show that it is not so; and when they think they have said enough to establish that they are brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated that they are gods. materialism is, amongst all nations, a dangerous disease of the human mind; but it is more especially to be dreaded amongst a democratic people, because it readily amalgamates with that vice which is most familiar to the heart under such circumstances. democracy encourages a taste for physical gratification: this taste, if it become excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in turn, hurries them back with mad impatience to these same delights: such is the fatal circle within which democratic nations are driven round. it were well that they should see the danger and hold back. most religions are only general, simple, and practical means of teaching men the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. that is the greatest benefit which a democratic people derives, from its belief, and hence belief is more necessary to such a people than to all others. when therefore any religion has struck its roots deep into a democracy, beware lest you disturb them; but rather watch it carefully, as the most precious bequest of aristocratic ages. seek not to supersede the old religious opinions of men by new ones; lest in the passage from one faith to another, the soul being left for a while stripped of all belief, the love of physical gratifications should grow upon it and fill it wholly. the doctrine of metempsychosis is assuredly not more rational than that of materialism; nevertheless if it were absolutely necessary that a democracy should choose one of the two, i should not hesitate to decide that the community would run less risk of being brutalized by believing that the soul of man will pass into the carcass of a hog, than by believing that the soul of man is nothing at all. the belief in a supersensual and immortal principle, united for a time to matter, is so indispensable to man's greatness, that its effects are striking even when it is not united to the doctrine of future reward and punishment; and when it holds no more than that after death the divine principle contained in man is absorbed in the deity, or transferred to animate the frame of some other creature. men holding so imperfect a belief will still consider the body as the secondary and inferior portion of their nature, and they will despise it even whilst they yield to its influence; whereas they have a natural esteem and secret admiration for the immaterial part of man, even though they sometimes refuse to submit to its dominion. that is enough to give a lofty cast to their opinions and their tastes, and to bid them tend with no interested motive, and as it were by impulse, to pure feelings and elevated thoughts. it is not certain that socrates and his followers had very fixed opinions as to what would befall man hereafter; but the sole point of belief on which they were determined--that the soul has nothing in common with the body, and survives it--was enough to give the platonic philosophy that sublime aspiration by which it is distinguished. it is clear from the works of plato, that many philosophical writers, his predecessors or contemporaries, professed materialism. these writers have not reached us, or have reached us in mere fragments. the same thing has happened in almost all ages; the greater part of the most famous minds in literature adhere to the doctrines of a supersensual philosophy. the instinct and the taste of the human race maintain those doctrines; they save them oftentimes in spite of men themselves, and raise the names of their defenders above the tide of time. it must not then be supposed that at any period or under any political condition, the passion for physical gratifications, and the opinions which are superinduced by that passion, can ever content a whole people. the heart of man is of a larger mould: it can at once comprise a taste for the possessions of earth and the love of those of heaven: at times it may seem to cling devotedly to the one, but it will never be long without thinking of the other. if it be easy to see that it is more particularly important in democratic ages that spiritual opinions should prevail, it is not easy to say by what means those who govern democratic nations may make them predominate. i am no believer in the prosperity, any more than in the durability, of official philosophies; and as to state religions, i have always held, that if they be sometimes of momentary service to the interests of political power, they always, sooner or later, become fatal to the church. nor do i think with those who assert, that to raise religion in the eyes of the people, and to make them do honor to her spiritual doctrines, it is desirable indirectly to give her ministers a political influence which the laws deny them. i am so much alive to the almost inevitable dangers which beset religious belief whenever the clergy take part in public affairs, and i am so convinced that christianity must be maintained at any cost in the bosom of modern democracies, that i had rather shut up the priesthood within the sanctuary than allow them to step beyond it. what means then remain in the hands of constituted authorities to bring men back to spiritual opinions, or to hold them fast to the religion by which those opinions are suggested? my answer will do me harm in the eyes of politicians. i believe that the sole effectual means which governments can employ in order to have the doctrine of the immortality of the soul duly respected, is ever to act as if they believed in it themselves; and i think that it is only by scrupulous conformity to religious morality in great affairs that they can hope to teach the community at large to know, to love, and to observe it in the lesser concerns of life. chapter xvi: that excessive care of worldly welfare may impair that welfare there is a closer tie than is commonly supposed between the improvement of the soul and the amelioration of what belongs to the body. man may leave these two things apart, and consider each of them alternately; but he cannot sever them entirely without at last losing sight of one and of the other. the beasts have the same senses as ourselves, and very nearly the same appetites. we have no sensual passions which are not common to our race and theirs, and which are not to be found, at least in the germ, in a dog as well as in a man. whence is it then that the animals can only provide for their first and lowest wants, whereas we can infinitely vary and endlessly increase our enjoyments? we are superior to the beasts in this, that we use our souls to find out those material benefits to which they are only led by instinct. in man, the angel teaches the brute the art of contenting its desires. it is because man is capable of rising above the things of the body, and of contemning life itself, of which the beasts have not the least notion, that he can multiply these same things of the body to a degree which inferior races are equally unable to conceive. whatever elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul, renders it more capable of succeeding in those very undertakings which concern it not. whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it, weakens it for all purposes, the chiefest, as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost equally impotent for the one and for the other. hence the soul must remain great and strong, though it were only to devote its strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the body. if men were ever to content themselves with material objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without improvement. chapter xvii: that in times marked by equality of conditions and sceptical opinions, it is important to remove to a distance the objects of human actions in the ages of faith the final end of life is placed beyond life. the men of those ages therefore naturally, and in a manner involuntarily, accustom themselves to fix their gaze for a long course of years on some immovable object, towards which they are constantly tending; and they learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty passing desires, in order to be the better able to content that great and lasting desire which possesses them. when these same men engage in the affairs of this world, the same habits may be traced in their conduct. they are apt to set up some general and certain aim and end to their actions here below, towards which all their efforts are directed: they do not turn from day to day to chase some novel object of desire, but they have settled designs which they are never weary of pursuing. this explains why religious nations have so often achieved such lasting results: for whilst they were thinking only of the other world, they had found out the great secret of success in this. religions give men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter; and this is one of their chief political characteristics. but in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range of man's sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human actions appeared every day to be more within his reach. when men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind. as soon as they have lost the habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires; and no sooner do they despair of living forever, than they are disposed to act as if they were to exist but for a single day. in sceptical ages it is always therefore to be feared that men may perpetually give way to their daily casual desires; and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may establish nothing great, permanent, and calm. if the social condition of a people, under these circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which i here point out is thereby increased. when everyone is constantly striving to change his position--when an immense field for competition is thrown open to all--when wealth is amassed or dissipated in the shortest possible space of time amidst the turmoil of democracy, visions of sudden and easy fortunes--of great possessions easily won and lost--of chance, under all its forms--haunt the mind. the instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man's desires. in the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the morrow. in those countries in which unhappily irreligion and democracy coexist, the most important duty of philosophers and of those in power is to be always striving to place the objects of human actions far beyond man's immediate range. circumscribed by the character of his country and his age, the moralist must learn to vindicate his principles in that position. he must constantly endeavor to show his contemporaries, that, even in the midst of the perpetual commotion around them, it is easier than they think to conceive and to execute protracted undertakings. he must teach them that, although the aspect of mankind may have changed, the methods by which men may provide for their prosperity in this world are still the same; and that amongst democratic nations, as well as elsewhere, it is only by resisting a thousand petty selfish passions of the hour that the general and unquenchable passion for happiness can be satisfied. the task of those in power is not less clearly marked out. at all times it is important that those who govern nations should act with a view to the future: but this is even more necessary in democratic and sceptical ages than in any others. by acting thus, the leading men of democracies not only make public affairs prosperous, but they also teach private individuals, by their example, the art of managing private concerns. above all they must strive as much as possible to banish chance from the sphere of politics. the sudden and undeserved promotion of a courtier produces only a transient impression in an aristocratic country, because the aggregate institutions and opinions of the nation habitually compel men to advance slowly in tracks which they cannot get out of. but nothing is more pernicious than similar instances of favor exhibited to the eyes of a democratic people: they give the last impulse to the public mind in a direction where everything hurries it onwards. at times of scepticism and equality more especially, the favor of the people or of the prince, which chance may confer or chance withhold, ought never to stand in lieu of attainments or services. it is desirable that every advancement should there appear to be the result of some effort; so that no greatness should be of too easy acquirement, and that ambition should be obliged to fix its gaze long upon an object before it is gratified. governments must apply themselves to restore to men that love of the future with which religion and the state of society no longer inspire them; and, without saying so, they must practically teach the community day by day that wealth, fame, and power are the rewards of labor--that great success stands at the utmost range of long desires, and that nothing lasting is obtained but what is obtained by toil. when men have accustomed themselves to foresee from afar what is likely to befall in the world and to feed upon hopes, they can hardly confine their minds within the precise circumference of life, and they are ready to break the boundary and cast their looks beyond. i do not doubt that, by training the members of a community to think of their future condition in this world, they would be gradually and unconsciously brought nearer to religious convictions. thus the means which allow men, up to a certain point, to go without religion, are perhaps after all the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back by a long and roundabout path to a state of faith. chapter xviii: that amongst the americans all honest callings are honorable amongst a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living, or has worked, or is born of parents who have worked. the notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence. not only is labor not dishonorable amongst such a people, but it is held in honor: the prejudice is not against it, but in its favor. in the united states a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business. he would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. it is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work, that so many rich americans come to europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, amongst which idleness is still held in honor. equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor in men's estimation, but it raises the notion of labor as a source of profit. in aristocracies it is not exactly labor that is despised, but labor with a view to profit. labor is honorific in itself, when it is undertaken at the sole bidding of ambition or of virtue. yet in aristocratic society it constantly happens that he who works for honor is not insensible to the attractions of profit. but these two desires only intermingle in the innermost depths of his soul: he carefully hides from every eye the point at which they join; he would fain conceal it from himself. in aristocratic countries there are few public officers who do not affect to serve their country without interested motives. their salary is an incident of which they think but little, and of which they always affect not to think at all. thus the notion of profit is kept distinct from that of labor; however they may be united in point of fact, they are not thought of together. in democratic communities these two notions are, on the contrary, always palpably united. as the desire of well-being is universal--as fortunes are slender or fluctuating--as everyone wants either to increase his own resources, or to provide fresh ones for his progeny, men clearly see that it is profit which, if not wholly, at least partially, leads them to work. even those who are principally actuated by the love of fame are necessarily made familiar with the thought that they are not exclusively actuated by that motive; and they discover that the desire of getting a living is mingled in their minds with the desire of making life illustrious. as soon as, on the one hand, labor is held by the whole community to be an honorable necessity of man's condition, and, on the other, as soon as labor is always ostensibly performed, wholly or in part, for the purpose of earning remuneration, the immense interval which separated different callings in aristocratic societies disappears. if all are not alike, all at least have one feature in common. no profession exists in which men do not work for money; and the remuneration which is common to them all gives them all an air of resemblance. this serves to explain the opinions which the americans entertain with respect to different callings. in america no one is degraded because he works, for everyone about him works also; nor is anyone humiliated by the notion of receiving pay, for the president of the united states also works for pay. he is paid for commanding, other men for obeying orders. in the united states professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable. chapter xix: that almost all the americans follow industrial callings agriculture is, perhaps, of all the useful arts that which improves most slowly amongst democratic nations. frequently, indeed, it would seem to be stationary, because other arts are making rapid strides towards perfection. on the other hand, almost all the tastes and habits which the equality of condition engenders naturally lead men to commercial and industrial occupations. suppose an active, enlightened, and free man, enjoying a competency, but full of desires: he is too poor to live in idleness; he is rich enough to feel himself protected from the immediate fear of want, and he thinks how he can better his condition. this man has conceived a taste for physical gratifications, which thousands of his fellow-men indulge in around him; he has himself begun to enjoy these pleasures, and he is eager to increase his means of satisfying these tastes more completely. but life is slipping away, time is urgent--to what is he to turn? the cultivation of the ground promises an almost certain result to his exertions, but a slow one; men are not enriched by it without patience and toil. agriculture is therefore only suited to those who have already large, superfluous wealth, or to those whose penury bids them only seek a bare subsistence. the choice of such a man as we have supposed is soon made; he sells his plot of ground, leaves his dwelling, and embarks in some hazardous but lucrative calling. democratic communities abound in men of this kind; and in proportion as the equality of conditions becomes greater, their multitude increases. thus democracy not only swells the number of workingmen, but it leads men to prefer one kind of labor to another; and whilst it diverts them from agriculture, it encourages their taste for commerce and manufactures. *a [footnote a: it has often been remarked that manufacturers and mercantile men are inordinately addicted to physical gratifications, and this has been attributed to commerce and manufactures; but that is, i apprehend, to take the effect for the cause. the taste for physical gratifications is not imparted to men by commerce or manufactures, but it is rather this taste which leads men to embark in commerce and manufactures, as a means by which they hope to satisfy themselves more promptly and more completely. if commerce and manufactures increase the desire of well-being, it is because every passion gathers strength in proportion as it is cultivated, and is increased by all the efforts made to satiate it. all the causes which make the love of worldly welfare predominate in the heart of man are favorable to the growth of commerce and manufactures. equality of conditions is one of those causes; it encourages trade, not directly by giving men a taste for business, but indirectly by strengthening and expanding in their minds a taste for prosperity.] this spirit may be observed even amongst the richest members of the community. in democratic countries, however opulent a man is supposed to be, he is almost always discontented with his fortune, because he finds that he is less rich than his father was, and he fears that his sons will be less rich than himself. most rich men in democracies are therefore constantly haunted by the desire of obtaining wealth, and they naturally turn their attention to trade and manufactures, which appear to offer the readiest and most powerful means of success. in this respect they share the instincts of the poor, without feeling the same necessities; say rather, they feel the most imperious of all necessities, that of not sinking in the world. in aristocracies the rich are at the same time those who govern. the attention which they unceasingly devote to important public affairs diverts them from the lesser cares which trade and manufactures demand. if the will of an individual happens, nevertheless, to turn his attention to business, the will of the body to which he belongs will immediately debar him from pursuing it; for however men may declaim against the rule of numbers, they cannot wholly escape their sway; and even amongst those aristocratic bodies which most obstinately refuse to acknowledge the rights of the majority of the nation, a private majority is formed which governs the rest. *b [footnote b: some aristocracies, however, have devoted themselves eagerly to commerce, and have cultivated manufactures with success. the history of the world might furnish several conspicuous examples. but, generally speaking, it may be affirmed that the aristocratic principle is not favorable to the growth of trade and manufactures. moneyed aristocracies are the only exception to the rule. amongst such aristocracies there are hardly any desires which do not require wealth to satisfy them; the love of riches becomes, so to speak, the high road of human passions, which is crossed by or connected with all lesser tracks. the love of money and the thirst for that distinction which attaches to power, are then so closely intermixed in the same souls, that it becomes difficult to discover whether men grow covetous from ambition, or whether they are ambitious from covetousness. this is the case in england, where men seek to get rich in order to arrive at distinction, and seek distinctions as a manifestation of their wealth. the mind is then seized by both ends, and hurried into trade and manufactures, which are the shortest roads that lead to opulence. this, however, strikes me as an exceptional and transitory circumstance. when wealth is become the only symbol of aristocracy, it is very difficult for the wealthy to maintain sole possession of political power, to the exclusion of all other men. the aristocracy of birth and pure democracy are at the two extremes of the social and political state of nations: between them moneyed aristocracy finds its place. the latter approximates to the aristocracy of birth by conferring great privileges on a small number of persons; it so far belongs to the democratic element, that these privileges may be successively acquired by all. it frequently forms a natural transition between these two conditions of society, and it is difficult to say whether it closes the reign of aristocratic institutions, or whether it already opens the new era of democracy.] in democratic countries, where money does not lead those who possess it to political power, but often removes them from it, the rich do not know how to spend their leisure. they are driven into active life by the inquietude and the greatness of their desires, by the extent of their resources, and by the taste for what is extraordinary, which is almost always felt by those who rise, by whatsoever means, above the crowd. trade is the only road open to them. in democracies nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it. neither their own prejudices, nor those of anybody else, can prevent the rich from devoting themselves to it. the wealthy members of democracies never form a body which has manners and regulations of its own; the opinions peculiar to their class do not restrain them, and the common opinions of their country urge them on. moreover, as all the large fortunes which are to be met with in a democratic community are of commercial growth, many generations must succeed each other before their possessors can have entirely laid aside their habits of business. circumscribed within the narrow space which politics leave them, rich men in democracies eagerly embark in commercial enterprise: there they can extend and employ their natural advantages; and indeed it is even by the boldness and the magnitude of their industrial speculations that we may measure the slight esteem in which productive industry would have been held by them, if they had been born amidst an aristocracy. a similar observation is likewise applicable to all men living in democracies, whether they be poor or rich. those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the phantom of chance; and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part. they are therefore all led to engage in commerce, not only for the sake of the profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pursuit. the united states of america have only been emancipated for half a century [in ] from the state of colonial dependence in which they stood to great britain; the number of large fortunes there is small, and capital is still scarce. yet no people in the world has made such rapid progress in trade and manufactures as the americans: they constitute at the present day the second maritime nation in the world; and although their manufactures have to struggle with almost insurmountable natural impediments, they are not prevented from making great and daily advances. in the united states the greatest undertakings and speculations are executed without difficulty, because the whole population is engaged in productive industry, and because the poorest as well as the most opulent members of the commonwealth are ready to combine their efforts for these purposes. the consequence is, that a stranger is constantly amazed by the immense public works executed by a nation which contains, so to speak, no rich men. the americans arrived but as yesterday on the territory which they inhabit, and they have already changed the whole order of nature for their own advantage. they have joined the hudson to the mississippi, and made the atlantic ocean communicate with the gulf of mexico, across a continent of more than five hundred leagues in extent which separates the two seas. the longest railroads which have been constructed up to the present time are in america. but what most astonishes me in the united states, is not so much the marvellous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones. almost all the farmers of the united states combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade. it seldom happens that an american farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the far west he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it: he builds a farmhouse on the speculation that, as the state of the country will soon be changed by the increase of population, a good price will be gotten for it. every year a swarm of the inhabitants of the north arrive in the southern states, and settle in the parts where the cotton plant and the sugar-cane grow. these men cultivate the soil in order to make it produce in a few years enough to enrich them; and they already look forward to the time when they may return home to enjoy the competency thus acquired. thus the americans carry their business-like qualities into agriculture; and their trading passions are displayed in that as in their other pursuits. the americans make immense progress in productive industry, because they all devote themselves to it at once; and for this same reason they are exposed to very unexpected and formidable embarrassments. as they are all engaged in commerce, their commercial affairs are affected by such various and complex causes that it is impossible to foresee what difficulties may arise. as they are all more or less engaged in productive industry, at the least shock given to business all private fortunes are put in jeopardy at the same time, and the state is shaken. i believe that the return of these commercial panics is an endemic disease of the democratic nations of our age. it may be rendered less dangerous, but it cannot be cured; because it does not originate in accidental circumstances, but in the temperament of these nations. chapter xx: that aristocracy may be engendered by manufactures i have shown that democracy is favorable to the growth of manufactures, and that it increases without limit the numbers of the manufacturing classes: we shall now see by what side road manufacturers may possibly in their turn bring men back to aristocracy. it is acknowledged that when a workman is engaged every day upon the same detail, the whole commodity is produced with greater ease, promptitude, and economy. it is likewise acknowledged that the cost of the production of manufactured goods is diminished by the extent of the establishment in which they are made, and by the amount of capital employed or of credit. these truths had long been imperfectly discerned, but in our time they have been demonstrated. they have been already applied to many very important kinds of manufactures, and the humblest will gradually be governed by them. i know of nothing in politics which deserves to fix the attention of the legislator more closely than these two new axioms of the science of manufactures. when a workman is unceasingly and exclusively engaged in the fabrication of one thing, he ultimately does his work with singular dexterity; but at the same time he loses the general faculty of applying his mind to the direction of the work. he every day becomes more adroit and less industrious; so that it may be said of him, that in proportion as the workman improves the man is degraded. what can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life in making heads for pins? and to what can that mighty human intelligence, which has so often stirred the world, be applied in him, except it be to investigate the best method of making pins' heads? when a workman has spent a considerable portion of his existence in this manner, his thoughts are forever set upon the object of his daily toil; his body has contracted certain fixed habits, which it can never shake off: in a word, he no longer belongs to himself, but to the calling which he has chosen. it is in vain that laws and manners have been at the pains to level all barriers round such a man, and to open to him on every side a thousand different paths to fortune; a theory of manufactures more powerful than manners and laws binds him to a craft, and frequently to a spot, which he cannot leave: it assigns to him a certain place in society, beyond which he cannot go: in the midst of universal movement it has rendered him stationary. in proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent. the art advances, the artisan recedes. on the other hand, in proportion as it becomes more manifest that the productions of manufactures are by so much the cheaper and better as the manufacture is larger and the amount of capital employed more considerable, wealthy and educated men come forward to embark in manufactures which were heretofore abandoned to poor or ignorant handicraftsmen. the magnitude of the efforts required, and the importance of the results to be obtained, attract them. thus at the very time at which the science of manufactures lowers the class of workmen, it raises the class of masters. whereas the workman concentrates his faculties more and more upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys a more extensive whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in proportion as that of the former is narrowed. in a short time the one will require nothing but physical strength without intelligence; the other stands in need of science, and almost of genius, to insure success. this man resembles more and more the administrator of a vast empire--that man, a brute. the master and the workman have then here no similarity, and their differences increase every day. they are only connected as the two rings at the extremities of a long chain. each of them fills the station which is made for him, and out of which he does not get: the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the other, and seems as much born to obey as that other is to command. what is this but aristocracy? as the conditions of men constituting the nation become more and more equal, the demand for manufactured commodities becomes more general and more extensive; and the cheapness which places these objects within the reach of slender fortunes becomes a great element of success. hence there are every day more men of great opulence and education who devote their wealth and knowledge to manufactures; and who seek, by opening large establishments, and by a strict division of labor, to meet the fresh demands which are made on all sides. thus, in proportion as the mass of the nation turns to democracy, that particular class which is engaged in manufactures becomes more aristocratic. men grow more alike in the one--more different in the other; and inequality increases in the less numerous class in the same ratio in which it decreases in the community. hence it would appear, on searching to the bottom, that aristocracy should naturally spring out of the bosom of democracy. but this kind of aristocracy by no means resembles those kinds which preceded it. it will be observed at once, that as it applies exclusively to manufactures and to some manufacturing callings, it is a monstrous exception in the general aspect of society. the small aristocratic societies which are formed by some manufacturers in the midst of the immense democracy of our age, contain, like the great aristocratic societies of former ages, some men who are very opulent, and a multitude who are wretchedly poor. the poor have few means of escaping from their condition and becoming rich; but the rich are constantly becoming poor, or they give up business when they have realized a fortune. thus the elements of which the class of the poor is composed are fixed; but the elements of which the class of the rich is composed are not so. to say the truth, though there are rich men, the class of rich men does not exist; for these rich individuals have no feelings or purposes in common, no mutual traditions or mutual hopes; there are therefore members, but no body. not only are the rich not compactly united amongst themselves, but there is no real bond between them and the poor. their relative position is not a permanent one; they are constantly drawn together or separated by their interests. the workman is generally dependent on the master, but not on any particular master; these two men meet in the factory, but know not each other elsewhere; and whilst they come into contact on one point, they stand very wide apart on all others. the manufacturer asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages. the one contracts no obligation to protect, nor the other to defend; and they are not permanently connected either by habit or by duty. the aristocracy created by business rarely settles in the midst of the manufacturing population which it directs; the object is not to govern that population, but to use it. an aristocracy thus constituted can have no great hold upon those whom it employs; and even if it succeed in retaining them at one moment, they escape the next; it knows not how to will, and it cannot act. the territorial aristocracy of former ages was either bound by law, or thought itself bound by usage, to come to the relief of its serving-men, and to succor their distresses. but the manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public. this is a natural consequence of what has been said before. between the workmen and the master there are frequent relations, but no real partnership. i am of opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in the world; but at the same time it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. nevertheless the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the channel by which they will enter. book three: influence of democracy on manners, properly so called chapter i: that manners are softened as social conditions become more equal we perceive that for several ages social conditions have tended to equality, and we discover that in the course of the same period the manners of society have been softened. are these two things merely contemporaneous, or does any secret link exist between them, so that the one cannot go on without making the other advance? several causes may concur to render the manners of a people less rude; but, of all these causes, the most powerful appears to me to be the equality of conditions. equality of conditions and growing civility in manners are, then, in my eyes, not only contemporaneous occurrences, but correlative facts. when the fabulists seek to interest us in the actions of beasts, they invest them with human notions and passions; the poets who sing of spirits and angels do the same; there is no wretchedness so deep, nor any happiness so pure, as to fill the human mind and touch the heart, unless we are ourselves held up to our own eyes under other features. this is strictly applicable to the subject upon which we are at present engaged. when all men are irrevocably marshalled in an aristocratic community, according to their professions, their property, and their birth, the members of each class, considering themselves as children of the same family, cherish a constant and lively sympathy towards each other, which can never be felt in an equal degree by the citizens of a democracy. but the same feeling does not exist between the several classes towards each other. amongst an aristocratic people each caste has its own opinions, feelings, rights, manners, and modes of living. thus the men of whom each caste is composed do not resemble the mass of their fellow-citizens; they do not think or feel in the same manner, and they scarcely believe that they belong to the same human race. they cannot, therefore, thoroughly understand what others feel, nor judge of others by themselves. yet they are sometimes eager to lend each other mutual aid; but this is not contrary to my previous observation. these aristocratic institutions, which made the beings of one and the same race so different, nevertheless bound them to each other by close political ties. although the serf had no natural interest in the fate of nobles, he did not the less think himself obliged to devote his person to the service of that noble who happened to be his lord; and although the noble held himself to be of a different nature from that of his serfs, he nevertheless held that his duty and his honor constrained him to defend, at the risk of his own life, those who dwelt upon his domains. it is evident that these mutual obligations did not originate in the law of nature, but in the law of society; and that the claim of social duty was more stringent than that of mere humanity. these services were not supposed to be due from man to man, but to the vassal or to the lord. feudal institutions awakened a lively sympathy for the sufferings of certain men, but none at all for the miseries of mankind. they infused generosity rather than mildness into the manners of the time, and although they prompted men to great acts of self-devotion, they engendered no real sympathies; for real sympathies can only exist between those who are alike; and in aristocratic ages men acknowledge none but the members of their own caste to be like themselves. when the chroniclers of the middle ages, who all belonged to the aristocracy by birth or education, relate the tragical end of a noble, their grief flows apace; whereas they tell you at a breath, and without wincing, of massacres and tortures inflicted on the common sort of people. not that these writers felt habitual hatred or systematic disdain for the people; war between the several classes of the community was not yet declared. they were impelled by an instinct rather than by a passion; as they had formed no clear notion of a poor man's sufferings, they cared but little for his fate. the same feelings animated the lower orders whenever the feudal tie was broken. the same ages which witnessed so many heroic acts of self-devotion on the part of vassals for their lords, were stained with atrocious barbarities, exercised from time to time by the lower classes on the higher. it must not be supposed that this mutual insensibility arose solely from the absence of public order and education; for traces of it are to be found in the following centuries, which became tranquil and enlightened whilst they remained aristocratic. in the lower classes in brittany revolted at the imposition of a new tax. these disturbances were put down with unexampled atrocity. observe the language in which madame de sevigne, a witness of these horrors, relates them to her daughter:-- "aux rochers, octobre, . "mon dieu, ma fille, que votre lettre d'aix est plaisante! au moins relisez vos lettres avant que de les envoyer; laissez-vous surpendre a leur agrement, et consolez-vous par ce plaisir de la peine que vous avez d'en tant ecrire. vous avez donc baise toute la provence? il n'y aurait pas satisfaction a baiser toute la bretagne, a moins qu'on n'aimat a sentir le vin. . . . voulez-vous savoir des nouvelles de rennes? on a fait une taxe de cent mille ecus sur le bourgeois; et si on ne trouve point cette somme dans vingt-quatre heures, elle sera doublee et exigible par les soldats. on a chasse et banni toute une grand rue, et defendu de les recueillir sous peine de la vie; de sorte qu'on voyait tous ces miserables, veillards, femmes accouchees, enfans, errer en pleurs au sortir de cette ville sans savoir ou aller. on roua avant-hier un violon, qui avait commence la danse et la pillerie du papier timbre; il a ete ecartele apres sa mort, et ses quatre quartiers exposes aux quatre coins de la ville. on a pris soixante bourgeois, et on commence demain les punitions. cette province est un bel exemple pour les autres, et surtout de respecter les gouverneurs et les gouvernantes, et de ne point jeter de pierres dans leur jardin." *a [footnote a: to feel the point of this joke the reader should recollect that madame de grignan was gouvernante de provence.] "madame de tarente etait hier dans ces bois par un temps enchante: il n'est question ni de chambre ni de collation; elle entre par la barriere et s'en retourne de meme. . . ." in another letter she adds:-- "vous me parlez bien plaisamment de nos miseres; nous ne sommes plus si roues; un en huit jours, pour entretenir la justice. il est vrai que la penderie me parait maintenant un refraichissement. j'ai une tout autre idee de la justice, depuis que je suis en ce pays. vos galeriens me paraissent une societe d'honnetes gens qui se sont retires du monde pour mener une vie douce." it would be a mistake to suppose that madame de sevigne, who wrote these lines, was a selfish or cruel person; she was passionately attached to her children, and very ready to sympathize in the sorrows of her friends; nay, her letters show that she treated her vassals and servants with kindness and indulgence. but madame de sevigne had no clear notion of suffering in anyone who was not a person of quality. in our time the harshest man writing to the most insensible person of his acquaintance would not venture wantonly to indulge in the cruel jocularity which i have quoted; and even if his own manners allowed him to do so, the manners of society at large would forbid it. whence does this arise? have we more sensibility than our forefathers? i know not that we have; but i am sure that our insensibility is extended to a far greater range of objects. when all the ranks of a community are nearly equal, as all men think and feel in nearly the same manner, each of them may judge in a moment of the sensations of all the others; he casts a rapid glance upon himself, and that is enough. there is no wretchedness into which he cannot readily enter, and a secret instinct reveals to him its extent. it signifies not that strangers or foes be the sufferers; imagination puts him in their place; something like a personal feeling is mingled with his pity, and makes himself suffer whilst the body of his fellow-creature is in torture. in democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for one another; but they display general compassion for the members of the human race. they inflict no useless ills; and they are happy to relieve the griefs of others, when they can do so without much hurting themselves; they are not disinterested, but they are humane. although the americans have, in a manner, reduced egotism to a social and philosophical theory, they are nevertheless extremely open to compassion. in no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the united states. whilst the english seem disposed carefully to retain the bloody traces of the dark ages in their penal legislation, the americans have almost expunged capital punishment from their codes. north america is, i think, the only one country upon earth in which the life of no one citizen has been taken for a political offence in the course of the last fifty years. the circumstance which conclusively shows that this singular mildness of the americans arises chiefly from their social condition, is the manner in which they treat their slaves. perhaps there is not, upon the whole, a single european colony in the new world in which the physical condition of the blacks is less severe than in the united states; yet the slaves still endure horrid sufferings there, and are constantly exposed to barbarous punishments. it is easy to perceive that the lot of these unhappy beings inspires their masters with but little compassion, and that they look upon slavery, not only as an institution which is profitable to them, but as an evil which does not affect them. thus the same man who is full of humanity towards his fellow-creatures when they are at the same time his equals, becomes insensible to their afflictions as soon as that equality ceases. his mildness should therefore be attributed to the equality of conditions, rather than to civilization and education. what i have here remarked of individuals is, to a certain extent, applicable to nations. when each nation has its distinct opinions, belief, laws, and customs, it looks upon itself as the whole of mankind, and is moved by no sorrows but its own. should war break out between two nations animated by this feeling, it is sure to be waged with great cruelty. at the time of their highest culture, the romans slaughtered the generals of their enemies, after having dragged them in triumph behind a car; and they flung their prisoners to the beasts of the circus for the amusement of the people. cicero, who declaimed so vehemently at the notion of crucifying a roman citizen, had not a word to say against these horrible abuses of victory. it is evident that in his eyes a barbarian did not belong to the same human race as a roman. on the contrary, in proportion as nations become more like each other, they become reciprocally more compassionate, and the law of nations is mitigated. chapter ii: that democracy renders the habitual intercourse of the americans simple and easy democracy does not attach men strongly to each other; but it places their habitual intercourse upon an easier footing. if two englishmen chance to meet at the antipodes, where they are surrounded by strangers whose language and manners are almost unknown to them, they will first stare at each other with much curiosity and a kind of secret uneasiness; they will then turn away, or, if one accosts the other, they will take care only to converse with a constrained and absent air upon very unimportant subjects. yet there is no enmity between these men; they have never seen each other before, and each believes the other to be a respectable person. why then should they stand so cautiously apart? we must go back to england to learn the reason. when it is birth alone, independent of wealth, which classes men in society, everyone knows exactly what his own position is upon the social scale; he does not seek to rise, he does not fear to sink. in a community thus organized, men of different castes communicate very little with each other; but if accident brings them together, they are ready to converse without hoping or fearing to lose their own position. their intercourse is not upon a footing of equality, but it is not constrained. when moneyed aristocracy succeeds to aristocracy of birth, the case is altered. the privileges of some are still extremely great, but the possibility of acquiring those privileges is open to all: whence it follows that those who possess them are constantly haunted by the apprehension of losing them, or of other men's sharing them; those who do not yet enjoy them long to possess them at any cost, or, if they fail to appear at least to possess them--which is not impossible. as the social importance of men is no longer ostensibly and permanently fixed by blood, and is infinitely varied by wealth, ranks still exist, but it is not easy clearly to distinguish at a glance those who respectively belong to them. secret hostilities then arise in the community; one set of men endeavor by innumerable artifices to penetrate, or to appear to penetrate, amongst those who are above them; another set are constantly in arms against these usurpers of their rights; or rather the same individual does both at once, and whilst he seeks to raise himself into a higher circle, he is always on the defensive against the intrusion of those below him. such is the condition of england at the present time; and i am of opinion that the peculiarity before adverted to is principally to be attributed to this cause. as aristocratic pride is still extremely great amongst the english, and as the limits of aristocracy are ill-defined, everybody lives in constant dread lest advantage should be taken of his familiarity. unable to judge at once of the social position of those he meets, an englishman prudently avoids all contact with them. men are afraid lest some slight service rendered should draw them into an unsuitable acquaintance; they dread civilities, and they avoid the obtrusive gratitude of a stranger quite as much as his hatred. many people attribute these singular anti-social propensities, and the reserved and taciturn bearing of the english, to purely physical causes. i may admit that there is something of it in their race, but much more of it is attributable to their social condition, as is proved by the contrast of the americans. in america, where the privileges of birth never existed, and where riches confer no peculiar rights on their possessors, men unacquainted with each other are very ready to frequent the same places, and find neither peril nor advantage in the free interchange of their thoughts. if they meet by accident, they neither seek nor avoid intercourse; their manner is therefore natural, frank, and open: it is easy to see that they hardly expect or apprehend anything from each other, and that they do not care to display, any more than to conceal, their position in the world. if their demeanor is often cold and serious, it is never haughty or constrained; and if they do not converse, it is because they are not in a humor to talk, not because they think it their interest to be silent. in a foreign country two americans are at once friends, simply because they are americans. they are repulsed by no prejudice; they are attracted by their common country. for two englishmen the same blood is not enough; they must be brought together by the same rank. the americans remark this unsociable mood of the english as much as the french do, and they are not less astonished by it. yet the americans are connected with england by their origin, their religion, their language, and partially by their manners; they only differ in their social condition. it may therefore be inferred that the reserve of the english proceeds from the constitution of their country much more than from that of its inhabitants. chapter iii: why the americans show so little sensitiveness in their own country, and are so sensitive in europe the temper of the americans is vindictive, like that of all serious and reflecting nations. they hardly ever forget an offence, but it is not easy to offend them; and their resentment is as slow to kindle as it is to abate. in aristocratic communities where a small number of persons manage everything, the outward intercourse of men is subject to settled conventional rules. everyone then thinks he knows exactly what marks of respect or of condescension he ought to display, and none are presumed to be ignorant of the science of etiquette. these usages of the first class in society afterwards serve as a model to all the others; besides which each of the latter lays down a code of its own, to which all its members are bound to conform. thus the rules of politeness form a complex system of legislation, which it is difficult to be perfectly master of, but from which it is dangerous for anyone to deviate; so that men are constantly exposed involuntarily to inflict or to receive bitter affronts. but as the distinctions of rank are obliterated, as men differing in education and in birth meet and mingle in the same places of resort, it is almost impossible to agree upon the rules of good breeding. as its laws are uncertain, to disobey them is not a crime, even in the eyes of those who know what they are; men attach more importance to intentions than to forms, and they grow less civil, but at the same time less quarrelsome. there are many little attentions which an american does not care about; he thinks they are not due to him, or he presumes that they are not known to be due: he therefore either does not perceive a rudeness or he forgives it; his manners become less courteous, and his character more plain and masculine. the mutual indulgence which the americans display, and the manly confidence with which they treat each other, also result from another deeper and more general cause, which i have already adverted to in the preceding chapter. in the united states the distinctions of rank in civil society are slight, in political society they are null; an american, therefore, does not think himself bound to pay particular attentions to any of his fellow-citizens, nor does he require such attentions from them towards himself. as he does not see that it is his interest eagerly to seek the company of any of his countrymen, he is slow to fancy that his own company is declined: despising no one on account of his station, he does not imagine that anyone can despise him for that cause; and until he has clearly perceived an insult, he does not suppose that an affront was intended. the social condition of the americans naturally accustoms them not to take offence in small matters; and, on the other hand, the democratic freedom which they enjoy transfuses this same mildness of temper into the character of the nation. the political institutions of the united states constantly bring citizens of all ranks into contact, and compel them to pursue great undertakings in concert. people thus engaged have scarcely time to attend to the details of etiquette, and they are besides too strongly interested in living harmoniously for them to stick at such things. they therefore soon acquire a habit of considering the feelings and opinions of those whom they meet more than their manners, and they do not allow themselves to be annoyed by trifles. i have often remarked in the united states that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off. i contradict an american at every word he says, to show him that his conversation bores me; he instantly labors with fresh pertinacity to convince me; i preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks i am meditating deeply on the truths which he is uttering; at last i rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. this man will never understand that he wearies me to extinction unless i tell him so: and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life. it appears surprising at first sight that the same man transported to europe suddenly becomes so sensitive and captious, that i often find it as difficult to avoid offending him here as it was to put him out of countenance. these two opposite effects proceed from the same cause. democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their country and of themselves. an american leaves his country with a heart swollen with pride; on arriving in europe he at once finds out that we are not so engrossed by the united states and the great people which inhabits them as he had supposed, and this begins to annoy him. he has been informed that the conditions of society are not equal in our part of the globe, and he observes that among the nations of europe the traces of rank are not wholly obliterated; that wealth and birth still retain some indeterminate privileges, which force themselves upon his notice whilst they elude definition. he is therefore profoundly ignorant of the place which he ought to occupy in this half-ruined scale of classes, which are sufficiently distinct to hate and despise each other, yet sufficiently alike for him to be always confounding them. he is afraid of ranging himself too high--still more is he afraid of being ranged too low; this twofold peril keeps his mind constantly on the stretch, and embarrasses all he says and does. he learns from tradition that in europe ceremonial observances were infinitely varied according to different ranks; this recollection of former times completes his perplexity, and he is the more afraid of not obtaining those marks of respect which are due to him, as he does not exactly know in what they consist. he is like a man surrounded by traps: society is not a recreation for him, but a serious toil: he weighs your least actions, interrogates your looks, and scrutinizes all you say, lest there should be some hidden allusion to affront him. i doubt whether there was ever a provincial man of quality so punctilious in breeding as he is: he endeavors to attend to the slightest rules of etiquette, and does not allow one of them to be waived towards himself: he is full of scruples and at the same time of pretensions; he wishes to do enough, but fears to do too much; and as he does not very well know the limits of the one or of the other, he keeps up a haughty and embarrassed air of reserve. but this is not all: here is yet another double of the human heart. an american is forever talking of the admirable equality which prevails in the united states; aloud he makes it the boast of his country, but in secret he deplores it for himself; and he aspires to show that, for his part, he is an exception to the general state of things which he vaunts. there is hardly an american to be met with who does not claim some remote kindred with the first founders of the colonies; and as for the scions of the noble families of england, america seemed to me to be covered with them. when an opulent american arrives in europe, his first care is to surround himself with all the luxuries of wealth: he is so afraid of being taken for the plain citizen of a democracy, that he adopts a hundred distorted ways of bringing some new instance of his wealth before you every day. his house will be in the most fashionable part of the town: he will always be surrounded by a host of servants. i have heard an american complain, that in the best houses of paris the society was rather mixed; the taste which prevails there was not pure enough for him; and he ventured to hint that, in his opinion, there was a want of elegance of manner; he could not accustom himself to see wit concealed under such unpretending forms. these contrasts ought not to surprise us. if the vestiges of former aristocratic distinctions were not so completely effaced in the united states, the americans would be less simple and less tolerant in their own country--they would require less, and be less fond of borrowed manners in ours. chapter iv: consequences of the three preceding chapters when men feel a natural compassion for their mutual sufferings--when they are brought together by easy and frequent intercourse, and no sensitive feelings keep them asunder--it may readily be supposed that they will lend assistance to one another whenever it is needed. when an american asks for the co-operation of his fellow-citizens it is seldom refused, and i have often seen it afforded spontaneously and with great goodwill. if an accident happens on the highway, everybody hastens to help the sufferer; if some great and sudden calamity befalls a family, the purses of a thousand strangers are at once willingly opened, and small but numerous donations pour in to relieve their distress. it often happens amongst the most civilized nations of the globe, that a poor wretch is as friendless in the midst of a crowd as the savage in his wilds: this is hardly ever the case in the united states. the americans, who are always cold and often coarse in their manners, seldom show insensibility; and if they do not proffer services eagerly, yet they do not refuse to render them. all this is not in contradiction to what i have said before on the subject of individualism. the two things are so far from combating each other, that i can see how they agree. equality of conditions, whilst it makes men feel their independence, shows them their own weakness: they are free, but exposed to a thousand accidents; and experience soon teaches them that, although they do not habitually require the assistance of others, a time almost always comes when they cannot do without it. we constantly see in europe that men of the same profession are ever ready to assist each other; they are all exposed to the same ills, and that is enough to teach them to seek mutual preservatives, however hard-hearted and selfish they may otherwise be. when one of them falls into danger, from which the others may save him by a slight transient sacrifice or a sudden effort, they do not fail to make the attempt. not that they are deeply interested in his fate; for if, by chance, their exertions are unavailing, they immediately forget the object of them, and return to their own business; but a sort of tacit and almost involuntary agreement has been passed between them, by which each one owes to the others a temporary support which he may claim for himself in turn. extend to a people the remark here applied to a class, and you will understand my meaning. a similar covenant exists in fact between all the citizens of a democracy: they all feel themselves subject to the same weakness and the same dangers; and their interest, as well as their sympathy, makes it a rule with them to lend each other mutual assistance when required. the more equal social conditions become, the more do men display this reciprocal disposition to oblige each other. in democracies no great benefits are conferred, but good offices are constantly rendered: a man seldom displays self-devotion, but all men are ready to be of service to one another. chapter v: how democracy affects the relation of masters and servants an american who had travelled for a long time in europe once said to me, "the english treat their servants with a stiffness and imperiousness of manner which surprise us; but on the other hand the french sometimes treat their attendants with a degree of familiarity or of politeness which we cannot conceive. it looks as if they were afraid to give orders: the posture of the superior and the inferior is ill-maintained." the remark was a just one, and i have often made it myself. i have always considered england as the country in the world where, in our time, the bond of domestic service is drawn most tightly, and france as the country where it is most relaxed. nowhere have i seen masters stand so high or so low as in these two countries. between these two extremes the americans are to be placed. such is the fact as it appears upon the surface of things: to discover the causes of that fact, it is necessary to search the matter thoroughly. no communities have ever yet existed in which social conditions have been so equal that there were neither rich nor poor, and consequently neither masters nor servants. democracy does not prevent the existence of these two classes, but it changes their dispositions and modifies their mutual relations. amongst aristocratic nations servants form a distinct class, not more variously composed than that of masters. a settled order is soon established; in the former as well as in the latter class a scale is formed, with numerous distinctions or marked gradations of rank, and generations succeed each other thus without any change of position. these two communities are superposed one above the other, always distinct, but regulated by analogous principles. this aristocratic constitution does not exert a less powerful influence on the notions and manners of servants than on those of masters; and, although the effects are different, the same cause may easily be traced. both classes constitute small communities in the heart of the nation, and certain permanent notions of right and wrong are ultimately engendered amongst them. the different acts of human life are viewed by one particular and unchanging light. in the society of servants, as in that of masters, men exercise a great influence over each other: they acknowledge settled rules, and in the absence of law they are guided by a sort of public opinion: their habits are settled, and their conduct is placed under a certain control. these men, whose destiny is to obey, certainly do not understand fame, virtue, honesty, and honor in the same manner as their masters; but they have a pride, a virtue, and an honesty pertaining to their condition; and they have a notion, if i may use the expression, of a sort of servile honor. *a because a class is mean, it must not be supposed that all who belong to it are mean-hearted; to think so would be a great mistake. however lowly it may be, he who is foremost there, and who has no notion of quitting it, occupies an aristocratic position which inspires him with lofty feelings, pride, and self-respect, that fit him for the higher virtues and actions above the common. amongst aristocratic nations it was by no means rare to find men of noble and vigorous minds in the service of the great, who felt not the servitude they bore, and who submitted to the will of their masters without any fear of their displeasure. but this was hardly ever the case amongst the inferior ranks of domestic servants. it may be imagined that he who occupies the lowest stage of the order of menials stands very low indeed. the french created a word on purpose to designate the servants of the aristocracy--they called them lackeys. this word "lackey" served as the strongest expression, when all others were exhausted, to designate human meanness. under the old french monarchy, to denote by a single expression a low-spirited contemptible fellow, it was usual to say that he had the "soul of a lackey"; the term was enough to convey all that was intended. [footnote a: if the principal opinions by which men are guided are examined closely and in detail, the analogy appears still more striking, and one is surprised to find amongst them, just as much as amongst the haughtiest scions of a feudal race, pride of birth, respect for their ancestry and their descendants, disdain of their inferiors, a dread of contact, a taste for etiquette, precedents, and antiquity.] the permanent inequality of conditions not only gives servants certain peculiar virtues and vices, but it places them in a peculiar relation with respect to their masters. amongst aristocratic nations the poor man is familiarized from his childhood with the notion of being commanded: to whichever side he turns his eyes the graduated structure of society and the aspect of obedience meet his view. hence in those countries the master readily obtains prompt, complete, respectful, and easy obedience from his servants, because they revere in him not only their master but the class of masters. he weighs down their will by the whole weight of the aristocracy. he orders their actions--to a certain extent he even directs their thoughts. in aristocracies the master often exercises, even without being aware of it, an amazing sway over the opinions, the habits, and the manners of those who obey him, and his influence extends even further than his authority. in aristocratic communities there are not only hereditary families of servants as well as of masters, but the same families of servants adhere for several generations to the same families of masters (like two parallel lines which neither meet nor separate); and this considerably modifies the mutual relations of these two classes of persons. thus, although in aristocratic society the master and servant have no natural resemblance--although, on the contrary, they are placed at an immense distance on the scale of human beings by their fortune, education, and opinions--yet time ultimately binds them together. they are connected by a long series of common reminiscences, and however different they may be, they grow alike; whilst in democracies, where they are naturally almost alike, they always remain strangers to each other. amongst an aristocratic people the master gets to look upon his servants as an inferior and secondary part of himself, and he often takes an interest in their lot by a last stretch of egotism. servants, on their part, are not averse to regard themselves in the same light; and they sometimes identify themselves with the person of the master, so that they become an appendage to him in their own eyes as well as in his. in aristocracies a servant fills a subordinate position which he cannot get out of; above him is another man, holding a superior rank which he cannot lose. on one side are obscurity, poverty, obedience for life; on the other, and also for life, fame, wealth, and command. the two conditions are always distinct and always in propinquity; the tie that connects them is as lasting as they are themselves. in this predicament the servant ultimately detaches his notion of interest from his own person; he deserts himself, as it were, or rather he transports himself into the character of his master, and thus assumes an imaginary personality. he complacently invests himself with the wealth of those who command him; he shares their fame, exalts himself by their rank, and feeds his mind with borrowed greatness, to which he attaches more importance than those who fully and really possess it. there is something touching, and at the same time ridiculous, in this strange confusion of two different states of being. these passions of masters, when they pass into the souls of menials, assume the natural dimensions of the place they occupy--they are contracted and lowered. what was pride in the former becomes puerile vanity and paltry ostentation in the latter. the servants of a great man are commonly most punctilious as to the marks of respect due to him, and they attach more importance to his slightest privileges than he does himself. in france a few of these old servants of the aristocracy are still to be met with here and there; they have survived their race, which will soon disappear with them altogether. in the united states i never saw anyone at all like them. the americans are not only unacquainted with the kind of man, but it is hardly possible to make them understand that such ever existed. it is scarcely less difficult for them to conceive it, than for us to form a correct notion of what a slave was amongst the romans, or a serf in the middle ages. all these men were in fact, though in different degrees, results of the same cause: they are all retiring from our sight, and disappearing in the obscurity of the past, together with the social condition to which they owed their origin. equality of conditions turns servants and masters into new beings, and places them in new relative positions. when social conditions are nearly equal, men are constantly changing their situations in life: there is still a class of menials and a class of masters, but these classes are not always composed of the same individuals, still less of the same families; and those who command are not more secure of perpetuity than those who obey. as servants do not form a separate people, they have no habits, prejudices, or manners peculiar to themselves; they are not remarkable for any particular turn of mind or moods of feeling. they know no vices or virtues of their condition, but they partake of the education, the opinions, the feelings, the virtues, and the vices of their contemporaries; and they are honest men or scoundrels in the same way as their masters are. the conditions of servants are not less equal than those of masters. as no marked ranks or fixed subordination are to be found amongst them, they will not display either the meanness or the greatness which characterizes the aristocracy of menials as well as all other aristocracies. i never saw a man in the united states who reminded me of that class of confidential servants of which we still retain a reminiscence in europe, neither did i ever meet with such a thing as a lackey: all traces of the one and of the other have disappeared. in democracies servants are not only equal amongst themselves, but it may be said that they are in some sort the equals of their masters. this requires explanation in order to be rightly understood. at any moment a servant may become a master, and he aspires to rise to that condition: the servant is therefore not a different man from the master. why then has the former a right to command, and what compels the latter to obey?--the free and temporary consent of both their wills. neither of them is by nature inferior to the other; they only become so for a time by covenant. within the terms of this covenant, the one is a servant, the other a master; beyond it they are two citizens of the commonwealth--two men. i beg the reader particularly to observe that this is not only the notion which servants themselves entertain of their own condition; domestic service is looked upon by masters in the same light; and the precise limits of authority and obedience are as clearly settled in the mind of the one as in that of the other. when the greater part of the community have long attained a condition nearly alike, and when equality is an old and acknowledged fact, the public mind, which is never affected by exceptions, assigns certain general limits to the value of man, above or below which no man can long remain placed. it is in vain that wealth and poverty, authority and obedience, accidentally interpose great distances between two men; public opinion, founded upon the usual order of things, draws them to a common level, and creates a species of imaginary equality between them, in spite of the real inequality of their conditions. this all-powerful opinion penetrates at length even into the hearts of those whose interest might arm them to resist it; it affects their judgment whilst it subdues their will. in their inmost convictions the master and the servant no longer perceive any deep-seated difference between them, and they neither hope nor fear to meet with any such at any time. they are therefore neither subject to disdain nor to anger, and they discern in each other neither humility nor pride. the master holds the contract of service to be the only source of his power, and the servant regards it as the only cause of his obedience. they do not quarrel about their reciprocal situations, but each knows his own and keeps it. in the french army the common soldier is taken from nearly the same classes as the officer, and may hold the same commissions; out of the ranks he considers himself entirely equal to his military superiors, and in point of fact he is so; but when under arms he does not hesitate to obey, and his obedience is not the less prompt, precise, and ready, for being voluntary and defined. this example may give a notion of what takes place between masters and servants in democratic communities. it would be preposterous to suppose that those warm and deep-seated affections, which are sometimes kindled in the domestic service of aristocracy, will ever spring up between these two men, or that they will exhibit strong instances of self-sacrifice. in aristocracies masters and servants live apart, and frequently their only intercourse is through a third person; yet they commonly stand firmly by one another. in democratic countries the master and the servant are close together; they are in daily personal contact, but their minds do not intermingle; they have common occupations, hardly ever common interests. amongst such a people the servant always considers himself as a sojourner in the dwelling of his masters. he knew nothing of their forefathers--he will see nothing of their descendants--he has nothing lasting to expect from their hand. why then should he confound his life with theirs, and whence should so strange a surrender of himself proceed? the reciprocal position of the two men is changed--their mutual relations must be so too. i would fain illustrate all these reflections by the example of the americans; but for this purpose the distinctions of persons and places must be accurately traced. in the south of the union, slavery exists; all that i have just said is consequently inapplicable there. in the north, the majority of servants are either freedmen or the children of freedmen; these persons occupy a contested position in the public estimation; by the laws they are brought up to the level of their masters--by the manners of the country they are obstinately detruded from it. they do not themselves clearly know their proper place, and they are almost always either insolent or craven. but in the northern states, especially in new england, there are a certain number of whites, who agree, for wages, to yield a temporary obedience to the will of their fellow-citizens. i have heard that these servants commonly perform the duties of their situation with punctuality and intelligence; and that without thinking themselves naturally inferior to the person who orders them, they submit without reluctance to obey him. they appear to me to carry into service some of those manly habits which independence and equality engender. having once selected a hard way of life, they do not seek to escape from it by indirect means; and they have sufficient respect for themselves, not to refuse to their master that obedience which they have freely promised. on their part, masters require nothing of their servants but the faithful and rigorous performance of the covenant: they do not ask for marks of respect, they do not claim their love or devoted attachment; it is enough that, as servants, they are exact and honest. it would not then be true to assert that, in democratic society, the relation of servants and masters is disorganized: it is organized on another footing; the rule is different, but there is a rule. it is not my purpose to inquire whether the new state of things which i have just described is inferior to that which preceded it, or simply different. enough for me that it is fixed and determined: for what is most important to meet with among men is not any given ordering, but order. but what shall i say of those sad and troubled times at which equality is established in the midst of the tumult of revolution--when democracy, after having been introduced into the state of society, still struggles with difficulty against the prejudices and manners of the country? the laws, and partially public opinion, already declare that no natural or permanent inferiority exists between the servant and the master. but this new belief has not yet reached the innermost convictions of the latter, or rather his heart rejects it; in the secret persuasion of his mind the master thinks that he belongs to a peculiar and superior race; he dares not say so, but he shudders whilst he allows himself to be dragged to the same level. his authority over his servants becomes timid and at the same time harsh: he has already ceased to entertain for them the feelings of patronizing kindness which long uncontested power always engenders, and he is surprised that, being changed himself, his servant changes also. he wants his attendants to form regular and permanent habits, in a condition of domestic service which is only temporary: he requires that they should appear contented with and proud of a servile condition, which they will one day shake off--that they should sacrifice themselves to a man who can neither protect nor ruin them--and in short that they should contract an indissoluble engagement to a being like themselves, and one who will last no longer than they will. amongst aristocratic nations it often happens that the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because they neither know nor imagine any other; and the amazing inequality which is manifest between them and their master appears to be the necessary and unavoidable consequence of some hidden law of providence. in democracies the condition of domestic service does not degrade the character of those who enter upon it, because it is freely chosen, and adopted for a time only; because it is not stigmatized by public opinion, and creates no permanent inequality between the servant and the master. but whilst the transition from one social condition to another is going on, there is almost always a time when men's minds fluctuate between the aristocratic notion of subjection and the democratic notion of obedience. obedience then loses its moral importance in the eyes of him who obeys; he no longer considers it as a species of divine obligation, and he does not yet view it under its purely human aspect; it has to him no character of sanctity or of justice, and he submits to it as to a degrading but profitable condition. at that moment a confused and imperfect phantom of equality haunts the minds of servants; they do not at once perceive whether the equality to which they are entitled is to be found within or without the pale of domestic service; and they rebel in their hearts against a subordination to which they have subjected themselves, and from which they derive actual profit. they consent to serve, and they blush to obey; they like the advantages of service, but not the master; or rather, they are not sure that they ought not themselves to be masters, and they are inclined to consider him who orders them as an unjust usurper of their own rights. then it is that the dwelling of every citizen offers a spectacle somewhat analogous to the gloomy aspect of political society. a secret and intestine warfare is going on there between powers, ever rivals and suspicious of one another: the master is ill-natured and weak, the servant ill-natured and intractable; the one constantly attempts to evade by unfair restrictions his obligation to protect and to remunerate--the other his obligation to obey. the reins of domestic government dangle between them, to be snatched at by one or the other. the lines which divide authority from oppression, liberty from license, and right from might, are to their eyes so jumbled together and confused, that no one knows exactly what he is, or what he may be, or what he ought to be. such a condition is not democracy, but revolution. chapter vi: that democratic institutions and manners tend to raise rents and shorten the terms of leases what has been said of servants and masters is applicable, to a certain extent, to landowners and farming tenants; but this subject deserves to be considered by itself. in america there are, properly speaking, no tenant farmers; every man owns the ground he tills. it must be admitted that democratic laws tend greatly to increase the number of landowners, and to diminish that of farming tenants. yet what takes place in the united states is much less attributable to the institutions of the country than to the country itself. in america land is cheap, and anyone may easily become a landowner; its returns are small, and its produce cannot well be divided between a landowner and a farmer. america therefore stands alone in this as well as in many other respects, and it would be a mistake to take it as an example. i believe that in democratic as well as in aristocratic countries there will be landowners and tenants, but the connection existing between them will be of a different kind. in aristocracies the hire of a farm is paid to the landlord, not only in rent, but in respect, regard, and duty; in democracies the whole is paid in cash. when estates are divided and passed from hand to hand, and the permanent connection which existed between families and the soil is dissolved, the landowner and the tenant are only casually brought into contact. they meet for a moment to settle the conditions of the agreement, and then lose sight of each other; they are two strangers brought together by a common interest, and who keenly talk over a matter of business, the sole object of which is to make money. in proportion as property is subdivided and wealth distributed over the country, the community is filled with people whose former opulence is declining, and with others whose fortunes are of recent growth and whose wants increase more rapidly than their resources. for all such persons the smallest pecuniary profit is a matter of importance, and none of them feel disposed to waive any of their claims, or to lose any portion of their income. as ranks are intermingled, and as very large as well as very scanty fortunes become more rare, every day brings the social condition of the landowner nearer to that of the farmer; the one has not naturally any uncontested superiority over the other; between two men who are equal, and not at ease in their circumstances, the contract of hire is exclusively an affair of money. a man whose estate extends over a whole district, and who owns a hundred farms, is well aware of the importance of gaining at the same time the affections of some thousands of men; this object appears to call for his exertions, and to attain it he will readily make considerable sacrifices. but he who owns a hundred acres is insensible to similar considerations, and he cares but little to win the private regard of his tenant. an aristocracy does not expire like a man in a single day; the aristocratic principle is slowly undermined in men's opinion, before it is attacked in their laws. long before open war is declared against it, the tie which had hitherto united the higher classes to the lower may be seen to be gradually relaxed. indifference and contempt are betrayed by one class, jealousy and hatred by the others; the intercourse between rich and poor becomes less frequent and less kind, and rents are raised. this is not the consequence of a democratic revolution, but its certain harbinger; for an aristocracy which has lost the affections of the people, once and forever, is like a tree dead at the root, which is the more easily torn up by the winds the higher its branches have spread. in the course of the last fifty years the rents of farms have amazingly increased, not only in france but throughout the greater part of europe. the remarkable improvements which have taken place in agriculture and manufactures within the same period do not suffice in my opinion to explain this fact; recourse must be had to another cause more powerful and more concealed. i believe that cause is to be found in the democratic institutions which several european nations have adopted, and in the democratic passions which more or less agitate all the rest. i have frequently heard great english landowners congratulate themselves that, at the present day, they derive a much larger income from their estates than their fathers did. they have perhaps good reasons to be glad; but most assuredly they know not what they are glad of. they think they are making a clear gain, when it is in reality only an exchange; their influence is what they are parting with for cash; and what they gain in money will ere long be lost in power. there is yet another sign by which it is easy to know that a great democratic revolution is going on or approaching. in the middle ages almost all lands were leased for lives, or for very long terms; the domestic economy of that period shows that leases for ninety-nine years were more frequent then than leases for twelve years are now. men then believed that families were immortal; men's conditions seemed settled forever, and the whole of society appeared to be so fixed, that it was not supposed that anything would ever be stirred or shaken in its structure. in ages of equality, the human mind takes a different bent; the prevailing notion is that nothing abides, and man is haunted by the thought of mutability. under this impression the landowner and the tenant himself are instinctively averse to protracted terms of obligation; they are afraid of being tied up to-morrow by the contract which benefits them today. they have vague anticipations of some sudden and unforeseen change in their conditions; they mistrust themselves; they fear lest their taste should change, and lest they should lament that they cannot rid themselves of what they coveted; nor are such fears unfounded, for in democratic ages that which is most fluctuating amidst the fluctuation of all around is the heart of man. chapter vii: influence of democracy on wages most of the remarks which i have already made in speaking of servants and masters, may be applied to masters and workmen. as the gradations of the social scale come to be less observed, whilst the great sink the humble rise, and as poverty as well as opulence ceases to be hereditary, the distance both in reality and in opinion, which heretofore separated the workman from the master, is lessened every day. the workman conceives a more lofty opinion of his rights, of his future, of himself; he is filled with new ambition and with new desires, he is harassed by new wants. every instant he views with longing eyes the profits of his employer; and in order to share them, he strives to dispose of his labor at a higher rate, and he generally succeeds at length in the attempt. in democratic countries, as well as elsewhere, most of the branches of productive industry are carried on at a small cost, by men little removed by their wealth or education above the level of those whom they employ. these manufacturing speculators are extremely numerous; their interests differ; they cannot therefore easily concert or combine their exertions. on the other hand the workmen have almost always some sure resources, which enable them to refuse to work when they cannot get what they conceive to be the fair price of their labor. in the constant struggle for wages which is going on between these two classes, their strength is divided, and success alternates from one to the other. it is even probable that in the end the interest of the working class must prevail; for the high wages which they have already obtained make them every day less dependent on their masters; and as they grow more independent, they have greater facilities for obtaining a further increase of wages. i shall take for example that branch of productive industry which is still at the present day the most generally followed in france, and in almost all the countries of the world--i mean the cultivation of the soil. in france most of those who labor for hire in agriculture, are themselves owners of certain plots of ground, which just enable them to subsist without working for anyone else. when these laborers come to offer their services to a neighboring landowner or farmer, if he refuses them a certain rate of wages, they retire to their own small property and await another opportunity. i think that, upon the whole, it may be asserted that a slow and gradual rise of wages is one of the general laws of democratic communities. in proportion as social conditions become more equal, wages rise; and as wages are higher, social conditions become more equal. but a great and gloomy exception occurs in our own time. i have shown in a preceding chapter that aristocracy, expelled from political society, has taken refuge in certain departments of productive industry, and has established its sway there under another form; this powerfully affects the rate of wages. as a large capital is required to embark in the great manufacturing speculations to which i allude, the number of persons who enter upon them is exceedingly limited: as their number is small, they can easily concert together, and fix the rate of wages as they please. their workmen on the contrary are exceedingly numerous, and the number of them is always increasing; for, from time to time, an extraordinary run of business takes place, during which wages are inordinately high, and they attract the surrounding population to the factories. but, when once men have embraced that line of life, we have already seen that they cannot quit it again, because they soon contract habits of body and mind which unfit them for any other sort of toil. these men have generally but little education and industry, with but few resources; they stand therefore almost at the mercy of the master. when competition, or other fortuitous circumstances, lessen his profits, he can reduce the wages of his workmen almost at pleasure, and make from them what he loses by the chances of business. should the workmen strike, the master, who is a rich man, can very well wait without being ruined until necessity brings them back to him; but they must work day by day or they die, for their only property is in their hands. they have long been impoverished by oppression, and the poorer they become the more easily may they be oppressed: they can never escape from this fatal circle of cause and consequence. it is not then surprising that wages, after having sometimes suddenly risen, are permanently lowered in this branch of industry; whereas in other callings the price of labor, which generally increases but little, is nevertheless constantly augmented. this state of dependence and wretchedness, in which a part of the manufacturing population of our time lives, forms an exception to the general rule, contrary to the state of all the rest of the community; but, for this very reason, no circumstance is more important or more deserving of the especial consideration of the legislator; for when the whole of society is in motion, it is difficult to keep any one class stationary; and when the greater number of men are opening new paths to fortune, it is no less difficult to make the few support in peace their wants and their desires. chapter viii: influence of democracy on kindred i have just examined the changes which the equality of conditions produces in the mutual relations of the several members of the community amongst democratic nations, and amongst the americans in particular. i would now go deeper, and inquire into the closer ties of kindred: my object here is not to seek for new truths, but to show in what manner facts already known are connected with my subject. it has been universally remarked, that in our time the several members of a family stand upon an entirely new footing towards each other; that the distance which formerly separated a father from his sons has been lessened; and that paternal authority, if not destroyed, is at least impaired. something analogous to this, but even more striking, may be observed in the united states. in america the family, in the roman and aristocratic signification of the word, does not exist. all that remains of it are a few vestiges in the first years of childhood, when the father exercises, without opposition, that absolute domestic authority, which the feebleness of his children renders necessary, and which their interest, as well as his own incontestable superiority, warrants. but as soon as the young american approaches manhood, the ties of filial obedience are relaxed day by day: master of his thoughts, he is soon master of his conduct. in america there is, strictly speaking, no adolescence: at the close of boyhood the man appears, and begins to trace out his own path. it would be an error to suppose that this is preceded by a domestic struggle, in which the son has obtained by a sort of moral violence the liberty that his father refused him. the same habits, the same principles which impel the one to assert his independence, predispose the other to consider the use of that independence as an incontestable right. the former does not exhibit any of those rancorous or irregular passions which disturb men long after they have shaken off an established authority; the latter feels none of that bitter and angry regret which is apt to survive a bygone power. the father foresees the limits of his authority long beforehand, and when the time arrives he surrenders it without a struggle: the son looks forward to the exact period at which he will be his own master; and he enters upon his freedom without precipitation and without effort, as a possession which is his own and which no one seeks to wrest from him. *a [footnote a: the americans, however, have not yet thought fit to strip the parent, as has been done in france, of one of the chief elements of parental authority, by depriving him of the power of disposing of his property at his death. in the united states there are no restrictions on the powers of a testator. in this respect, as in almost all others, it is easy to perceive, that if the political legislation of the americans is much more democratic than that of the french, the civil legislation of the latter is infinitely more democratic than that of the former. this may easily be accounted for. the civil legislation of france was the work of a man who saw that it was his interest to satisfy the democratic passions of his contemporaries in all that was not directly and immediately hostile to his own power. he was willing to allow some popular principles to regulate the distribution of property and the government of families, provided they were not to be introduced into the administration of public affairs. whilst the torrent of democracy overwhelmed the civil laws of the country, he hoped to find an easy shelter behind its political institutions. this policy was at once both adroit and selfish; but a compromise of this kind could not last; for in the end political institutions never fail to become the image and expression of civil society; and in this sense it may be said that nothing is more political in a nation than its civil legislation.] it may perhaps not be without utility to show how these changes which take place in family relations, are closely connected with the social and political revolution which is approaching its consummation under our own observation. there are certain great social principles, which a people either introduces everywhere, or tolerates nowhere. in countries which are aristocratically constituted with all the gradations of rank, the government never makes a direct appeal to the mass of the governed: as men are united together, it is enough to lead the foremost, the rest will follow. this is equally applicable to the family, as to all aristocracies which have a head. amongst aristocratic nations, social institutions recognize, in truth, no one in the family but the father; children are received by society at his hands; society governs him, he governs them. thus the parent has not only a natural right, but he acquires a political right, to command them: he is the author and the support of his family; but he is also its constituted ruler. in democracies, where the government picks out every individual singly from the mass, to make him subservient to the general laws of the community, no such intermediate person is required: a father is there, in the eye of the law, only a member of the community, older and richer than his sons. when most of the conditions of life are extremely unequal, and the inequality of these conditions is permanent, the notion of a superior grows upon the imaginations of men: if the law invested him with no privileges, custom and public opinion would concede them. when, on the contrary, men differ but little from each other, and do not always remain in dissimilar conditions of life, the general notion of a superior becomes weaker and less distinct: it is vain for legislation to strive to place him who obeys very much beneath him who commands; the manners of the time bring the two men nearer to one another, and draw them daily towards the same level. although the legislation of an aristocratic people should grant no peculiar privileges to the heads of families; i shall not be the less convinced that their power is more respected and more extensive than in a democracy; for i know that, whatsoever the laws may be, superiors always appear higher and inferiors lower in aristocracies than amongst democratic nations. when men live more for the remembrance of what has been than for the care of what is, and when they are more given to attend to what their ancestors thought than to think themselves, the father is the natural and necessary tie between the past and the present--the link by which the ends of these two chains are connected. in aristocracies, then, the father is not only the civil head of the family, but the oracle of its traditions, the expounder of its customs, the arbiter of its manners. he is listened to with deference, he is addressed with respect, and the love which is felt for him is always tempered with fear. when the condition of society becomes democratic, and men adopt as their general principle that it is good and lawful to judge of all things for one's self, using former points of belief not as a rule of faith but simply as a means of information, the power which the opinions of a father exercise over those of his sons diminishes as well as his legal power. perhaps the subdivision of estates which democracy brings with it contributes more than anything else to change the relations existing between a father and his children. when the property of the father of a family is scanty, his son and himself constantly live in the same place, and share the same occupations: habit and necessity bring them together, and force them to hold constant communication: the inevitable consequence is a sort of familiar intimacy, which renders authority less absolute, and which can ill be reconciled with the external forms of respect. now in democratic countries the class of those who are possessed of small fortunes is precisely that which gives strength to the notions, and a particular direction to the manners, of the community. that class makes its opinions preponderate as universally as its will, and even those who are most inclined to resist its commands are carried away in the end by its example. i have known eager opponents of democracy who allowed their children to address them with perfect colloquial equality. thus, at the same time that the power of aristocracy is declining, the austere, the conventional, and the legal part of parental authority vanishes, and a species of equality prevails around the domestic hearth. i know not, upon the whole, whether society loses by the change, but i am inclined to believe that man individually is a gainer by it. i think that, in proportion as manners and laws become more democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of; confidence and tenderness are oftentimes increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer in proportion as the social bond is loosened. in a democratic family the father exercises no other power than that with which men love to invest the affection and the experience of age; his orders would perhaps be disobeyed, but his advice is for the most part authoritative. though he be not hedged in with ceremonial respect, his sons at least accost him with confidence; no settled form of speech is appropriated to the mode of addressing him, but they speak to him constantly, and are ready to consult him day by day; the master and the constituted ruler have vanished--the father remains. nothing more is needed, in order to judge of the difference between the two states of society in this respect, than to peruse the family correspondence of aristocratic ages. the style is always correct, ceremonious, stiff, and so cold that the natural warmth of the heart can hardly be felt in the language. the language, on the contrary, addressed by a son to his father in democratic countries is always marked by mingled freedom, familiarity and affection, which at once show that new relations have sprung up in the bosom of the family. a similar revolution takes place in the mutual relations of children. in aristocratic families, as well as in aristocratic society, every place is marked out beforehand. not only does the father occupy a separate rank, in which he enjoys extensive privileges, but even the children are not equal amongst themselves. the age and sex of each irrevocably determine his rank, and secure to him certain privileges: most of these distinctions are abolished or diminished by democracy. in aristocratic families the eldest son, inheriting the greater part of the property, and almost all the rights of the family, becomes the chief, and, to a certain extent, the master, of his brothers. greatness and power are for him--for them, mediocrity and dependence. nevertheless it would be wrong to suppose that, amongst aristocratic nations, the privileges of the eldest son are advantageous to himself alone, or that they excite nothing but envy and hatred in those around him. the eldest son commonly endeavors to procure wealth and power for his brothers, because the general splendor of the house is reflected back on him who represents it; the younger sons seek to back the elder brother in all his undertakings, because the greatness and power of the head of the family better enable him to provide for all its branches. the different members of an aristocratic family are therefore very closely bound together; their interests are connected, their minds agree, but their hearts are seldom in harmony. democracy also binds brothers to each other, but by very different means. under democratic laws all the children are perfectly equal, and consequently independent; nothing brings them forcibly together, but nothing keeps them apart; and as they have the same origin, as they are trained under the same roof, as they are treated with the same care, and as no peculiar privilege distinguishes or divides them, the affectionate and youthful intimacy of early years easily springs up between them. scarcely any opportunities occur to break the tie thus formed at the outset of life; for their brotherhood brings them daily together, without embarrassing them. it is not, then, by interest, but by common associations and by the free sympathy of opinion and of taste, that democracy unites brothers to each other. it divides their inheritance, but it allows their hearts and minds to mingle together. such is the charm of these democratic manners, that even the partisans of aristocracy are caught by it; and after having experienced it for some time, they are by no means tempted to revert to the respectful and frigid observance of aristocratic families. they would be glad to retain the domestic habits of democracy, if they might throw off its social conditions and its laws; but these elements are indissolubly united, and it is impossible to enjoy the former without enduring the latter. the remarks i have made on filial love and fraternal affection are applicable to all the passions which emanate spontaneously from human nature itself. if a certain mode of thought or feeling is the result of some peculiar condition of life, when that condition is altered nothing whatever remains of the thought or feeling. thus a law may bind two members of the community very closely to one another; but that law being abolished, they stand asunder. nothing was more strict than the tie which united the vassal to the lord under the feudal system; at the present day the two men know not each other; the fear, the gratitude, and the affection which formerly connected them have vanished, and not a vestige of the tie remains. such, however, is not the case with those feelings which are natural to mankind. whenever a law attempts to tutor these feelings in any particular manner, it seldom fails to weaken them; by attempting to add to their intensity, it robs them of some of their elements, for they are never stronger than when left to themselves. democracy, which destroys or obscures almost all the old conventional rules of society, and which prevents men from readily assenting to new ones, entirely effaces most of the feelings to which these conventional rules have given rise; but it only modifies some others, and frequently imparts to them a degree of energy and sweetness unknown before. perhaps it is not impossible to condense into a single proposition the whole meaning of this chapter, and of several others that preceded it. democracy loosens social ties, but it draws the ties of nature more tight; it brings kindred more closely together, whilst it places the various members of the community more widely apart. chapter ix: education of young women in the united states no free communities ever existed without morals; and, as i observed in the former part of this work, morals are the work of woman. consequently, whatever affects the condition of women, their habits and their opinions, has great political importance in my eyes. amongst almost all protestant nations young women are far more the mistresses of their own actions than they are in catholic countries. this independence is still greater in protestant countries, like england, which have retained or acquired the right of self-government; the spirit of freedom is then infused into the domestic circle by political habits and by religious opinions. in the united states the doctrines of protestantism are combined with great political freedom and a most democratic state of society; and nowhere are young women surrendered so early or so completely to their own guidance. long before an american girl arrives at the age of marriage, her emancipation from maternal control begins; she has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse. the great scene of the world is constantly open to her view; far from seeking concealment, it is every day disclosed to her more completely, and she is taught to survey it with a firm and calm gaze. thus the vices and dangers of society are early revealed to her; as she sees them clearly, she views them without illusions, and braves them without fear; for she is full of reliance on her own strength, and her reliance seems to be shared by all who are about her. an american girl scarcely ever displays that virginal bloom in the midst of young desires, or that innocent and ingenuous grace which usually attends the european woman in the transition from girlhood to youth. it is rarely that an american woman at any age displays childish timidity or ignorance. like the young women of europe, she seeks to please, but she knows precisely the cost of pleasing. if she does not abandon herself to evil, at least she knows that it exists; and she is remarkable rather for purity of manners than for chastity of mind. i have been frequently surprised, and almost frightened, at the singular address and happy boldness with which young women in america contrive to manage their thoughts and their language amidst all the difficulties of stimulating conversation; a philosopher would have stumbled at every step along the narrow path which they trod without accidents and without effort. it is easy indeed to perceive that, even amidst the independence of early youth, an american woman is always mistress of herself; she indulges in all permitted pleasures, without yielding herself up to any of them; and her reason never allows the reins of self-guidance to drop, though it often seems to hold them loosely. in france, where remnants of every age are still so strangely mingled in the opinions and tastes of the people, women commonly receive a reserved, retired, and almost cloistral education, as they did in aristocratic times; and then they are suddenly abandoned, without a guide and without assistance, in the midst of all the irregularities inseparable from democratic society. the americans are more consistent. they have found out that in a democracy the independence of individuals cannot fail to be very great, youth premature, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion often unsettled and powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital authority contested. under these circumstances, believing that they had little chance of repressing in woman the most vehement passions of the human heart, they held that the surer way was to teach her the art of combating those passions for herself. as they could not prevent her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined that she should know how best to defend it; and more reliance was placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which have been shaken or overthrown. instead, then, of inculcating mistrust of herself, they constantly seek to enhance their confidence in her own strength of character. as it is neither possible nor desirable to keep a young woman in perpetual or complete ignorance, they hasten to give her a precocious knowledge on all subjects. far from hiding the corruptions of the world from her, they prefer that she should see them at once and train herself to shun them; and they hold it of more importance to protect her conduct than to be over-scrupulous of her innocence. although the americans are a very religious people, they do not rely on religion alone to defend the virtue of woman; they seek to arm her reason also. in this they have followed the same method as in several other respects; they first make the most vigorous efforts to bring individual independence to exercise a proper control over itself, and they do not call in the aid of religion until they have reached the utmost limits of human strength. i am aware that an education of this kind is not without danger; i am sensible that it tends to invigorate the judgment at the expense of the imagination, and to make cold and virtuous women instead of affectionate wives and agreeable companions to man. society may be more tranquil and better regulated, but domestic life has often fewer charms. these, however, are secondary evils, which may be braved for the sake of higher interests. at the stage at which we are now arrived the time for choosing is no longer within our control; a democratic education is indispensable to protect women from the dangers with which democratic institutions and manners surround them. chapter x: the young woman in the character of a wife in america the independence of woman is irrevocably lost in the bonds of matrimony: if an unmarried woman is less constrained there than elsewhere, a wife is subjected to stricter obligations. the former makes her father's house an abode of freedom and of pleasure; the latter lives in the home of her husband as if it were a cloister. yet these two different conditions of life are perhaps not so contrary as may be supposed, and it is natural that the american women should pass through the one to arrive at the other. religious peoples and trading nations entertain peculiarly serious notions of marriage: the former consider the regularity of woman's life as the best pledge and most certain sign of the purity of her morals; the latter regard it as the highest security for the order and prosperity of the household. the americans are at the same time a puritanical people and a commercial nation: their religious opinions, as well as their trading habits, consequently lead them to require much abnegation on the part of woman, and a constant sacrifice of her pleasures to her duties which is seldom demanded of her in europe. thus in the united states the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic interest and duties, and forbids her to step beyond it. upon her entrance into the world a young american woman finds these notions firmly established; she sees the rules which are derived from them; she is not slow to perceive that she cannot depart for an instant from the established usages of her contemporaries, without putting in jeopardy her peace of mind, her honor, nay even her social existence; and she finds the energy required for such an act of submission in the firmness of her understanding and in the virile habits which her education has given her. it may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle and without a murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice. but no american woman falls into the toils of matrimony as into a snare held out to her simplicity and ignorance. she has been taught beforehand what is expected of her, and voluntarily and freely does she enter upon this engagement. she supports her new condition with courage, because she chose it. as in america paternal discipline is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict, a young woman does not contract the latter without considerable circumspection and apprehension. precocious marriages are rare. thus american women do not marry until their understandings are exercised and ripened; whereas in other countries most women generally only begin to exercise and to ripen their understandings after marriage. i by no means suppose, however, that the great change which takes place in all the habits of women in the united states, as soon as they are married, ought solely to be attributed to the constraint of public opinion: it is frequently imposed upon themselves by the sole effort of their own will. when the time for choosing a husband is arrived, that cold and stern reasoning power which has been educated and invigorated by the free observation of the world, teaches an american woman that a spirit of levity and independence in the bonds of marriage is a constant subject of annoyance, not of pleasure; it tells her that the amusements of the girl cannot become the recreations of the wife, and that the sources of a married woman's happiness are in the home of her husband. as she clearly discerns beforehand the only road which can lead to domestic happiness, she enters upon it at once, and follows it to the end without seeking to turn back. the same strength of purpose which the young wives of america display, in bending themselves at once and without repining to the austere duties of their new condition, is no less manifest in all the great trials of their lives. in no country in the world are private fortunes more precarious than in the united states. it is not uncommon for the same man, in the course of his life, to rise and sink again through all the grades which lead from opulence to poverty. american women support these vicissitudes with calm and unquenchable energy: it would seem that their desires contract, as easily as they expand, with their fortunes. *a [footnote a: see appendix s.] the greater part of the adventurers who migrate every year to people the western wilds, belong, as i observed in the former part of this work, to the old anglo-american race of the northern states. many of these men, who rush so boldly onwards in pursuit of wealth, were already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the country. they take their wives along with them, and make them share the countless perils and privations which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. i have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who after having been brought up amidst all the comforts of the large towns of new england, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of their parents to a comfortless hovel in a forest. fever, solitude, and a tedious life had not broken the springs of their courage. their features were impaired and faded, but their looks were firm: they appeared to be at once sad and resolute. i do not doubt that these young american women had amassed, in the education of their early years, that inward strength which they displayed under these circumstances. the early culture of the girl may still therefore be traced, in the united states, under the aspect of marriage: her part is changed, her habits are different, but her character is the same. chapter xi: that the equality of conditions contributes to the maintenance of good morals in america some philosophers and historians have said, or have hinted, that the strictness of female morality was increased or diminished simply by the distance of a country from the equator. this solution of the difficulty was an easy one; and nothing was required but a globe and a pair of compasses to settle in an instant one of the most difficult problems in the condition of mankind. but i am not aware that this principle of the materialists is supported by facts. the same nations have been chaste or dissolute at different periods of their history; the strictness or the laxity of their morals depended therefore on some variable cause, not only on the natural qualities of their country, which were invariable. i do not deny that in certain climates the passions which are occasioned by the mutual attraction of the sexes are peculiarly intense; but i am of opinion that this natural intensity may always be excited or restrained by the condition of society and by political institutions. although the travellers who have visited north america differ on a great number of points, they all agree in remarking that morals are far more strict there than elsewhere. it is evident that on this point the americans are very superior to their progenitors the english. a superficial glance at the two nations will establish the fact. in england, as in all other countries of europe, public malice is constantly attacking the frailties of women. philosophers and statesmen are heard to deplore that morals are not sufficiently strict, and the literary productions of the country constantly lead one to suppose so. in america all books, novels not excepted, suppose women to be chaste, and no one thinks of relating affairs of gallantry. no doubt this great regularity of american morals originates partly in the country, in the race of the people, and in their religion: but all these causes, which operate elsewhere, do not suffice to account for it; recourse must be had to some special reason. this reason appears to me to be the principle of equality and the institutions derived from it. equality of conditions does not of itself engender regularity of morals, but it unquestionably facilitates and increases it. *a [footnote a: see appendix t.] amongst aristocratic nations birth and fortune frequently make two such different beings of man and woman, that they can never be united to each other. their passions draw them together, but the condition of society, and the notions suggested by it, prevent them from contracting a permanent and ostensible tie. the necessary consequence is a great number of transient and clandestine connections. nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man. this is not so much the case when the equality of conditions has swept away all the imaginary, or the real, barriers which separated man from woman. no girl then believes that she cannot become the wife of the man who loves her; and this renders all breaches of morality before marriage very uncommon: for, whatever be the credulity of the passions, a woman will hardly be able to persuade herself that she is beloved, when her lover is perfectly free to marry her and does not. the same cause operates, though more indirectly, on married life. nothing better serves to justify an illicit passion, either to the minds of those who have conceived it or to the world which looks on, than compulsory or accidental marriages. *b in a country in which a woman is always free to exercise her power of choosing, and in which education has prepared her to choose rightly, public opinion is inexorable to her faults. the rigor of the americans arises in part from this cause. they consider marriages as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfil, because they knew all those conditions beforehand, and were perfectly free not to have contracted them. [footnote b: the literature of europe sufficiently corroborates this remark. when a european author wishes to depict in a work of imagination any of these great catastrophes in matrimony which so frequently occur amongst us, he takes care to bespeak the compassion of the reader by bringing before him ill-assorted or compulsory marriages. although habitual tolerance has long since relaxed our morals, an author could hardly succeed in interesting us in the misfortunes of his characters, if he did not first palliate their faults. this artifice seldom fails: the daily scenes we witness prepare us long beforehand to be indulgent. but american writers could never render these palliations probable to their readers; their customs and laws are opposed to it; and as they despair of rendering levity of conduct pleasing, they cease to depict it. this is one of the causes to which must be attributed the small number of novels published in the united states.] the very circumstances which render matrimonial fidelity more obligatory also render it more easy. in aristocratic countries the object of marriage is rather to unite property than persons; hence the husband is sometimes at school and the wife at nurse when they are betrothed. it cannot be wondered at if the conjugal tie which holds the fortunes of the pair united allows their hearts to rove; this is the natural result of the nature of the contract. when, on the contrary, a man always chooses a wife for himself, without any external coercion or even guidance, it is generally a conformity of tastes and opinions which brings a man and a woman together, and this same conformity keeps and fixes them in close habits of intimacy. our forefathers had conceived a very strange notion on the subject of marriage: as they had remarked that the small number of love-matches which occurred in their time almost always turned out ill, they resolutely inferred that it was exceedingly dangerous to listen to the dictates of the heart on the subject. accident appeared to them to be a better guide than choice. yet it was not very difficult to perceive that the examples which they witnessed did in fact prove nothing at all. for in the first place, if democratic nations leave a woman at liberty to choose her husband, they take care to give her mind sufficient knowledge, and her will sufficient strength, to make so important a choice: whereas the young women who, amongst aristocratic nations, furtively elope from the authority of their parents to throw themselves of their own accord into the arms of men whom they have had neither time to know, nor ability to judge of, are totally without those securities. it is not surprising that they make a bad use of their freedom of action the first time they avail themselves of it; nor that they fall into such cruel mistakes, when, not having received a democratic education, they choose to marry in conformity to democratic customs. but this is not all. when a man and woman are bent upon marriage in spite of the differences of an aristocratic state of society, the difficulties to be overcome are enormous. having broken or relaxed the bonds of filial obedience, they have then to emancipate themselves by a final effort from the sway of custom and the tyranny of opinion; and when at length they have succeeded in this arduous task, they stand estranged from their natural friends and kinsmen: the prejudice they have crossed separates them from all, and places them in a situation which soon breaks their courage and sours their hearts. if, then, a couple married in this manner are first unhappy and afterwards criminal, it ought not to be attributed to the freedom of their choice, but rather to their living in a community in which this freedom of choice is not admitted. moreover it should not be forgotten that the same effort which makes a man violently shake off a prevailing error, commonly impels him beyond the bounds of reason; that, to dare to declare war, in however just a cause, against the opinion of one's age and country, a violent and adventurous spirit is required, and that men of this character seldom arrive at happiness or virtue, whatever be the path they follow. and this, it may be observed by the way, is the reason why in the most necessary and righteous revolutions, it is so rare to meet with virtuous or moderate revolutionary characters. there is then no just ground for surprise if a man, who in an age of aristocracy chooses to consult nothing but his own opinion and his own taste in the choice of a wife, soon finds that infractions of morality and domestic wretchedness invade his household: but when this same line of action is in the natural and ordinary course of things, when it is sanctioned by parental authority and backed by public opinion, it cannot be doubted that the internal peace of families will be increased by it, and conjugal fidelity more rigidly observed. almost all men in democracies are engaged in public or professional life; and on the other hand the limited extent of common incomes obliges a wife to confine herself to the house, in order to watch in person and very closely over the details of domestic economy. all these distinct and compulsory occupations are so many natural barriers, which, by keeping the two sexes asunder, render the solicitations of the one less frequent and less ardent--the resistance of the other more easy. not indeed that the equality of conditions can ever succeed in making men chaste, but it may impart a less dangerous character to their breaches of morality. as no one has then either sufficient time or opportunity to assail a virtue armed in self-defence, there will be at the same time a great number of courtesans and a great number of virtuous women. this state of things causes lamentable cases of individual hardship, but it does not prevent the body of society from being strong and alert: it does not destroy family ties, or enervate the morals of the nation. society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by laxity of morals amongst all. in the eyes of a legislator, prostitution is less to be dreaded than intrigue. the tumultuous and constantly harassed life which equality makes men lead, not only distracts them from the passion of love, by denying them time to indulge in it, but it diverts them from it by another more secret but more certain road. all men who live in democratic ages more or less contract the ways of thinking of the manufacturing and trading classes; their minds take a serious, deliberate, and positive turn; they are apt to relinquish the ideal, in order to pursue some visible and proximate object, which appears to be the natural and necessary aim of their desires. thus the principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth. no men are less addicted to reverie than the citizens of a democracy; and few of them are ever known to give way to those idle and solitary meditations which commonly precede and produce the great emotions of the heart. it is true they attach great importance to procuring for themselves that sort of deep, regular, and quiet affection which constitutes the charm and safeguard of life, but they are not apt to run after those violent and capricious sources of excitement which disturb and abridge it. i am aware that all this is only applicable in its full extent to america, and cannot at present be extended to europe. in the course of the last half-century, whilst laws and customs have impelled several european nations with unexampled force towards democracy, we have not had occasion to observe that the relations of man and woman have become more orderly or more chaste. in some places the very reverse may be detected: some classes are more strict--the general morality of the people appears to be more lax. i do not hesitate to make the remark, for i am as little disposed to flatter my contemporaries as to malign them. this fact must distress, but it ought not to surprise us. the propitious influence which a democratic state of society may exercise upon orderly habits, is one of those tendencies which can only be discovered after a time. if the equality of conditions is favorable to purity of morals, the social commotion by which conditions are rendered equal is adverse to it. in the last fifty years, during which france has been undergoing this transformation, that country has rarely had freedom, always disturbance. amidst this universal confusion of notions and this general stir of opinions--amidst this incoherent mixture of the just and unjust, of truth and falsehood, of right and might--public virtue has become doubtful, and private morality wavering. but all revolutions, whatever may have been their object or their agents, have at first produced similar consequences; even those which have in the end drawn the bonds of morality more tightly began by loosening them. the violations of morality which the french frequently witness do not appear to me to have a permanent character; and this is already betokened by some curious signs of the times. nothing is more wretchedly corrupt than an aristocracy which retains its wealth when it has lost its power, and which still enjoys a vast deal of leisure after it is reduced to mere vulgar pastimes. the energetic passions and great conceptions which animated it heretofore, leave it then; and nothing remains to it but a host of petty consuming vices, which cling about it like worms upon a carcass. no one denies that the french aristocracy of the last century was extremely dissolute; whereas established habits and ancient belief still preserved some respect for morality amongst the other classes of society. nor will it be contested that at the present day the remnants of that same aristocracy exhibit a certain severity of morals; whilst laxity of morals appears to have spread amongst the middle and lower ranks. so that the same families which were most profligate fifty years ago are nowadays the most exemplary, and democracy seems only to have strengthened the morality of the aristocratic classes. the french revolution, by dividing the fortunes of the nobility, by forcing them to attend assiduously to their affairs and to their families, by making them live under the same roof with their children, and in short by giving a more rational and serious turn to their minds, has imparted to them, almost without their being aware of it, a reverence for religious belief, a love of order, of tranquil pleasures, of domestic endearments, and of comfort; whereas the rest of the nation, which had naturally these same tastes, was carried away into excesses by the effort which was required to overthrow the laws and political habits of the country. the old french aristocracy has undergone the consequences of the revolution, but it neither felt the revolutionary passions nor shared in the anarchical excitement which produced that crisis; it may easily be conceived that this aristocracy feels the salutary influence of the revolution in its manners, before those who achieve it. it may therefore be said, though at first it seems paradoxical, that, at the present day, the most anti-democratic classes of the nation principally exhibit the kind of morality which may reasonably be anticipated from democracy. i cannot but think that when we shall have obtained all the effects of this democratic revolution, after having got rid of the tumult it has caused, the observations which are now only applicable to the few will gradually become true of the whole community. chapter xii: how the americans understand the equality of the sexes i have shown how democracy destroys or modifies the different inequalities which originate in society; but is this all? or does it not ultimately affect that great inequality of man and woman which has seemed, up to the present day, to be eternally based in human nature? i believe that the social changes which bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and superiors and inferiors generally speaking, will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man. but here, more than ever, i feel the necessity of making myself clearly understood; for there is no subject on which the coarse and lawless fancies of our age have taken a freer range. there are people in europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. they would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things--their occupations, their pleasures, their business. it may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women. it is not thus that the americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. they admit, that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in getting each of them to fulfil their respective tasks in the best possible manner. the americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufactures of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman, in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on. in no country has such constant care been taken as in america to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes, and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways which are always different. american women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields, or to make any of those laborious exertions which demand the exertion of physical strength. no families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. if on the one hand an american woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, on the other hand she is never forced to go beyond it. hence it is that the women of america, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women, although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men. nor have the americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is the subversion of marital power, of the confusion of the natural authorities in families. they hold that every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. they do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner; and they maintain, that in the smaller association of husband and wife, as well as in the great social community, the object of democracy is to regulate and legalize the powers which are necessary, not to subvert all power. this opinion is not peculiar to one sex, and contested by the other: i never observed that the women of america consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, nor that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. it appeared to me, on the contrary, that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will, and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off. such at least is the feeling expressed by the most virtuous of their sex; the others are silent; and in the united states it is not the practice for a guilty wife to clamor for the rights of women, whilst she is trampling on her holiest duties. it has often been remarked that in europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery which men lavish upon women: although a european frequently affects to be the slave of woman, it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal. in the united states men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them. they constantly display an entire confidence in the understanding of a wife, and a profound respect for her freedom; they have decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of a man to discover the plain truth, and her heart as firm to embrace it; and they have never sought to place her virtue, any more than his, under the shelter of prejudice, ignorance, and fear. it would seem that in europe, where man so easily submits to the despotic sway of women, they are nevertheless curtailed of some of the greatest qualities of the human species, and considered as seductive but imperfect beings; and (what may well provoke astonishment) women ultimately look upon themselves in the same light, and almost consider it as a privilege that they are entitled to show themselves futile, feeble, and timid. the women of america claim no such privileges. again, it may be said that in our morals we have reserved strange immunities to man; so that there is, as it were, one virtue for his use, and another for the guidance of his partner; and that, according to the opinion of the public, the very same act may be punished alternately as a crime or only as a fault. the americans know not this iniquitous division of duties and rights; amongst them the seducer is as much dishonored as his victim. it is true that the americans rarely lavish upon women those eager attentions which are commonly paid them in europe; but their conduct to women always implies that they suppose them to be virtuous and refined; and such is the respect entertained for the moral freedom of the sex, that in the presence of a woman the most guarded language is used, lest her ear should be offended by an expression. in america a young unmarried woman may, alone and without fear, undertake a long journey. the legislators of the united states, who have mitigated almost all the penalties of criminal law, still make rape a capital offence, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion. this may be accounted for; as the americans can conceive nothing more precious than a woman's honor, and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will. in france, where the same offence is visited with far milder penalties, it is frequently difficult to get a verdict from a jury against the prisoner. is this a consequence of contempt of decency or contempt of women? i cannot but believe that it is a contempt of one and of the other. thus the americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. they do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man; but they never doubt her courage: and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear. thus, then, whilst they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to subsist, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement. as for myself, i do not hesitate to avow that, although the women of the united states are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, i have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if i were asked, now that i am drawing to the close of this work, in which i have spoken of so many important things done by the americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, i should reply--to the superiority of their women. chapter xiii: that the principle of equality naturally divides the americans into a number of small private circles it may probably be supposed that the final consequence and necessary effect of democratic institutions is to confound together all the members of the community in private as well as in public life, and to compel them all to live in common; but this would be to ascribe a very coarse and oppressive form to the equality which originates in democracy. no state of society or laws can render men so much alike, but that education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some differences between them; and, though different men may sometimes find it their interest to combine for the same purposes, they will never make it their pleasure. they will therefore always tend to evade the provisions of legislation, whatever they may be; and departing in some one respect from the circle within which they were to be bounded, they will set up, close by the great political community, small private circles, united together by the similitude of their conditions, habits, and manners. in the united states the citizens have no sort of pre-eminence over each other; they owe each other no mutual obedience or respect; they all meet for the administration of justice, for the government of the state, and in general to treat of the affairs which concern their common welfare; but i never heard that attempts have been made to bring them all to follow the same diversions, or to amuse themselves promiscuously in the same places of recreation. the americans, who mingle so readily in their political assemblies and courts of justice, are wont on the contrary carefully to separate into small distinct circles, in order to indulge by themselves in the enjoyments of private life. each of them is willing to acknowledge all his fellow-citizens as his equals, but he will only receive a very limited number of them amongst his friends or his guests. this appears to me to be very natural. in proportion as the circle of public society is extended, it may be anticipated that the sphere of private intercourse will be contracted; far from supposing that the members of modern society will ultimately live in common, i am afraid that they may end by forming nothing but small coteries. amongst aristocratic nations the different classes are like vast chambers, out of which it is impossible to get, into which it is impossible to enter. these classes have no communication with each other, but within their pale men necessarily live in daily contact; even though they would not naturally suit, the general conformity of a similar condition brings them nearer together. but when neither law nor custom professes to establish frequent and habitual relations between certain men, their intercourse originates in the accidental analogy of opinions and tastes; hence private society is infinitely varied. in democracies, where the members of the community never differ much from each other, and naturally stand in such propinquity that they may all at any time be confounded in one general mass, numerous artificial and arbitrary distinctions spring up, by means of which every man hopes to keep himself aloof, lest he should be carried away in the crowd against his will. this can never fail to be the case; for human institutions may be changed, but not man: whatever may be the general endeavor of a community to render its members equal and alike, the personal pride of individuals will always seek to rise above the line, and to form somewhere an inequality to their own advantage. in aristocracies men are separated from each other by lofty stationary barriers; in democracies they are divided by a number of small and almost invisible threads, which are constantly broken or moved from place to place. thus, whatever may be the progress of equality, in democratic nations a great number of small private communities will always be formed within the general pale of political society; but none of them will bear any resemblance in its manners to the highest class in aristocracies. chapter xiv: some reflections on american manners nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners. the influence of the social and political state of a country upon manners is therefore deserving of serious examination. manners are, generally, the product of the very basis of the character of a people, but they are also sometimes the result of an arbitrary convention between certain men; thus they are at once natural and acquired. when certain men perceive that they are the foremost persons in society, without contestation and without effort--when they are constantly engaged on large objects, leaving the more minute details to others--and when they live in the enjoyment of wealth which they did not amass and which they do not fear to lose, it may be supposed that they feel a kind of haughty disdain of the petty interests and practical cares of life, and that their thoughts assume a natural greatness, which their language and their manners denote. in democratic countries manners are generally devoid of dignity, because private life is there extremely petty in its character; and they are frequently low, because the mind has few opportunities of rising above the engrossing cares of domestic interests. true dignity in manners consists in always taking one's proper station, neither too high nor too low; and this is as much within the reach of a peasant as of a prince. in democracies all stations appear doubtful; hence it is that the manners of democracies, though often full of arrogance, are commonly wanting in dignity, and, moreover, they are never either well disciplined or accomplished. the men who live in democracies are too fluctuating for a certain number of them ever to succeed in laying down a code of good breeding, and in forcing people to follow it. every man therefore behaves after his own fashion, and there is always a certain incoherence in the manners of such times, because they are moulded upon the feelings and notions of each individual, rather than upon an ideal model proposed for general imitation. this, however, is much more perceptible at the time when an aristocracy has just been overthrown than after it has long been destroyed. new political institutions and new social elements then bring to the same places of resort, and frequently compel to live in common, men whose education and habits are still amazingly dissimilar, and this renders the motley composition of society peculiarly visible. the existence of a former strict code of good breeding is still remembered, but what it contained or where it is to be found is already forgotten. men have lost the common law of manners, and they have not yet made up their minds to do without it; but everyone endeavors to make to himself some sort of arbitrary and variable rule, from the remnant of former usages; so that manners have neither the regularity and the dignity which they often display amongst aristocratic nations, nor the simplicity and freedom which they sometimes assume in democracies; they are at once constrained and without constraint. this, however, is not the normal state of things. when the equality of conditions is long established and complete, as all men entertain nearly the same notions and do nearly the same things, they do not require to agree or to copy from one another in order to speak or act in the same manner: their manners are constantly characterized by a number of lesser diversities, but not by any great differences. they are never perfectly alike, because they do not copy from the same pattern; they are never very unlike, because their social condition is the same. at first sight a traveller would observe that the manners of all the americans are exactly similar; it is only upon close examination that the peculiarities in which they differ may be detected. the english make game of the manners of the americans; but it is singular that most of the writers who have drawn these ludicrous delineations belonged themselves to the middle classes in england, to whom the same delineations are exceedingly applicable: so that these pitiless censors for the most part furnish an example of the very thing they blame in the united states; they do not perceive that they are deriding themselves, to the great amusement of the aristocracy of their own country. nothing is more prejudicial to democracy than its outward forms of behavior: many men would willingly endure its vices, who cannot support its manners. i cannot, however, admit that there is nothing commendable in the manners of a democratic people. amongst aristocratic nations, all who live within reach of the first class in society commonly strain to be like it, which gives rise to ridiculous and insipid imitations. as a democratic people does not possess any models of high breeding, at least it escapes the daily necessity of seeing wretched copies of them. in democracies manners are never so refined as amongst aristocratic nations, but on the other hand they are never so coarse. neither the coarse oaths of the populace, nor the elegant and choice expressions of the nobility are to be heard there: the manners of such a people are often vulgar, but they are neither brutal nor mean. i have already observed that in democracies no such thing as a regular code of good breeding can be laid down; this has some inconveniences and some advantages. in aristocracies the rules of propriety impose the same demeanor on everyone; they make all the members of the same class appear alike, in spite of their private inclinations; they adorn and they conceal the natural man. amongst a democratic people manners are neither so tutored nor so uniform, but they are frequently more sincere. they form, as it were, a light and loosely woven veil, through which the real feelings and private opinions of each individual are easily discernible. the form and the substance of human actions often, therefore, stand in closer relation; and if the great picture of human life be less embellished, it is more true. thus it may be said, in one sense, that the effect of democracy is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all. the feelings, the passions, the virtues, and the vices of an aristocracy may sometimes reappear in a democracy, but not its manners; they are lost, and vanish forever, as soon as the democratic revolution is completed. it would seem that nothing is more lasting than the manners of an aristocratic class, for they are preserved by that class for some time after it has lost its wealth and its power--nor so fleeting, for no sooner have they disappeared than not a trace of them is to be found; and it is scarcely possible to say what they have been as soon as they have ceased to be. a change in the state of society works this miracle, and a few generations suffice to consummate it. the principal characteristics of aristocracy are handed down by history after an aristocracy is destroyed, but the light and exquisite touches of manners are effaced from men's memories almost immediately after its fall. men can no longer conceive what these manners were when they have ceased to witness them; they are gone, and their departure was unseen, unfelt; for in order to feel that refined enjoyment which is derived from choice and distinguished manners, habit and education must have prepared the heart, and the taste for them is lost almost as easily as the practice of them. thus not only a democratic people cannot have aristocratic manners, but they neither comprehend nor desire them; and as they never have thought of them, it is to their minds as if such things had never been. too much importance should not be attached to this loss, but it may well be regretted. i am aware that it has not unfrequently happened that the same men have had very high-bred manners and very low-born feelings: the interior of courts has sufficiently shown what imposing externals may conceal the meanest hearts. but though the manners of aristocracy did not constitute virtue, they sometimes embellish virtue itself. it was no ordinary sight to see a numerous and powerful class of men, whose every outward action seemed constantly to be dictated by a natural elevation of thought and feeling, by delicacy and regularity of taste, and by urbanity of manners. those manners threw a pleasing illusory charm over human nature; and though the picture was often a false one, it could not be viewed without a noble satisfaction. chapter xv: of the gravity of the americans, and why it does not prevent them from often committing inconsiderate actions men who live in democratic countries do not value the simple, turbulent, or coarse diversions in which the people indulge in aristocratic communities: such diversions are thought by them to be puerile or insipid. nor have they a greater inclination for the intellectual and refined amusements of the aristocratic classes. they want something productive and substantial in their pleasures; they want to mix actual fruition with their joy. in aristocratic communities the people readily give themselves up to bursts of tumultuous and boisterous gayety, which shake off at once the recollection of their privations: the natives of democracies are not fond of being thus violently broken in upon, and they never lose sight of their own selves without regret. they prefer to these frivolous delights those more serious and silent amusements which are like business, and which do not drive business wholly from their minds. an american, instead of going in a leisure hour to dance merrily at some place of public resort, as the fellows of his calling continue to do throughout the greater part of europe, shuts himself up at home to drink. he thus enjoys two pleasures; he can go on thinking of his business, and he can get drunk decently by his own fireside. i thought that the english constituted the most serious nation on the face of the earth, but i have since seen the americans and have changed my opinion. i do not mean to say that temperament has not a great deal to do with the character of the inhabitants of the united states, but i think that their political institutions are a still more influential cause. i believe the seriousness of the americans arises partly from their pride. in democratic countries even poor men entertain a lofty notion of their personal importance: they look upon themselves with complacency, and are apt to suppose that others are looking at them, too. with this disposition they watch their language and their actions with care, and do not lay themselves open so as to betray their deficiencies; to preserve their dignity they think it necessary to retain their gravity. but i detect another more deep-seated and powerful cause which instinctively produces amongst the americans this astonishing gravity. under a despotism communities give way at times to bursts of vehement joy; but they are generally gloomy and moody, because they are afraid. under absolute monarchies tempered by the customs and manners of the country, their spirits are often cheerful and even, because as they have some freedom and a good deal of security, they are exempted from the most important cares of life; but all free peoples are serious, because their minds are habitually absorbed by the contemplation of some dangerous or difficult purpose. this is more especially the case amongst those free nations which form democratic communities. then there are in all classes a very large number of men constantly occupied with the serious affairs of the government; and those whose thoughts are not engaged in the direction of the commonwealth are wholly engrossed by the acquisition of a private fortune. amongst such a people a serious demeanor ceases to be peculiar to certain men, and becomes a habit of the nation. we are told of small democracies in the days of antiquity, in which the citizens met upon the public places with garlands of roses, and spent almost all their time in dancing and theatrical amusements. i do not believe in such republics any more than in that of plato; or, if the things we read of really happened, i do not hesitate to affirm that these supposed democracies were composed of very different elements from ours, and that they had nothing in common with the latter except their name. but it must not be supposed that, in the midst of all their toils, the people who live in democracies think themselves to be pitied; the contrary is remarked to be the case. no men are fonder of their own condition. life would have no relish for them if they were delivered from the anxieties which harass them, and they show more attachment to their cares than aristocratic nations to their pleasures. i am next led to inquire how it is that these same democratic nations, which are so serious, sometimes act in so inconsiderate a manner. the americans, who almost always preserve a staid demeanor and a frigid air, nevertheless frequently allow themselves to be borne away, far beyond the bound of reason, by a sudden passion or a hasty opinion, and they sometimes gravely commit strange absurdities. this contrast ought not to surprise us. there is one sort of ignorance which originates in extreme publicity. in despotic states men know not how to act, because they are told nothing; in democratic nations they often act at random, because nothing is to be left untold. the former do not know--the latter forget; and the chief features of each picture are lost to them in a bewilderment of details. it is astonishing what imprudent language a public man may sometimes use in free countries, and especially in democratic states, without being compromised; whereas in absolute monarchies a few words dropped by accident are enough to unmask him forever, and ruin him without hope of redemption. this is explained by what goes before. when a man speaks in the midst of a great crowd, many of his words are not heard, or are forthwith obliterated from the memories of those who hear them; but amidst the silence of a mute and motionless throng the slightest whisper strikes the ear. in democracies men are never stationary; a thousand chances waft them to and fro, and their life is always the sport of unforeseen or (so to speak) extemporaneous circumstances. thus they are often obliged to do things which they have imperfectly learned, to say things they imperfectly understand, and to devote themselves to work for which they are unprepared by long apprenticeship. in aristocracies every man has one sole object which he unceasingly pursues, but amongst democratic nations the existence of man is more complex; the same mind will almost always embrace several objects at the same time, and these objects are frequently wholly foreign to each other: as it cannot know them all well, the mind is readily satisfied with imperfect notions of each. when the inhabitant of democracies is not urged by his wants, he is so at least by his desires; for of all the possessions which he sees around him, none are wholly beyond his reach. he therefore does everything in a hurry, he is always satisfied with "pretty well," and never pauses more than an instant to consider what he has been doing. his curiosity is at once insatiable and cheaply satisfied; for he cares more to know a great deal quickly than to know anything well: he has no time and but little taste to search things to the bottom. thus then democratic peoples are grave, because their social and political condition constantly leads them to engage in serious occupations; and they act inconsiderately, because they give but little time and attention to each of these occupations. the habit of inattention must be considered as the greatest bane of the democratic character. chapter xvi: why the national vanity of the americans is more restless and captious than that of the english all free nations are vainglorious, but national pride is not displayed by all in the same manner. the americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. the most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. it would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous; it will grant nothing, whilst it demands everything, but is ready to beg and to quarrel at the same time. if i say to an american that the country he lives in is a fine one, "ay," he replies, "there is not its fellow in the world." if i applaud the freedom which its inhabitants enjoy, he answers, "freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it." if i remark the purity of morals which distinguishes the united states, "i can imagine," says he, "that a stranger, who has been struck by the corruption of all other nations, is astonished at the difference." at length i leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge, and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all i had just been saying. it is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it. *a [footnote a: see appendix u.] such is not the case with the english. an englishman calmly enjoys the real or imaginary advantages which in his opinion his country possesses. if he grants nothing to other nations, neither does he solicit anything for his own. the censure of foreigners does not affect him, and their praise hardly flatters him; his position with regard to the rest of the world is one of disdainful and ignorant reserve: his pride requires no sustenance, it nourishes itself. it is remarkable that two nations, so recently sprung from the same stock, should be so opposite to one another in their manner of feeling and conversing. in aristocratic countries the great possess immense privileges, upon which their pride rests, without seeking to rely upon the lesser advantages which accrue to them. as these privileges came to them by inheritance, they regard them in some sort as a portion of themselves, or at least as a natural right inherent in their own persons. they therefore entertain a calm sense of their superiority; they do not dream of vaunting privileges which everyone perceives and no one contests, and these things are not sufficiently new to them to be made topics of conversation. they stand unmoved in their solitary greatness, well assured that they are seen of all the world without any effort to show themselves off, and that no one will attempt to drive them from that position. when an aristocracy carries on the public affairs, its national pride naturally assumes this reserved, indifferent, and haughty form, which is imitated by all the other classes of the nation. when, on the contrary, social conditions differ but little, the slightest privileges are of some importance; as every man sees around himself a million of people enjoying precisely similar or analogous advantages, his pride becomes craving and jealous, he clings to mere trifles, and doggedly defends them. in democracies, as the conditions of life are very fluctuating, men have almost always recently acquired the advantages which they possess; the consequence is that they feel extreme pleasure in exhibiting them, to show others and convince themselves that they really enjoy them. as at any instant these same advantages may be lost, their possessors are constantly on the alert, and make a point of showing that they still retain them. men living in democracies love their country just as they love themselves, and they transfer the habits of their private vanity to their vanity as a nation. the restless and insatiable vanity of a democratic people originates so entirely in the equality and precariousness of social conditions, that the members of the haughtiest nobility display the very same passion in those lesser portions of their existence in which there is anything fluctuating or contested. an aristocratic class always differs greatly from the other classes of the nation, by the extent and perpetuity of its privileges; but it often happens that the only differences between the members who belong to it consist in small transient advantages, which may any day be lost or acquired. the members of a powerful aristocracy, collected in a capital or a court, have been known to contest with virulence those frivolous privileges which depend on the caprice of fashion or the will of their master. these persons then displayed towards each other precisely the same puerile jealousies which animate the men of democracies, the same eagerness to snatch the smallest advantages which their equals contested, and the same desire to parade ostentatiously those of which they were in possession. if national pride ever entered into the minds of courtiers, i do not question that they would display it in the same manner as the members of a democratic community. chapter xvii: that the aspect of society in the united states is at once excited and monotonous it would seem that nothing can be more adapted to stimulate and to feed curiosity than the aspect of the united states. fortunes, opinions, and laws are there in ceaseless variation: it is as if immutable nature herself were mutable, such are the changes worked upon her by the hand of man. yet in the end the sight of this excited community becomes monotonous, and after having watched the moving pageant for a time the spectator is tired of it. amongst aristocratic nations every man is pretty nearly stationary in his own sphere; but men are astonishingly unlike each other--their passions, their notions, their habits, and their tastes are essentially different: nothing changey, but everything differs. in democracies, on the contrary, all men are alike and do things pretty nearly alike. it is true that they are subject to great and frequent vicissitudes; but as the same events of good or adverse fortune are continually recurring, the name of the actors only is changed, the piece is always the same. the aspect of american society is animated, because men and things are always changing; but it is monotonous, because all these changes are alike. men living in democratic ages have many passions, but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it. the cause of this is, not that their souls are narrower, but that the importance of money is really greater at such times. when all the members of a community are independent of or indifferent to each other, the co-operation of each of them can only be obtained by paying for it: this infinitely multiplies the purposes to which wealth may be applied, and increases its value. when the reverence which belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition, and profession no longer distinguish men, or scarcely distinguish them at all: hardly anything but money remains to create strongly marked differences between them, and to raise some of them above the common level. the distinction originating in wealth is increased by the disappearance and diminution of all other distinctions. amongst aristocratic nations money only reaches to a few points on the vast circle of man's desires--in democracies it seems to lead to all. the love of wealth is therefore to be traced, either as a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the americans do: this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness, and soon renders the survey of them exceedingly wearisome. this perpetual recurrence of the same passion is monotonous; the peculiar methods by which this passion seeks its own gratification are no less so. in an orderly and constituted democracy like the united states, where men cannot enrich themselves by war, by public office, or by political confiscation, the love of wealth mainly drives them into business and manufactures. although these pursuits often bring about great commotions and disasters, they cannot prosper without strictly regular habits and a long routine of petty uniform acts. the stronger the passion is, the more regular are these habits, and the more uniform are these acts. it may be said that it is the vehemence of their desires which makes the americans so methodical; it perturbs their minds, but it disciplines their lives. the remark i here apply to america may indeed be addressed to almost all our contemporaries. variety is disappearing from the human race; the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are to be met with all over the world. this is not only because nations work more upon each other, and are more faithful in their mutual imitation; but as the men of each country relinquish more and more the peculiar opinions and feelings of a caste, a profession, or a family, they simultaneously arrive at something nearer to the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same. thus they become more alike, even without having imitated each other. like travellers scattered about some large wood, which is intersected by paths converging to one point, if all of them keep, their eyes fixed upon that point and advance towards it, they insensibly draw nearer together--though they seek not, though they see not, though they know not each other; and they will be surprised at length to find themselves all collected on the same spot. all the nations which take, not any particular man, but man himself, as the object of their researches and their imitations, are tending in the end to a similar state of society, like these travellers converging to the central plot of the forest. chapter xviii: of honor in the united states and in democratic communities it would seem that men employ two very distinct methods in the public estimation *a of the actions of their fellowmen; at one time they judge them by those simple notions of right and wrong which are diffused all over the world; at another they refer their decision to a few very special notions which belong exclusively to some particular age and country. it often happens that these two rules differ; they sometimes conflict: but they are never either entirely identified or entirely annulled by one another. honor, at the periods of its greatest power, sways the will more than the belief of men; and even whilst they yield without hesitation and without a murmur to its dictates, they feel notwithstanding, by a dim but mighty instinct, the existence of a more general, more ancient, and more holy law, which they sometimes disobey although they cease not to acknowledge it. some actions have been held to be at the same time virtuous and dishonorable--a refusal to fight a duel is a case in point. [footnote a: the word "honor" is not always used in the same sense either in french or english. i. it first signifies the dignity, glory, or reverence which a man receives from his kind; and in this sense a man is said to acquire honor. . honor signifies the aggregate of those rules by the assistance of which this dignity, glory, or reverence is obtained. thus we say that a man has always strictly obeyed the laws of honor; or a man has violated his honor. in this chapter the word is always used in the latter sense.] i think these peculiarities may be otherwise explained than by the mere caprices of certain individuals and nations, as has hitherto been the customary mode of reasoning on the subject. mankind is subject to general and lasting wants that have engendered moral laws, to the neglect of which men have ever and in all places attached the notion of censure and shame: to infringe them was "to do ill"--"to do well" was to conform to them. within the bosom of this vast association of the human race, lesser associations have been formed which are called nations; and amidst these nations further subdivisions have assumed the names of classes or castes. each of these associations forms, as it were, a separate species of the human race; and though it has no essential difference from the mass of mankind, to a certain extent it stands apart and has certain wants peculiar to itself. to these special wants must be attributed the modifications which affect in various degrees and in different countries the mode of considering human actions, and the estimate which ought to be formed of them. it is the general and permanent interest of mankind that men should not kill each other: but it may happen to be the peculiar and temporary interest of a people or a class to justify, or even to honor, homicide. honor is simply that peculiar rule, founded upon a peculiar state of society, by the application of which a people or a class allot praise or blame. nothing is more unproductive to the mind than an abstract idea; i therefore hasten to call in the aid of facts and examples to illustrate my meaning. i select the most extraordinary kind of honor which was ever known in the world, and that which we are best acquainted with, viz., aristocratic honor springing out of feudal society. i shall explain it by means of the principle already laid down, and i shall explain the principle by means of the illustration. i am not here led to inquire when and how the aristocracy of the middle ages came into existence, why it was so deeply severed from the remainder of the nation, or what founded and consolidated its power. i take its existence as an established fact, and i am endeavoring to account for the peculiar view which it took of the greater part of human actions. the first thing that strikes me is, that in the feudal world actions were not always praised or blamed with reference to their intrinsic worth, but that they were sometimes appreciated exclusively with reference to the person who was the actor or the object of them, which is repugnant to the general conscience of mankind. thus some of the actions which were indifferent on the part of a man in humble life, dishonored a noble; others changed their whole character according as the person aggrieved by them belonged or did not belong to the aristocracy. when these different notions first arose, the nobility formed a distinct body amidst the people, which it commanded from the inaccessible heights where it was ensconced. to maintain this peculiar position, which constituted its strength, it not only required political privileges, but it required a standard of right and wrong for its own especial use. that some particular virtue or vice belonged to the nobility rather than to the humble classes--that certain actions were guiltless when they affected the villain, which were criminal when they touched the noble--these were often arbitrary matters; but that honor or shame should be attached to a man's actions according to his condition, was a result of the internal constitution of an aristocratic community. this has been actually the case in all the countries which have had an aristocracy; as long as a trace of the principle remains, these peculiarities will still exist; to debauch a woman of color scarcely injures the reputation of an american--to marry her dishonors him. in some cases feudal honor enjoined revenge, and stigmatized the forgiveness of insults; in others it imperiously commanded men to conquer their own passions, and imposed forgetfulness of self. it did not make humanity or kindness its law, but it extolled generosity; it set more store on liberality than on benevolence; it allowed men to enrich themselves by gambling or by war, but not by labor; it preferred great crimes to small earnings; cupidity was less distasteful to it than avarice; violence it often sanctioned, but cunning and treachery it invariably reprobated as contemptible. these fantastical notions did not proceed exclusively from the caprices of those who entertained them. a class which has succeeded in placing itself at the head of and above all others, and which makes perpetual exertions to maintain this lofty position, must especially honor those virtues which are conspicuous for their dignity and splendor, and which may be easily combined with pride and the love of power. such men would not hesitate to invert the natural order of the conscience in order to give those virtues precedence before all others. it may even be conceived that some of the more bold and brilliant vices would readily be set above the quiet, unpretending virtues. the very existence of such a class in society renders these things unavoidable. the nobles of the middle ages placed military courage foremost amongst virtues, and in lieu of many of them. this was again a peculiar opinion which arose necessarily from the peculiarity of the state of society. feudal aristocracy existed by war and for war; its power had been founded by arms, and by arms that power was maintained; it therefore required nothing more than military courage, and that quality was naturally exalted above all others; whatever denoted it, even at the expense of reason and humanity, was therefore approved and frequently enjoined by the manners of the time. such was the main principle; the caprice of man was only to be traced in minuter details. that a man should regard a tap on the cheek as an unbearable insult, and should be obliged to kill in single combat the person who struck him thus lightly, is an arbitrary rule; but that a noble could not tranquilly receive an insult, and was dishonored if he allowed himself to take a blow without fighting, were direct consequences of the fundamental principles and the wants of military aristocracy. thus it was true to a certain extent to assert that the laws of honor were capricious; but these caprices of honor were always confined within certain necessary limits. the peculiar rule, which was called honor by our forefathers, is so far from being an arbitrary law in my eyes, that i would readily engage to ascribe its most incoherent and fantastical injunctions to a small number of fixed and invariable wants inherent in feudal society. if i were to trace the notion of feudal honor into the domain of politics, i should not find it more difficult to explain its dictates. the state of society and the political institutions of the middle ages were such, that the supreme power of the nation never governed the community directly. that power did not exist in the eyes of the people: every man looked up to a certain individual whom he was bound to obey; by that intermediate personage he was connected with all the others. thus in feudal society the whole system of the commonwealth rested upon the sentiment of fidelity to the person of the lord: to destroy that sentiment was to open the sluices of anarchy. fidelity to a political superior was, moreover, a sentiment of which all the members of the aristocracy had constant opportunities of estimating the importance; for every one of them was a vassal as well as a lord, and had to command as well as to obey. to remain faithful to the lord, to sacrifice one's self for him if called upon, to share his good or evil fortunes, to stand by him in his undertakings whatever they might be--such were the first injunctions of feudal honor in relation to the political institutions of those times. the treachery of a vassal was branded with extraordinary severity by public opinion, and a name of peculiar infamy was invented for the offence which was called "felony." on the contrary, few traces are to be found in the middle ages of the passion which constituted the life of the nations of antiquity--i mean patriotism; the word itself is not of very ancient date in the language. *b feudal institutions concealed the country at large from men's sight, and rendered the love of it less necessary. the nation was forgotten in the passions which attached men to persons. hence it was no part of the strict law of feudal honor to remain faithful to one's country. not indeed that the love of their country did not exist in the hearts of our forefathers; but it constituted a dim and feeble instinct, which has grown more clear and strong in proportion as aristocratic classes have been abolished, and the supreme power of the nation centralized. this may be clearly seen from the contrary judgments which european nations have passed upon the various events of their histories, according to the generations by which such judgments have been formed. the circumstance which most dishonored the constable de bourbon in the eyes of his contemporaries was that he bore arms against his king: that which most dishonors him in our eyes, is that he made war against his country; we brand him as deeply as our forefathers did, but for different reasons. [footnote b: even the word "patrie" was not used by the french writers until the sixteenth century.] i have chosen the honor of feudal times by way of illustration of my meaning, because its characteristics are more distinctly marked and more familiar to us than those of any other period; but i might have taken an example elsewhere, and i should have reached the same conclusion by a different road. although we are less perfectly acquainted with the romans than with our own ancestors, yet we know that certain peculiar notions of glory and disgrace obtained amongst them, which were not solely derived from the general principles of right and wrong. many human actions were judged differently, according as they affected a roman citizen or a stranger, a freeman or a slave; certain vices were blazoned abroad, certain virtues were extolled above all others. "in that age," says plutarch in the life of coriolanus, "martial prowess was more honored and prized in rome than all the other virtues, insomuch that it was called virtus, the name of virtue itself, by applying the name of the kind to this particular species; so that virtue in latin was as much as to say valor." can anyone fail to recognize the peculiar want of that singular community which was formed for the conquest of the world? any nation would furnish us with similar grounds of observation; for, as i have already remarked, whenever men collect together as a distinct community, the notion of honor instantly grows up amongst them; that is to say, a system of opinions peculiar to themselves as to what is blamable or commendable; and these peculiar rules always originate in the special habits and special interests of the community. this is applicable to a certain extent to democratic communities as well as to others, as we shall now proceed to prove by the example of the americans. *c some loose notions of the old aristocratic honor of europe are still to be found scattered amongst the opinions of the americans; but these traditional opinions are few in number, they have but little root in the country, and but little power. they are like a religion which has still some temples left standing, though men have ceased to believe in it. but amidst these half-obliterated notions of exotic honor, some new opinions have sprung up, which constitute what may be termed in our days american honor. i have shown how the americans are constantly driven to engage in commerce and industry. their origin, their social condition, their political institutions, and even the spot they inhabit, urge them irresistibly in this direction. their present condition is then that of an almost exclusively manufacturing and commercial association, placed in the midst of a new and boundless country, which their principal object is to explore for purposes of profit. this is the characteristic which most peculiarly distinguishes the american people from all others at the present time. all those quiet virtues which tend to give a regular movement to the community, and to encourage business, will therefore be held in peculiar honor by that people, and to neglect those virtues will be to incur public contempt. all the more turbulent virtues, which often dazzle, but more frequently disturb society, will on the contrary occupy a subordinate rank in the estimation of this same people: they may be neglected without forfeiting the esteem of the community--to acquire them would perhaps be to run a risk of losing it. [footnote c: i speak here of the americans inhabiting those states where slavery does not exist; they alone can be said to present a complete picture of democratic society.] the americans make a no less arbitrary classification of men's vices. there are certain propensities which appear censurable to the general reason and the universal conscience of mankind, but which happen to agree with the peculiar and temporary wants of the american community: these propensities are lightly reproved, sometimes even encouraged; for instance, the love of wealth and the secondary propensities connected with it may be more particularly cited. to clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent which is his domain, the american requires the daily support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in america, and provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public security, it is held in honor. the american lauds as a noble and praiseworthy ambition what our own forefathers in the middle ages stigmatized as servile cupidity, just as he treats as a blind and barbarous frenzy that ardor of conquest and martial temper which bore them to battle. in the united states fortunes are lost and regained without difficulty; the country is boundless, and its resources inexhaustible. the people have all the wants and cravings of a growing creature; and whatever be their efforts, they are always surrounded by more than they can appropriate. it is not the ruin of a few individuals which may be soon repaired, but the inactivity and sloth of the community at large which would be fatal to such a people. boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness. commercial business is there like a vast lottery, by which a small number of men continually lose, but the state is always a gainer; such a people ought therefore to encourage and do honor to boldness in commercial speculations. but any bold speculation risks the fortune of the speculator and of all those who put their trust in him. the americans, who make a virtue of commercial temerity, have no right in any case to brand with disgrace those who practise it. hence arises the strange indulgence which is shown to bankrupts in the united states; their honor does not suffer by such an accident. in this respect the americans differ, not only from the nations of europe, but from all the commercial nations of our time, and accordingly they resemble none of them in their position or their wants. in america all those vices which tend to impair the purity of morals, and to destroy the conjugal tie, are treated with a degree of severity which is unknown in the rest of the world. at first sight this seems strangely at variance with the tolerance shown there on other subjects, and one is surprised to meet with a morality so relaxed and so austere amongst the selfsame people. but these things are less incoherent than they seem to be. public opinion in the united states very gently represses that love of wealth which promotes the commercial greatness and the prosperity of the nation, and it especially condemns that laxity of morals which diverts the human mind from the pursuit of well-being, and disturbs the internal order of domestic life which is so necessary to success in business. to earn the esteem of their countrymen, the americans are therefore constrained to adapt themselves to orderly habits--and it may be said in this sense that they make it a matter of honor to live chastely. on one point american honor accords with the notions of honor acknowledged in europe; it places courage as the highest virtue, and treats it as the greatest of the moral necessities of man; but the notion of courage itself assumes a different aspect. in the united states martial valor is but little prized; the courage which is best known and most esteemed is that which emboldens men to brave the dangers of the ocean, in order to arrive earlier in port--to support the privations of the wilderness without complaint, and solitude more cruel than privations--the courage which renders them almost insensible to the loss of a fortune laboriously acquired, and instantly prompts to fresh exertions to make another. courage of this kind is peculiarly necessary to the maintenance and prosperity of the american communities, and it is held by them in peculiar honor and estimation; to betray a want of it is to incur certain disgrace. i have yet another characteristic point which may serve to place the idea of this chapter in stronger relief. in a democratic society like that of the united states, where fortunes are scanty and insecure, everybody works, and work opens a way to everything: this has changed the point of honor quite round, and has turned it against idleness. i have sometimes met in america with young men of wealth, personally disinclined to all laborious exertion, but who had been compelled to embrace a profession. their disposition and their fortune allowed them to remain without employment; public opinion forbade it, too imperiously to be disobeyed. in the european countries, on the contrary, where aristocracy is still struggling with the flood which overwhelms it, i have often seen men, constantly spurred on by their wants and desires, remain in idleness, in order not to lose the esteem of their equals; and i have known them submit to ennui and privations rather than to work. no one can fail to perceive that these opposite obligations are two different rules of conduct, both nevertheless originating in the notion of honor. what our forefathers designated as honor absolutely was in reality only one of its forms; they gave a generic name to what was only a species. honor therefore is to be found in democratic as well as in aristocratic ages, but it will not be difficult to show that it assumes a different aspect in the former. not only are its injunctions different, but we shall shortly see that they are less numerous, less precise, and that its dictates are less rigorously obeyed. the position of a caste is always much more peculiar than that of a people. nothing is so much out of the way of the world as a small community invariably composed of the same families (as was for instance the aristocracy of the middle ages), whose object is to concentrate and to retain, exclusively and hereditarily, education, wealth, and power amongst its own members. but the more out of the way the position of a community happens to be, the more numerous are its special wants, and the more extensive are its notions of honor corresponding to those wants. the rules of honor will therefore always be less numerous amongst a people not divided into castes than amongst any other. if ever any nations are constituted in which it may even be difficult to find any peculiar classes of society, the notion of honor will be confined to a small number of precepts, which will be more and more in accordance with the moral laws adopted by the mass of mankind. thus the laws of honor will be less peculiar and less multifarious amongst a democratic people than in an aristocracy. they will also be more obscure; and this is a necessary consequence of what goes before; for as the distinguishing marks of honor are less numerous and less peculiar, it must often be difficult to distinguish them. to this, other reasons may be added. amongst the aristocratic nations of the middle ages, generation succeeded generation in vain; each family was like a never-dying, ever-stationary man, and the state of opinions was hardly more changeable than that of conditions. everyone then had always the same objects before his eyes, which he contemplated from the same point; his eyes gradually detected the smallest details, and his discernment could not fail to become in the end clear and accurate. thus not only had the men of feudal times very extraordinary opinions in matters of honor, but each of those opinions was present to their minds under a clear and precise form. this can never be the case in america, where all men are in constant motion; and where society, transformed daily by its own operations, changes its opinions together with its wants. in such a country men have glimpses of the rules of honor, but they have seldom time to fix attention upon them. but even if society were motionless, it would still be difficult to determine the meaning which ought to be attached to the word "honor." in the middle ages, as each class had its own honor, the same opinion was never received at the same time by a large number of men; and this rendered it possible to give it a determined and accurate form, which was the more easy, as all those by whom it was received, having a perfectly identical and most peculiar position, were naturally disposed to agree upon the points of a law which was made for themselves alone. thus the code of honor became a complete and detailed system, in which everything was anticipated and provided for beforehand, and a fixed and always palpable standard was applied to human actions. amongst a democratic nation, like the americans, in which ranks are identified, and the whole of society forms one single mass, composed of elements which are all analogous though not entirely similar, it is impossible ever to agree beforehand on what shall or shall not be allowed by the laws of honor. amongst that people, indeed, some national wants do exist which give rise to opinions common to the whole nation on points of honor; but these opinions never occur at the same time, in the same manner, or with the same intensity to the minds of the whole community; the law of honor exists, but it has no organs to promulgate it. the confusion is far greater still in a democratic country like france, where the different classes of which the former fabric of society was composed, being brought together but not yet mingled, import day by day into each other's circles various and sometimes conflicting notions of honor--where every man, at his own will and pleasure, forsakes one portion of his forefathers' creed, and retains another; so that, amidst so many arbitrary measures, no common rule can ever be established, and it is almost impossible to predict which actions will be held in honor and which will be thought disgraceful. such times are wretched, but they are of short duration. as honor, amongst democratic nations, is imperfectly defined, its influence is of course less powerful; for it is difficult to apply with certainty and firmness a law which is not distinctly known. public opinion, the natural and supreme interpreter of the laws of honor, not clearly discerning to which side censure or approval ought to lean, can only pronounce a hesitating judgment. sometimes the opinion of the public may contradict itself; more frequently it does not act, and lets things pass. the weakness of the sense of honor in democracies also arises from several other causes. in aristocratic countries, the same notions of honor are always entertained by only a few persons, always limited in number, often separated from the rest of their fellow-citizens. honor is easily mingled and identified in their minds with the idea of all that distinguishes their own position; it appears to them as the chief characteristic of their own rank; they apply its different rules with all the warmth of personal interest, and they feel (if i may use the expression) a passion for complying with its dictates. this truth is extremely obvious in the old black-letter lawbooks on the subject of "trial by battel." the nobles, in their disputes, were bound to use the lance and sword; whereas the villains used only sticks amongst themselves, "inasmuch as," to use the words of the old books, "villains have no honor." this did not mean, as it may be imagined at the present day, that these people were contemptible; but simply that their actions were not to be judged by the same rules which were applied to the actions of the aristocracy. it is surprising, at first sight, that when the sense of honor is most predominant, its injunctions are usually most strange; so that the further it is removed from common reason the better it is obeyed; whence it has sometimes been inferred that the laws of honor were strengthened by their own extravagance. the two things indeed originate from the same source, but the one is not derived from the other. honor becomes fantastical in proportion to the peculiarity of the wants which it denotes, and the paucity of the men by whom those wants are felt; and it is because it denotes wants of this kind that its influence is great. thus the notion of honor is not the stronger for being fantastical, but it is fantastical and strong from the selfsame cause. further, amongst aristocratic nations each rank is different, but all ranks are fixed; every man occupies a place in his own sphere which he cannot relinquish, and he lives there amidst other men who are bound by the same ties. amongst these nations no man can either hope or fear to escape being seen; no man is placed so low but that he has a stage of his own, and none can avoid censure or applause by his obscurity. in democratic states on the contrary, where all the members of the community are mingled in the same crowd and in constant agitation, public opinion has no hold on men; they disappear at every instant, and elude its power. consequently the dictates of honor will be there less imperious and less stringent; for honor acts solely for the public eye--differing in this respect from mere virtue, which lives upon itself contented with its own approval. if the reader has distinctly apprehended all that goes before, he will understand that there is a close and necessary relation between the inequality of social conditions and what has here been styled honor--a relation which, if i am not mistaken, had not before been clearly pointed out. i shall therefore make one more attempt to illustrate it satisfactorily. suppose a nation stands apart from the rest of mankind: independently of certain general wants inherent in the human race, it will also have wants and interests peculiar to itself: certain opinions of censure or approbation forthwith arise in the community, which are peculiar to itself, and which are styled honor by the members of that community. now suppose that in this same nation a caste arises, which, in its turn, stands apart from all the other classes, and contracts certain peculiar wants, which give rise in their turn to special opinions. the honor of this caste, composed of a medley of the peculiar notions of the nation, and the still more peculiar notions of the caste, will be as remote as it is possible to conceive from the simple and general opinions of men. having reached this extreme point of the argument, i now return. when ranks are commingled and privileges abolished, the men of whom a nation is composed being once more equal and alike, their interests and wants become identical, and all the peculiar notions which each caste styled honor successively disappear: the notion of honor no longer proceeds from any other source than the wants peculiar to the nation at large, and it denotes the individual character of that nation to the world. lastly, if it be allowable to suppose that all the races of mankind should be commingled, and that all the peoples of earth should ultimately come to have the same interests, the same wants, undistinguished from each other by any characteristic peculiarities, no conventional value whatever would then be attached to men's actions; they would all be regarded by all in the same light; the general necessities of mankind, revealed by conscience to every man, would become the common standard. the simple and general notions of right and wrong only would then be recognized in the world, to which, by a natural and necessary tie, the idea of censure or approbation would be attached. thus, to comprise all my meaning in a single proposition, the dissimilarities and inequalities of men gave rise to the notion of honor; that notion is weakened in proportion as these differences are obliterated, and with them it would disappear. chapter xix: why so many ambitious men and so little lofty ambition are to be found in the united states the first thing which strikes a traveller in the united states is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society. no americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise; but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude, or to drive at very lofty aims. all are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation--few contemplate these things upon a great scale; and this is the more surprising, as nothing is to be discerned in the manners or laws of america to limit desire, or to prevent it from spreading its impulses in every direction. it seems difficult to attribute this singular state of things to the equality of social conditions; for at the instant when that same equality was established in france, the flight of ambition became unbounded. nevertheless, i think that the principal cause which may be assigned to this fact is to be found in the social condition and democratic manners of the americans. all revolutions enlarge the ambition of men: this proposition is more peculiarly true of those revolutions which overthrow an aristocracy. when the former barriers which kept back the multitude from fame and power are suddenly thrown down, a violent and universal rise takes place towards that eminence so long coveted and at length to be enjoyed. in this first burst of triumph nothing seems impossible to anyone: not only are desires boundless, but the power of satisfying them seems almost boundless, too. amidst the general and sudden renewal of laws and customs, in this vast confusion of all men and all ordinances, the various members of the community rise and sink again with excessive rapidity; and power passes so quickly from hand to hand that none need despair of catching it in turn. it must be recollected, moreover, that the people who destroy an aristocracy have lived under its laws; they have witnessed its splendor, and they have unconsciously imbibed the feelings and notions which it entertained. thus at the moment when an aristocracy is dissolved, its spirit still pervades the mass of the community, and its tendencies are retained long after it has been defeated. ambition is therefore always extremely great as long as a democratic revolution lasts, and it will remain so for some time after the revolution is consummated. the reminiscence of the extraordinary events which men have witnessed is not obliterated from their memory in a day. the passions which a revolution has roused do not disappear at its close. a sense of instability remains in the midst of re-established order: a notion of easy success survives the strange vicissitudes which gave it birth; desires still remain extremely enlarged, when the means of satisfying them are diminished day by day. the taste for large fortunes subsists, though large fortunes are rare: and on every side we trace the ravages of inordinate and hapless ambition kindled in hearts which they consume in secret and in vain. at length, however, the last vestiges of the struggle are effaced; the remains of aristocracy completely disappear; the great events by which its fall was attended are forgotten; peace succeeds to war, and the sway of order is restored in the new realm; desires are again adapted to the means by which they may be fulfilled; the wants, the opinions, and the feelings of men cohere once more; the level of the community is permanently determined, and democratic society established. a democratic nation, arrived at this permanent and regular state of things, will present a very different spectacle from that which we have just described; and we may readily conclude that, if ambition becomes great whilst the conditions of society are growing equal, it loses that quality when they have grown so. as wealth is subdivided and knowledge diffused, no one is entirely destitute of education or of property; the privileges and disqualifications of caste being abolished, and men having shattered the bonds which held them fixed, the notion of advancement suggests itself to every mind, the desire to rise swells in every heart, and all men want to mount above their station: ambition is the universal feeling. but if the equality of conditions gives some resources to all the members of the community, it also prevents any of them from having resources of great extent, which necessarily circumscribes their desires within somewhat narrow limits. thus amongst democratic nations ambition is ardent and continual, but its aim is not habitually lofty; and life is generally spent in eagerly coveting small objects which are within reach. what chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of their fortunes, but the vehemence of the exertions they daily make to improve them. they strain their faculties to the utmost to achieve paltry results, and this cannot fail speedily to limit their discernment and to circumscribe their powers. they might be much poorer and still be greater. the small number of opulent citizens who are to be found amidst a democracy do not constitute an exception to this rule. a man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. a man cannot enlarge his mind as he would his house. the same observation is applicable to the sons of such a man; they are born, it is true, in a lofty position, but their parents were humble; they have grown up amidst feelings and notions which they cannot afterwards easily get rid of; and it may be presumed that they will inherit the propensities of their father as well as his wealth. it may happen, on the contrary, that the poorest scion of a powerful aristocracy may display vast ambition, because the traditional opinions of his race and the general spirit of his order still buoy him up for some time above his fortune. another thing which prevents the men of democratic periods from easily indulging in the pursuit of lofty objects, is the lapse of time which they foresee must take place before they can be ready to approach them. "it is a great advantage," says pascal, "to be a man of quality, since it brings one man as forward at eighteen or twenty as another man would be at fifty, which is a clear gain of thirty years." those thirty years are commonly wanting to the ambitious characters of democracies. the principle of equality, which allows every man to arrive at everything, prevents all men from rapid advancement. in a democratic society, as well as elsewhere, there are only a certain number of great fortunes to be made; and as the paths which lead to them are indiscriminately open to all, the progress of all must necessarily be slackened. as the candidates appear to be nearly alike, and as it is difficult to make a selection without infringing the principle of equality, which is the supreme law of democratic societies, the first idea which suggests itself is to make them all advance at the same rate and submit to the same probation. thus in proportion as men become more alike, and the principle of equality is more peaceably and deeply infused into the institutions and manners of the country, the rules of advancement become more inflexible, advancement itself slower, the difficulty of arriving quickly at a certain height far greater. from hatred of privilege and from the embarrassment of choosing, all men are at last constrained, whatever may be their standard, to pass the same ordeal; all are indiscriminately subjected to a multitude of petty preliminary exercises, in which their youth is wasted and their imagination quenched, so that they despair of ever fully attaining what is held out to them; and when at length they are in a condition to perform any extraordinary acts, the taste for such things has forsaken them. in china, where the equality of conditions is exceedingly great and very ancient, no man passes from one public office to another without undergoing a probationary trial. this probation occurs afresh at every stage of his career; and the notion is now so rooted in the manners of the people that i remember to have read a chinese novel, in which the hero, after numberless crosses, succeeds at length in touching the heart of his mistress by taking honors. a lofty ambition breathes with difficulty in such an atmosphere. the remark i apply to politics extends to everything; equality everywhere produces the same effects; where the laws of a country do not regulate and retard the advancement of men by positive enactment, competition attains the same end. in a well-established democratic community great and rapid elevation is therefore rare; it forms an exception to the common rule; and it is the singularity of such occurrences that makes men forget how rarely they happen. men living in democracies ultimately discover these things; they find out at last that the laws of their country open a boundless field of action before them, but that no one can hope to hasten across it. between them and the final object of their desires, they perceive a multitude of small intermediate impediments, which must be slowly surmounted: this prospect wearies and discourages their ambition at once. they therefore give up hopes so doubtful and remote, to search nearer to themselves for less lofty and more easy enjoyments. their horizon is not bounded by the laws but narrowed by themselves. i have remarked that lofty ambitions are more rare in the ages of democracy than in times of aristocracy: i may add that when, in spite of these natural obstacles, they do spring into existence, their character is different. in aristocracies the career of ambition is often wide, but its boundaries are determined. in democracies ambition commonly ranges in a narrower field, but if once it gets beyond that, hardly any limits can be assigned to it. as men are individually weak--as they live asunder, and in constant motion--as precedents are of little authority and laws but of short duration, resistance to novelty is languid, and the fabric of society never appears perfectly erect or firmly consolidated. so that, when once an ambitious man has the power in his grasp, there is nothing he may noted are; and when it is gone from him, he meditates the overthrow of the state to regain it. this gives to great political ambition a character of revolutionary violence, which it seldom exhibits to an equal degree in aristocratic communities. the common aspect of democratic nations will present a great number of small and very rational objects of ambition, from amongst which a few ill-controlled desires of a larger growth will at intervals break out: but no such a thing as ambition conceived and contrived on a vast scale is to be met with there. i have shown elsewhere by what secret influence the principle of equality makes the passion for physical gratifications and the exclusive love of the present predominate in the human heart: these different propensities mingle with the sentiment of ambition, and tinge it, as it were, with their hues. i believe that ambitious men in democracies are less engrossed than any others with the interests and the judgment of posterity; the present moment alone engages and absorbs them. they are more apt to complete a number of undertakings with rapidity than to raise lasting monuments of their achievements; and they care much more for success than for fame. what they most ask of men is obedience--what they most covet is empire. their manners have in almost all cases remained below the height of their station; the consequence is that they frequently carry very low tastes into their extraordinary fortunes, and that they seem to have acquired the supreme power only to minister to their coarse or paltry pleasures. i think that in our time it is very necessary to cleanse, to regulate, and to adapt the feeling of ambition, but that it would be extremely dangerous to seek to impoverish and to repress it over-much. we should attempt to lay down certain extreme limits, which it should never be allowed to outstep; but its range within those established limits should not be too much checked. i confess that i apprehend much less for democratic society from the boldness than from the mediocrity of desires. what appears to me most to be dreaded is that, in the midst of the small incessant occupations of private life, ambition should lose its vigor and its greatness--that the passions of man should abate, but at the same time be lowered, so that the march of society should every day become more tranquil and less aspiring. i think then that the leaders of modern society would be wrong to seek to lull the community by a state of too uniform and too peaceful happiness; and that it is well to expose it from time to time to matters of difficulty and danger, in order to raise ambition and to give it a field of action. moralists are constantly complaining that the ruling vice of the present time is pride. this is true in one sense, for indeed no one thinks that he is not better than his neighbor, or consents to obey his superior: but it is extremely false in another; for the same man who cannot endure subordination or equality, has so contemptible an opinion of himself that he thinks he is only born to indulge in vulgar pleasures. he willingly takes up with low desires, without daring to embark in lofty enterprises, of which he scarcely dreams. thus, far from thinking that humility ought to be preached to our contemporaries, i would have endeavors made to give them a more enlarged idea of themselves and of their kind. humility is unwholesome to them; what they most want is, in my opinion, pride. i would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one vice. chapter xx: the trade of place-hunting in certain democratic countries in the united states as soon as a man has acquired some education and pecuniary resources, he either endeavors to get rich by commerce or industry, or he buys land in the bush and turns pioneer. all that he asks of the state is not to be disturbed in his toil, and to be secure of his earnings. amongst the greater part of european nations, when a man begins to feel his strength and to extend his desires, the first thing that occurs to him is to get some public employment. these opposite effects, originating in the same cause, deserve our passing notice. when public employments are few in number, ill-paid and precarious, whilst the different lines of business are numerous and lucrative, it is to business, and not to official duties, that the new and eager desires engendered by the principle of equality turn from every side. but if, whilst the ranks of society are becoming more equal, the education of the people remains incomplete, or their spirit the reverse of bold--if commerce and industry, checked in their growth, afford only slow and arduous means of making a fortune--the various members of the community, despairing of ameliorating their own condition, rush to the head of the state and demand its assistance. to relieve their own necessities at the cost of the public treasury, appears to them to be the easiest and most open, if not the only, way they have to rise above a condition which no longer contents them; place-hunting becomes the most generally followed of all trades. this must especially be the case, in those great centralized monarchies in which the number of paid offices is immense, and the tenure of them tolerably secure, so that no one despairs of obtaining a place, and of enjoying it as undisturbedly as a hereditary fortune. i shall not remark that the universal and inordinate desire for place is a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in the citizen, and diffuses a venal and servile humor throughout the frame of society; that it stifles the manlier virtues: nor shall i be at the pains to demonstrate that this kind of traffic only creates an unproductive activity, which agitates the country without adding to its resources: all these things are obvious. but i would observe, that a government which encourages this tendency risks its own tranquillity, and places its very existence in great jeopardy. i am aware that at a time like our own, when the love and respect which formerly clung to authority are seen gradually to decline, it may appear necessary to those in power to lay a closer hold on every man by his own interest, and it may seem convenient to use his own passions to keep him in order and in silence; but this cannot be so long, and what may appear to be a source of strength for a certain time will assuredly become in the end a great cause of embarrassment and weakness. amongst democratic nations, as well as elsewhere, the number of official appointments has in the end some limits; but amongst those nations, the number of aspirants is unlimited; it perpetually increases, with a gradual and irresistible rise in proportion as social conditions become more equal, and is only checked by the limits of the population. thus, when public employments afford the only outlet for ambition, the government necessarily meets with a permanent opposition at last; for it is tasked to satisfy with limited means unlimited desires. it is very certain that of all people in the world the most difficult to restrain and to manage are a people of solicitants. whatever endeavors are made by rulers, such a people can never be contented; and it is always to be apprehended that they will ultimately overturn the constitution of the country, and change the aspect of the state, for the sole purpose of making a clearance of places. the sovereigns of the present age, who strive to fix upon themselves alone all those novel desires which are aroused by equality, and to satisfy them, will repent in the end, if i am not mistaken, that they ever embarked in this policy: they will one day discover that they have hazarded their own power, by making it so necessary; and that the more safe and honest course would have been to teach their subjects the art of providing for themselves. *a [footnote a: as a matter of fact, more recent experience has shown that place-hunting is quite as intense in the united states as in any country in europe. it is regarded by the americans themselves as one of the great evils of their social condition, and it powerfully affects their political institutions. but the american who seeks a place seeks not so much a means of subsistence as the distinction which office and public employment confer. in the absence of any true aristocracy, the public service creates a spurious one, which is as much an object of ambition as the distinctions of rank in aristocratic countries.--translator's note.] chapter xxi: why great revolutions will become more rare a people which has existed for centuries under a system of castes and classes can only arrive at a democratic state of society by passing through a long series of more or less critical transformations, accomplished by violent efforts, and after numerous vicissitudes; in the course of which, property, opinions, and power are rapidly transferred from one hand to another. even after this great revolution is consummated, the revolutionary habits engendered by it may long be traced, and it will be followed by deep commotion. as all this takes place at the very time at which social conditions are becoming more equal, it is inferred that some concealed relation and secret tie exist between the principle of equality itself and revolution, insomuch that the one cannot exist without giving rise to the other. on this point reasoning may seem to lead to the same result as experience. amongst a people whose ranks are nearly equal, no ostensible bond connects men together, or keeps them settled in their station. none of them have either a permanent right or power to command--none are forced by their condition to obey; but every man, finding himself possessed of some education and some resources, may choose his won path and proceed apart from all his fellow-men. the same causes which make the members of the community independent of each other, continually impel them to new and restless desires, and constantly spur them onwards. it therefore seems natural that, in a democratic community, men, things, and opinions should be forever changing their form and place, and that democratic ages should be times of rapid and incessant transformation. but is this really the case? does the equality of social conditions habitually and permanently lead men to revolution? does that state of society contain some perturbing principle which prevents the community from ever subsiding into calm, and disposes the citizens to alter incessantly their laws, their principles, and their manners? i do not believe it; and as the subject is important, i beg for the reader's close attention. almost all the revolutions which have changed the aspect of nations have been made to consolidate or to destroy social inequality. remove the secondary causes which have produced the great convulsions of the world, and you will almost always find the principle of inequality at the bottom. either the poor have attempted to plunder the rich, or the rich to enslave the poor. if then a state of society can ever be founded in which every man shall have something to keep, and little to take from others, much will have been done for the peace of the world. i am aware that amongst a great democratic people there will always be some members of the community in great poverty, and others in great opulence; but the poor, instead of forming the immense majority of the nation, as is always the case in aristocratic communities, are comparatively few in number, and the laws do not bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury. the wealthy, on their side, are scarce and powerless; they have no privileges which attract public observation; even their wealth, as it is no longer incorporated and bound up with the soil, is impalpable, and as it were invisible. as there is no longer a race of poor men, so there is no longer a race of rich men; the latter spring up daily from the multitude, and relapse into it again. hence they do not form a distinct class, which may be easily marked out and plundered; and, moreover, as they are connected with the mass of their fellow-citizens by a thousand secret ties, the people cannot assail them without inflicting an injury upon itself. between these two extremes of democratic communities stand an innumerable multitude of men almost alike, who, without being exactly either rich or poor, are possessed of sufficient property to desire the maintenance of order, yet not enough to excite envy. such men are the natural enemies of violent commotions: their stillness keeps all beneath them and above them still, and secures the balance of the fabric of society. not indeed that even these men are contented with what they have gotten, or that they feel a natural abhorrence for a revolution in which they might share the spoil without sharing the calamity; on the contrary, they desire, with unexampled ardor, to get rich, but the difficulty is to know from whom riches can be taken. the same state of society which constantly prompts desires, restrains these desires within necessary limits: it gives men more liberty of changing and less interest in change. not only are the men of democracies not naturally desirous of revolutions, but they are afraid of them. all revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property--not only are they possessed of property, but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property. if we attentively consider each of the classes of which society is composed, it is easy to see that the passions engendered by property are keenest and most tenacious amongst the middle classes. the poor often care but little for what they possess, because they suffer much more from the want of what they have not, than they enjoy the little they have. the rich have many other passions besides that of riches to satisfy; and, besides, the long and arduous enjoyment of a great fortune sometimes makes them in the end insensible to its charms. but the men who have a competency, alike removed from opulence and from penury, attach an enormous value to their possessions. as they are still almost within the reach of poverty, they see its privations near at hand, and dread them; between poverty and themselves there is nothing but a scanty fortune, upon which they immediately fix their apprehensions and their hopes. every day increases the interest they take in it, by the constant cares which it occasions; and they are the more attached to it by their continual exertions to increase the amount. the notion of surrendering the smallest part of it is insupportable to them, and they consider its total loss as the worst of misfortunes. now these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one. i have shown in another part of this work that the equality of conditions naturally urges men to embark in commercial and industrial pursuits, and that it tends to increase and to distribute real property: i have also pointed out the means by which it inspires every man with an eager and constant desire to increase his welfare. nothing is more opposed to revolutionary passions than these things. it may happen that the final result of a revolution is favorable to commerce and manufactures; but its first consequence will almost always be the ruin of manufactures and mercantile men, because it must always change at once the general principles of consumption, and temporarily upset the existing proportion between supply and demand. i know of nothing more opposite to revolutionary manners than commercial manners. commerce is naturally adverse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. it is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme measures until obliged by the most absolute necessity. commerce renders men independent of each other, gives them a lofty notion of their personal importance, leads them to seek to conduct their own affairs, and teaches how to conduct them well; it therefore prepares men for freedom, but preserves them from revolutions. in a revolution the owners of personal property have more to fear than all others; for on the one hand their property is often easy to seize, and on the other it may totally disappear at any moment--a subject of alarm to which the owners of real property are less exposed, since, although they may lose the income of their estates, they may hope to preserve the land itself through the greatest vicissitudes. hence the former are much more alarmed at the symptoms of revolutionary commotion than the latter. thus nations are less disposed to make revolutions in proportion as personal property is augmented and distributed amongst them, and as the number of those possessing it increases. moreover, whatever profession men may embrace, and whatever species of property they may possess, one characteristic is common to them all. no one is fully contented with his present fortune--all are perpetually striving in a thousand ways to improve it. consider any one of them at any period of his life, and he will be found engaged with some new project for the purpose of increasing what he has; talk not to him of the interests and the rights of mankind: this small domestic concern absorbs for the time all his thoughts, and inclines him to defer political excitement to some other season. this not only prevents men from making revolutions, but deters men from desiring them. violent political passions have but little hold on those who have devoted all their faculties to the pursuit of their well-being. the ardor which they display in small matters calms their zeal for momentous undertakings. from time to time indeed, enterprising and ambitious men will arise in democratic communities, whose unbounded aspirations cannot be contented by following the beaten track. such men like revolutions and hail their approach; but they have great difficulty in bringing them about, unless unwonted events come to their assistance. no man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country; and, however powerful he may be supposed to be, he will find it difficult to make his contemporaries share in feelings and opinions which are repugnant to t all their feelings and desires. it is a mistake to believe that, when once the equality of conditions has become the old and uncontested state of society, and has imparted its characteristics to the manners of a nation, men will easily allow themselves to be thrust into perilous risks by an imprudent leader or a bold innovator. not indeed that they will resist him openly, by well-contrived schemes, or even by a premeditated plan of resistance. they will not struggle energetically against him, sometimes they will even applaud him--but they do not follow him. to his vehemence they secretly oppose their inertia; to his revolutionary tendencies their conservative interests; their homely tastes to his adventurous passions; their good sense to the flights of his genius; to his poetry their prose. with immense exertion he raises them for an instant, but they speedily escape from him, and fall back, as it were, by their own weight. he strains himself to rouse the indifferent and distracted multitude, and finds at last that he is reduced to impotence, not because he is conquered, but because he is alone. i do not assert that men living in democratic communities are naturally stationary; i think, on the contrary, that a perpetual stir prevails in the bosom of those societies, and that rest is unknown there; but i think that men bestir themselves within certain limits beyond which they hardly ever go. they are forever varying, altering, and restoring secondary matters; but they carefully abstain from touching what is fundamental. they love change, but they dread revolutions. although the americans are constantly modifying or abrogating some of their laws, they by no means display revolutionary passions. it may be easily seen, from the promptitude with which they check and calm themselves when public excitement begins to grow alarming, and at the very moment when passions seem most roused, that they dread a revolution as the worst of misfortunes, and that every one of them is inwardly resolved to make great sacrifices to avoid such a catastrophe. in no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the united states; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws of property. i have often remarked that theories which are of a revolutionary nature, since they cannot be put in practice without a complete and sometimes a sudden change in the state of property and persons, are much less favorably viewed in the united states than in the great monarchical countries of europe: if some men profess them, the bulk of the people reject them with instinctive abhorrence. i do not hesitate to say that most of the maxims commonly called democratic in france would be proscribed by the democracy of the united states. this may easily be understood: in america men have the opinions and passions of democracy, in europe we have still the passions and opinions of revolution. if ever america undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the united states--that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality, of conditions. when social conditions are equal, every man is apt to live apart, centred in himself and forgetful of the public. if the rulers of democratic nations were either to neglect to correct this fatal tendency, or to encourage it from a notion that it weans men from political passions and thus wards off revolutions, they might eventually produce the evil they seek to avoid, and a time might come when the inordinate passions of a few men, aided by the unintelligent selfishness or the pusillanimity of the greater number, would ultimately compel society to pass through strange vicissitudes. in democratic communities revolutions are seldom desired except by a minority; but a minority may sometimes effect them. i do not assert that democratic nations are secure from revolutions; i merely say that the state of society in those nations does not lead to revolutions, but rather wards them off. a democratic people left to itself will not easily embark in great hazards; it is only led to revolutions unawares; it may sometimes undergo them, but it does not make them; and i will add that, when such a people has been allowed to acquire sufficient knowledge and experience, it will not suffer them to be made. i am well aware that it this respect public institutions may themselves do much; they may encourage or repress the tendencies which originate in the state of society. i therefore do not maintain, i repeat, that a people is secure from revolutions simply because conditions are equal in the community; but i think that, whatever the institutions of such a people may be, great revolutions will always be far less violent and less frequent than is supposed; and i can easily discern a state of polity, which, when combined with the principle of equality, would render society more stationary than it has ever been in our western apart of the world. the observations i have here made on events may also be applied in part to opinions. two things are surprising in the united states--the mutability of the greater part of human actions, and the singular stability of certain principles. men are in constant motion; the mind of man appears almost unmoved. when once an opinion has spread over the country and struck root there, it would seem that no power on earth is strong enough to eradicate it. in the united states, general principles in religion, philosophy, morality, and even politics, do not vary, or at least are only modified by a hidden and often an imperceptible process: even the grossest prejudices are obliterated with incredible slowness, amidst the continual friction of men and things. i hear it said that it is in the nature and the habits of democracies to be constantly changing their opinions and feelings. this may be true of small democratic nations, like those of the ancient world, in which the whole community could be assembled in a public place and then excited at will by an orator. but i saw nothing of the kind amongst the great democratic people which dwells upon the opposite shores of the atlantic ocean. what struck me in the united states was the difficulty in shaking the majority in an opinion once conceived, or of drawing it off from a leader once adopted. neither speaking nor writing can accomplish it; nothing but experience will avail, and even experience must be repeated. this is surprising at first sight, but a more attentive investigation explains the fact. i do not think that it is as easy as is supposed to uproot the prejudices of a democratic people--to change its belief--to supersede principles once established, by new principles in religion, politics, and morals--in a word, to make great and frequent changes in men's minds. not that the human mind is there at rest--it is in constant agitation; but it is engaged in infinitely varying the consequences of known principles, and in seeking for new consequences, rather than in seeking for new principles. its motion is one of rapid circumvolution, rather than of straightforward impulse by rapid and direct effort; it extends its orbit by small continual and hasty movements, but it does not suddenly alter its position. men who are equal in rights, in education, in fortune, or, to comprise all in one word, in their social condition, have necessarily wants, habits, and tastes which are hardly dissimilar. as they look at objects under the same aspect, their minds naturally tend to analogous conclusions; and, though each of them may deviate from his contemporaries and from opinions of his own, they will involuntarily and unconsciously concur in a certain number of received opinions. the more attentively i consider the effects of equality upon the mind, the more am i persuaded that the intellectual anarchy which we witness about us is not, as many men suppose, the natural state of democratic nations. i think it is rather to be regarded as an accident peculiar to their youth, and that it only breaks out at that period of transition when men have already snapped the former ties which bound them together, but are still amazingly different in origin, education, and manners; so that, having retained opinions, propensities and tastes of great diversity, nothing any longer prevents men from avowing them openly. the leading opinions of men become similar in proportion as their conditions assimilate; such appears to me to be the general and permanent law--the rest is casual and transient. i believe that it will rarely happen to any man amongst a democratic community, suddenly to frame a system of notions very remote from that which his contemporaries have adopted; and if some such innovator appeared, i apprehend that he would have great difficulty in finding listeners, still more in finding believers. when the conditions of men are almost equal, they do not easily allow themselves to be persuaded by each other. as they all live in close intercourse, as they have learned the same things together, and as they lead the same life, they are not naturally disposed to take one of themselves for a guide, and to follow him implicitly. men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust. not only is confidence in the superior attainments of certain individuals weakened amongst democratic nations, as i have elsewhere remarked, but the general notion of the intellectual superiority which any man whatsoever may acquire in relation to the rest of the community is soon overshadowed. as men grow more like each other, the doctrine of the equality of the intellect gradually infuses itself into their opinions; and it becomes more difficult for any innovator to acquire or to exert much influence over the minds of a people. in such communities sudden intellectual revolutions will therefore be rare; for, if we read aright the history of the world, we shall find that great and rapid changes in human opinions have been produced far less by the force of reasoning than by the authority of a name. observe, too, that as the men who live in democratic societies are not connected with each other by any tie, each of them must be convinced individually; whilst in aristocratic society it is enough to convince a few--the rest follow. if luther had lived in an age of equality, and had not had princes and potentates for his audience, he would perhaps have found it more difficult to change the aspect of europe. not indeed that the men of democracies are naturally strongly persuaded of the certainty of their opinions, or are unwavering in belief; they frequently entertain doubts which no one, in their eyes, can remove. it sometimes happens at such times that the human mind would willingly change its position; but as nothing urges or guides it forwards, it oscillates to and fro without progressive motion. *a [footnote a: if i inquire what state of society is most favorable to the great revolutions of the mind, i find that it occurs somewhere between the complete equality of the whole community and the absolute separation of ranks. under a system of castes generations succeed each other without altering men's positions; some have nothing more, others nothing better, to hope for. the imagination slumbers amidst this universal silence and stillness, and the very idea of change fades from the human mind. when ranks have been abolished and social conditions are almost equalized, all men are in ceaseless excitement, but each of them stands alone, independent and weak. this latter state of things is excessively different from the former one; yet it has one point of analogy--great revolutions of the human mind seldom occur in it. but between these two extremes of the history of nations is an intermediate period--a period as glorious as it is agitated--when the conditions of men are not sufficiently settled for the mind to be lulled in torpor, when they are sufficiently unequal for men to exercise a vast power on the minds of one another, and when some few may modify the convictions of all. it is at such times that great reformers start up, and new opinions suddenly change the face of the world.] even when the reliance of a democratic people has been won, it is still no easy matter to gain their attention. it is extremely difficult to obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak to them of themselves. they do not attend to the things said to them, because they are always fully engrossed with the things they are doing. for indeed few men are idle in democratic nations; life is passed in the midst of noise and excitement, and men are so engaged in acting that little remains to them for thinking. i would especially remark that they are not only employed, but that they are passionately devoted to their employments. they are always in action, and each of their actions absorbs their faculties: the zeal which they display in business puts out the enthusiasm they might otherwise entertain for idea. i think that it is extremely difficult to excite the enthusiasm of a democratic people for any theory which has not a palpable, direct, and immediate connection with the daily occupations of life: therefore they will not easily forsake their old opinions; for it is enthusiasm which flings the minds of men out of the beaten track, and effects the great revolutions of the intellect as well as the great revolutions of the political world. thus democratic nations have neither time nor taste to go in search of novel opinions. even when those they possess become doubtful, they still retain them, because it would take too much time and inquiry to change them--they retain them, not as certain, but as established. there are yet other and more cogent reasons which prevent any great change from being easily effected in the principles of a democratic people. i have already adverted to them at the commencement of this part of my work. if the influence of individuals is weak and hardly perceptible amongst such a people, the power exercised by the mass upon the mind of each individual is extremely great--i have already shown for what reasons. i would now observe that it is wrong to suppose that this depends solely upon the form of government, and that the majority would lose its intellectual supremacy if it were to lose its political power. in aristocracies men have often much greatness and strength of their own: when they find themselves at variance with the greater number of their fellow-countrymen, they withdraw to their own circle, where they support and console themselves. such is not the case in a democratic country; there public favor seems as necessary as the air we breathe, and to live at variance with the multitude is, as it were, not to live. the multitude requires no laws to coerce those who think not like itself: public disapprobation is enough; a sense of their loneliness and impotence overtakes them and drives them to despair. whenever social conditions are equal, public opinion presses with enormous weight upon the mind of each individual; it surrounds, directs, and oppresses him; and this arises from the very constitution of society, much more than from its political laws. as men grow more alike, each man feels himself weaker in regard to all the rest; as he discerns nothing by which he is considerably raised above them, or distinguished from them, he mistrusts himself as soon as they assail him. not only does he mistrust his strength, but he even doubts of his right; and he is very near acknowledging that he is in the wrong, when the greater number of his countrymen assert that he is so. the majority do not need to constrain him--they convince him. in whatever way then the powers of a democratic community may be organized and balanced, it will always be extremely difficult to believe what the bulk of the people reject, or to profess what they condemn. this circumstance is extraordinarily favorable to the stability of opinions. when an opinion has taken root amongst a democratic people, and established itself in the minds of the bulk of the community, it afterwards subsists by itself and is maintained without effort, because no one attacks it. those who at first rejected it as false, ultimately receive it as the general impression; and those who still dispute it in their hearts, conceal their dissent; they are careful not to engage in a dangerous and useless conflict. it is true, that when the majority of a democratic people change their opinions, they may suddenly and arbitrarily effect strange revolutions in men's minds; but their opinions do not change without much difficulty, and it is almost as difficult to show that they are changed. time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind, will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward sign of the change. it has not been openly assailed, no conspiracy has been formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly secede--day by day a few of them abandon it, until last it is only professed by a minority. in this state it will still continue to prevail. as its enemies remain mute, or only interchange their thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of uncertainly they take no steps--they observe each other and are silent. the majority have ceased to believe what they believed before; but they still affect to believe, and this empty phantom of public opinion in strong enough to chill innovators, and to keep them silent and at respectful distance. we live at a time which has witnessed the most rapid changes of opinion in the minds of men; nevertheless it may be that the leading opinions of society will ere long be more settled than they have been for several centuries in our history: that time is not yet come, but it may perhaps be approaching. as i examine more closely the natural wants and tendencies of democratic nations, i grow persuaded that if ever social equality is generally and permanently established in the world, great intellectual and political revolutions will become more difficult and less frequent than is supposed. because the men of democracies appear always excited, uncertain, eager, changeable in their wills and in their positions, it is imagined that they are suddenly to abrogate their laws, to adopt new opinions, and to assume new manners. but if the principle of equality predisposes men to change, it also suggests to them certain interests and tastes which cannot be satisfied without a settled order of things; equality urges them on, but at the same time it holds them back; it spurs them, but fastens them to earth;--it kindles their desires, but limits their powers. this, however, is not perceived at first; the passions which tend to sever the citizens of a democracy are obvious enough; but the hidden force which restrains and unites them is not discernible at a glance. amidst the ruins which surround me, shall i dare to say that revolutions are not what i most fear coming generations? if men continue to shut themselves more closely within the narrow circle of domestic interests and to live upon that kind of excitement, it is to be apprehended that they may ultimately become inaccessible to those great and powerful public emotions which perturb nations--but which enlarge them and recruit them. when property becomes so fluctuating, and the love of property so restless and so ardent, i cannot but fear that men may arrive at such a state as to regard every new theory as a peril, every innovation as an irksome toil, every social improvement as a stepping-stone to revolution, and so refuse to move altogether for fear of being moved too far. i dread, and i confess it, lest they should at last so entirely give way to a cowardly love of present enjoyment, as to lose sight of the interests of their future selves and of those of their descendants; and to prefer to glide along the easy current of life, rather than to make, when it is necessary, a strong and sudden effort to a higher purpose. it is believed by some that modern society will be ever changing its aspect; for myself, i fear that it will ultimately be too invariably fixed in the same institutions, the same prejudices, the same manners, so that mankind will be stopped and circumscribed; that the mind will swing backwards and forwards forever, without begetting fresh ideas; that man will waste his strength in bootless and solitary trifling; and, though in continual motion, that humanity will cease to advance. chapter xxii: why democratic nations are naturally desirous of peace, and democratic armies of war the same interests, the same fears, the same passions which deter democratic nations from revolutions, deter them also from war; the spirit of military glory and the spirit of revolution are weakened at the same time and by the same causes. the ever-increasing numbers of men of property--lovers of peace, the growth of personal wealth which war so rapidly consumes, the mildness of manners, the gentleness of heart, those tendencies to pity which are engendered by the equality of conditions, that coolness of understanding which renders men comparatively insensible to the violent and poetical excitement of arms--all these causes concur to quench the military spirit. i think it may be admitted as a general and constant rule, that, amongst civilized nations, the warlike passions will become more rare and less intense in proportion as social conditions shall be more equal. war is nevertheless an occurrence to which all nations are subject, democratic nations as well as others. whatever taste they may have for peace, they must hold themselves in readiness to repel aggression, or in other words they must have an army. fortune, which has conferred so many peculiar benefits upon the inhabitants of the united states, has placed them in the midst of a wilderness, where they have, so to speak, no neighbors: a few thousand soldiers are sufficient for their wants; but this is peculiar to america, not to democracy. the equality of conditions, and the manners as well as the institutions resulting from it, do not exempt a democratic people from the necessity of standing armies, and their armies always exercise a powerful influence over their fate. it is therefore of singular importance to inquire what are the natural propensities of the men of whom these armies are composed. amongst aristocratic nations, especially amongst those in which birth is the only source of rank, the same inequality exists in the army as in the nation; the officer is noble, the soldier is a serf; the one is naturally called upon to command, the other to obey. in aristocratic armies, the private soldier's ambition is therefore circumscribed within very narrow limits. nor has the ambition of the officer an unlimited range. an aristocratic body not only forms a part of the scale of ranks in the nation, but it contains a scale of ranks within itself: the members of whom it is composed are placed one above another, in a particular and unvarying manner. thus one man is born to the command of a regiment, another to that of a company; when once they have reached the utmost object of their hopes, they stop of their own accord, and remain contented with their lot. there is, besides, a strong cause, which, in aristocracies, weakens the officer's desire of promotion. amongst aristocratic nations, an officer, independently of his rank in the army, also occupies an elevated rank in society; the former is almost always in his eyes only an appendage to the latter. a nobleman who embraces the profession of arms follows it less from motives of ambition than from a sense of the duties imposed on him by his birth. he enters the army in order to find an honorable employment for the idle years of his youth, and to be able to bring back to his home and his peers some honorable recollections of military life; but his principal object is not to obtain by that profession either property, distinction, or power, for he possesses these advantages in his own right, and enjoys them without leaving his home. in democratic armies all the soldiers may become officers, which makes the desire of promotion general, and immeasurably extends the bounds of military ambition. the officer, on his part, sees nothing which naturally and necessarily stops him at one grade more than at another; and each grade has immense importance in his eyes, because his rank in society almost always depends on his rank in the army. amongst democratic nations it often happens that an officer has no property but his pay, and no distinction but that of military honors: consequently as often as his duties change, his fortune changes, and he becomes, as it were, a new man. what was only an appendage to his position in aristocratic armies, has thus become the main point, the basis of his whole condition. under the old french monarchy officers were always called by their titles of nobility; they are now always called by the title of their military rank. this little change in the forms of language suffices to show that a great revolution has taken place in the constitution of society and in that of the army. in democratic armies the desire of advancement is almost universal: it is ardent, tenacious, perpetual; it is strengthened by all other desires, and only extinguished with life itself. but it is easy to see, that of all armies in the world, those in which advancement must be slowest in time of peace are the armies of democratic countries. as the number of commissions is naturally limited, whilst the number of competitors is almost unlimited, and as the strict law of equality is over all alike, none can make rapid progress--many can make no progress at all. thus the desire of advancement is greater, and the opportunities of advancement fewer, there than elsewhere. all the ambitious spirits of a democratic army are consequently ardently desirous of war, because war makes vacancies, and warrants the violation of that law of seniority which is the sole privilege natural to democracy. we thus arrive at this singular consequence, that of all armies those most ardently desirous of war are democratic armies, and of all nations those most fond of peace are democratic nations: and, what makes these facts still more extraordinary, is that these contrary effects are produced at the same time by the principle of equality. all the members of the community, being alike, constantly harbor the wish, and discover the possibility, of changing their condition and improving their welfare: this makes them fond of peace, which is favorable to industry, and allows every man to pursue his own little undertakings to their completion. on the other hand, this same equality makes soldiers dream of fields of battle, by increasing the value of military honors in the eyes of those who follow the profession of arms, and by rendering those honors accessible to all. in either case the inquietude of the heart is the same, the taste for enjoyment as insatiable, the ambition of success as great--the means of gratifying it are alone different. these opposite tendencies of the nation and the army expose democratic communities to great dangers. when a military spirit forsakes a people, the profession of arms immediately ceases to be held in honor, and military men fall to the lowest rank of the public servants: they are little esteemed, and no longer understood. the reverse of what takes place in aristocratic ages then occurs; the men who enter the army are no longer those of the highest, but of the lowest rank. military ambition is only indulged in when no other is possible. hence arises a circle of cause and consequence from which it is difficult to escape: the best part of the nation shuns the military profession because that profession is not honored, and the profession is not honored because the best part of the nation has ceased to follow it. it is then no matter of surprise that democratic armies are often restless, ill-tempered, and dissatisfied with their lot, although their physical condition is commonly far better, and their discipline less strict than in other countries. the soldier feels that he occupies an inferior position, and his wounded pride either stimulates his taste for hostilities which would render his services necessary, or gives him a turn for revolutions, during which he may hope to win by force of arms the political influence and personal importance now denied him. the composition of democratic armies makes this last-mentioned danger much to be feared. in democratic communities almost every man has some property to preserve; but democratic armies are generally led by men without property, most of whom have little to lose in civil broils. the bulk of the nation is naturally much more afraid of revolutions than in the ages of aristocracy, but the leaders of the army much less so. moreover, as amongst democratic nations (to repeat what i have just remarked) the wealthiest, the best educated, and the most able men seldom adopt the military profession, the army, taken collectively, eventually forms a small nation by itself, where the mind is less enlarged, and habits are more rude than in the nation at large. now, this small uncivilized nation has arms in its possession, and alone knows how to use them: for, indeed, the pacific temper of the community increases the danger to which a democratic people is exposed from the military and turbulent spirit of the army. nothing is so dangerous as an army amidst an unwarlike nation; the excessive love of the whole community for quiet continually puts its constitution at the mercy of the soldiery. it may therefore be asserted, generally speaking, that if democratic nations are naturally prone to peace from their interests and their propensities, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies. military revolutions, which are scarcely ever to be apprehended in aristocracies, are always to be dreaded amongst democratic nations. these perils must be reckoned amongst the most formidable which beset their future fate, and the attention of statesmen should be sedulously applied to find a remedy for the evil. when a nation perceives that it is inwardly affected by the restless ambition of its army, the first thought which occurs is to give this inconvenient ambition an object by going to war. i speak no ill of war: war almost always enlarges the mind of a people, and raises their character. in some cases it is the only check to the excessive growth of certain propensities which naturally spring out of the equality of conditions, and it must be considered as a necessary corrective to certain inveterate diseases to which democratic communities are liable. war has great advantages, but we must not flatter ourselves that it can diminish the danger i have just pointed out. that peril is only suspended by it, to return more fiercely when the war is over; for armies are much more impatient of peace after having tasted military exploits. war could only be a remedy for a people which should always be athirst for military glory. i foresee that all the military rulers who may rise up in great democratic nations, will find it easier to conquer with their armies, than to make their armies live at peace after conquest. there are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult--to begin a war, and to end it. again, if war has some peculiar advantages for democratic nations, on the other hand it exposes them to certain dangers which aristocracies have no cause to dread to an equal extent. i shall only point out two of these. although war gratifies the army, it embarrasses and often exasperates that countless multitude of men whose minor passions every day require peace in order to be satisfied. thus there is some risk of its causing, under another form, the disturbance it is intended to prevent. no protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. not indeed that after every victory it is to be apprehended that the victorious generals will possess themselves by force of the supreme power, after the manner of sylla and caesar: the danger is of another kind. war does not always give over democratic communities to military government, but it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government; it must almost compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. if it lead not to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits. all those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it. this is the first axiom of the science. one remedy, which appears to be obvious when the ambition of soldiers and officers becomes the subject of alarm, is to augment the number of commissions to be distributed by increasing the army. this affords temporary relief, but it plunges the country into deeper difficulties at some future period. to increase the army may produce a lasting effect in an aristocratic community, because military ambition is there confined to one class of men, and the ambition of each individual stops, as it were, at a certain limit; so that it may be possible to satisfy all who feel its influence. but nothing is gained by increasing the army amongst a democratic people, because the number of aspirants always rises in exactly the same ratio as the army itself. those whose claims have been satisfied by the creation of new commissions are instantly succeeded by a fresh multitude beyond all power of satisfaction; and even those who were but now satisfied soon begin to crave more advancement; for the same excitement prevails in the ranks of the army as in the civil classes of democratic society, and what men want is not to reach a certain grade, but to have constant promotion. though these wants may not be very vast, they are perpetually recurring. thus a democratic nation, by augmenting its army, only allays for a time the ambition of the military profession, which soon becomes even more formidable, because the number of those who feel it is increased. i am of opinion that a restless and turbulent spirit is an evil inherent in the very constitution of democratic armies, and beyond hope of cure. the legislators of democracies must not expect to devise any military organization capable by its influence of calming and restraining the military profession: their efforts would exhaust their powers, before the object is attained. the remedy for the vices of the army is not to be found in the army itself, but in the country. democratic nations are naturally afraid of disturbance and of despotism; the object is to turn these natural instincts into well-digested, deliberate, and lasting tastes. when men have at last learned to make a peaceful and profitable use of freedom, and have felt its blessings--when they have conceived a manly love of order, and have freely submitted themselves to discipline--these same men, if they follow the profession of arms, bring into it, unconsciously and almost against their will, these same habits and manners. the general spirit of the nation being infused into the spirit peculiar to the army, tempers the opinions and desires engendered by military life, or represses them by the mighty force of public opinion. teach but the citizens to be educated, orderly, firm, and free, the soldiers will be disciplined and obedient. any law which, in repressing the turbulent spirit of the army, should tend to diminish the spirit of freedom in the nation, and to overshadow the notion of law and right, would defeat its object: it would do much more to favor, than to defeat, the establishment of military tyranny. after all, and in spite of all precautions, a large army amidst a democratic people will always be a source of great danger; the most effectual means of diminishing that danger would be to reduce the army, but this is a remedy which all nations have it not in their power to use. chapter xxiii: which is the most warlike and most revolutionary class in democratic armies? it is a part of the essence of a democratic army to be very numerous in proportion to the people to which it belongs, as i shall hereafter show. on the other hand, men living in democratic times seldom choose a military life. democratic nations are therefore soon led to give up the system of voluntary recruiting for that of compulsory enlistment. the necessity of their social condition compels them to resort to the latter means, and it may easily be foreseen that they will all eventually adopt it. when military service is compulsory, the burden is indiscriminately and equally borne by the whole community. this is another necessary consequence of the social condition of these nations, and of their notions. the government may do almost whatever it pleases, provided it appeals to the whole community at once: it is the unequal distribution of the weight, not the weight itself, which commonly occasions resistance. but as military service is common to all the citizens, the evident consequence is that each of them remains but for a few years on active duty. thus it is in the nature of things that the soldier in democracies only passes through the army, whilst among most aristocratic nations the military profession is one which the soldier adopts, or which is imposed upon him, for life. this has important consequences. amongst the soldiers of a democratic army, some acquire a taste for military life, but the majority, being enlisted against their will, and ever ready to go back to their homes, do not consider themselves as seriously engaged in the military profession, and are always thinking of quitting it. such men do not contract the wants, and only half partake in the passions, which that mode of life engenders. they adapt themselves to their military duties, but their minds are still attached to the interests and the duties which engaged them in civil life. they do not therefore imbibe the spirit of the army--or rather, they infuse the spirit of the community at large into the army, and retain it there. amongst democratic nations the private soldiers remain most like civilians: upon them the habits of the nation have the firmest hold, and public opinion most influence. it is by the instrumentality of the private soldiers especially that it may be possible to infuse into a democratic army the love of freedom and the respect of rights, if these principles have once been successfully inculcated on the people at large. the reverse happens amongst aristocratic nations, where the soldiery have eventually nothing in common with their fellow-citizens, and where they live amongst them as strangers, and often as enemies. in aristocratic armies the officers are the conservative element, because the officers alone have retained a strict connection with civil society, and never forego their purpose of resuming their place in it sooner or later: in democratic armies the private soldiers stand in this position, and from the same cause. it often happens, on the contrary, that in these same democratic armies the officers contract tastes and wants wholly distinct from those of the nation--a fact which may be thus accounted for. amongst democratic nations, the man who becomes an officer severs all the ties which bound him to civil life; he leaves it forever; he has no interest to resume it. his true country is the army, since he owes all he has to the rank he has attained in it; he therefore follows the fortunes of the army, rises or sinks with it, and henceforward directs all his hopes to that quarter only. as the wants of an officer are distinct from those of the country, he may perhaps ardently desire war, or labor to bring about a revolution at the very moment when the nation is most desirous of stability and peace. there are, nevertheless, some causes which allay this restless and warlike spirit. though ambition is universal and continual amongst democratic nations, we have seen that it is seldom great. a man who, being born in the lower classes of the community, has risen from the ranks to be an officer, has already taken a prodigious step. he has gained a footing in a sphere above that which he filled in civil life, and he has acquired rights which most democratic nations will ever consider as inalienable. *a he is willing to pause after so great an effort, and to enjoy what he has won. the fear of risking what he has already obtained damps the desire of acquiring what he has not got. having conquered the first and greatest impediment which opposed his advancement, he resigns himself with less impatience to the slowness of his progress. his ambition will be more and more cooled in proportion as the increasing distinction of his rank teaches him that he has more to put in jeopardy. if i am not mistaken, the least warlike, and also the least revolutionary part, of a democratic army, will always be its chief commanders. [footnote a: the position of officers is indeed much more secure amongst democratic nations than elsewhere; the lower the personal standing of the man, the greater is the comparative importance of his military grade, and the more just and necessary is it that the enjoyment of that rank should be secured by the laws.] but the remarks i have just made on officers and soldiers are not applicable to a numerous class which in all armies fills the intermediate space between them--i mean the class of non-commissioned officers. this class of non-commissioned officers which have never acted a part in history until the present century, is henceforward destined, i think, to play one of some importance. like the officers, non-commissioned officers have broken, in their minds, all the ties which bound them to civil life; like the former, they devote themselves permanently to the service, and perhaps make it even more exclusively the object of all their desires: but non-commissioned officers are men who have not yet reached a firm and lofty post at which they may pause and breathe more freely, ere they can attain further promotion. by the very nature of his duties, which is invariable, a non-commissioned officer is doomed to lead an obscure, confined, comfortless, and precarious existence; as yet he sees nothing of military life but its dangers; he knows nothing but its privations and its discipline--more difficult to support than dangers: he suffers the more from his present miseries, from knowing that the constitution of society and of the army allow him to rise above them; he may, indeed, at any time obtain his commission, and enter at once upon command, honors, independence, rights, and enjoyments. not only does this object of his hopes appear to him of immense importance, but he is never sure of reaching it till it is actually his own; the grade he fills is by no means irrevocable; he is always entirely abandoned to the arbitrary pleasure of his commanding officer, for this is imperiously required by the necessity of discipline: a slight fault, a whim, may always deprive him in an instant of the fruits of many years of toil and endeavor; until he has reached the grade to which he aspires he has accomplished nothing; not till he reaches that grade does his career seem to begin. a desperate ambition cannot fail to be kindled in a man thus incessantly goaded on by his youth, his wants, his passions, the spirit of his age, his hopes, and his age, his hopes, and his fears. non-commissioned officers are therefore bent on war--on war always, and at any cost; but if war be denied them, then they desire revolutions to suspend the authority of established regulations, and to enable them, aided by the general confusion and the political passions of the time, to get rid of their superior officers and to take their places. nor is it impossible for them to bring about such a crisis, because their common origin and habits give them much influence over the soldiers, however different may be their passions and their desires. it would be an error to suppose that these various characteristics of officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, belong to any particular time or country; they will always occur at all times, and amongst all democratic nations. in every democratic army the non-commissioned officers will be the worst representatives of the pacific and orderly spirit of the country, and the private soldiers will be the best. the latter will carry with them into military life the strength or weakness of the manners of the nation; they will display a faithful reflection of the community: if that community is ignorant and weak, they will allow themselves to be drawn by their leaders into disturbances, either unconsciously or against their will; if it is enlightened and energetic, the community will itself keep them within the bounds of order. chapter xxiv: causes which render democratic armies weaker than other armies at the outset of a campaign, and more formidable in protracted warfare any army is in danger of being conquered at the outset of a campaign, after a long peace; any army which has long been engaged in warfare has strong chances of victory: this truth is peculiarly applicable to democratic armies. in aristocracies the military profession, being a privileged career, is held in honor even in time of peace. men of great talents, great attainments, and great ambition embrace it; the army is in all respects on a level with the nation, and frequently above it. we have seen, on the contrary, that amongst a democratic people the choicer minds of the nation are gradually drawn away from the military profession, to seek by other paths, distinction, power, and especially wealth. after a long peace--and in democratic ages the periods of peace are long--the army is always inferior to the country itself. in this state it is called into active service; and until war has altered it, there is danger for the country as well as for the army. i have shown that in democratic armies, and in time of peace, the rule of seniority is the supreme and inflexible law of advancement. this is not only a consequence, as i have before observed, of the constitution of these armies, but of the constitution of the people, and it will always occur. again, as amongst these nations the officer derives his position in the country solely from his position in the army, and as he draws all the distinction and the competency he enjoys from the same source, he does not retire from his profession, or is not super-annuated, till towards the extreme close of life. the consequence of these two causes is, that when a democratic people goes to war after a long interval of peace all the leading officers of the army are old men. i speak not only of the generals, but of the non-commissioned officers, who have most of them been stationary, or have only advanced step by step. it may be remarked with surprise, that in a democratic army after a long peace all the soldiers are mere boys, and all the superior officers in declining years; so that the former are wanting in experience, the latter in vigor. this is a strong element of defeat, for the first condition of successful generalship is youth: i should not have ventured to say so if the greatest captain of modern times had not made the observation. these two causes do not act in the same manner upon aristocratic armies: as men are promoted in them by right of birth much more than by right of seniority, there are in all ranks a certain number of young men, who bring to their profession all the early vigor of body and mind. again, as the men who seek for military honors amongst an aristocratic people, enjoy a settled position in civil society, they seldom continue in the army until old age overtakes them. after having devoted the most vigorous years of youth to the career of arms, they voluntarily retire, and spend at home the remainder of their maturer years. a long peace not only fills democratic armies with elderly officers, but it also gives to all the officers habits both of body and mind which render them unfit for actual service. the man who has long lived amidst the calm and lukewarm atmosphere of democratic manners can at first ill adapt himself to the harder toils and sterner duties of warfare; and if he has not absolutely lost the taste for arms, at least he has assumed a mode of life which unfits him for conquest. amongst aristocratic nations, the ease of civil life exercises less influence on the manners of the army, because amongst those nations the aristocracy commands the army: and an aristocracy, however plunged in luxurious pleasures, has always many other passions besides that of its own well-being, and to satisfy those passions more thoroughly its well-being will be readily sacrificed. *a [footnote a: see appendix v.] i have shown that in democratic armies, in time of peace, promotion is extremely slow. the officers at first support this state of things with impatience, they grow excited, restless, exasperated, but in the end most of them make up their minds to it. those who have the largest share of ambition and of resources quit the army; others, adapting their tastes and their desires to their scanty fortunes, ultimately look upon the military profession in a civil point of view. the quality they value most in it is the competency and security which attend it: their whole notion of the future rests upon the certainty of this little provision, and all they require is peaceably to enjoy it. thus not only does a long peace fill an army with old men, but it is frequently imparts the views of old men to those who are still in the prime of life. i have also shown that amongst democratic nations in time of peace the military profession is held in little honor and indifferently followed. this want of public favor is a heavy discouragement to the army; it weighs down the minds of the troops, and when war breaks out at last, they cannot immediately resume their spring and vigor. no similar cause of moral weakness occurs in aristocratic armies: there the officers are never lowered either in their own eyes or in those of their countrymen, because, independently of their military greatness, they are personally great. but even if the influence of peace operated on the two kinds of armies in the same manner, the results would still be different. when the officers of an aristocratic army have lost their warlike spirit and the desire of raising themselves by service, they still retain a certain respect for the honor of their class, and an old habit of being foremost to set an example. but when the officers of a democratic army have no longer the love of war and the ambition of arms, nothing whatever remains to them. i am therefore of opinion that, when a democratic people engages in a war after a long peace, it incurs much more risk of defeat than any other nation; but it ought not easily to be cast down by its reverses, for the chances of success for such an army are increased by the duration of the war. when a war has at length, by its long continuance, roused the whole community from their peaceful occupations and ruined their minor undertakings, the same passions which made them attach so much importance to the maintenance of peace will be turned to arms. war, after it has destroyed all modes of speculation, becomes itself the great and sole speculation, to which all the ardent and ambitious desires which equality engenders are exclusively directed. hence it is that the selfsame democratic nations which are so reluctant to engage in hostilities, sometimes perform prodigious achievements when once they have taken the field. as the war attracts more and more of public attention, and is seen to create high reputations and great fortunes in a short space of time, the choicest spirits of the nation enter the military profession: all the enterprising, proud, and martial minds, no longer of the aristocracy solely, but of the whole country, are drawn in this direction. as the number of competitors for military honors is immense, and war drives every man to his proper level, great generals are always sure to spring up. a long war produces upon a democratic army the same effects that a revolution produces upon a people; it breaks through regulations, and allows extraordinary men to rise above the common level. those officers whose bodies and minds have grown old in peace, are removed, or superannuated, or they die. in their stead a host of young men are pressing on, whose frames are already hardened, whose desires are extended and inflamed by active service. they are bent on advancement at all hazards, and perpetual advancement; they are followed by others with the same passions and desires, and after these are others yet unlimited by aught but the size of the army. the principle of equality opens the door of ambition to all, and death provides chances for ambition. death is constantly thinning the ranks, making vacancies, closing and opening the career of arms. there is moreover a secret connection between the military character and the character of democracies, which war brings to light. the men of democracies are naturally passionately eager to acquire what they covet, and to enjoy it on easy conditions. they for the most part worship chance, and are much less afraid of death than of difficulty. this is the spirit which they bring to commerce and manufactures; and this same spirit, carried with them to the field of battle, induces them willingly to expose their lives in order to secure in a moment the rewards of victory. no kind of greatness is more pleasing to the imagination of a democratic people than military greatness--a greatness of vivid and sudden lustre, obtained without toil, by nothing but the risk of life. thus, whilst the interests and the tastes of the members of a democratic community divert them from war, their habits of mind fit them for carrying on war well; they soon make good soldiers, when they are roused from their business and their enjoyments. if peace is peculiarly hurtful to democratic armies, war secures to them advantages which no other armies ever possess; and these advantages, however little felt at first, cannot fail in the end to give them the victory. an aristocratic nation, which in a contest with a democratic people does not succeed in ruining the latter at the outset of the war, always runs a great risk of being conquered by it. chapter xxv: of discipline in democratic armies it is a very general opinion, especially in aristocratic countries, that the great social equality which prevails in democracies ultimately renders the private soldier independent of the officer, and thus destroys the bond of discipline. this is a mistake, for there are two kinds of discipline, which it is important not to confound. when the officer is noble and the soldier a serf--one rich, the other poor--the former educated and strong, the latter ignorant and weak--the strictest bond of obedience may easily be established between the two men. the soldier is broken in to military discipline, as it were, before he enters the army; or rather, military discipline is nothing but an enhancement of social servitude. in aristocratic armies the soldier will soon become insensible to everything but the orders of his superior officers; he acts without reflection, triumphs without enthusiasm, and dies without complaint: in this state he is no longer a man, but he is still a most formidable animal trained for war. a democratic people must despair of ever obtaining from soldiers that blind, minute, submissive, and invariable obedience which an aristocratic people may impose on them without difficulty. the state of society does not prepare them for it, and the nation might be in danger of losing its natural advantages if it sought artificially to acquire advantages of this particular kind. amongst democratic communities, military discipline ought not to attempt to annihilate the free spring of the faculties; all that can be done by discipline is to direct it; the obedience thus inculcated is less exact, but it is more eager and more intelligent. it has its root in the will of him who obeys: it rests not only on his instinct, but on his reason; and consequently it will often spontaneously become more strict as danger requires it. the discipline of an aristocratic army is apt to be relaxed in war, because that discipline is founded upon habits, and war disturbs those habits. the discipline of a democratic army on the contrary is strengthened in sight of the enemy, because every soldier then clearly perceives that he must be silent and obedient in order to conquer. the nations which have performed the greatest warlike achievements knew no other discipline than that which i speak of. amongst the ancients none were admitted into the armies but freemen and citizens, who differed but little from one another, and were accustomed to treat each other as equals. in this respect it may be said that the armies of antiquity were democratic, although they came out of the bosom of aristocracy; the consequence was that in those armies a sort of fraternal familiarity prevailed between the officers and the men. plutarch's lives of great commanders furnish convincing instances of the fact: the soldiers were in the constant habit of freely addressing their general, and the general listened to and answered whatever the soldiers had to say: they were kept in order by language and by example, far more than by constraint or punishment; the general was as much their companion as their chief. i know not whether the soldiers of greece and rome ever carried the minutiae of military discipline to the same degree of perfection as the russians have done; but this did not prevent alexander from conquering asia--and rome, the world. chapter xxvi: some considerations on war in democratic communities when the principle of equality is in growth, not only amongst a single nation, but amongst several neighboring nations at the same time, as is now the case in europe, the inhabitants of these different countries, notwithstanding the dissimilarity of language, of customs, and of laws, nevertheless resemble each other in their equal dread of war and their common love of peace. *a it is in vain that ambition or anger puts arms in the hands of princes; they are appeased in spite of themselves by a species of general apathy and goodwill, which makes the sword drop from their grasp, and wars become more rare. as the spread of equality, taking place in several countries at once, simultaneously impels their various inhabitants to follow manufactures and commerce, not only do their tastes grow alike, but their interests are so mixed and entangled with one another that no nation can inflict evils on other nations without those evils falling back upon itself; and all nations ultimately regard war as a calamity, almost as severe to the conqueror as to the conquered. thus, on the one hand, it is extremely difficult in democratic ages to draw nations into hostilities; but on the other hand, it is almost impossible that any two of them should go to war without embroiling the rest. the interests of all are so interlaced, their opinions and their wants so much alike, that none can remain quiet when the others stir. wars therefore become more rare, but when they break out they spread over a larger field. neighboring democratic nations not only become alike in some respects, but they eventually grow to resemble each other in almost all. *b this similitude of nations has consequences of great importance in relation to war. [footnote a: it is scarcely necessary for me to observe that the dread of war displayed by the nations of europe is not solely attributable to the progress made by the principle of equality amongst them; independently of this permanent cause several other accidental causes of great weight might be pointed out, and i may mention before all the rest the extreme lassitude which the wars of the revolution and the empire have left behind them.] [footnote b: this is not only because these nations have the same social condition, but it arises from the very nature of that social condition which leads men to imitate and identify themselves with each other. when the members of a community are divided into castes and classes, they not only differ from one another, but they have no taste and no desire to be alike; on the contrary, everyone endeavors, more and more, to keep his own opinions undisturbed, to retain his own peculiar habits, and to remain himself. the characteristics of individuals are very strongly marked. when the state of society amongst a people is democratic--that is to say, when there are no longer any castes or classes in the community, and all its members are nearly equal in education and in property--the human mind follows the opposite direction. men are much alike, and they are annoyed, as it were, by any deviation from that likeness: far from seeking to preserve their own distinguishing singularities, they endeavor to shake them off, in order to identify themselves with the general mass of the people, which is the sole representative of right and of might to their eyes. the characteristics of individuals are nearly obliterated. in the ages of aristocracy even those who are naturally alike strive to create imaginary differences between themselves: in the ages of democracy even those who are not alike seek only to become so, and to copy each other--so strongly is the mind of every man always carried away by the general impulse of mankind. something of the same kind may be observed between nations: two nations having the same aristocratic social condition, might remain thoroughly distinct and extremely different, because the spirit of aristocracy is to retain strong individual characteristics; but if two neighboring nations have the same democratic social condition, they cannot fail to adopt similar opinions and manners, because the spirit of democracy tends to assimilate men to each other.] if i inquire why it is that the helvetic confederacy made the greatest and most powerful nations of europe tremble in the fifteenth century, whilst at the present day the power of that country is exactly proportioned to its population, i perceive that the swiss are become like all the surrounding communities, and those surrounding communities like the swiss: so that as numerical strength now forms the only difference between them, victory necessarily attends the largest army. thus one of the consequences of the democratic revolution which is going on in europe is to make numerical strength preponderate on all fields of battle, and to constrain all small nations to incorporate themselves with large states, or at least to adopt the policy of the latter. as numbers are the determining cause of victory, each people ought of course to strive by all the means in its power to bring the greatest possible number of men into the field. when it was possible to enlist a kind of troops superior to all others, such as the swiss infantry or the french horse of the sixteenth century, it was not thought necessary to raise very large armies; but the case is altered when one soldier is as efficient as another. the same cause which begets this new want also supplies means of satisfying it; for, as i have already observed, when men are all alike, they are all weak, and the supreme power of the state is naturally much stronger amongst democratic nations than elsewhere. hence, whilst these nations are desirous of enrolling the whole male population in the ranks of the army, they have the power of effecting this object: the consequence is, that in democratic ages armies seem to grow larger in proportion as the love of war declines. in the same ages, too, the manner of carrying on war is likewise altered by the same causes. machiavelli observes in "the prince," "that it is much more difficult to subdue a people which has a prince and his barons for its leaders, than a nation which is commanded by a prince and his slaves." to avoid offence, let us read public functionaries for slaves, and this important truth will be strictly applicable to our own time. a great aristocratic people cannot either conquer its neighbors, or be conquered by them, without great difficulty. it cannot conquer them, because all its forces can never be collected and held together for a considerable period: it cannot be conquered, because an enemy meets at every step small centres of resistance by which invasion is arrested. war against an aristocracy may be compared to war in a mountainous country; the defeated party has constant opportunities of rallying its forces to make a stand in a new position. exactly the reverse occurs amongst democratic nations: they easily bring their whole disposable force into the field, and when the nation is wealthy and populous it soon becomes victorious; but if ever it is conquered, and its territory invaded, it has few resources at command; and if the enemy takes the capital, the nation is lost. this may very well be explained: as each member of the community is individually isolated and extremely powerless, no one of the whole body can either defend himself or present a rallying point to others. nothing is strong in a democratic country except the state; as the military strength of the state is destroyed by the destruction of the army, and its civil power paralyzed by the capture of the chief city, all that remains is only a multitude without strength or government, unable to resist the organized power by which it is assailed. i am aware that this danger may be lessened by the creation of provincial liberties, and consequently of provincial powers, but this remedy will always be insufficient. for after such a catastrophe, not only is the population unable to carry on hostilities, but it may be apprehended that they will not be inclined to attempt it. in accordance with the law of nations adopted in civilized countries, the object of wars is not to seize the property of private individuals, but simply to get possession of political power. the destruction of private property is only occasionally resorted to for the purpose of attaining the latter object. when an aristocratic country is invaded after the defeat of its army, the nobles, although they are at the same time the wealthiest members of the community, will continue to defend themselves individually rather than submit; for if the conqueror remained master of the country, he would deprive them of their political power, to which they cling even more closely than to their property. they therefore prefer fighting to subjection, which is to them the greatest of all misfortunes; and they readily carry the people along with them because the people has long been used to follow and obey them, and besides has but little to risk in the war. amongst a nation in which equality of conditions prevails, each citizen, on the contrary, has but slender share of political power, and often has no share at all; on the other hand, all are independent, and all have something to lose; so that they are much less afraid of being conquered, and much more afraid of war, than an aristocratic people. it will always be extremely difficult to decide a democratic population to take up arms, when hostilities have reached its own territory. hence the necessity of giving to such a people the rights and the political character which may impart to every citizen some of those interests that cause the nobles to act for the public welfare in aristocratic countries. it should never be forgotten by the princes and other leaders of democratic nations, that nothing but the passion and the habit of freedom can maintain an advantageous contest with the passion and the habit of physical well-being. i can conceive nothing better prepared for subjection, in case of defeat, than a democratic people without free institutions. formerly it was customary to take the field with a small body of troops, to fight in small engagements, and to make long, regular sieges: modern tactics consist in fighting decisive battles, and, as soon as a line of march is open before the army, in rushing upon the capital city, in order to terminate the war at a single blow. napoleon, it is said, was the inventor of this new system; but the invention of such a system did not depend on any individual man, whoever he might be. the mode in which napoleon carried on war was suggested to him by the state of society in his time; that mode was successful, because it was eminently adapted to that state of society, and because he was the first to employ it. napoleon was the first commander who marched at the head of an army from capital to capital, but the road was opened for him by the ruin of feudal society. it may fairly be believed that, if that extraordinary man had been born three hundred years ago, he would not have derived the same results from his method of warfare, or, rather, that he would have had a different method. i shall add but a few words on civil wars, for fear of exhausting the patience of the reader. most of the remarks which i have made respecting foreign wars are applicable a fortiori to civil wars. men living in democracies are not naturally prone to the military character; they sometimes assume it, when they have been dragged by compulsion to the field; but to rise in a body and voluntarily to expose themselves to the horrors of war, and especially of civil war, is a course which the men of democracies are not apt to adopt. none but the most adventurous members of the community consent to run into such risks; the bulk of the population remains motionless. but even if the population were inclined to act, considerable obstacles would stand in their way; for they can resort to no old and well-established influence which they are willing to obey--no well-known leaders to rally the discontented, as well as to discipline and to lead them--no political powers subordinate to the supreme power of the nation, which afford an effectual support to the resistance directed against the government. in democratic countries the moral power of the majority is immense, and the physical resources which it has at its command are out of all proportion to the physical resources which may be combined against it. therefore the party which occupies the seat of the majority, which speaks in its name and wields its power, triumphs instantaneously and irresistibly over all private resistance; it does not even give such opposition time to exist, but nips it in the bud. those who in such nations seek to effect a revolution by force of arms have no other resource than suddenly to seize upon the whole engine of government as it stands, which can better be done by a single blow than by a war; for as soon as there is a regular war, the party which represents the state is always certain to conquer. the only case in which a civil war could arise is, if the army should divide itself into two factions, the one raising the standard of rebellion, the other remaining true to its allegiance. an army constitutes a small community, very closely united together, endowed with great powers of vitality, and able to supply its own wants for some time. such a war might be bloody, but it could not be long; for either the rebellious army would gain over the government by the sole display of its resources, or by its first victory, and then the war would be over; or the struggle would take place, and then that portion of the army which should not be supported by the organized powers of the state would speedily either disband itself or be destroyed. it may therefore be admitted as a general truth, that in ages of equality civil wars will become much less frequent and less protracted. *c [footnote c: it should be borne in mind that i speak here of sovereign and independent democratic nations, not of confederate democracies; in confederacies, as the preponderating power always resides, in spite of all political fictions, in the state governments, and not in the federal government, civil wars are in fact nothing but foreign wars in disguise.] book four: influence of democratic opinions on political society chapter i: that equality naturally gives men a taste for free institutions i should imperfectly fulfil the purpose of this book, if, after having shown what opinions and sentiments are suggested by the principle of equality, i did not point out, ere i conclude, the general influence which these same opinions and sentiments may exercise upon the government of human societies. to succeed in this object i shall frequently have to retrace my steps; but i trust the reader will not refuse to follow me through paths already known to him, which may lead to some new truth. the principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. this complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; you will find that of all governments he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government, whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control. of all the political effects produced by the equality of conditions, this love of independence is the first to strike the observing, and to alarm the timid; nor can it be said that their alarm is wholly misplaced, for anarchy has a more formidable aspect in democratic countries than elsewhere. as the citizens have no direct influence on each other, as soon as the supreme power of the nation fails, which kept them all in their several stations, it would seem that disorder must instantly reach its utmost pitch, and that, every man drawing aside in a different direction, the fabric of society must at once crumble away. i am, however, persuaded that anarchy is not the principal evil which democratic ages have to fear, but the least. for the principle of equality begets two tendencies; the one leads men straight to independence, and may suddenly drive them into anarchy; the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but more certain road, to servitude. nations readily discern the former tendency, and are prepared to resist it; they are led away by the latter, without perceiving its drift; hence it is peculiarly important to point it out. for myself, i am so far from urging as a reproach to the principle of equality that it renders men untractable, that this very circumstance principally calls forth my approbation. i admire to see how it deposits in the mind and heart of man the dim conception and instinctive love of political independence, thus preparing the remedy for the evil which it engenders; it is on this very account that i am attached to it. chapter ii: that the notions of democratic nations on government are naturally favorable to the concentration of power the notion of secondary powers, placed between the sovereign and his subjects, occurred naturally to the imagination of aristocratic nations, because those communities contained individuals or families raised above the common level, and apparently destined to command by their birth, their education, and their wealth. this same notion is naturally wanting in the minds of men in democratic ages, for converse reasons: it can only be introduced artificially, it can only be kept there with difficulty; whereas they conceive, as it were, without thinking upon the subject, the notion of a sole and central power which governs the whole community by its direct influence. moreover in politics, as well as in philosophy and in religion, the intellect of democratic nations is peculiarly open to simple and general notions. complicated systems are repugnant to it, and its favorite conception is that of a great nation composed of citizens all resembling the same pattern, and all governed by a single power. the very next notion to that of a sole and central power, which presents itself to the minds of men in the ages of equality, is the notion of uniformity of legislation. as every man sees that he differs but little from those about him, he cannot understand why a rule which is applicable to one man should not be equally applicable to all others. hence the slightest privileges are repugnant to his reason; the faintest dissimilarities in the political institutions of the same people offend him, and uniformity of legislation appears to him to be the first condition of good government. i find, on the contrary, that this same notion of a uniform rule, equally binding on all the members of the community, was almost unknown to the human mind in aristocratic ages; it was either never entertained, or it was rejected. these contrary tendencies of opinion ultimately turn on either side to such blind instincts and such ungovernable habits that they still direct the actions of men, in spite of particular exceptions. notwithstanding the immense variety of conditions in the middle ages, a certain number of persons existed at that period in precisely similar circumstances; but this did not prevent the laws then in force from assigning to each of them distinct duties and different rights. on the contrary, at the present time all the powers of government are exerted to impose the same customs and the same laws on populations which have as yet but few points of resemblance. as the conditions of men become equal amongst a people, individuals seem of less importance, and society of greater dimensions; or rather, every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd, and nothing stands conspicuous but the great and imposing image of the people at large. this naturally gives the men of democratic periods a lofty opinion of the privileges of society, and a very humble notion of the rights of individuals; they are ready to admit that the interests of the former are everything, and those of the latter nothing. they are willing to acknowledge that the power which represents the community has far more information and wisdom than any of the members of that community; and that it is the duty, as well as the right, of that power to guide as well as govern each private citizen. if we closely scrutinize our contemporaries, and penetrate to the root of their political opinions, we shall detect some of the notions which i have just pointed out, and we shall perhaps be surprised to find so much accordance between men who are so often at variance. the americans hold, that in every state the supreme power ought to emanate from the people; but when once that power is constituted, they can conceive, as it were, no limits to it, and they are ready to admit that it has the right to do whatever it pleases. they have not the slightest notion of peculiar privileges granted to cities, families, or persons: their minds appear never to have foreseen that it might be possible not to apply with strict uniformity the same laws to every part, and to all the inhabitants. these same opinions are more and more diffused in europe; they even insinuate themselves amongst those nations which most vehemently reject the principle of the sovereignty of the people. such nations assign a different origin to the supreme power, but they ascribe to that power the same characteristics. amongst them all, the idea of intermediate powers is weakened and obliterated: the idea of rights inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing from the minds of men; the idea of the omnipotence and sole authority of society at large rises to fill its place. these ideas take root and spread in proportion as social conditions become more equal, and men more alike; they are engendered by equality, and in turn they hasten the progress of equality. in france, where the revolution of which i am speaking has gone further than in any other european country, these opinions have got complete hold of the public mind. if we listen attentively to the language of the various parties in france, we shall find that there is not one which has not adopted them. most of these parties censure the conduct of the government, but they all hold that the government ought perpetually to act and interfere in everything that is done. even those which are most at variance are nevertheless agreed upon this head. the unity, the ubiquity, the omnipotence of the supreme power, and the uniformity of its rules, constitute the principal characteristics of all the political systems which have been put forward in our age. they recur even in the wildest visions of political regeneration: the human mind pursues them in its dreams. if these notions spontaneously arise in the minds of private individuals, they suggest themselves still more forcibly to the minds of princes. whilst the ancient fabric of european society is altered and dissolved, sovereigns acquire new conceptions of their opportunities and their duties; they learn for the first time that the central power which they represent may and ought to administer by its own agency, and on a uniform plan, all the concerns of the whole community. this opinion, which, i will venture to say, was never conceived before our time by the monarchs of europe, now sinks deeply into the minds of kings, and abides there amidst all the agitation of more unsettled thoughts. our contemporaries are therefore much less divided than is commonly supposed; they are constantly disputing as to the hands in which supremacy is to be vested, but they readily agree upon the duties and the rights of that supremacy. the notion they all form of government is that of a sole, simple, providential, and creative power. all secondary opinions in politics are unsettled; this one remains fixed, invariable, and consistent. it is adopted by statesmen and political philosophers; it is eagerly laid hold of by the multitude; those who govern and those who are governed agree to pursue it with equal ardor: it is the foremost notion of their minds, it seems inborn. it originates therefore in no caprice of the human intellect, but it is a necessary condition of the present state of mankind. chapter iii: that the sentiments of democratic nations accord with their opinions in leading them to concentrate political power if it be true that, in ages of equality, men readily adopt the notion of a great central power, it cannot be doubted on the other hand that their habits and sentiments predispose them to recognize such a power and to give it their support. this may be demonstrated in a few words, as the greater part of the reasons, to which the fact may be attributed, have been previously stated. *a as the men who inhabit democratic countries have no superiors, no inferiors, and no habitual or necessary partners in their undertakings, they readily fall back upon themselves and consider themselves as beings apart. i had occasion to point this out at considerable length in treating of individualism. hence such men can never, without an effort, tear themselves from their private affairs to engage in public business; their natural bias leads them to abandon the latter to the sole visible and permanent representative of the interests of the community, that is to say, to the state. not only are they naturally wanting in a taste for public business, but they have frequently no time to attend to it. private life is so busy in democratic periods, so excited, so full of wishes and of work, that hardly any energy or leisure remains to each individual for public life. i am the last man to contend that these propensities are unconquerable, since my chief object in writing this book has been to combat them. i only maintain that at the present day a secret power is fostering them in the human heart, and that if they are not checked they will wholly overgrow it. [footnote a: see appendix w.] i have also had occasion to show how the increasing love of well-being, and the fluctuating character of property, cause democratic nations to dread all violent disturbance. the love of public tranquillity is frequently the only passion which these nations retain, and it becomes more active and powerful amongst them in proportion as all other passions droop and die. this naturally disposes the members of the community constantly to give or to surrender additional rights to the central power, which alone seems to be interested in defending them by the same means that it uses to defend itself. as in ages of equality no man is compelled to lend his assistance to his fellow-men, and none has any right to expect much support from them, everyone is at once independent and powerless. these two conditions, which must never be either separately considered or confounded together, inspire the citizen of a democratic country with very contrary propensities. his independence fills him with self-reliance and pride amongst his equals; his debility makes him feel from time to time the want of some outward assistance, which he cannot expect from any of them, because they are all impotent and unsympathizing. in this predicament he naturally turns his eyes to that imposing power which alone rises above the level of universal depression. of that power his wants and especially his desires continually remind him, until he ultimately views it as the sole and necessary support of his own weakness. *b this may more completely explain what frequently takes place in democratic countries, where the very men who are so impatient of superiors patiently submit to a master, exhibiting at once their pride and their servility. [footnote b: in democratic communities nothing but the central power has any stability in its position or any permanence in its undertakings. all the members of society are in ceaseless stir and transformation. now it is in the nature of all governments to seek constantly to enlarge their sphere of action; hence it is almost impossible that such a government should not ultimately succeed, because it acts with a fixed principle and a constant will, upon men, whose position, whose notions, and whose desires are in continual vacillation. it frequently happens that the members of the community promote the influence of the central power without intending it. democratic ages are periods of experiment, innovation, and adventure. at such times there are always a multitude of men engaged in difficult or novel undertakings, which they follow alone, without caring for their fellowmen. such persons may be ready to admit, as a general principle, that the public authority ought not to interfere in private concerns; but, by an exception to that rule, each of them craves for its assistance in the particular concern on which he is engaged, and seeks to draw upon the influence of the government for his own benefit, though he would restrict it on all other occasions. if a large number of men apply this particular exception to a great variety of different purposes, the sphere of the central power extends insensibly in all directions, although each of them wishes it to be circumscribed. thus a democratic government increases its power simply by the fact of its permanence. time is on its side; every incident befriends it; the passions of individuals unconsciously promote it; and it may be asserted, that the older a democratic community is, the more centralized will its government become.] the hatred which men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become more scarce and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely at the very time when they have least fuel. i have already given the reason of this phenomenon. when all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye; whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity: the more complete is this uniformity, the more insupportable does the sight of such a difference become. hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds upon. this never-dying, ever-kindling hatred, which sets a democratic people against the smallest privileges, is peculiarly favorable to the gradual concentration of all political rights in the hands of the representative of the state alone. the sovereign, being necessarily and incontestably above all the citizens, excites not their envy, and each of them thinks that he strips his equals of the prerogative which he concedes to the crown. the man of a democratic age is extremely reluctant to obey his neighbor who is his equal; he refuses to acknowledge in such a person ability superior to his own; he mistrusts his justice, and is jealous of his power; he fears and he contemns him; and he loves continually to remind him of the common dependence in which both of them stand to the same master. every central power which follows its natural tendencies courts and encourages the principle of equality; for equality singularly facilitates, extends, and secures the influence of a central power. in like manner it may be said that every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinite number of small details which must be attended to if rules were to be adapted to men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting men to rules: thus the government likes what the citizens like, and naturally hates what they hate. these common sentiments, which, in democratic nations, constantly unite the sovereign and every member of the community in one and the same conviction, establish a secret and lasting sympathy between them. the faults of the government are pardoned for the sake of its tastes; public confidence is only reluctantly withdrawn in the midst even of its excesses and its errors, and it is restored at the first call. democratic nations often hate those in whose hands the central power is vested; but they always love that power itself. thus, by two separate paths, i have reached the same conclusion. i have shown that the principle of equality suggests to men the notion of a sole, uniform, and strong government: i have now shown that the principle of equality imparts to them a taste for it. to governments of this kind the nations of our age are therefore tending. they are drawn thither by the natural inclination of mind and heart; and in order to reach that result, it is enough that they do not check themselves in their course. i am of opinion, that, in the democratic ages which are opening upon us, individual independence and local liberties will ever be the produce of artificial contrivance; that centralization will be the natural form of government. *c [footnote c: see appendix x.] chapter iv: of certain peculiar and accidental causes which either lead a people to complete centralization of government, or which divert them from it if all democratic nations are instinctively led to the centralization of government, they tend to this result in an unequal manner. this depends on the particular circumstances which may promote or prevent the natural consequences of that state of society--circumstances which are exceedingly numerous; but i shall only advert to a few of them. amongst men who have lived free long before they became equal, the tendencies derived from free institutions combat, to a certain extent, the propensities superinduced by the principle of equality; and although the central power may increase its privileges amongst such a people, the private members of such a community will never entirely forfeit their independence. but when the equality of conditions grows up amongst a people which has never known, or has long ceased to know, what freedom is (and such is the case upon the continent of europe), as the former habits of the nation are suddenly combined, by some sort of natural attraction, with the novel habits and principles engendered by the state of society, all powers seem spontaneously to rush to the centre. these powers accumulate there with astonishing rapidity, and the state instantly attains the utmost limits of its strength, whilst private persons allow themselves to sink as suddenly to the lowest degree of weakness. the english who emigrated three hundred years ago to found a democratic commonwealth on the shores of the new world, had all learned to take a part in public affairs in their mother-country; they were conversant with trial by jury; they were accustomed to liberty of speech and of the press--to personal freedom, to the notion of rights and the practice of asserting them. they carried with them to america these free institutions and manly customs, and these institutions preserved them against the encroachments of the state. thus amongst the americans it is freedom which is old--equality is of comparatively modern date. the reverse is occurring in europe, where equality, introduced by absolute power and under the rule of kings, was already infused into the habits of nations long before freedom had entered into their conceptions. i have said that amongst democratic nations the notion of government naturally presents itself to the mind under the form of a sole and central power, and that the notion of intermediate powers is not familiar to them. this is peculiarly applicable to the democratic nations which have witnessed the triumph of the principle of equality by means of a violent revolution. as the classes which managed local affairs have been suddenly swept away by the storm, and as the confused mass which remains has as yet neither the organization nor the habits which fit it to assume the administration of these same affairs, the state alone seems capable of taking upon itself all the details of government, and centralization becomes, as it were, the unavoidable state of the country. napoleon deserves neither praise nor censure for having centred in his own hands almost all the administrative power of france; for, after the abrupt disappearance of the nobility and the higher rank of the middle classes, these powers devolved on him of course: it would have been almost as difficult for him to reject as to assume them. but no necessity of this kind has ever been felt by the americans, who, having passed through no revolution, and having governed themselves from the first, never had to call upon the state to act for a time as their guardian. thus the progress of centralization amongst a democratic people depends not only on the progress of equality, but on the manner in which this equality has been established. at the commencement of a great democratic revolution, when hostilities have but just broken out between the different classes of society, the people endeavors to centralize the public administration in the hands of the government, in order to wrest the management of local affairs from the aristocracy. towards the close of such a revolution, on the contrary, it is usually the conquered aristocracy that endeavors to make over the management of all affairs to the state, because such an aristocracy dreads the tyranny of a people which has become its equal, and not unfrequently its master. thus it is not always the same class of the community which strives to increase the prerogative of the government; but as long as the democratic revolution lasts there is always one class in the nation, powerful in numbers or in wealth, which is induced, by peculiar passions or interests, to centralize the public administration, independently of that hatred of being governed by one's neighbor, which is a general and permanent feeling amongst democratic nations. it may be remarked, that at the present day the lower orders in england are striving with all their might to destroy local independence, and to transfer the administration from all points of the circumference to the centre; whereas the higher classes are endeavoring to retain this administration within its ancient boundaries. i venture to predict that a time will come when the very reverse will happen. these observations explain why the supreme power is always stronger, and private individuals weaker, amongst a democratic people which has passed through a long and arduous struggle to reach a state of equality than amongst a democratic community in which the citizens have been equal from the first. the example of the americans completely demonstrates the fact. the inhabitants of the united states were never divided by any privileges; they have never known the mutual relation of master and inferior, and as they neither dread nor hate each other, they have never known the necessity of calling in the supreme power to manage their affairs. the lot of the americans is singular: they have derived from the aristocracy of england the notion of private rights and the taste for local freedom; and they have been able to retain both the one and the other, because they have had no aristocracy to combat. if at all times education enables men to defend their independence, this is most especially true in democratic ages. when all men are alike, it is easy to found a sole and all-powerful government, by the aid of mere instinct. but men require much intelligence, knowledge, and art to organize and to maintain secondary powers under similar circumstances, and to create amidst the independence and individual weakness of the citizens such free associations as may be in a condition to struggle against tyranny without destroying public order. hence the concentration of power and the subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance. it is true, that in ages of imperfect civilization the government is frequently as wanting in the knowledge required to impose a despotism upon the people as the people are wanting in the knowledge required to shake it off; but the effect is not the same on both sides. however rude a democratic people may be, the central power which rules it is never completely devoid of cultivation, because it readily draws to its own uses what little cultivation is to be found in the country, and, if necessary, may seek assistance elsewhere. hence, amongst a nation which is ignorant as well as democratic, an amazing difference cannot fail speedily to arise between the intellectual capacity of the ruler and that of each of his subjects. this completes the easy concentration of all power in his hands: the administrative function of the state is perpetually extended, because the state alone is competent to administer the affairs of the country. aristocratic nations, however unenlightened they may be, never afford the same spectacle, because in them instruction is nearly equally diffused between the monarch and the leading members of the community. the pacha who now rules in egypt found the population of that country composed of men exceedingly ignorant and equal, and he has borrowed the science and ability of europe to govern that people. as the personal attainments of the sovereign are thus combined with the ignorance and democratic weakness of his subjects, the utmost centralization has been established without impediment, and the pacha has made the country his manufactory, and the inhabitants his workmen. i think that extreme centralization of government ultimately enervates society, and thus after a length of time weakens the government itself; but i do not deny that a centralized social power may be able to execute great undertakings with facility in a given time and on a particular point. this is more especially true of war, in which success depends much more on the means of transferring all the resources of a nation to one single point, than on the extent of those resources. hence it is chiefly in war that nations desire and frequently require to increase the powers of the central government. all men of military genius are fond of centralization, which increases their strength; and all men of centralizing genius are fond of war, which compels nations to combine all their powers in the hands of the government. thus the democratic tendency which leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state, and to circumscribe the rights of private persons, is much more rapid and constant amongst those democratic nations which are exposed by their position to great and frequent wars, than amongst all others. i have shown how the dread of disturbance and the love of well-being insensibly lead democratic nations to increase the functions of central government, as the only power which appears to be intrinsically sufficiently strong, enlightened, and secure, to protect them from anarchy. i would now add, that all the particular circumstances which tend to make the state of a democratic community agitated and precarious, enhance this general propensity, and lead private persons more and more to sacrifice their rights to their tranquility. a people is therefore never so disposed to increase the functions of central government as at the close of a long and bloody revolution, which, after having wrested property from the hands of its former possessors, has shaken all belief, and filled the nation with fierce hatreds, conflicting interests, and contending factions. the love of public tranquillity becomes at such times an indiscriminating passion, and the members of the community are apt to conceive a most inordinate devotion to order. i have already examined several of the incidents which may concur to promote the centralization of power, but the principal cause still remains to be noticed. the foremost of the incidental causes which may draw the management of all affairs into the hands of the ruler in democratic countries, is the origin of that ruler himself, and his own propensities. men who live in the ages of equality are naturally fond of central power, and are willing to extend its privileges; but if it happens that this same power faithfully represents their own interests, and exactly copies their own inclinations, the confidence they place in it knows no bounds, and they think that whatever they bestow upon it is bestowed upon themselves. the attraction of administrative powers to the centre will always be less easy and less rapid under the reign of kings who are still in some way connected with the old aristocratic order, than under new princes, the children of their own achievements, whose birth, prejudices, propensities, and habits appear to bind them indissolubly to the cause of equality. i do not mean that princes of aristocratic origin who live in democratic ages do not attempt to centralize; i believe they apply themselves to that object as diligently as any others. for them, the sole advantages of equality lie in that direction; but their opportunities are less great, because the community, instead of volunteering compliance with their desires, frequently obeys them with reluctance. in democratic communities the rule is that centralization must increase in proportion as the sovereign is less aristocratic. when an ancient race of kings stands at the head of an aristocracy, as the natural prejudices of the sovereign perfectly accord with the natural prejudices of the nobility, the vices inherent in aristocratic communities have a free course, and meet with no corrective. the reverse is the case when the scion of a feudal stock is placed at the head of a democratic people. the sovereign is constantly led, by his education, his habits, and his associations, to adopt sentiments suggested by the inequality of conditions, and the people tend as constantly, by their social condition, to those manners which are engendered by equality. at such times it often happens that the citizens seek to control the central power far less as a tyrannical than as an aristocratical power, and that they persist in the firm defence of their independence, not only because they would remain free, but especially because they are determined to remain equal. a revolution which overthrows an ancient regal family, in order to place men of more recent growth at the head of a democratic people, may temporarily weaken the central power; but however anarchical such a revolution may appear at first, we need not hesitate to predict that its final and certain consequence will be to extend and to secure the prerogatives of that power. the foremost or indeed the sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced as it were to a single principle. chapter v: that amongst the european nations of our time the power of governments is increasing, although the persons who govern are less stable on reflecting upon what has already been said, the reader will be startled and alarmed to find that in europe everything seems to conduce to the indefinite extension of the prerogatives of government, and to render all that enjoyed the rights of private independence more weak, more subordinate, and more precarious. the democratic nations of europe have all the general and permanent tendencies which urge the americans to the centralization of government, and they are moreover exposed to a number of secondary and incidental causes with which the americans are unacquainted. it would seem as if every step they make towards equality brings them nearer to despotism. and indeed if we do but cast our looks around, we shall be convinced that such is the fact. during the aristocratic ages which preceded the present time, the sovereigns of europe had been deprived of, or had relinquished, many of the rights inherent in their power. not a hundred years ago, amongst the greater part of european nations, numerous private persons and corporations were sufficiently independent to administer justice, to raise and maintain troops, to levy taxes, and frequently even to make or interpret the law. the state has everywhere resumed to itself alone these natural attributes of sovereign power; in all matters of government the state tolerates no intermediate agent between itself and the people, and in general business it directs the people by its own immediate influence. i am far from blaming this concentration of power, i simply point it out. at the same period a great number of secondary powers existed in europe, which represented local interests and administered local affairs. most of these local authorities have already disappeared; all are speedily tending to disappear, or to fall into the most complete dependence. from one end of europe to the other the privileges of the nobility, the liberties of cities, and the powers of provincial bodies, are either destroyed or upon the verge of destruction. europe has endured, in the course of the last half-century, many revolutions and counter-revolutions which have agitated it in opposite directions: but all these perturbations resemble each other in one respect--they have all shaken or destroyed the secondary powers of government. the local privileges which the french did not abolish in the countries they conquered, have finally succumbed to the policy of the princes who conquered the french. those princes rejected all the innovations of the french revolution except centralization: that is the only principle they consented to receive from such a source. my object is to remark, that all these various rights, which have been successively wrested, in our time, from classes, corporations, and individuals, have not served to raise new secondary powers on a more democratic basis, but have uniformly been concentrated in the hands of the sovereign. everywhere the state acquires more and more direct control over the humblest members of the community, and a more exclusive power of governing each of them in his smallest concerns. *a almost all the charitable establishments of europe were formerly in the hands of private persons or of corporations; they are now almost all dependent on the supreme government, and in many countries are actually administered by that power. the state almost exclusively undertakes to supply bread to the hungry, assistance and shelter to the sick, work to the idle, and to act as the sole reliever of all kinds of misery. education, as well as charity, is become in most countries at the present day a national concern. the state receives, and often takes, the child from the arms of the mother, to hand it over to official agents: the state undertakes to train the heart and to instruct the mind of each generation. uniformity prevails in the courses of public instruction as in everything else; diversity, as well as freedom, is disappearing day by day. nor do i hesitate to affirm, that amongst almost all the christian nations of our days, catholic as well as protestant, religion is in danger of falling into the hands of the government. not that rulers are over-jealous of the right of settling points of doctrine, but they get more and more hold upon the will of those by whom doctrines are expounded; they deprive the clergy of their property, and pay them by salaries; they divert to their own use the influence of the priesthood, they make them their own ministers--often their own servants--and by this alliance with religion they reach the inner depths of the soul of man. *b [footnote a: this gradual weakening of individuals in relation to society at large may be traced in a thousand ways. i shall select from amongst these examples one derived from the law of wills. in aristocracies it is common to profess the greatest reverence for the last testamentary dispositions of a man; this feeling sometimes even became superstitious amongst the older nations of europe: the power of the state, far from interfering with the caprices of a dying man, gave full force to the very least of them, and insured to him a perpetual power. when all living men are enfeebled, the will of the dead is less respected: it is circumscribed within a narrow range, beyond which it is annulled or checked by the supreme power of the laws. in the middle ages, testamentary power had, so to speak, no limits: amongst the french at the present day, a man cannot distribute his fortune amongst his children without the interference of the state; after having domineered over a whole life, the law insists upon regulating the very last act of it.] [footnote b: in proportion as the duties of the central power are augmented, the number of public officers by whom that power is represented must increase also. they form a nation in each nation; and as they share the stability of the government, they more and more fill up the place of an aristocracy. in almost every part of europe the government rules in two ways; it rules one portion of the community by the fear which they entertain of its agents, and the other by the hope they have of becoming its agents.] but this is as yet only one side of the picture. the authority of government has not only spread, as we have just seen, throughout the sphere of all existing powers, till that sphere can no longer contain it, but it goes further, and invades the domain heretofore reserved to private independence. a multitude of actions, which were formerly entirely beyond the control of the public administration, have been subjected to that control in our time, and the number of them is constantly increasing. amongst aristocratic nations the supreme government usually contented itself with managing and superintending the community in whatever directly and ostensibly concerned the national honor; but in all other respects the people were left to work out their own free will. amongst these nations the government often seemed to forget that there is a point at which the faults and the sufferings of private persons involve the general prosperity, and that to prevent the ruin of a private individual must sometimes be a matter of public importance. the democratic nations of our time lean to the opposite extreme. it is evident that most of our rulers will not content themselves with governing the people collectively: it would seem as if they thought themselves responsible for the actions and private condition of their subjects--as if they had undertaken to guide and to instruct each of them in the various incidents of life, and to secure their happiness quite independently of their own consent. on the other hand private individuals grow more and more apt to look upon the supreme power in the same light; they invoke its assistance in all their necessities, and they fix their eyes upon the administration as their mentor or their guide. i assert that there is no country in europe in which the public administration has not become, not only more centralized, but more inquisitive and more minute it everywhere interferes in private concerns more than it did; it regulates more undertakings, and undertakings of a lesser kind; and it gains a firmer footing every day about, above, and around all private persons, to assist, to advise, and to coerce them. formerly a sovereign lived upon the income of his lands, or the revenue of his taxes; this is no longer the case now that his wants have increased as well as his power. under the same circumstances which formerly compelled a prince to put on a new tax, he now has recourse to a loan. thus the state gradually becomes the debtor of most of the wealthier members of the community, and centralizes the largest amounts of capital in its own hands. small capital is drawn into its keeping by another method. as men are intermingled and conditions become more equal, the poor have more resources, more education, and more desires; they conceive the notion of bettering their condition, and this teaches them to save. these savings are daily producing an infinite number of small capitals, the slow and gradual produce of labor, which are always increasing. but the greater part of this money would be unproductive if it remained scattered in the hands of its owners. this circumstance has given rise to a philanthropic institution, which will soon become, if i am not mistaken, one of our most important political institutions. some charitable persons conceived the notion of collecting the savings of the poor and placing them out at interest. in some countries these benevolent associations are still completely distinct from the state; but in almost all they manifestly tend to identify themselves with the government; and in some of them the government has superseded them, taking upon itself the enormous task of centralizing in one place, and putting out at interest on its own responsibility, the daily savings of many millions of the working classes. thus the state draws to itself the wealth of the rich by loans, and has the poor man's mite at its disposal in the savings banks. the wealth of the country is perpetually flowing around the government and passing through its hands; the accumulation increases in the same proportion as the equality of conditions; for in a democratic country the state alone inspires private individuals with confidence, because the state alone appears to be endowed with strength and durability. *c thus the sovereign does not confine himself to the management of the public treasury; he interferes in private money matters; he is the superior, and often the master, of all the members of the community; and, in addition to this, he assumes the part of their steward and paymaster. [footnote c: on the one hand the taste for worldly welfare is perpetually increasing, and on the other the government gets more and more complete possession of the sources of that welfare. thus men are following two separate roads to servitude: the taste for their own welfare withholds them from taking a part in the government, and their love of that welfare places them in closer dependence upon those who govern.] the central power not only fulfils of itself the whole of the duties formerly discharged by various authorities--extending those duties, and surpassing those authorities--but it performs them with more alertness, strength, and independence than it displayed before. all the governments of europe have in our time singularly improved the science of administration: they do more things, and they do everything with more order, more celerity, and at less expense; they seem to be constantly enriched by all the experience of which they have stripped private persons. from day to day the princes of europe hold their subordinate officers under stricter control, and they invent new methods for guiding them more closely, and inspecting them with less trouble. not content with managing everything by their agents, they undertake to manage the conduct of their agents in everything; so that the public administration not only depends upon one and the same power, but it is more and more confined to one spot and concentrated in the same hands. the government centralizes its agency whilst it increases its prerogative--hence a twofold increase of strength. in examining the ancient constitution of the judicial power, amongst most european nations, two things strike the mind--the independence of that power, and the extent of its functions. not only did the courts of justice decide almost all differences between private persons, but in very many cases they acted as arbiters between private persons and the state. i do not here allude to the political and administrative offices which courts of judicature had in some countries usurped, but the judicial office common to them all. in most of the countries of europe, there were, and there still are, many private rights, connected for the most part with the general right of property, which stood under the protection of the courts of justice, and which the state could not violate without their sanction. it was this semi-political power which mainly distinguished the european courts of judicature from all others; for all nations have had judges, but all have not invested their judges with the same privileges. upon examining what is now occurring amongst the democratic nations of europe which are called free, as well as amongst the others, it will be observed that new and more dependent courts are everywhere springing up by the side of the old ones, for the express purpose of deciding, by an extraordinary jurisdiction, such litigated matters as may arise between the government and private persons. the elder judicial power retains its independence, but its jurisdiction is narrowed; and there is a growing tendency to reduce it to be exclusively the arbiter between private interests. the number of these special courts of justice is continually increasing, and their functions increase likewise. thus the government is more and more absolved from the necessity of subjecting its policy and its rights to the sanction of another power. as judges cannot be dispensed with, at least the state is to select them, and always to hold them under its control; so that, between the government and private individuals, they place the effigy of justice rather than justice itself. the state is not satisfied with drawing all concerns to itself, but it acquires an ever-increasing power of deciding on them all without restriction and without appeal. *d [footnote d: a strange sophism has been made on this head in france. when a suit arises between the government and a private person, it is not to be tried before an ordinary judge--in order, they say, not to mix the administrative and the judicial powers; as if it were not to mix those powers, and to mix them in the most dangerous and oppressive manner, to invest the government with the office of judging and administering at the same time.] there exists amongst the modern nations of europe one great cause, independent of all those which have already been pointed out, which perpetually contributes to extend the agency or to strengthen the prerogative of the supreme power, though it has not been sufficiently attended to: i mean the growth of manufactures, which is fostered by the progress of social equality. manufactures generally collect a multitude of men of the same spot, amongst whom new and complex relations spring up. these men are exposed by their calling to great and sudden alternations of plenty and want, during which public tranquillity is endangered. it may also happen that these employments sacrifice the health, and even the life, of those who gain by them, or of those who live by them. thus the manufacturing classes require more regulation, superintendence, and restraint than the other classes of society, and it is natural that the powers of government should increase in the same proportion as those classes. this is a truth of general application; what follows more especially concerns the nations of europe. in the centuries which preceded that in which we live, the aristocracy was in possession of the soil, and was competent to defend it: landed property was therefore surrounded by ample securities, and its possessors enjoyed great independence. this gave rise to laws and customs which have been perpetuated, notwithstanding the subdivision of lands and the ruin of the nobility; and, at the present time, landowners and agriculturists are still those amongst the community who must easily escape from the control of the supreme power. in these same aristocratic ages, in which all the sources of our history are to be traced, personal property was of small importance, and those who possessed it were despised and weak: the manufacturing class formed an exception in the midst of those aristocratic communities; as it had no certain patronage, it was not outwardly protected, and was often unable to protect itself. hence a habit sprung up of considering manufacturing property as something of a peculiar nature, not entitled to the same deference, and not worthy of the same securities as property in general; and manufacturers were looked upon as a small class in the bulk of the people, whose independence was of small importance, and who might with propriety be abandoned to the disciplinary passions of princes. on glancing over the codes of the middle ages, one is surprised to see, in those periods of personal independence, with what incessant royal regulations manufactures were hampered, even in their smallest details: on this point centralization was as active and as minute as it can ever be. since that time a great revolution has taken place in the world; manufacturing property, which was then only in the germ, has spread till it covers europe: the manufacturing class has been multiplied and enriched by the remnants of all other ranks; it has grown and is still perpetually growing in number, in importance, in wealth. almost all those who do not belong to it are connected with it at least on some one point; after having been an exception in society, it threatens to become the chief, if not the only, class; nevertheless the notions and political precedents engendered by it of old still cling about it. these notions and these precedents remain unchanged, because they are old, and also because they happen to be in perfect accordance with the new notions and general habits of our contemporaries. manufacturing property then does not extend its rights in the same ratio as its importance. the manufacturing classes do not become less dependent, whilst they become more numerous; but, on the contrary, it would seem as if despotism lurked within them, and naturally grew with their growth. *e as a nation becomes more engaged in manufactures, the want of roads, canals, harbors, and other works of a semi-public nature, which facilitate the acquisition of wealth, is more strongly felt; and as a nation becomes more democratic, private individuals are less able, and the state more able, to execute works of such magnitude. i do not hesitate to assert that the manifest tendency of all governments at the present time is to take upon themselves alone the execution of these undertakings; by which means they daily hold in closer dependence the population which they govern. [footnote e: i shall quote a few facts in corroboration of this remark. mines are the natural sources of manufacturing wealth: as manufactures have grown up in europe, as the produce of mines has become of more general importance, and good mining more difficult from the subdivision of property which is a consequence of the equality of conditions, most governments have asserted a right of owning the soil in which the mines lie, and of inspecting the works; which has never been the case with any other kind of property. thus mines, which were private property, liable to the same obligations and sheltered by the same guarantees as all other landed property, have fallen under the control of the state. the state either works them or farms them; the owners of them are mere tenants, deriving their rights from the state; and, moreover, the state almost everywhere claims the power of directing their operations: it lays down rules, enforces the adoption of particular methods, subjects the mining adventurers to constant superintendence, and, if refractory, they are ousted by a government court of justice, and the government transfers their contract to other hands; so that the government not only possesses the mines, but has all the adventurers in its power. nevertheless, as manufactures increase, the working of old mines increases also; new ones are opened, the mining population extends and grows up; day by day governments augment their subterranean dominions, and people them with their agents.] on the other hand, in proportion as the power of a state increases, and its necessities are augmented, the state consumption of manufactured produce is always growing larger, and these commodities are generally made in the arsenals or establishments of the government. thus, in every kingdom, the ruler becomes the principal manufacturer; he collects and retains in his service a vast number of engineers, architects, mechanics, and handicraftsmen. not only is he the principal manufacturer, but he tends more and more to become the chief, or rather the master of all other manufacturers. as private persons become more powerless by becoming more equal, they can effect nothing in manufactures without combination; but the government naturally seeks to place these combinations under its own control. it must be admitted that these collective beings, which are called combinations, are stronger and more formidable than a private individual can ever be, and that they have less of the responsibility of their own actions; whence it seems reasonable that they should not be allowed to retain so great an independence of the supreme government as might be conceded to a private individual. rulers are the more apt to follow this line of policy, as their own inclinations invite them to it. amongst democratic nations it is only by association that the resistance of the people to the government can ever display itself: hence the latter always looks with ill-favor on those associations which are not in its own power; and it is well worthy of remark, that amongst democratic nations, the people themselves often entertain a secret feeling of fear and jealousy against these very associations, which prevents the citizens from defending the institutions of which they stand so much in need. the power and the duration of these small private bodies, in the midst of the weakness and instability of the whole community, astonish and alarm the people; and the free use which each association makes of its natural powers is almost regarded as a dangerous privilege. all the associations which spring up in our age are, moreover, new corporate powers, whose rights have not been sanctioned by time; they come into existence at a time when the notion of private rights is weak, and when the power of government is unbounded; hence it is not surprising that they lose their freedom at their birth. amongst all european nations there are some kinds of associations which cannot be formed until the state has examined their by-laws, and authorized their existence. in several others, attempts are made to extend this rule to all associations; the consequences of such a policy, if it were successful, may easily be foreseen. if once the sovereign had a general right of authorizing associations of all kinds upon certain conditions, he would not be long without claiming the right of superintending and managing them, in order to prevent them from departing from the rules laid down by himself. in this manner, the state, after having reduced all who are desirous of forming associations into dependence, would proceed to reduce into the same condition all who belong to associations already formed--that is to say, almost all the men who are now in existence. governments thus appropriate to themselves, and convert to their own purposes, the greater part of this new power which manufacturing interests have in our time brought into the world. manufacturers govern us--they govern manufactures. i attach so much importance to all that i have just been saying, that i am tormented by the fear of having impaired my meaning in seeking to render it more clear. if the reader thinks that the examples i have adduced to support my observations are insufficient or ill-chosen--if he imagines that i have anywhere exaggerated the encroachments of the supreme power, and, on the other hand, that i have underrated the extent of the sphere which still remains open to the exertions of individual independence, i entreat him to lay down the book for a moment, and to turn his mind to reflect for himself upon the subjects i have attempted to explain. let him attentively examine what is taking place in france and in other countries--let him inquire of those about him--let him search himself, and i am much mistaken if he does not arrive, without my guidance, and by other paths, at the point to which i have sought to lead him. he will perceive that for the last half-century, centralization has everywhere been growing up in a thousand different ways. wars, revolutions, conquests, have served to promote it: all men have labored to increase it. in the course of the same period, during which men have succeeded each other with singular rapidity at the head of affairs, their notions, interests, and passions have been infinitely diversified; but all have by some means or other sought to centralize. this instinctive centralization has been the only settled point amidst the extreme mutability of their lives and of their thoughts. if the reader, after having investigated these details of human affairs, will seek to survey the wide prospect as a whole, he will be struck by the result. on the one hand the most settled dynasties shaken or overthrown--the people everywhere escaping by violence from the sway of their laws--abolishing or limiting the authority of their rulers or their princes--the nations, which are not in open revolution, restless at least, and excited--all of them animated by the same spirit of revolt: and on the other hand, at this very period of anarchy, and amongst these untractable nations, the incessant increase of the prerogative of the supreme government, becoming more centralized, more adventurous, more absolute, more extensive--the people perpetually falling under the control of the public administration--led insensibly to surrender to it some further portion of their individual independence, till the very men, who from time to time upset a throne and trample on a race of kings, bend more and more obsequiously to the slightest dictate of a clerk. thus two contrary revolutions appear in our days to be going on; the one continually weakening the supreme power, the other as continually strengthening it: at no other period in our history has it appeared so weak or so strong. but upon a more attentive examination of the state of the world, it appears that these two revolutions are intimately connected together, that they originate in the same source, and that after having followed a separate course, they lead men at last to the same result. i may venture once more to repeat what i have already said or implied in several parts of this book: great care must be taken not to confound the principle of equality itself with the revolution which finally establishes that principle in the social condition and the laws of a nation: here lies the reason of almost all the phenomena which occasion our astonishment. all the old political powers of europe, the greatest as well as the least, were founded in ages of aristocracy, and they more or less represented or defended the principles of inequality and of privilege. to make the novel wants and interests, which the growing principle of equality introduced, preponderate in government, our contemporaries had to overturn or to coerce the established powers. this led them to make revolutions, and breathed into many of them, that fierce love of disturbance and independence, which all revolutions, whatever be their object, always engender. i do not believe that there is a single country in europe in which the progress of equality has not been preceded or followed by some violent changes in the state of property and persons; and almost all these changes have been attended with much anarchy and license, because they have been made by the least civilized portion of the nation against that which is most civilized. hence proceeded the two-fold contrary tendencies which i have just pointed out. as long as the democratic revolution was glowing with heat, the men who were bent upon the destruction of old aristocratic powers hostile to that revolution, displayed a strong spirit of independence; but as the victory or the principle of equality became more complete, they gradually surrendered themselves to the propensities natural to that condition of equality, and they strengthened and centralized their governments. they had sought to be free in order to make themselves equal; but in proportion as equality was more established by the aid of freedom, freedom itself was thereby rendered of more difficult attainment. these two states of a nation have sometimes been contemporaneous: the last generation in france showed how a people might organize a stupendous tyranny in the community, at the very time when they were baffling the authority of the nobility and braving the power of all kings--at once teaching the world the way to win freedom, and the way to lose it. in our days men see that constituted powers are dilapidated on every side--they see all ancient authority gasping away, all ancient barriers tottering to their fall, and the judgment of the wisest is troubled at the sight: they attend only to the amazing revolution which is taking place before their eyes, and they imagine that mankind is about to fall into perpetual anarchy: if they looked to the final consequences of this revolution, their fears would perhaps assume a different shape. for myself, i confess that i put no trust in the spirit of freedom which appears to animate my contemporaries. i see well enough that the nations of this age are turbulent, but i do not clearly perceive that they are liberal; and i fear lest, at the close of those perturbations which rock the base of thrones, the domination of sovereigns may prove more powerful than it ever was before. chapter vi: what sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear i had remarked during my stay in the united states, that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and i perceived, upon my return to europe, how much use had already been made by most of our rulers, of the notions, the sentiments, and the wants engendered by this same social condition, for the purpose of extending the circle of their power. this led me to think that the nations of christendom would perhaps eventually undergo some sort of oppression like that which hung over several of the nations of the ancient world. a more accurate examination of the subject, and five years of further meditations, have not diminished my apprehensions, but they have changed the object of them. no sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire: none ever attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to strict uniformity of regulation, and personally to tutor and direct every member of the community. the notion of such an undertaking never occurred to the human mind; and if any man had conceived it, the want of information, the imperfection of the administrative system, and above all, the natural obstacles caused by the inequality of conditions, would speedily have checked the execution of so vast a design. when the roman emperors were at the height of their power, the different nations of the empire still preserved manners and customs of great diversity; although they were subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were separately administered; they abounded in powerful and active municipalities; and although the whole government of the empire was centred in the hands of the emperor alone, and he always remained, upon occasions, the supreme arbiter in all matters, yet the details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control. the emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes, and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. they frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life: their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; it was fixed to some few main objects, and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited. but it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. i do not question, that in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands, and might interfere more habitually and decidedly within the circle of private interests, than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. but this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigor. we have seen how the manners of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. when no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. as all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed--their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. this universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself, and checks within certain limits the inordinate extent of his desires. independently of these reasons drawn from the nature of the state of society itself, i might add many others arising from causes beyond my subject; but i shall keep within the limits i have laid down to myself. democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger: but these crises will be rare and brief. when i consider the petty passions of our contemporaries, the mildness of their manners, the extent of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their regular and industrious habits, and the restraint which they almost all observe in their vices no less than in their virtues, i have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather guardians. *a i think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. i am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea i have formed of it, but in vain; the old words "despotism" and "tyranny" are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since i cannot name it, i must attempt to define it. [footnote a: see appendix y.] i seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. the first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest--his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not--he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. that power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. it would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. for their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances--what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. the principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. it covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. the will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. i have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which i have just described, might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. they devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. they combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. by this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. a great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. this does not satisfy me: the nature of him i am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. i do not however deny that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one, which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. of all the forms which democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst. when the sovereign is elective, or narrowly watched by a legislature which is really elective and independent, the oppression which he exercises over individuals is sometimes greater, but it is always less degrading; because every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine, that whilst he yields obedience it is to himself he yields it, and that it is to one of his own inclinations that all the rest give way. in like manner i can understand that when the sovereign represents the nation, and is dependent upon the people, the rights and the power of which every citizen is deprived, not only serve the head of the state, but the state itself; and that private persons derive some return from the sacrifice of their independence which they have made to the public. to create a representation of the people in every centralized country, is therefore, to diminish the evil which extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it. i admit that by this means room is left for the intervention of individuals in the more important affairs; but it is not the less suppressed in the smaller and more private ones. it must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. for my own part, i should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other. subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day, and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. it does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their will. thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience, which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions, only exhibits servitude at certain intervals, and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. it is in vain to summon a people, which has been rendered so dependent on the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity. *b i add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. the democratic nations which have introduced freedom into their political constitution, at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution, have been led into strange paradoxes. to manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted--the people are held to be unequal to the task, but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the playthings of their ruler, and his masters--more than kings, and less than men. after having exhausted all the different modes of election, without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed, and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they remark did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body. it is, indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people. a constitution, which should be republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts, has ever appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. the vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master. [footnote b: see appendix z.] chapter vii: continuation of the preceding chapters i believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and i think that if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. despotism therefore appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic ages. i should have loved freedom, i believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live i am ready to worship it. on the other hand, i am persuaded that all who shall attempt, in the ages upon which we are entering, to base freedom upon aristocratic privilege, will fail--that all who shall attempt to draw and to retain authority within a single class, will fail. at the present day no ruler is skilful or strong enough to found a despotism, by re-establishing permanent distinctions of rank amongst his subjects: no legislator is wise or powerful enough to preserve free institutions, if he does not take equality for his first principle and his watchword. all those of our contemporaries who would establish or secure the independence and the dignity of their fellow-men, must show themselves the friends of equality; and the only worthy means of showing themselves as such, is to be so: upon this depends the success of their holy enterprise. thus the question is not how to reconstruct aristocratic society, but how to make liberty proceed out of that democratic state of society in which god has placed us. these two truths appear to me simple, clear, and fertile in consequences; and they naturally lead me to consider what kind of free government can be established amongst a people in which social conditions are equal. it results from the very constitution of democratic nations and from their necessities, that the power of government amongst them must be more uniform, more centralized, more extensive, more searching, and more efficient than in other countries. society at large is naturally stronger and more active, individuals more subordinate and weak; the former does more, the latter less; and this is inevitably the case. it is not therefore to be expected that the range of private independence will ever be as extensive in democratic as in aristocratic countries--nor is this to be desired; for, amongst aristocratic nations, the mass is often sacrificed to the individual, and the prosperity of the greater number to the greatness of the few. it is both necessary and desirable that the government of a democratic people should be active and powerful: and our object should not be to render it weak or indolent, but solely to prevent it from abusing its aptitude and its strength. the circumstance which most contributed to secure the independence of private persons in aristocratic ages, was, that the supreme power did not affect to take upon itself alone the government and administration of the community; those functions were necessarily partially left to the members of the aristocracy: so that as the supreme power was always divided, it never weighed with its whole weight and in the same manner on each individual. not only did the government not perform everything by its immediate agency; but as most of the agents who discharged its duties derived their power not from the state, but from the circumstance of their birth, they were not perpetually under its control. the government could not make or unmake them in an instant, at pleasure, nor bend them in strict uniformity to its slightest caprice--this was an additional guarantee of private independence. i readily admit that recourse cannot be had to the same means at the present time: but i discover certain democratic expedients which may be substituted for them. instead of vesting in the government alone all the administrative powers of which corporations and nobles have been deprived, a portion of them may be entrusted to secondary public bodies, temporarily composed of private citizens: thus the liberty of private persons will be more secure, and their equality will not be diminished. the americans, who care less for words than the french, still designate by the name of "county" the largest of their administrative districts: but the duties of the count or lord-lieutenant are in part performed by a provincial assembly. at a period of equality like our own it would be unjust and unreasonable to institute hereditary officers; but there is nothing to prevent us from substituting elective public officers to a certain extent. election is a democratic expedient which insures the independence of the public officer in relation to the government, as much and even more than hereditary rank can insure it amongst aristocratic nations. aristocratic countries abound in wealthy and influential persons who are competent to provide for themselves, and who cannot be easily or secretly oppressed: such persons restrain a government within general habits of moderation and reserve. i am very well aware that democratic countries contain no such persons naturally; but something analogous to them may be created by artificial means. i firmly believe that an aristocracy cannot again be founded in the world; but i think that private citizens, by combining together, may constitute bodies of great wealth, influence, and strength, corresponding to the persons of an aristocracy. by this means many of the greatest political advantages of aristocracy would be obtained without its injustice or its dangers. an association for political, commercial, or manufacturing purposes, or even for those of science and literature, is a powerful and enlightened member of the community, which cannot be disposed of at pleasure, or oppressed without remonstrance; and which, by defending its own rights against the encroachments of the government, saves the common liberties of the country. in periods of aristocracy every man is always bound so closely to many of his fellow-citizens, that he cannot be assailed without their coming to his assistance. in ages of equality every man naturally stands alone; he has no hereditary friends whose co-operation he may demand--no class upon whose sympathy he may rely: he is easily got rid of, and he is trampled on with impunity. at the present time, an oppressed member of the community has therefore only one method of self-defence--he may appeal to the whole nation; and if the whole nation is deaf to his complaint, he may appeal to mankind: the only means he has of making this appeal is by the press. thus the liberty of the press is infinitely more valuable amongst democratic nations than amongst all others; it is the only cure for the evils which equality may produce. equality sets men apart and weakens them; but the press places a powerful weapon within every man's reach, which the weakest and loneliest of them all may use. equality deprives a man of the support of his connections; but the press enables him to summon all his fellow-countrymen and all his fellow-men to his assistance. printing has accelerated the progress of equality, and it is also one of its best correctives. i think that men living in aristocracies may, strictly speaking, do without the liberty of the press: but such is not the case with those who live in democratic countries. to protect their personal independence i trust not to great political assemblies, to parliamentary privilege, or to the assertion of popular sovereignty. all these things may, to a certain extent, be reconciled with personal servitude--but that servitude cannot be complete if the press is free: the press is the chiefest democratic instrument of freedom. something analogous may be said of the judicial power. it is a part of the essence of judicial power to attend to private interests, and to fix itself with predilection on minute objects submitted to its observation; another essential quality of judicial power is never to volunteer its assistance to the oppressed, but always to be at the disposal of the humblest of those who solicit it; their complaint, however feeble they may themselves be, will force itself upon the ear of justice and claim redress, for this is inherent in the very constitution of the courts of justice. a power of this kind is therefore peculiarly adapted to the wants of freedom, at a time when the eye and finger of the government are constantly intruding into the minutest details of human actions, and when private persons are at once too weak to protect themselves, and too much isolated for them to reckon upon the assistance of their fellows. the strength of the courts of law has ever been the greatest security which can be offered to personal independence; but this is more especially the case in democratic ages: private rights and interests are in constant danger, if the judicial power does not grow more extensive and more strong to keep pace with the growing equality of conditions. equality awakens in men several propensities extremely dangerous to freedom, to which the attention of the legislator ought constantly to be directed. i shall only remind the reader of the most important amongst them. men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms: they feel an instinctive contempt for them--i have elsewhere shown for what reasons. forms excite their contempt and often their hatred; as they commonly aspire to none but easy and present gratifications, they rush onwards to the object of their desires, and the slightest delay exasperates them. this same temper, carried with them into political life, renders them hostile to forms, which perpetually retard or arrest them in some of their projects. yet this objection which the men of democracies make to forms is the very thing which renders forms so useful to freedom; for their chief merit is to serve as a barrier between the strong and the weak, the ruler and the people, to retard the one, and give the other time to look about him. forms become more necessary in proportion as the government becomes more active and more powerful, whilst private persons are becoming more indolent and more feeble. thus democratic nations naturally stand more in need of forms than other nations, and they naturally respect them less. this deserves most serious attention. nothing is more pitiful than the arrogant disdain of most of our contemporaries for questions of form; for the smallest questions of form have acquired in our time an importance which they never had before: many of the greatest interests of mankind depend upon them. i think that if the statesmen of aristocratic ages could sometimes contemn forms with impunity, and frequently rise above them, the statesmen to whom the government of nations is now confided ought to treat the very least among them with respect, and not neglect them without imperious necessity. in aristocracies the observance of forms was superstitious; amongst us they ought to be kept with a deliberate and enlightened deference. another tendency, which is extremely natural to democratic nations and extremely dangerous, is that which leads them ta despise and undervalue the rights of private persons. the attachment which men feel to a right, and the respect which they display for it, is generally proportioned to its importance, or to the length of time during which they have enjoyed it. the rights of private persons amongst democratic nations are commonly of small importance, of recent growth, and extremely precarious--the consequence is that they are often sacrificed without regret, and almost always violated without remorse. but it happens that at the same period and amongst the same nations in which men conceive a natural contempt for the rights of private persons, the rights of society at large are naturally extended and consolidated: in other words, men become less attached to private rights at the very time at which it would be most necessary to retain and to defend what little remains of them. it is therefore most especially in the present democratic ages, that the true friends of the liberty and the greatness of man ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. at such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed--no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government. the reason is plain:--if the private right of an individual is violated at a time when the human mind is fully impressed with the importance and the sanctity of such rights, the injury done is confined to the individual whose right is infringed; but to violate such a right, at the present day, is deeply to corrupt the manners of the nation and to put the whole community in jeopardy, because the very notion of this kind of right constantly tends amongst us to be impaired and lost. there are certain habits, certain notions, and certain vices which are peculiar to a state of revolution, and which a protracted revolution cannot fail to engender and to propagate, whatever be, in other respects, its character, its purpose, and the scene on which it takes place. when any nation has, within a short space of time, repeatedly varied its rulers, its opinions, and its laws, the men of whom it is composed eventually contract a taste for change, and grow accustomed to see all changes effected by sudden violence. thus they naturally conceive a contempt for forms which daily prove ineffectual; and they do not support without impatience the dominion of rules which they have so often seen infringed. as the ordinary notions of equity and morality no longer suffice to explain and justify all the innovations daily begotten by a revolution, the principle of public utility is called in, the doctrine of political necessity is conjured up, and men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interests without scruple, and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose. these habits and notions, which i shall call revolutionary, because all revolutions produce them, occur in aristocracies just as much as amongst democratic nations; but amongst the former they are often less powerful and always less lasting, because there they meet with habits, notions, defects, and impediments, which counteract them: they consequently disappear as soon as the revolution is terminated, and the nation reverts to its former political courses. this is not always the case in democratic countries, in which it is ever to be feared that revolutionary tendencies, becoming more gentle and more regular, without entirely disappearing from society, will be gradually transformed into habits of subjection to the administrative authority of the government. i know of no countries in which revolutions re more dangerous than in democratic countries; because, independently of the accidental and transient evils which must always attend them, they may always create some evils which are permanent and unending. i believe that there are such things as justifiable resistance and legitimate rebellion: i do not therefore assert, as an absolute proposition, that the men of democratic ages ought never to make revolutions; but i think that they have especial reason to hesitate before they embark in them, and that it is far better to endure many grievances in their present condition than to have recourse to so perilous a remedy. i shall conclude by one general idea, which comprises not only all the particular ideas which have been expressed in the present chapter, but also most of those which it is the object of this book to treat of. in the ages of aristocracy which preceded our own, there were private persons of great power, and a social authority of extreme weakness. the outline of society itself was not easily discernible, and constantly confounded with the different powers by which the community was ruled. the principal efforts of the men of those times were required to strengthen, aggrandize, and secure the supreme power; and on the other hand, to circumscribe individual independence within narrower limits, and to subject private interests to the interests of the public. other perils and other cares await the men of our age. amongst the greater part of modern nations, the government, whatever may be its origin, its constitution, or its name, has become almost omnipotent, and private persons are falling, more and more, into the lowest stage of weakness and dependence. in olden society everything was different; unity and uniformity were nowhere to be met with. in modern society everything threatens to become so much alike, that the peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely lost in the general aspect of the world. our forefathers were ever prone to make an improper use of the notion, that private rights ought to be respected; and we are naturally prone on the other hand to exaggerate the idea that the interest of a private individual ought always to bend to the interest of the many. the political world is metamorphosed: new remedies must henceforth be sought for new disorders. to lay down extensive, but distinct and settled limits, to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights; to enable individual man to maintain whatever independence, strength, and original power he still possesses; to raise him by the side of society at large, and uphold him in that position--these appear to me the main objects of legislators in the ages upon which we are now entering. it would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; i wish that they would try a little more to make great men; that they would set less value on the work, and more upon the workman; that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when every man belonging to it is individually weak, and that no form or combination of social polity has yet been devised, to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens. i trace amongst our contemporaries two contrary notions which are equally injurious. one set of men can perceive nothing in the principle of equality but the anarchical tendencies which it engenders: they dread their own free agency--they fear themselves. other thinkers, less numerous but more enlightened, take a different view: besides that track which starts from the principle of equality to terminate in anarchy, they have at last discovered the road which seems to lead men to inevitable servitude. they shape their souls beforehand to this necessary condition; and, despairing of remaining free, they already do obeisance in their hearts to the master who is soon to appear. the former abandon freedom, because they think it dangerous; the latter, because they hold it to be impossible. if i had entertained the latter conviction, i should not have written this book, but i should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind. i have sought to point out the dangers to which the principle of equality exposes the independence of man, because i firmly believe that these dangers are the most formidable, as well as the least foreseen, of all those which futurity holds in store: but i do not think that they are insurmountable. the men who live in the democratic ages upon which we are entering have naturally a taste for independence: they are naturally impatient of regulation, and they are wearied by the permanence even of the condition they themselves prefer. they are fond of power; but they are prone to despise and hate those who wield it, and they easily elude its grasp by their own mobility and insignificance. these propensities will always manifest themselves, because they originate in the groundwork of society, which will undergo no change: for a long time they will prevent the establishment of any despotism, and they will furnish fresh weapons to each succeeding generation which shall struggle in favor of the liberty of mankind. let us then look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart. chapter viii: general survey of the subject before i close forever the theme that has detained me so long, i would fain take a parting survey of all the various characteristics of modern society, and appreciate at last the general influence to be exercised by the principle of equality upon the fate of mankind; but i am stopped by the difficulty of the task, and in presence of so great an object my sight is troubled, and my reason fails. the society of the modern world which i have sought to delineate, and which i seek to judge, has but just come into existence. time has not yet shaped it into perfect form: the great revolution by which it has been created is not yet over: and amidst the occurrences of our time, it is almost impossible to discern what will pass away with the revolution itself, and what will survive its close. the world which is rising into existence is still half encumbered by the remains of the world which is waning into decay; and amidst the vast perplexity of human affairs, none can say how much of ancient institutions and former manners will remain, or how much will completely disappear. although the revolution which is taking place in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men, is still very far from being terminated, yet its results already admit of no comparison with anything that the world has ever before witnessed. i go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity; but i find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes: as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. nevertheless, in the midst of a prospect so wide, so novel and so confused, some of the more prominent characteristics may already be discerned and pointed out. the good things and the evils of life are more equally distributed in the world: great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown. the sentiment of ambition is universal, but the scope of ambition is seldom vast. each individual stands apart in solitary weakness; but society at large is active, provident, and powerful: the performances of private persons are insignificant, those of the state immense. there is little energy of character; but manners are mild, and laws humane. if there be few instances of exalted heroism or of virtues of the highest, brightest, and purest temper, men's habits are regular, violence is rare, and cruelty almost unknown. human existence becomes longer, and property more secure: life is not adorned with brilliant trophies, but it is extremely easy and tranquil. few pleasures are either very refined or very coarse; and highly polished manners are as uncommon as great brutality of tastes. neither men of great learning, nor extremely ignorant communities, are to be met with; genius becomes more rare, information more diffused. the human mind is impelled by the small efforts of all mankind combined together, not by the strenuous activity of certain men. there is less perfection, but more abundance, in all the productions of the arts. the ties of race, of rank, and of country are relaxed; the great bond of humanity is strengthened. if i endeavor to find out the most general and the most prominent of all these different characteristics, i shall have occasion to perceive, that what is taking place in men's fortunes manifests itself under a thousand other forms. almost all extremes are softened or blunted: all that was most prominent is superseded by some mean term, at once less lofty and less low, less brilliant and less obscure, than what before existed in the world. when i survey this countless multitude of beings, shaped in each other's likeness, amidst whom nothing rises and nothing falls, the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me, and i am tempted to regret that state of society which has ceased to be. when the world was full of men of great importance and extreme insignificance, of great wealth and extreme poverty, of great learning and extreme ignorance, i turned aside from the latter to fix my observation on the former alone, who gratified my sympathies. but i admit that this gratification arose from my own weakness: it is because i am unable to see at once all that is around me, that i am allowed thus to select and separate the objects of my predilection from among so many others. such is not the case with that almighty and eternal being whose gaze necessarily includes the whole of created things, and who surveys distinctly, though at once, mankind and man. we may naturally believe that it is not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all, which is most pleasing in the sight of the creator and preserver of men. what appears to me to be man's decline, is to his eye advancement; what afflicts me is acceptable to him. a state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just; and its justice constitutes its greatness and its beauty. i would strive then to raise myself to this point of the divine contemplation, and thence to view and to judge the concerns of men. no man, upon the earth, can as yet affirm absolutely and generally, that the new state of the world is better than its former one; but it is already easy to perceive that this state is different. some vices and some virtues were so inherent in the constitution of an aristocratic nation, and are so opposite to the character of a modern people, that they can never be infused into it; some good tendencies and some bad propensities which were unknown to the former, are natural to the latter; some ideas suggest themselves spontaneously to the imagination of the one, which are utterly repugnant to the mind of the other. they are like two distinct orders of human beings, each of which has its own merits and defects, its own advantages and its own evils. care must therefore be taken not to judge the state of society, which is now coming into existence, by notions derived from a state of society which no longer exists; for as these states of society are exceedingly different in their structure, they cannot be submitted to a just or fair comparison. it would be scarcely more reasonable to require of our own contemporaries the peculiar virtues which originated in the social condition of their forefathers, since that social condition is itself fallen, and has drawn into one promiscuous ruin the good and evil which belonged to it. but as yet these things are imperfectly understood. i find that a great number of my contemporaries undertake to make a certain selection from amongst the institutions, the opinions, and the ideas which originated in the aristocratic constitution of society as it was: a portion of these elements they would willingly relinquish, but they would keep the remainder and transplant them into their new world. i apprehend that such men are wasting their time and their strength in virtuous but unprofitable efforts. the object is not to retain the peculiar advantages which the inequality of conditions bestows upon mankind, but to secure the new benefits which equality may supply. we have not to seek to make ourselves like our progenitors, but to strive to work out that species of greatness and happiness which is our own. for myself, who now look back from this extreme limit of my task, and discover from afar, but at once, the various objects which have attracted my more attentive investigation upon my way, i am full of apprehensions and of hopes. i perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off--mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and i cling with a firmer hold to the belief, that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous they require but to will it. i am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations. providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. it is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free: as it is with man, so with communities. the nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness. part i. appendix a for information concerning all the countries of the west which have not been visited by europeans, consult the account of two expeditions undertaken at the expense of congress by major long. this traveller particularly mentions, on the subject of the great american desert, that a line may be drawn nearly parallel to the th degree of longitude *a (meridian of washington), beginning from the red river and ending at the river platte. from this imaginary line to the rocky mountains, which bound the valley of the mississippi on the west, lie immense plains, which are almost entirely covered with sand, incapable of cultivation, or scattered over with masses of granite. in summer, these plains are quite destitute of water, and nothing is to be seen on them but herds of buffaloes and wild horses. some hordes of indians are also found there, but in no great numbers. major long was told that in travelling northwards from the river platte you find the same desert lying constantly on the left; but he was unable to ascertain the truth of this report. however worthy of confidence may be the narrative of major long, it must be remembered that he only passed through the country of which he speaks, without deviating widely from the line which he had traced out for his journey. [footnote a: the th degree of longitude, according to the meridian of washington, agrees very nearly with the th degree on the meridian of greenwich.] appendix b south america, in the region between the tropics, produces an incredible profusion of climbing plants, of which the flora of the antilles alone presents us with forty different species. among the most graceful of these shrubs is the passion-flower, which, according to descourtiz, grows with such luxuriance in the antilles, as to climb trees by means of the tendrils with which it is provided, and form moving bowers of rich and elegant festoons, decorated with blue and purple flowers, and fragrant with perfume. the mimosa scandens (acacia a grandes gousses) is a creeper of enormous and rapid growth, which climbs from tree to tree, and sometimes covers more than half a league. appendix c the languages which are spoken by the indians of america, from the pole to cape horn, are said to be all formed upon the same model, and subject to the same grammatical rules; whence it may fairly be concluded that all the indian nations sprang from the same stock. each tribe of the american continent speaks a different dialect; but the number of languages, properly so called, is very small, a fact which tends to prove that the nations of the new world had not a very remote origin. moreover, the languages of america have a great degree of regularity, from which it seems probable that the tribes which employ them had not undergone any great revolutions, or been incorporated voluntarily or by constraint, with foreign nations. for it is generally the union of several languages into one which produces grammatical irregularities. it is not long since the american languages, especially those of the north, first attracted the serious attention of philologists, when the discovery was made that this idiom of a barbarous people was the product of a complicated system of ideas and very learned combinations. these languages were found to be very rich, and great pains had been taken at their formation to render them agreeable to the ear. the grammatical system of the americans differs from all others in several points, but especially in the following:--some nations of europe, amongst others the germans, have the power of combining at pleasure different expressions, and thus giving a complex sense to certain words. the indians have given a most surprising extension to this power, so as to arrive at the means of connecting a great number of ideas with a single term. this will be easily understood with the help of an example quoted by mr. duponceau, in the "memoirs of the philosophical society of america": a delaware woman playing with a cat or a young dog, says this writer, is heard to pronounce the word kuligatschis, which is thus composed: k is the sign of the second person, and signifies "thou" or "thy"; uli is a part of the word wulit, which signifies "beautiful," "pretty"; gat is another fragment, of the word wichgat, which means "paw"; and, lastly, schis is a diminutive giving the idea of smallness. thus in one word the indian woman has expressed "thy pretty little paw." take another example of the felicity with which the savages of america have composed their words. a young man of delaware is called pilape. this word is formed from pilsit, "chaste," "innocent"; and lenape, "man"; viz., "man in his purity and innocence." this facility of combining words is most remarkable in the strange formation of their verbs. the most complex action is often expressed by a single verb, which serves to convey all the shades of an idea by the modification of its construction. those who may wish to examine more in detail this subject, which i have only glanced at superficially, should read:-- . the correspondence of mr. duponceau and the rev. mr. hecwelder relative to the indian languages, which is to be found in the first volume of the "memoirs of the philosophical society of america," published at philadelphia, , by abraham small; vol. i. p. - . . the "grammar of the delaware or the lenape language," by geiberger, and the preface of mr. duponceau. all these are in the same collection, vol. iii. . an excellent account of these works, which is at the end of the sixth volume of the american encyclopaedia. appendix d see in charlevoix, vol. i. p. , the history of the first war which the french inhabitants of canada carried on, in , against the iroquois. the latter, armed with bows and arrows, offered a desperate resistance to the french and their allies. charlevoix is not a great painter, yet he exhibits clearly enough, in this narrative, the contrast between the european manners and those of savages, as well as the different way in which the two races of men understood the sense of honor. when the french, says he, seized upon the beaver-skins which covered the indians who had fallen, the hurons, their allies, were greatly offended at this proceeding; but without hesitation they set to work in their usual manner, inflicting horrid cruelties upon the prisoners, and devouring one of those who had been killed, which made the frenchmen shudder. the barbarians prided themselves upon a scrupulousness which they were surprised at not finding in our nation, and could not understand that there was less to reprehend in the stripping of dead bodies than in the devouring of their flesh like wild beasts. charlevoix, in another place (vol. i. p. ), thus describes the first torture of which champlain was an eyewitness, and the return of the hurons into their own village. having proceeded about eight leagues, says he, our allies halted; and having singled out one of their captives, they reproached him with all the cruelties which he had practised upon the warriors of their nation who had fallen into his hands, and told him that he might expect to be treated in like manner; adding, that if he had any spirit he would prove it by singing. he immediately chanted forth his death-song, and then his war-song, and all the songs he knew, "but in a very mournful strain," says champlain, who was not then aware that all savage music has a melancholy character. the tortures which succeeded, accompanied by all the horrors which we shall mention hereafter, terrified the french, who made every effort to put a stop to them, but in vain. the following night, one of the hurons having dreamt that they were pursued, the retreat was changed to a real flight, and the savages never stopped until they were out of the reach of danger. the moment they perceived the cabins of their own village, they cut themselves long sticks, to which they fastened the scalps which had fallen to their share, and carried them in triumph. at this sight, the women swam to the canoes, where they received the bloody scalps from the hands of their husbands, and tied them round their necks. the warriors offered one of these horrible trophies to champlain; they also presented him with some bows and arrows--the only spoils of the iroquois which they had ventured to seize--entreating him to show them to the king of france. champlain lived a whole winter quite alone among these barbarians, without being under any alarm for his person or property. appendix e although the puritanical strictness which presided over the establishment of the english colonies in america is now much relaxed, remarkable traces of it are still found in their habits and their laws. in , at the very time when the anti-christian republic of france began its ephemeral existence, the legislative body of massachusetts promulgated the following law, to compel the citizens to observe the sabbath. we give the preamble and the principal articles of this law, which is worthy of the reader's attention: "whereas," says the legislator, "the observation of the sunday is an affair of public interest; inasmuch as it produces a necessary suspension of labor, leads men to reflect upon the duties of life, and the errors to which human nature is liable, and provides for the public and private worship of god, the creator and governor of the universe, and for the performance of such acts of charity as are the ornament and comfort of christian societies:--whereas irreligious or light-minded persons, forgetting the duties which the sabbath imposes, and the benefits which these duties confer on society, are known to profane its sanctity, by following their pleasures or their affairs; this way of acting being contrary to their own interest as christians, and calculated to annoy those who do not follow their example; being also of great injury to society at large, by spreading a taste for dissipation and dissolute manners; be it enacted and ordained by the governor, council, and representatives convened in general court of assembly, that all and every person and persons shall on that day carefully apply themselves to the duties of religion and piety, that no tradesman or labourer shall exercise his ordinary calling, and that no game or recreation shall be used on the lord's day, upon pain of forfeiting ten shillings. "that no one shall travel on that day, or any part thereof, under pain of forfeiting twenty shillings; that no vessel shall leave a harbour of the colony; that no persons shall keep outside the meeting-house during the time of public worship, or profane the time by playing or talking, on penalty of five shillings. "public-houses shall not entertain any other than strangers or lodgers, under penalty of five shillings for every person found drinking and abiding therein. "any person in health, who, without sufficient reason, shall omit to worship god in public during three months, shall be condemned to a fine of ten shillings. "any person guilty of misbehaviour in a place of public worship, shall be fined from five to forty shillings. "these laws are to be enforced by the tything-men of each township, who have authority to visit public-houses on the sunday. the innkeeper who shall refuse them admittance, shall be fined forty shillings for such offence. "the tything-men are to stop travellers, and require of them their reason for being on the road on sunday; anyone refusing to answer, shall be sentenced to pay a fine not exceeding five pounds sterling. if the reason given by the traveller be not deemed by the tything-man sufficient, he may bring the traveller before the justice of the peace of the district." (law of march , ; general laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .) on march , , a new law increased the amount of fines, half of which was to be given to the informer. (same collection, vol. ii. p. .) on february , , a new law confirmed these same measures. (same collection, vol. ii. p. .) similar enactments exist in the laws of the state of new york, revised in and . (see revised statutes, part i. chapter , p. .) in these it is declared that no one is allowed on the sabbath to sport, to fish, to play at games, or to frequent houses where liquor is sold. no one can travel, except in case of necessity. and this is not the only trace which the religious strictness and austere manners of the first emigrants have left behind them in the american laws. in the revised statutes of the state of new york, vol. i. p. , is the following clause:-- "whoever shall win or lose in the space of twenty-four hours, by gaming or betting, the sum of twenty-five dollars, shall be found guilty of a misdemeanour, and upon conviction shall be condemned to pay a fine equal to at least five times the value of the sum lost or won; which shall be paid to the inspector of the poor of the township. he that loses twenty-five dollars or more may bring an action to recover them; and if he neglects to do so the inspector of the poor may prosecute the winner, and oblige him to pay into the poor's box both the sum he has gained and three times as much besides." the laws we quote from are of recent date; but they are unintelligible without going back to the very origin of the colonies. i have no doubt that in our days the penal part of these laws is very rarely applied. laws preserve their inflexibility, long after the manners of a nation have yielded to the influence of time. it is still true, however, that nothing strikes a foreigner on his arrival in america more forcibly than the regard paid to the sabbath. there is one, in particular, of the large american cities, in which all social movements begin to be suspended even on saturday evening. you traverse its streets at the hour at which you expect men in the middle of life to be engaged in business, and young people in pleasure; and you meet with solitude and silence. not only have all ceased to work, but they appear to have ceased to exist. neither the movements of industry are heard, nor the accents of joy, nor even the confused murmur which arises from the midst of a great city. chains are hung across the streets in the neighborhood of the churches; the half-closed shutters of the houses scarcely admit a ray of sun into the dwellings of the citizens. now and then you perceive a solitary individual who glides silently along the deserted streets and lanes. next day, at early dawn, the rolling of carriages, the noise of hammers, the cries of the population, begin to make themselves heard again. the city is awake. an eager crowd hastens towards the resort of commerce and industry; everything around you bespeaks motion, bustle, hurry. a feverish activity succeeds to the lethargic stupor of yesterday; you might almost suppose that they had but one day to acquire wealth and to enjoy it. appendix f it is unnecessary for me to say, that in the chapter which has just been read, i have not had the intention of giving a history of america. my only object was to enable the reader to appreciate the influence which the opinions and manners of the first emigrants had exercised upon the fate of the different colonies, and of the union in general. i have therefore confined myself to the quotation of a few detached fragments. i do not know whether i am deceived, but it appears to me that, by pursuing the path which i have merely pointed out, it would be easy to present such pictures of the american republics as would not be unworthy the attention of the public, and could not fail to suggest to the statesman matter for reflection. not being able to devote myself to this labor, i am anxious to render it easy to others; and, for this purpose, i subjoin a short catalogue and analysis of the works which seem to me the most important to consult. at the head of the general documents which it would be advantageous to examine i place the work entitled "an historical collection of state papers, and other authentic documents, intended as materials for a history of the united states of america," by ebenezer hasard. the first volume of this compilation, which was printed at philadelphia in , contains a literal copy of all the charters granted by the crown of england to the emigrants, as well as the principal acts of the colonial governments, during the commencement of their existence. amongst other authentic documents, we here find a great many relating to the affairs of new england and virginia during this period. the second volume is almost entirely devoted to the acts of the confederation of . this federal compact, which was entered into by the colonies of new england with the view of resisting the indians, was the first instance of union afforded by the anglo-americans. there were besides many other confederations of the same nature, before the famous one of , which brought about the independence of the colonies. each colony has, besides, its own historic monuments, some of which are extremely curious; beginning with virginia, the state which was first peopled. the earliest historian of virginia was its founder, captain john smith. captain smith has left us an octavo volume, entitled "the generall historie of virginia and new england, by captain john smith, sometymes governor in those countryes, and admirall of new england"; printed at london in . the work is adorned with curious maps and engravings of the time when it appeared; the narrative extends from the year to . smith's work is highly and deservedly esteemed. the author was one of the most celebrated adventurers of a period of remarkable adventure; his book breathes that ardor for discovery, that spirit of enterprise, which characterized the men of his time, when the manners of chivalry were united to zeal for commerce, and made subservient to the acquisition of wealth. but captain smith is most remarkable for uniting to the virtues which characterized his contemporaries several qualities to which they were generally strangers; his style is simple and concise, his narratives bear the stamp of truth, and his descriptions are free from false ornament. this author throws most valuable light upon the state and condition of the indians at the time when north america was first discovered. the second historian to consult is beverley, who commences his narrative with the year , and ends it with . the first part of his book contains historical documents, properly so called, relative to the infancy of the colony. the second affords a most curious picture of the state of the indians at this remote period. the third conveys very clear ideas concerning the manners, social conditions, laws, and political customs of the virginians in the author's lifetime. beverley was a native of virginia, which occasions him to say at the beginning of his book, that he entreats his readers not to exercise their critical severity upon it, since, having been born in the indies, he does not aspire to purity of language. notwithstanding this colonial modesty, the author shows throughout his book the impatience with which he endures the supremacy of the mother-country. in this work of beverley are also found numerous traces of that spirit of civil liberty which animated the english colonies of america at the time when he wrote. he also shows the dissensions which existed among them, and retarded their independence. beverley detests his catholic neighbors of maryland even more than he hates the english government: his style is simple, his narrative interesting, and apparently trustworthy. i saw in america another work which ought to be consulted, entitled "the history of virginia," by william stith. this book affords some curious details, but i thought it long and diffuse. the most ancient as well as the best document to be consulted on the history of carolina, is a work in small quarto, entitled "the history of carolina," by john lawson, printed at london in . this work contains, in the first part, a journey of discovery in the west of carolina; the account of which, given in the form of a journal, is in general confused and superficial; but it contains a very striking description of the mortality caused among the savages of that time both by the smallpox and the immoderate use of brandy; with a curious picture of the corruption of manners prevalent amongst them, which was increased by the presence of europeans. the second part of lawson's book is taken up with a description of the physical condition of carolina, and its productions. in the third part, the author gives an interesting account of the manners, customs, and government of the indians at that period. there is a good deal of talent and originality in this part of the work. lawson concludes his history with a copy of the charter granted to the carolinas in the reign of charles ii. the general tone of this work is light, and often licentious, forming a perfect contrast to the solemn style of the works published at the same period in new england. lawson's history is extremely scarce in america, and cannot be procured in europe. there is, however, a copy of it in the royal library at paris. from the southern extremity of the united states, i pass at once to the northern limit; as the intermediate space was not peopled till a later period. i must first point out a very curious compilation, entitled "collection of the massachusetts historical society," printed for the first time at boston in , and reprinted in . the collection of which i speak, and which is continued to the present day, contains a great number of very valuable documents relating to the history of the different states in new england. among them are letters which have never been published, and authentic pieces which had been buried in provincial archives. the whole work of gookin, concerning the indians, is inserted there. i have mentioned several times in the chapter to which this note relates, the work of nathaniel norton entitled "new england's memorial"; sufficiently, perhaps, to prove that it deserves the attention of those who would be conversant with the history of new england. this book is in octavo, and was reprinted at boston in . the most valuable and important authority which exists upon the history of new england, is the work of the rev. cotton mather, entitled "magnalia christi americana, or the ecclesiastical history of new england, - , vols. vo, reprinted at hartford, united states, in ." *b the author divided his work into seven books. the first presents the history of the events which prepared and brought about the establishment of new england. the second contains the lives of the first governors and chief magistrates who presided over the country. the third is devoted to the lives and labors of the evangelical ministers who, during the same period, had the care of souls. in the fourth the author relates the institution and progress of the university of cambridge (massachusetts). in the fifth he describes the principles and the discipline of the church of new england. the sixth is taken up in retracing certain facts, which, in the opinion of mather, prove the merciful interposition of providence in behalf of the inhabitants of new england. lastly, in the seventh, the author gives an account of the heresies and the troubles to which the church of new england was exposed. cotton mather was an evangelical minister who was born at boston, and passed his life there. his narratives are distinguished by the same ardor and religious zeal which led to the foundation of the colonies of new england. traces of bad taste sometimes occur in his manner of writing; but he interests, because he is full of enthusiasm. he is often intolerant, still oftener credulous, but he never betrays an intention to deceive. sometimes his book contains fine passages, and true and profound reflections, such as the following:-- "before the arrival of the puritans," says he (vol. i. chap. iv.), "there were more than a few attempts of the english to people and improve the parts of new england which were to the northward of new plymouth; but the designs of those attempts being aimed no higher than the advancement of some worldly interests, a constant series of disasters has confounded them, until there was a plantation erected upon the nobler designs of christianity: and that plantation though it has had more adversaries than perhaps any one upon earth, yet, having obtained help from god, it continues to this day." mather occasionally relieves the austerity of his descriptions with images full of tender feeling: after having spoken of an english lady whose religious ardor had brought her to america with her husband, and who soon after sank under the fatigues and privations of exile, he adds, "as for her virtuous husband, isaac johnson, he tryed to live without her, liked it not, and dyed." [footnote b: a folio edition of this work was published in london in .] mather's work gives an admirable picture of the time and country which he describes. in his account of the motives which led the puritans to seek an asylum beyond seas, he says:--"the god of heaven served, as it were, a summons upon the spirits of his people in the english nation, stirring up the spirits of thousands which never saw the faces of each other, with a most unanimous inclination to leave all the pleasant accommodations of their native country, and go over a terrible ocean, into a more terrible desert, for the pure enjoyment of all his ordinances. it is now reasonable that, before we pass any further, the reasons of his undertaking should be more exactly made known unto posterity, especially unto the posterity of those that were the undertakers, lest they come at length to forget and neglect the true interest of new england. wherefore i shall now transcribe some of them from a manuscript, wherein they were then tendered unto consideration: "general considerations for the plantation of new england "first, it will be a service unto the church of great consequence, to carry the gospel unto those parts of the world, and raise a bulwark against the kingdom of antichrist, which the jesuits labour to rear up in all parts of the world. "secondly, all other churches of europe have been brought under desolations; and it may be feared that the like judgments are coming upon us; and who knows but god hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general destruction? "thirdly, the land grows weary of her inhabitants, insomuch that man, which is the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth he treads upon; children, neighbours, and friends, especially the poor, are counted the greatest burdens, which, if things were right, would be the chiefest of earthly blessings. "fourthly, we are grown to that intemperance in all excess of riot, as no mean estate almost will suffice a man to keep sail with his equals, and he that fails in it must live in scorn and contempt: hence it comes to pass, that all arts and trades are carried in that deceitful manner and unrighteous course, as it is almost impossible for a good upright man to maintain his constant charge and live comfortably in them. "fifthly, the schools of learning and religion are so corrupted, as (besides the unsupportable charge of education) most children, even the best, wittiest, and of the fairest hopes, are perverted, corrupted, and utterly overthrown by the multitude of evil examples and licentious behaviours in these seminaries. "sixthly, the whole earth is the lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of adam, to be tilled and improved by them: why, then, should we stand starving here for places of habitation, and in the meantime suffer whole countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement? "seventhly, what can be a better or nobler work, and more worthy of a christian, than to erect and support a reformed particular church in its infancy, and unite our forces with such a company of faithful people, as by timely assistance may grow stronger and prosper; but for want of it, may be put to great hazards, if not be wholly ruined? "eighthly, if any such as are known to be godly, and live in wealth and prosperity here, shall forsake all this to join with this reformed church, and with it run the hazard of an hard and mean condition, it will be an example of great use, both for the removing of scandal and to give more life unto the faith of god's people in their prayers for the plantation, and also to encourage others to join the more willingly in it." further on, when he declares the principles of the church of new england with respect to morals, mather inveighs with violence against the custom of drinking healths at table, which he denounces as a pagan and abominable practice. he proscribes with the same rigor all ornaments for the hair used by the female sex, as well as their custom of having the arms and neck uncovered. in another part of his work he relates several instances of witchcraft which had alarmed new england. it is plain that the visible action of the devil in the affairs of this world appeared to him an incontestable and evident fact. this work of cotton mather displays, in many places, the spirit of civil liberty and political independence which characterized the times in which he lived. their principles respecting government are discoverable at every page. thus, for instance, the inhabitants of massachusetts, in the year , ten years after the foundation of plymouth, are found to have devoted pound sterling to the establishment of the university of cambridge. in passing from the general documents relative to the history of new england to those which describe the several states comprised within its limits, i ought first to notice "the history of the colony of massachusetts," by hutchinson, lieutenant-governor of the massachusetts province, vols. vo. the history of hutchinson, which i have several times quoted in the chapter to which this note relates, commences in the year , and ends in . throughout the work there is a striking air of truth and the greatest simplicity of style: it is full of minute details. the best history to consult concerning connecticut is that of benjamin trumbull, entitled "a complete history of connecticut, civil and ecclesiastical," - , vols. vo, printed in at new haven. this history contains a clear and calm account of all the events which happened in connecticut during the period given in the title. the author drew from the best sources, and his narrative bears the stamp of truth. all that he says of the early days of connecticut is extremely curious. see especially the constitution of , vol. i. ch. vi. p. ; and also the penal laws of connecticut, vol. i. ch. vii. p. . "the history of new hampshire," by jeremy belknap, is a work held in merited estimation. it was printed at boston in , in vols. vo. the third chapter of the first volume is particularly worthy of attention for the valuable details it affords on the political and religious principles of the puritans, on the causes of their emigration, and on their laws. the following curious quotation is given from a sermon delivered in :--"it concerneth new england always to remember that they are a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade. the profession of the purity of doctrine, worship, and discipline, is written upon her forehead. let merchants, and such as are increasing cent. per cent., remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of new england, but religion. and if any man among us make religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, such an one hath not the spirit of a true new englishman." the reader of belknap will find in his work more general ideas, and more strength of thought, than are to be met with in the american historians even to the present day. among the central states which deserve our attention for their remote origin, new york and pennsylvania are the foremost. the best history we have of the former is entitled "a history of new york," by william smith, printed at london in . smith gives us important details of the wars between the french and english in america. his is the best account of the famous confederation of the iroquois. with respect to pennsylvania, i cannot do better than point out the work of proud, entitled "the history of pennsylvania, from the original institution and settlement of that province, under the first proprietor and governor, william penn, in , till after the year ," by robert proud, vols. vo, printed at philadelphia in . this work is deserving of the especial attention of the reader; it contains a mass of curious documents concerning penn, the doctrine of the quakers, and the character, manners, and customs of the first inhabitants of pennsylvania. i need not add that among the most important documents relating to this state are the works of penn himself, and those of franklin. part ii. appendix g we read in jefferson's "memoirs" as follows:-- "at the time of the first settlement of the english in virginia, when land was to be had for little or nothing, some provident persons having obtained large grants of it, and being desirous of maintaining the splendor of their families, entailed their property upon their descendants. the transmission of these estates from generation to generation, to men who bore the same name, had the effect of raising up a distinct class of families, who, possessing by law the privilege of perpetuating their wealth, formed by these means a sort of patrician order, distinguished by the grandeur and luxury of their establishments. from this order it was that the king usually chose his councillors of state." *c [footnote c: this passage is extracted and translated from m. conseil's work upon the life of jefferson, entitled "melanges politiques et philosophiques de jefferson."] in the united states, the principal clauses of the english law respecting descent have been universally rejected. the first rule that we follow, says mr. kent, touching inheritance, is the following:--if a man dies intestate, his property goes to his heirs in a direct line. if he has but one heir or heiress, he or she succeeds to the whole. if there are several heirs of the same degree, they divide the inheritance equally amongst them, without distinction of sex. this rule was prescribed for the first time in the state of new york by a statute of february , . (see revised statutes, vol. iii. appendix, p. .) it has since then been adopted in the revised statutes of the same state. at the present day this law holds good throughout the whole of the united states, with the exception of the state of vermont, where the male heir inherits a double portion. (kent's "commentaries," vol. iv. p. .) mr. kent, in the same work, vol. iv. p. - , gives a historical account of american legislation on the subject of entail: by this we learn that, previous to the revolution, the colonies followed the english law of entail. estates tail were abolished in virginia in , on a motion of mr. jefferson. they were suppressed in new york in , and have since been abolished in north carolina, kentucky, tennessee, georgia, and missouri. in vermont, indiana, illinois, south carolina, and louisiana, entail was never introduced. those states which thought proper to preserve the english law of entail, modified it in such a way as to deprive it of its most aristocratic tendencies. "our general principles on the subject of government," says mr. kent, "tend to favor the free circulation of property." it cannot fail to strike the french reader who studies the law of inheritance, that on these questions the french legislation is infinitely more democratic even than the american. the american law makes an equal division of the father's property, but only in the case of his will not being known; "for every man," says the law, "in the state of new york (revised statutes, vol. iii. appendix, p. ), has entire liberty, power, and authority, to dispose of his property by will, to leave it entire, or divided in favor of any persons he chooses as his heirs, provided he do not leave it to a political body or any corporation." the french law obliges the testator to divide his property equally, or nearly so, among his heirs. most of the american republics still admit of entails, under certain restrictions; but the french law prohibits entail in all cases. if the social condition of the americans is more democratic than that of the french, the laws of the latter are the most democratic of the two. this may be explained more easily than at first appears to be the case. in france, democracy is still occupied in the work of destruction; in america, it reigns quietly over the ruins it has made. appendix h summary of the qualifications of voters in the united states as they existed in all the states agree in granting the right of voting at the age of twenty-one. in all of them it is necessary to have resided for a certain time in the district where the vote is given. this period varies from three months to two years. as to the qualification: in the state of massachusetts it is necessary to have an income of pound or a capital of pound . in rhode island, a man must possess landed property to the amount of $ . in connecticut, he must have a property which gives an income of $ . a year of service in the militia also gives the elective privilege. in new jersey, an elector must have a property of pound a year. in south carolina and maryland, the elector must possess fifty acres of land. in tennessee, he must possess some property. in the states of mississippi, ohio, georgia, virginia, pennsylvania, delaware, new york, the only necessary qualification for voting is that of paying the taxes; and in most of the states, to serve in the militia is equivalent to the payment of taxes. in maine and new hampshire any man can vote who is not on the pauper list. lastly, in the states of missouri, alabama, illinois, louisiana, indiana, kentucky, and vermont, the conditions of voting have no reference to the property of the elector. i believe there is no other state besides that of north carolina in which different conditions are applied to the voting for the senate and the electing the house of representatives. the electors of the former, in this case, should possess in property fifty acres of land; to vote for the latter, nothing more is required than to pay taxes. appendix i the small number of custom-house officers employed in the united states, compared with the extent of the coast, renders smuggling very easy; notwithstanding which, it is less practised than elsewhere, because everybody endeavors to repress it. in america there is no police for the prevention of fires, and such accidents are more frequent than in europe; but in general they are more speedily extinguished, because the surrounding population is prompt in lending assistance. appendix k it is incorrect to assert that centralization was produced by the french revolution; the revolution brought it to perfection, but did not create it. the mania for centralization and government regulations dates from the time when jurists began to take a share in the government, in the time of philippele-bel; ever since which period they have been on the increase. in the year , m. de malesherbes, speaking in the name of the cour des aides, said to louis xiv:-- *d [footnote d: see "memoires pour servir a l'histoire du droit public de la france en matiere d'impots," p. , printed at brussels in .] ". . . every corporation and every community of citizens retained the right of administering its own affairs; a right which not only forms part of the primitive constitution of the kingdom, but has a still higher origin; for it is the right of nature, and of reason. nevertheless, your subjects, sire, have been deprived of it; and we cannot refrain from saying that in this respect your government has fallen into puerile extremes. from the time when powerful ministers made it a political principle to prevent the convocation of a national assembly, one consequence has succeeded another, until the deliberations of the inhabitants of a village are declared null when they have not been authorized by the intendant. of course, if the community has an expensive undertaking to carry through, it must remain under the control of the sub-delegate of the intendant, and, consequently, follow the plan he proposes, employ his favorite workmen, pay them according to his pleasure; and if an action at law is deemed necessary, the intendant's permission must be obtained. the cause must be pleaded before this first tribunal, previous to its being carried into a public court; and if the opinion of the intendant is opposed to that of the inhabitants, or if their adversary enjoys his favor, the community is deprived of the power of defending its rights. such are the means, sire, which have been exerted to extinguish the municipal spirit in france; and to stifle, if possible, the opinions of the citizens. the nation may be said to lie under an interdict, and to be in wardship under guardians." what could be said more to the purpose at the present day, when the revolution has achieved what are called its victories in centralization? in , jefferson wrote from paris to one of his friends:--"there is no country where the mania for over-governing has taken deeper root than in france, or been the source of greater mischief." (letter to madison, august , .) the fact is, that for several centuries past the central power of france has done everything it could to extend central administration; it has acknowledged no other limits than its own strength. the central power to which the revolution gave birth made more rapid advances than any of its predecessors, because it was stronger and wiser than they had been; louis xiv committed the welfare of such communities to the caprice of an intendant; napoleon left them to that of the minister. the same principle governed both, though its consequences were more or less remote. appendix l the immutability of the constitution of france is a necessary consequence of the laws of that country. to begin with the most important of all the laws, that which decides the order of succession to the throne; what can be more immutable in its principle than a political order founded upon the natural succession of father to son? in , louis xviii had established the perpetual law of hereditary succession in favor of his own family. the individuals who regulated the consequences of the revolution of followed his example; they merely established the perpetuity of the law in favor of another family. in this respect they imitated the chancellor meaupou, who, when he erected the new parliament upon the ruins of the old, took care to declare in the same ordinance that the rights of the new magistrates should be as inalienable as those of their predecessors had been. the laws of , like those of , point out no way of changing the constitution: and it is evident that the ordinary means of legislation are insufficient for this purpose. as the king, the peers, and the deputies, all derive their authority from the constitution, these three powers united cannot alter a law by virtue of which alone they govern. out of the pale of the constitution they are nothing: where, when, could they take their stand to effect a change in its provisions? the alternative is clear: either their efforts are powerless against the charter, which continues to exist in spite of them, in which case they only reign in the name of the charter; or they succeed in changing the charter, and then, the law by which they existed being annulled, they themselves cease to exist. by destroying the charter, they destroy themselves. this is much more evident in the laws of than in those of . in , the royal prerogative took its stand above and beyond the constitution; but in , it was avowedly created by, and dependent on, the constitution. a part, therefore, of the french constitution is immutable, because it is united to the destiny of a family; and the body of the constitution is equally immutable, because there appear to be no legal means of changing it. these remarks are not applicable to england. that country having no written constitution, who can assert when its constitution is changed? appendix m the most esteemed authors who have written upon the english constitution agree with each other in establishing the omnipotence of the parliament. delolme says: "it is a fundamental principle with the english lawyers, that parliament can do everything except making a woman a man, or a man a woman." blackstone expresses himself more in detail, if not more energetically, than delolme, in the following terms:--"the power and jurisdiction of parliament, says sir edward coke ( inst. ), 'is so transcendent and absolute that it cannot be confined, either for causes or persons, within any bounds.' and of this high court, he adds, may be truly said, 'si antiquitatem spectes, est vetustissima; si dignitatem, est honoratissima; si jurisdictionem, est capacissima.' it hath sovereign and uncontrollable authority in the making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving, and expounding of laws, concerning matters of all possible denominations; ecclesiastical or temporal; civil, military, maritime, or criminal; this being the place where that absolute despotic power which must, in all governments, reside somewhere, is intrusted by the constitution of these kingdoms. all mischiefs and grievances, operations and remedies, that transcend the ordinary course of the laws, are within the reach of this extraordinary tribunal. it can regulate or new-model the succession to the crown; as was done in the reign of henry viii and william iii. it can alter the established religion of the land; as was done in a variety of instances in the reigns of king henry viii and his three children. it can change and create afresh even the constitution of the kingdom, and of parliaments themselves; as was done by the act of union and the several statutes for triennial and septennial elections. it can, in short, do everything that is not naturally impossible to be done; and, therefore some have not scrupled to call its power, by a figure rather too bold, the omnipotence of parliament." appendix n there is no question upon which the american constitutions agree more fully than upon that of political jurisdiction. all the constitutions which take cognizance of this matter, give to the house of delegates the exclusive right of impeachment; excepting only the constitution of north carolina, which grants the same privilege to grand juries. (article .) almost all the constitutions give the exclusive right of pronouncing sentence to the senate, or to the assembly which occupies its place. the only punishments which the political tribunals can inflict are removal, or the interdiction of public functions for the future. there is no other constitution but that of virginia (p. ), which enables them to inflict every kind of punishment. the crimes which are subject to political jurisdiction are, in the federal constitution (section , art. ); in that of indiana (art. , paragraphs and ); of new york (art. ); of delaware (art. ), high treason, bribery, and other high crimes or offences. in the constitution of massachusetts (chap. i, section ); that of north carolina (art. ); of virginia (p. ), misconduct and maladministration. in the constitution of new hampshire (p. ), corruption, intrigue, and maladministration. in vermont (chap. , art. ), maladministration. in south carolina (art. ); kentucky (art. ); tennessee (art. ); ohio (art. , , ); louisiana (art. ); mississippi (art. ); alabama (art. ); pennsylvania (art. ), crimes committed in the non-performance of official duties. in the states of illinois, georgia, maine, and connecticut, no particular offences are specified. appendix o it is true that the powers of europe may carry on maritime wars with the union; but there is always greater facility and less danger in supporting a maritime than a continental war. maritime warfare only requires one species of effort. a commercial people which consents to furnish its government with the necessary funds, is sure to possess a fleet. and it is far easier to induce a nation to part with its money, almost unconsciously, than to reconcile it to sacrifices of men and personal efforts. moreover, defeat by sea rarely compromises the existence or independence of the people which endures it. as for continental wars, it is evident that the nations of europe cannot be formidable in this way to the american union. it would be very difficult to transport and maintain in america more than , soldiers; an army which may be considered to represent a nation of about , , of men. the most populous nation of europe contending in this way against the union, is in the position of a nation of , , of inhabitants at war with one of , , . add to this, that america has all its resources within reach, whilst the european is at , miles distance from his; and that the immensity of the american continent would of itself present an insurmountable obstacle to its conquest. appendix p the first american journal appeared in april, , and was published at boston. see "collection of the historical society of massachusetts," vol. vi. p. . it would be a mistake to suppose that the periodical press has always been entirely free in the american colonies: an attempt was made to establish something analogous to a censorship and preliminary security. consult the legislative documents of massachusetts of january , . the committee appointed by the general assembly (the legislative body of the province) for the purpose of examining into circumstances connected with a paper entitled "the new england courier," expresses its opinion that "the tendency of the said journal is to turn religion into derision and bring it into contempt; that it mentions the sacred writers in a profane and irreligious manner; that it puts malicious interpretations upon the conduct of the ministers of the gospel; and that the government of his majesty is insulted, and the peace and tranquillity of the province disturbed by the said journal. the committee is consequently of opinion that the printer and publisher, james franklin, should be forbidden to print and publish the said journal or any other work in future, without having previously submitted it to the secretary of the province; and that the justices of the peace for the county of suffolk should be commissioned to require bail of the said james franklin for his good conduct during the ensuing year." the suggestion of the committee was adopted and passed into a law, but the effect of it was null, for the journal eluded the prohibition by putting the name of benjamin franklin instead of james franklin at the bottom of its columns, and this manoeuvre was supported by public opinion. appendix q the federal constitution has introduced the jury into the tribunals of the union in the same way as the states had introduced it into their own several courts; but as it has not established any fixed rules for the choice of jurors, the federal courts select them from the ordinary jury list which each state makes for itself. the laws of the states must therefore be examined for the theory of the formation of juries. see story's "commentaries on the constitution," b. iii. chap. , p. - ; sergeant's "constitutional law," p. . see also the federal laws of the years , , and , upon the subject. for the purpose of thoroughly understanding the american principles with respect to the formation of juries, i examined the laws of states at a distance from one another, and the following observations were the result of my inquiries. in america, all the citizens who exercise the elective franchise have the right of serving upon a jury. the great state of new york, however, has made a slight difference between the two privileges, but in a spirit quite contrary to that of the laws of france; for in the state of new york there are fewer persons eligible as jurymen than there are electors. it may be said in general that the right of forming part of a jury, like the right of electing representatives, is open to all the citizens: the exercise of this right, however, is not put indiscriminately into any hands. every year a body of municipal or county magistrates--called "selectmen" in new england, "supervisors" in new york, "trustees" in ohio, and "sheriffs of the parish" in louisiana--choose for each county a certain number of citizens who have the right of serving as jurymen, and who are supposed to be capable of exercising their functions. these magistrates, being themselves elective, excite no distrust; their powers, like those of most republican magistrates, are very extensive and very arbitrary, and they frequently make use of them to remove unworthy or incompetent jurymen. the names of the jurymen thus chosen are transmitted to the county court; and the jury who have to decide any affair are drawn by lot from the whole list of names. the americans have contrived in every way to make the common people eligible to the jury, and to render the service as little onerous as possible. the sessions are held in the chief town of every county, and the jury are indemnified for their attendance either by the state or the parties concerned. they receive in general a dollar per day, besides their travelling expenses. in america, the being placed upon the jury is looked upon as a burden, but it is a burden which is very supportable. see brevard's "digest of the public statute law of south carolina," vol. i. pp. and , vol. ii. pp. and ; "the general laws of massachusetts, revised and published by authority of the legislature," vol. ii. pp. and ; "the revised statutes of the state of new york," vol. ii. pp. , , , ; "the statute law of the state of tennessee," vol. i. p. ; "acts of the state of ohio," pp. and ; and "digeste general des actes de la legislature de la louisiane." appendix r if we attentively examine the constitution of the jury as introduced into civil proceedings in england, we shall readily perceive that the jurors are under the immediate control of the judge. it is true that the verdict of the jury, in civil as well as in criminal cases, comprises the question of fact and the question of right in the same reply; thus--a house is claimed by peter as having been purchased by him: this is the fact to be decided. the defendant puts in a plea of incompetency on the part of the vendor: this is the legal question to be resolved. but the jury do not enjoy the same character of infallibility in civil cases, according to the practice of the english courts, as they do in criminal cases. the judge may refuse to receive the verdict; and even after the first trial has taken place, a second or new trial may be awarded by the court. see blackstone's "commentaries," book iii. ch. . appendix s i find in my travelling journal a passage which may serve to convey a more complete notion of the trials to which the women of america, who consent to follow their husbands into the wilds, are often subjected. this description has nothing to recommend it to the reader but its strict accuracy: ". . . from time to time we come to fresh clearings; all these places are alike; i shall describe the one at which we have halted to-night, for it will serve to remind me of all the others. "the bell which the pioneers hang round the necks of their cattle, in order to find them again in the woods, announced our approach to a clearing, when we were yet a long way off; and we soon afterwards heard the stroke of the hatchet, hewing down the trees of the forest. as we came nearer, traces of destruction marked the presence of civilized man; the road was strewn with shattered boughs; trunks of trees, half consumed by fire, or cleft by the wedge, were still standing in the track we were following. we continued to proceed till we reached a wood in which all the trees seemed to have been suddenly struck dead; in the height of summer their boughs were as leafless as in winter; and upon closer examination we found that a deep circle had been cut round the bark, which, by stopping the circulation of the sap, soon kills the tree. we were informed that this is commonly the first thing a pioneer does; as he cannot in the first year cut down all the trees which cover his new parcel of land, he sows indian corn under their branches, and puts the trees to death in order to prevent them from injuring his crop. beyond this field, at present imperfectly traced out, we suddenly came upon the cabin of its owner, situated in the centre of a plot of ground more carefully cultivated than the rest, but where man was still waging unequal warfare with the forest; there the trees were cut down, but their roots were not removed, and the trunks still encumbered the ground which they so recently shaded. around these dry blocks, wheat, suckers of trees, and plants of every kind, grow and intertwine in all the luxuriance of wild, untutored nature. amidst this vigorous and various vegetation stands the house of the pioneer, or, as they call it, the log house. like the ground about it, this rustic dwelling bore marks of recent and hasty labor; its length seemed not to exceed thirty feet, its height fifteen; the walls as well as the roof were formed of rough trunks of trees, between which a little moss and clay had been inserted to keep out the cold and rain. "as night was coming on, we determined to ask the master of the log house for a lodging. at the sound of our footsteps, the children who were playing amongst the scattered branches sprang up and ran towards the house, as if they were frightened at the sight of man; whilst two large dogs, almost wild, with ears erect and outstretched nose, came growling out of their hut, to cover the retreat of their young masters. the pioneer himself made his appearance at the door of his dwelling; he looked at us with a rapid and inquisitive glance, made a sign to the dogs to go into the house, and set them the example, without betraying either curiosity or apprehension at our arrival. "we entered the log house: the inside is quite unlike that of the cottages of the peasantry of europe: it contains more than is superfluous, less than is necessary. a single window with a muslin blind; on a hearth of trodden clay an immense fire, which lights the whole structure; above the hearth a good rifle, a deer's skin, and plumes of eagles' feathers; on the right hand of the chimney a map of the united states, raised and shaken by the wind through the crannies in the wall; near the map, upon a shelf formed of a roughly hewn plank, a few volumes of books--a bible, the six first books of milton, and two of shakespeare's plays; along the wall, trunks instead of closets; in the centre of the room a rude table, with legs of green wood, and with the bark still upon them, looking as if they grew out of the ground on which they stood; but on this table a tea-pot of british ware, silver spoons, cracked tea-cups, and some newspapers. "the master of this dwelling has the strong angular features and lank limbs peculiar to the native of new england. it is evident that this man was not born in the solitude in which we have met with him: his physical constitution suffices to show that his earlier years were spent in the midst of civilized society, and that he belongs to that restless, calculating, and adventurous race of men, who do with the utmost coolness things only to be accounted for by the ardor of the passions, and who endure the life of savages for a time, in order to conquer and civilize the backwoods. "when the pioneer perceived that we were crossing his threshold, he came to meet us and shake hands, as is their custom; but his face was quite unmoved; he opened the conversation by inquiring what was going on in the world; and when his curiosity was satisfied, he held his peace, as if he were tired by the noise and importunity of mankind. when we questioned him in our turn, he gave us all the information we required; he then attended sedulously, but without eagerness, to our personal wants. whilst he was engaged in providing thus kindly for us, how came it that in spit of ourselves we felt our gratitude die upon our lips? it is that our host whilst he performs the duties of hospitality, seems to be obeying an irksome necessity of his condition: he treats it as a duty imposed upon him by his situation, not as a pleasure. by the side of the hearth sits a woman with a baby on her lap: she nods to us without disturbing herself. like the pioneer, this woman is in the prime of life; her appearance would seem superior to her condition, and her apparel even betrays a lingering taste for dress; but her delicate limbs appear shrunken, her features are drawn in, her eye is mild and melancholy; her whole physiognomy bears marks of a degree of religious resignation, a deep quiet of all passions, and some sort of natural and tranquil firmness, ready to meet all the ills of life, without fearing and without braving them. her children cluster about her, full of health, turbulence, and energy: they are true children of the wilderness; their mother watches them from time to time with mingled melancholy and joy: to look at their strength and her languor, one might imagine that the life she has given them has exhausted her own, and still she regrets not what they have cost her. the house inhabited by these emigrants has no internal partition or loft. in the one chamber of which it consists, the whole family is gathered for the night. the dwelling is itself a little world--an ark of civilization amidst an ocean of foliage: a hundred steps beyond it the primeval forest spreads its shades, and solitude resumes its sway." appendix t it is not the equality of conditions which makes men immoral and irreligious; but when men, being equal, are at the same time immoral and irreligious, the effects of immorality and irreligion easily manifest themselves outwardly, because men have but little influence upon each other, and no class exists which can undertake to keep society in order. equality of conditions never engenders profligacy of morals, but it sometimes allows that profligacy to show itself. appendix u setting aside all those who do not think at all, and those who dare not say what they think, the immense majority of the americans will still be found to appear satisfied with the political institutions by which they are governed; and, i believe, really to be so. i look upon this state of public opinion as an indication, but not as a demonstration, of the absolute excellence of american laws. the pride of a nation, the gratification of certain ruling passions by the law, a concourse of circumstances, defects which escape notice, and more than all the rest, the influence of a majority which shuts the mouth of all cavillers, may long perpetuate the delusions of a people as well as those of a man. look at england throughout the eighteenth century. no nation was ever more prodigal of self-applause, no people was ever more self-satisfied; then every part of its constitution was right--everything, even to its most obvious defects, was irreproachable: at the present day a vast number of englishmen seem to have nothing better to do than to prove that this constitution was faulty in many respects. which was right?--the english people of the last century, or the english people of the present day? the same thing has occurred in france. it is certain that during the reign of louis xiv the great bulk of the nation was devotedly attached to the form of government which, at that time, governed the community. but it is a vast error to suppose that there was anything degraded in the character of the french of that age. there might be some sort of servitude in france at that time, but assuredly there was no servile spirit among the people. the writers of that age felt a species of genuine enthusiasm in extolling the power of their king; and there was no peasant so obscure in his hovel as not to take a pride in the glory of his sovereign, and to die cheerfully with the cry "vive le roi!" upon his lips. these very same forms of loyalty are now odious to the french people. which are wrong?--the french of the age of louis xiv, or their descendants of the present day? our judgment of the laws of a people must not then be founded future condition of three races in the united states exclusively upon its inclinations, since those inclinations change from age to age; but upon more elevated principles and a more general experience. the love which a people may show for its law proves only this:--that we should not be in too great a hurry to change them. appendix v in the chapter to which this note relates i have pointed out one source of danger: i am now about to point out another kind of peril, more rare indeed, but far more formidable if it were ever to make its appearance. if the love of physical gratification and the taste for well-being, which are naturally suggested to men by a state of equality, were to get entire possession of the mind of a democratic people, and to fill it completely, the manners of the nation would become so totally opposed to military tastes, that perhaps even the army would eventually acquire a love of peace, in spite of the peculiar interest which leads it to desire war. living in the midst of a state of general relaxation, the troops would ultimately think it better to rise without efforts, by the slow but commodious advancement of a peace establishment, than to purchase more rapid promotion at the cost of all the toils and privations of the field. with these feelings, they would take up arms without enthusiasm, and use them without energy; they would allow themselves to be led to meet the foe, instead of marching to attack him. it must not be supposed that this pacific state of the army would render it adverse to revolutions; for revolutions, and especially military revolutions, which are generally very rapid, are attended indeed with great dangers, but not with protracted toil; they gratify ambition at less cost than war; life only is at stake, and the men of democracies care less for their lives than for their comforts. nothing is more dangerous for the freedom and the tranquillity of a people than an army afraid of war, because, as such an army no longer seeks to maintain its importance and its influence on the field of battle, it seeks to assert them elsewhere. thus it might happen that the men of whom a democratic army consists should lose the interests of citizens without acquiring the virtues of soldiers; and that the army should cease to be fit for war without ceasing to be turbulent. i shall here repeat what i have said in the text: the remedy for these dangers is not to be found in the army, but in the country: a democratic people which has preserved the manliness of its character will never be at a loss for military prowess in its soldiers. appendix w men connect the greatness of their idea of unity with means, god with ends: hence this idea of greatness, as men conceive it, leads us into infinite littleness. to compel all men to follow the same course towards the same object is a human notion;--to introduce infinite variety of action, but so combined that all these acts lead by a multitude of different courses to the accomplishment of one great design, is a conception of the deity. the human idea of unity is almost always barren; the divine idea pregnant with abundant results. men think they manifest their greatness by simplifying the means they use; but it is the purpose of god which is simple--his means are infinitely varied. appendix x a democratic people is not only led by its own tastes to centralize its government, but the passions of all the men by whom it is governed constantly urge it in the same direction. it may easily be foreseen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor without ceasing to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers. it is a waste of time to attempt to prove to them that extreme centralization may be injurious to the state, since they are centralizing for their own benefit. amongst the public men of democracies there are hardly any but men of great disinterestedness or extreme mediocrity who seek to oppose the centralization of government: the former are scarce, the latter powerless. appendix y i have often asked myself what would happen if, amidst the relaxation of democratic manners, and as a consequence of the restless spirit of the army, a military government were ever to be founded amongst any of the nations of the present age. i think that even such a government would not differ very much from the outline i have drawn in the chapter to which this note belongs, and that it would retain none of the fierce characteristics of a military oligarchy. i am persuaded that, in such a case, a sort of fusion would take place between the habits of official men and those of the military service. the administration would assume something of a military character, and the army some of the usages of the civil administration. the result would be a regular, clear, exact, and absolute system of government; the people would become the reflection of the army, and the community be drilled like a garrison. appendix z it cannot be absolutely or generally affirmed that the greatest danger of the present age is license or tyranny, anarchy or despotism. both are equally to be feared; and the one may as easily proceed as the other from the selfsame cause, namely, that "general apathy," which is the consequence of what i have termed "individualism": it is because this apathy exists, that the executive government, having mustered a few troops, is able to commit acts of oppression one day, and the next day a party, which has mustered some thirty men in its ranks, can also commit acts of oppression. neither one nor the other can found anything to last; and the causes which enable them to succeed easily, prevent them from succeeding long: they rise because nothing opposes them, and they sink because nothing supports them. the proper object therefore of our most strenuous resistance, is far less either anarchy or despotism than the apathy which may almost indifferently beget either the one or the other. constitution of the united states of america we the people of the united states, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the united states of america: article i section . all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a congress of the united states, which shall consist of a senate and house of representatives. section . the house of representatives shall be composed of members of chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each states shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature. no person shall be a representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty-five years, and been seven years a citizen of the united states, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen. representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. the actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the congress of the united states, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the state of new hampshire shall be entitled to choose three, massachusetts, eight, rhode-island and providence plantations one, connecticut five, new york six, new jersey four, pennsylvania eight, delaware one, maryland six, virginia ten, north carolina five, south carolina five, and georgia three. when vacancies happen in the representation from any state, the executive authority thereof shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies. the house of representatives shall choose their speaker and other officers; and shall have the sole power of impeachment. section . the senate of the united states shall be composed of two senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years; and each senator shall have one vote. immediately after they shall be assembled in consequence of the first election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three classes. the seats of the senators of the first class shall be vacated at the expiration of the second year, of the second class at the expiration of the fourth year, and of the third class at the expiration of the sixth year, so that one-third may be chosen every second year; and if vacancies happen by resignation, or otherwise, during the recess of the legislature of any state, the executive thereof may make temporary appointments until the next meeting of the legislature, which shall then fill such vacancies. no person shall be a senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the united states, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state for which he shall be chosen. the vice-president of the united states shall be president of the senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided. the senate shall choose their other officers, and also a president pro tempore, in the absence of the vice-president, or when he shall exercise the office of president of the united states. the senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. when sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. when the president of the united states is tried, the chief justice shall preside: and no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present. judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the united states: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment according to law. section . the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators. the congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall be on the first monday in december, unless they shall by law appoint a different day. section . each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each house may provide. each house may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behaviour, and, with a concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member. each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy; and the yeas and nays of the members of either house on any question shall, at the desire of one-fifth of those present, be entered on the journal. neither house, during the session of congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other place than that in which the two houses shall be sitting. section . the senators and representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law, and paid out of the treasury of the united states. they shall in all cases, except treason, felony, and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either house, they shall not be questioned in any other place. no senator or representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the united states, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no person holding any office under the united states, shall be a member of either house during his continuance in office. section . all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the house of representatives; but the senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills. every bill which shall have passed the house of representatives and the senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the president of the united states; if he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his objections, to that house in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their journal, and proceed to reconsider it. if after such reconsideration two-thirds of that house shall agree to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the other house, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two-thirds of that house, it shall become a law. but in all such cases the votes of both houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the journal of each house respectively. if any bill shall not be returned by the president within ten days (sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law, in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the congress by their adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law. every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence of the senate and house of representatives may be necessary (except on a question of adjournment) shall be presented to the president of the united states; and before the same shall take effect, shall be approved by him, or being disapproved by him, shall be repassed by two-thirds of the senate and house of representatives, according to the rules and limitations prescribed in the case of a bill. section . the congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the united states; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the united states; to borrow money on the credit of the united states; to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the indian tribes; to establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the united states; to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures; to provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the united states; to establish post offices and post roads; to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; to constitute tribunals inferior to the supreme court; to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offences against the law of nations; to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; to raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; to provide and maintain a navy; to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces. to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions. to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the united states, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by congress; to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such district (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of congress become the seat of the government of the united states, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards, and other needful buildings;--and to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution in the government of the united states, or in any department or officer thereof. section . the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person. the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. no bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed. no capitation, or other direct tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. no tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state. no preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay duties in another. no money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time. no title of nobility shall be granted by the united states: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state. section . no state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque or reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility. no state shall, without the consent of the congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports shall be for the use of the treasury of the united states; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the congress. no state shall, without the consent of congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay. article ii section . the executive power shall be vested in a president of the united states of america. he shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the vice-president, chosen for the same term, be elected as follows: each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the congress: but no senator or representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the united states, shall be appointed an elector. [the electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for two persons, of whom one at least shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves. and they shall make a list of all the persons voted for, and of the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the united states, directed to the president of the senate. the president of the senate shall, in the presence of the senate and house of representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted. the person having the greatest number of votes shall be the president, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such majority, and have an equal number of votes, then the house of representatives shall immediately choose by ballot one of them for president; and if no person have a majority, then from the five highest on the list the said house shall in like manner choose the president. but in choosing the president, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. in every case, after the choice of the president, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the vice-president. but if there should remain two or more who have equal votes, the senate shall choose from them by ballot the vice-president.]*d [footnote *d: this clause is superseded by article xii, amendments. see page .] the congress may determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the united states. no person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the united states, at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall be eligible to the office of president; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the united states. in case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the vice-president, and the congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation or inability, both of the president and vice-president, declaring what officer shall then act as president, and such officer shall act accordingly, until the disability be removed, or a president shall be elected. the president shall, at stated times, receive for his services, a compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that period any other emolument from the united states, or any of them. before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:--"i do solemnly swear (or affirm) that i will faithfully execute the office of president of the united states, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the united states." section . the president shall be commander in chief of the army and navy of the united states, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the united states; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the united states, except in cases of impeachment. he shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the supreme court, and all other officers of the united states, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the president alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments. the president shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session. section . he shall from time to time give to the congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the united states. section . the president, vice-president and all civil officers of the united states, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. article iii section . the judicial power of the united states shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the congress may from time to time ordain and establish. the judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office. section . the judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this constitution, the laws of the united states, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;--to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls;--to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; to controversies to which the united states shall be a party;--to controversies between two or more states;--between a state and citizens of another state; between citizens of different states,--between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens or subjects. in all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the supreme court shall have original jurisdiction. in all the other cases before mentioned, the supreme court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions and under such regulations as the congress shall make. the trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury; and such trial shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any state, the trial shall be at such place or places as the congress may by law have directed. section . treason against the united states shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. no person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. the congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted. article iv section . full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. and the congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof. section . the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states. a person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime. no person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due. section . new states may be admitted by the congress into this union; but no new state shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the congress. the congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the united states; and nothing in this constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the united states, or of any particular state. section . the united states shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence. article v the congress, whenever two-thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three-fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the senate. article vi all debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this constitution, shall be as valid against the united states under this constitution, as under the confederation. this constitution, and the laws of the united states which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the united states, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding. the senators and representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the united states and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the united states. article vii the ratification of the conventions of nine states shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution between the states so ratifying the same. done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present the seventeenth day of september in the year of our lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven and of the independence of the united states of america the twelfth. in witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names, geo. washington presidt. and deputy from virginia. new hampshire john langdon nicholas gilman massachusetts nathaniel gorham rufus king connecticut wm. saml. johnson roger sherman new york alexander hamilton new jersey wil. livingston. david brearley. wm. paterson. jona. dayton pennsylvania b franklin thomas mifflin robt. morris. geo. clymer thos. fitzsimons jared ingersoll james wilson gouv. morris delaware geo. read gunning bedford jun john dickinson richard bassett jaco. broom maryland james mchenry dan of st thos. jenifer danl. carroll virginia john blair-- james madison jr. north carolina wm. blount richd. dobbs spaight hu. williamson south carolina j. rutledge charles cotesworth pinckney charles pinckney peirce butler. georgia william few abr. baldwin attest. william jackson, secretary the word 'the,' being interlined between the seventh and eighth lines of the first page, the word 'thirty' being partly written on an erasure in the fifteenth line of the first page, the words 'is tried' being interlined between the thirty-second and thirty-third lines of the first page, and the word 'the' being interlined between the forty-third and forty-fourth lines of the second page. [note by the department of state.--the foregoing explanation in the original instrument is placed on the left of the paragraph beginning with the words, 'done in convention,' and therefore precedes the signatures. the interlined and rewritten words, mentioned in it, are in this edition printed in their proper places in the text.] bill of rights in addition to, and amendment of, the constitution of the united states of america, proposed by congress and ratified by the legislatures of the several states, pursuant to the fifth article of the original constitution article i congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. article ii a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. article iii no soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law. article iv the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. article v no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. article vi in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favour, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence. article vii in suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the united states, than according to the rules of the common law. article viii excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. article ix the enumeration in the constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. article x the powers not delegated to the united states by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. article xi the judicial power of the united states shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the united states by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state. article xii the electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for president and vice-president, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as president; and in distinct ballots the person voted for as vice-president; and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as president, and of all persons voted for as vice president, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the united states, directed to the president of the senate;--the president of the senate shall, in the presence of the senate and house of representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;--the person having the greatest number of votes for president, shall be the president, if such number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as president, the house of representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the president. but in choosing the president, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. and if the house of representatives shall not choose a president whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of march next following, then the vice-president shall act as president, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the president. the person having the greatest number of votes as vice-president, shall be the vice-president, if such a number be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the senate shall choose the vice-president; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. but no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the united states. article xiii section . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the united states, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. section . congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. article xiv section . all persons born or naturalized in the united states, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the united states and of the state wherein they reside. no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united states; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. section . representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding indians not taxed. but when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the united states, representatives in congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the united states, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state. section . no person shall be a senator or representative in congress, or elector of president and vice-president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the united states, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of congress, or as an officer of the united states, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the constitution of the united states, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. but congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability. section . the validity of the public debt of the united states, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. but neither the united states nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the united states, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void. section . the congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. article xv section . the right of citizens of the united states to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the united states or by any state on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude. section . the congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. the soul of democracy the philosophy of the world war in relation to human liberty by edward howard griggs man for the state means autocracy and imperialism; man for mankind is the soul of democracy. contents i the world tragedy ii the conflict of ideas in the war iii the ideas for which the allied nations fight iv moral standards and the moral order v the present state of international relations vi the ethics of international relationship vii america's duty in international relations viii the gospel and the superstition of non-resistance ix preparedness for self-defense x reconstruction from the war xi the war and education xii socialism and the war xiii the war and feminism xiv the transformation of democracy xv democracy and education xvi menaces of democracy xvii the dilemma of democracy xviii paternalism versus democracy xix the solution for democracy xx training for moral leadership xxi democracy and sacrifice xxii the hour of sacrifice the soul of democracy i the world tragedy we are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the history of mankind. not even the overthrow of the old roman empire was so colossal a disaster as this. inevitably we are bewildered by it. utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it overwhelms our vision. man had been going forward steadily, inventing and discovering, until in the last hundred years his whole world had been transformed. suddenly the entire range of invention is turned against man. the machinery of comfort and progress becomes the enginery of devastation. under such a shock, we ask, "has civilization over-reached itself? has the machine run away with its maker?" the imagination is staggered. we are too much in the storm to see across the storm. when the war began, it was over our minds as a dark cloud. it was the last conscious thought as we went to sleep at night, and the first to which we awakened in the morning: wakening with a dumb sense of something wrong, as if we had suffered a personal tragedy, and then as we came to clear consciousness we said, "o yes, the war!" the days have passed into weeks, the weeks into months and years: inevitably we become benumbed to the long continued disaster. it is impossible to think deaths and mutilations in terms of millions. even those who stand in the immediate presence of it and suffer most terribly become calloused to it: much more must we who stood so long apart and have not yet felt the brunt of it. even our entrance into the whirling vortex, drawing ever nearer our shores, has failed to waken us to a realizing sense of it. nevertheless, these years through which we are now living are the most important in the entire history of the world. it is probable that the future will look back upon them as the years determining the destiny of mankind for ages to come. how this terrible fact of war falls across all philosophies! complacent optimisms, so widely current recently, are put out of court by it. the pleasant interpretations mediocrity formulates of the universe are torn to tatters. there is at least the refreshment of standing face to face with brute actuality, though it crash all our "little systems" to the ground. philosophy must wait. the interpretations cannot be hastened, while the facts are multiplying with such bewildering rapidity. the one certainty is that an entirely new world is being born--_what_ it will be, no one knows. nevertheless, we have gone far enough to recognize that all our thinking will be transformed under the influence of the struggle. it will be impossible for us, after the war, to do what we have done so widely hitherto: proclaim one range of ethical ideals and standards, and live to something widely different in practice. either we shall have to abandon the standards, or bring our conduct measurably into harmony with them. we shall be unable longer to hold unconsciously in solution christianity and the gospel of brute force. one or the other must be rejected, or both consciously reconstructed. the effect on the thought life of the world will be even greater--vastly greater--than that of the french revolution. the twentieth century will differ from the nineteenth more than that did from the eighteenth. the effect on the relations of different social groups throughout the world will be so far-reaching that possibly the democracy and socialism of the nineteenth century may look like remote historic phenomena, such as the athenian tribal system or mediaeval feudalism. thus our whole social philosophy will have to be remolded. we americans are still in the patent medicine period of politics, trusting to political devices on the surface for the cure of any evils that arise. all across the country, like an epidemic of disease has gone the notion --if anything is the matter with us, just pass another law. thus we are suffering under an ill-considered mass of legislation, while blindly trusting to it to solve all problems. legislation is no solution for moral evils. it is possible, to some extent, to suppress vice by legislation, but not to create virtue. virtue can be developed only by conduct and education. you cannot drive men into the kingdom of heaven with the whip of legislation; and if you could, you would so change the atmosphere of the place that one would prefer to take the other road. if our democracy is to survive, we must think it through; carrying it down, from these superficial political devices, into our industry and commerce, still so largely dominated by feudal ideas of the middle age, into our science and art, far more completely into our education, into our social relationship, and beyond all else, into our fundamental attitude of mind. democracy is, at bottom, not a series of political forms, but a way of life. thus the war will be the supreme test of democracy. the question it will settle is this: can free men, by voluntary cooperation, develop an efficiency and an endurance which will make it possible for them to stand and protect their liberties against the machinery and aggressive ambitions of autocratic empires where everything is done paternally from the top? if they can, then democracy will survive and grow as the highest form of society for ages to come; if not, then democracy will pass and be succeeded by some other social order. that is why this war has been our war from the beginning, though we have entered it so late. as we look back upon the struggle of athens and the other free greek cities with the overwhelming hordes of asia, at marathon and salamis, as the conflict that saved democracy for europe and made possible the civilization of the occident, so it is probable that the world will look back upon this colossal war as the same struggle, multiplied a thousand times in the men and munitions employed, the struggle determining the future of democracy and civilization for generations, perhaps for all time. ii the conflict of ideas in the war the world has been confused as to the issue in this war, because of the multitude of its causes and of the antagonisms it involves; yet under all the national and racial hatreds, the economic jealousies, certain great ideas are being tested out. apologists for germany have told us, even with pride, that in germany the supreme conception is the dedication of man to the state. this was not true of old germany. before the formation of the prussian empire, her spirit was intensely individualistic. she stood preeminently for freedom of thought and action. it was this that gave her noble spiritual heritage. goethe is the most individualistic of world masters. froebel developed, in the kindergarten, one of the purest of democracies. luther and german protestantism represented the affirmation of individual conscience as against hierarchical control. it was this spirit that gave germany her golden age of literature, her unmatched group of spiritual philosophers, her religious teachers, her pre-eminence in music. nevertheless, the prussian state, autocratic from its inception, received philosophic justification in a series of thinkers, culminating in hegel, who regarded the individual as a capricious egotist, the state, incarnate in its sovereign, as the supreme spiritual entity. he justified war, regarding it as a permanent necessity, and practically made might, right, in arguing that a conquering nation is justified by its more fruitful idea in annexing the weaker, while the conquered, in being conquered, is judged of god. here is the philosophic justification of that prussian arrogance which in nietzsche is carried into glittering rhetoric. thus the prussian state from afar back was opposed to the general spirit of old germany. since , it must be admitted, that spirit is gone. with the formation of the prussian empire and for the half century of its existence, every force of social control--press, church, state, education, social opinion--was deliberately employed to stamp on the german people one idea--the subordination of the individual to the state, as the supreme and only virtue. how far has the policy succeeded? apparently absolutely. to the outside observer the old spirit seems utterly gone. how far this policy has been helped by the cultivation of the fear of the slav, one cannot say. looking at the map of europe, one sees that the geographical relation of germany to the great slavic empire is not unlike the relation of holland to germany. thus the deliberate fostering of fear of the vast empire of the east has done much to strengthen the hands of the prussian regime in its chosen task. nevertheless, when one recalls the spiritual heritage of germany: when one thinks of herder, schiller and goethe; tauler, luther and schleiermacher; froebel, herbart and richter; kant, fichte and novalis; mozart, beethoven and wagner; one feels that something of the old german heritage must survive. when the german people find out what has happened to them and why, that heritage surely ought to show in some reaction against the present autocratic regime, after the war closes, if not before, perhaps even to the extent of making germany a republic. that would be some compensation for the waste and destruction of the war. meantime germany stands now, ruthlessly, for the dedication of man to the state. one can understand why a prussian minister forbade the teaching of froebel's ideas in prussia during the latter period of the educator's life. so one understands the hatred of goethe because he refused allegiance to a narrow nationalism and remained cosmopolitan in his world-view. similarly hegel, with his justification of absolute monarchy and his theory of the german state as the acme of all spiritual evolution, was the acclaimed orthodox philosopher of prussia, while the individualist, schopenhauer, was neglected and despised. one must have lived in germany to realize the absolute control of the state over the individual--the incessant surveillance, the petty regulations, the constant interference with private life. it was to escape just this vexatious control, with the arduous militarism in which it culminates, that so vast a multitude of germans left their native land and came to the united states--not all of whom have shown appreciation and loyalty to the free land that welcomed them. iii the ideas for which the allied nations fight in contrast to the idea for which germany now stands, the anglo-saxon instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of the individual. we, of course, are no longer anglo-saxon. when de tocqueville in visited our country, surveyed our institutions and, after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he could justly designate us anglo-americans. that time is past; we are to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of time, struggling to be born. nevertheless, anglo-american ideas still dominate and inspire our civilization. it is, indeed, remarkable to what an extent this is true, in the face of the mingling of heterogeneous races in our population. as english is our speech, so anglo-american ideas are still the soul of our life and institutions. this is evident in the jealousy of authority. we resent the intrusion of the government into affairs of private life, and prefer to submit to annoyances and even injustice on the part of other individuals, rather than to have protection at the price of paternalistic regulation by the state. we resent any law that we do not see is necessary to the general welfare, and are rather lawless even then. this shows clearly in our reaction on legislation in regard to drink. the prohibition of intoxicating liquor is about the surest way to make an anglo-saxon want to go out and get drunk, even when he has no other inclination in that direction. in boston, under the eleven o'clock closing law, men in public restaurants will at times order, at ten minutes of eleven, eight or ten glasses of beer or whiskey, for fear they might want them, whereas, if the restriction had not been present, two or three would have sufficed. not long ago we saw the very labor leaders who forced the adamson law through congress, threatening to disobey any legislation limiting their own freedom of action, even though vitally necessary to the freedom of all. the general behavior under automobile and traffic regulation illustrates the tendency evenmore clearly. thinking over the list of acquaintances who own automobiles, one finds it hard to recall one who would not break the speed law at a convenient opportunity. even a staid college professor, who has walked the walled-in path all his life: let him get a ford runabout, and in three months he is exultant in running as close as possible to every foot traveler and in exceeding the speed limit at any favorable chance. these are not beautiful expressions of our national spirit, but they serve to illustrate our instinctive individualism. especially are we jealous of highly centralized authority. de tocqueville argued that we would never be able to develop a strong central government, and that our democracy would be menaced with failure by that lack. that his prophecy has proved false and our federal government has become so strong is due only to the accidents of our history and the exigency of the tremendous problems we have had to solve. the same individualistic spirit is strong in england. it has been particularly evident, during the war, in the resentment of military authority as applied to labor conditions. the artisans and their leaders dreaded to give up liberties for which they had struggled through generations, for fear that those rights would not be readily accorded them again after the war. it must be admitted that this fear is justified. the same spirit was evident in the fight on conscription. this attitude has been a handicap to england in successfully carrying on the war, as it is to us; but it shows how strong is the essential spirit of democracy in both lands. in france, the revolution was at bottom an affirmation of individualism --of the right of the people, as against classes and kings, to seek life, liberty and happiness. the great words, _liberty, equality, fraternity,_ that the french placed upon their public buildings in the period of the revolution, are the essential battle-cry of true democracy,--as it is to be, rather than as it is at present. through her peculiar situation, threatened and overshadowed by potential enemies, france has been forced to a policy of militarism, with a large subordination of the individual to the state. the subordination, however, is voluntary. that is touchingly evident in the beautiful fraternization of french officers and men in the present war. with our anglo-saxon reserve, we smile at the pictures of grave generals kissing bearded soldiers, in recognition of valor, but it is a significant expression of the voluntary equality and brotherhood of frenchmen in this war. the reason france has risen with such splendid courage and unity is the consciousness of every frenchman that complete defeat in this war would mean that there would be no france in the future, that paris would be a larger strassburg, and france a greater alsace-lorraine. while the subordination has been thus voluntary, surely the french soldiers, man for man, have proved themselves the equal of any soldiers on earth. the anomaly of the first two years of the war was the presence of the vast russian autocratic empire on the side of the allied democracies. for russia, however, the war was of the people, rather than of the autocracy at the top, and one saw that russia would emerge from the war changed and purified. what one could not foresee was that, under the awakening of the people, russia could pass, in a day, through a revolution as profound in its character and consequences as the great explosion in france. it would be almost a miracle if so complete a revolution, in such a vast, benighted empire, were not followed by decades of recurrent chaos and anarchy. if russia avoids this fate, she will present a unique experience in history. the tendency to abrogate all authority, the spectacle of regiments of soldiers becoming debating societies to discuss whether or not they shall obey orders and fight, are ominous signs for the next period. emancipated russia must learn, if necessary through bitter suffering, that liberty is not license, that democracy is not anarchy, but voluntary and intelligent obedience to just laws and the chosen executors of those laws. meantime, whatever her immediate future may be, russia's transformation has clarified the issue and justified her place with the allied democracies. however long and confused her struggle, there can be no return to the past, and, in the end, her revolution means democracy. thus, in democracy, the state exists for man. other forms of society seek the interest or welfare of an individual, a group or a class, democracy aims at the welfare, that is, the liberty, happiness, growth, intelligence, helpfulness of _all the people_. under all the welter of this world struggle, it is therefore these great contrasting ideas that are being tested out, perhaps for all time. what is their relative value for efficiency, initiative, invention, endurance, permanence; beneath all, what is their final value for the happiness and helpfulness of all human beings? iv moral standards and the moral order there is only one moral order of the universe--one range of moral as of physical law. for instance, the law of gravitation--simplest of physical principles--holds the last star in the abyss of space, rounds the dew-drop on the petal of a spring violet and determines the symmetry of living organisms; but it is one and unchanging, a fundamental pull in the nature of matter itself. so with moral laws: they are not superadded to life by some divine or other authority. they are simply the fundamental principles in the nature of life itself, which we must obey to grow and be happy. if the moral order is one and unchanging, man does change in relation to it, and moral standards are relative to the stage of his growth. history is filled with illustrations of this relativity of ethical standards. for instance: human slavery doubtless began as an act of beneficence on the part of some philanthropist well in advance of his age. the first man who, in the dim dawn of history, said to the captive he had made in war, "i will not kill you and eat you; i will let you live and work for me the rest of your life": that man instituted human slavery; but it was distinctly a step upward, from something that had been far worse. homer represents ulysses as the favorite pupil of pallas athena, goddess of wisdom: why? baldly stated, because ulysses was the shrewdest and most successful liar in classic antiquity. if ulysses were to appear in a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their companionship, and for the same reason that led homer to glorify him as the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. thus what is a virtue at one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher recognition of the moral order. just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding where it applies. in other words, if you see the light shining on your path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not owe obedience in the same way. if you do not obey your light, your punishment is that you lose the light--degenerate to a lower plane, and it is the worst punishment imaginable. thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the developed, distinctly immoral. before the instincts of personal modesty and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. when a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day. this gradual elevation of moral standards, or growth in the recognition of the sacredness of life and the obligation to other individuals, can be traced historically as a long and confused process. there was a time, in the remote past, when no law was recognized except that of the strong arm. the man who wanted anything, took it, if he was strong enough, and others submitted to his superior force. then follows an age when the family is the supreme social unit. each member of the family group feels the pain or pleasure of all the others as something like his own, but all outside this circle are as the beasts. this is the condition among the veddahs of ceylon, studied so interestingly by haeckel. living in isolated family groups, scattered through the tropical wilderness: one man, one woman and their children forming the social unit: they as nearly represent primitive life as any other body of people now on the earth. then follows a long roll of ages when the tribe is the highest social unit. each member of the tribe is conscious of the sacredness of life of all the other members and of some obligation toward them; but men of other tribes may be slain as freely as the beasts. then comes a period when appreciation of the sacredness of life is extended over all those of the same race, tested generally by their speaking somewhat the same language. that was the condition in classic antiquity: it was "jew and gentile," "greek and barbarian"--the very word "barbarous" coming from the unintelligible sounds, to the greeks, of those who spoke other than the hellenic tongue. even plato, with all his far-sighted humanism, says, in the _republic_, that in the ideal state, "greeks should deal with barbarians as greeks now deal with one another." if one remembers what occurred in the peloponnesian war--how greek men voted to kill all the men of military age in a conquered greek city and sell all the women and children into slavery--one will see that plato's dream of humanity was not so very wide. from that time on, there has been further extension of the appreciation of the sacredness of life and of the consciousness of moral obligation toward other human beings. we are far from the end of the path. our sympathies are still limited by accidents of time and place, race and color; but we have gone far enough to see what the end would be, were we to reach it: a sympathy so wide, an appreciation of the sacredness of life so universal, that each of us would feel the joy or sorrow of every other human being, alive to-day or to be alive to-morrow, as something like his own. moreover, in all civilized society, we have gone far enough to renounce the right to private vengeance and adjustment of quarrels: we live under established courts of law, with organized civil force to carry out their judgments. this gives relative peace and security, and a general, if imperfect, application of the moral law. v the present state of international relations the astounding anomaly of modern civilization is the way we have lagged behind in applying to groups and nations of men the moral laws, universally recognized as binding over individuals. for instance, about twenty years ago we coined and used widely the phrase, "soulless corporation," to designate our great combinations of capital in industry and commerce. why was that phrase used so widely? the answer is illuminating: we took it for granted that an individual employer would treat his artisans to some extent as human beings and not merely as cog-wheels in a productive machine; but we also took it for granted that an impersonal corporation, where no individual was dominantly responsible, would regard its artisans merely as pieces of machinery, with no respect whatever for their humanity. the supreme paradox, however, is in the relation of nations: it is there that we have most amazingly lagged behind in applying the moral laws universally accepted in the relations of individuals. for instance, long before this war began we heard it proclaimed, even proudly, by certain philosophers, in more than one nation, that the state is the supreme spiritual unit, that there is no law higher than its interest, that the state makes the law and may break it at will. when a great statesman in germany, doubtless in a moment of intense anger and irritation, used the phrase that has gone all across the earth, "_scrap of paper_," for a sacred treaty between nations, he was only making a pungent practical application of the philosophy in question. do we regard self-preservation as the highest law for the individual? distinctly not. here is a crowded theater and a sudden cry of fire, with the ensuing panic: if strong men trample down and kill women and children, in the effort to save their own lives, we regard them with loathing and contempt. on the other hand, it is just this plea of national self-preservation that the german regime has used in cynical justification of its every atrocity--the initial violation of belgium, the making war ruthlessly on civil populations, the atrocious spying and plotting in the bosom of neutral and friendly nations, the destruction of monuments of art and devastation of the cities, fields, orchards and forests of northern france, and finally the submarine warfare on the world's shipping. no civilized human being would, for a moment, think of using the plea of self-preservation to justify comparable conduct in individual life. consider international diplomacy: much of it has been merely shrewd and skillful lying. if you will review the list of the most famous diplomats of europe for the last thousand years, you will find that a considerable portion of them won their fame and reputation by being a little more shrewd and successful liars than the diplomats with whom they had to deal in other lands. in other words, their conduct has been exactly on the plane that ulysses represented in personal life, afar back in classic antiquity. take an illustration a little nearer home. if you were doing business on one side of the street and had two competitors in the same line, across the way, and a cyclone swept the town, destroying their establishments and sparing yours: you, as an individual, would be ashamed to take advantage of the disaster under which your rivals were suffering, using the time while they were out of business to lure their customers away from them and bind those customers to you so securely that your competitors would never be able to get them back. you would scorn such conduct as an individual; but when it comes to a relation of the nations: during the first two years of the war, from the highest government circles down to the smallest country newspaper, we were urged to take advantage of the disaster under which our european rivals were suffering, win their international customers away from them and bind those customers to us so securely that europe would never be able to get them back. not that we were urged to industry and enterprise--that is always right--but actually to seek to profit by the sufferings of others--conduct we would regard as utterly unworthy in personal life. if your neighbor were to say, "my personal aspirations demand this portion of your front yard," and he were to attempt to fence it in: the situation is unimaginable; but when a nation says, "my national aspirations demand this portion of your territory," and proceeds to annex it: if the nation is strong enough to carry it out, a large part of the world acquiesces. the relations of nations are thus still largely on the plane of primitive life among individuals, or, since nations are made up of civilized and semi-civilized persons, it would be fairer to say that the relations of nations are comparable to those prevailing among individuals when a group of men goes far out from civil society, to the frontier, beyond the reach of courts of law and their police forces: then nearly always there is a reversion to the rule of the strong arm. that is what kipling meant in exclaiming, "there's never a law of god or man runs north of fifty-three." that condition prevailed all across our frontier in the early days. for instance, the cattle men came, pasturing their herds on the hills and plains, using the great expanse of land not yet taken up by private ownership. a little later came the sheep men, with vast flocks of sheep, which nibbled every blade of grass and other edible plant down to the ground, thus starving out the cattle. what followed? the cattle men got together by night, rode down the sheep-herders, shot them or drove them out, or were themselves driven out. so on the frontier, in the early days, a weakling staked out an agricultural or mining claim. a ruffian appears, who is a sure shot, jumps the claim and drives the other out. it was the rule of the strong arm, and it was evident on the frontier all across the country. this is exactly the state that a considerable part of the world has reached in international relationship to-day. claim-jumping is still accepted and widely practised among the nations. that is, in fact, the way in which all empires have been built--by a succession of successful claim-jumpings. consider the most impressive of them all, the old roman empire. rome was a city near the mouth of the tiber. she reached out and conquered a few neighboring cities in the latin plain, binding them securely to herself by domestic and economic ties. then she extended her power south and north, crossed into northern africa, conquered gaul and spain, swept asia minor, until a territory three thousand by two thousand miles in extent was under the sway of her all-conquering arm. what justified rome, as far as she had justification, was the remarkable strength and wisdom with which she established law and order and the protections of civil society over all the conquered territory, until often the subject populations were glad they had come under the all-dominant sway of rome, since their situation was so much more peaceful and happy than before. such justification, however, is after the fact: it is not moral justification of the building of the empire. that represented a succession of claim-jumpings. for an illustration from more modern history, take the greatest international crime of the last five hundred years, with one exception-- the partition of poland. it is true the polish nobles were a nuisance to their neighbors, ever quarreling among themselves, with no central authority powerful enough to restrain them, but that did not justify the action taken. three nations, or rather the autocratic sovereigns of those nations, powerful enough to accomplish the crime, agreed to partition poland among themselves. they did it, with the result that there are plenty of poles in the world to-day, but there is no poland. consider the possession of silesia by prussia. silesia was an integral part of the austrian domain, long so recognized. friedrich the great wanted it. he annexed it. the deed caused him many years of recurring, devastating wars; again and again he was near the point of utter defeat; but he succeeded in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, and silesia is part of prussia to-day. the strong arm conquest is the only reason. so is it with germany's possession of schleswig-holstein, with austria in herzegovina and bosnia, france in algiers, italy in tripoli: they are all instances of claim-jumping, reprehensible in varying degrees. i suppose no thoughtful englishman would attempt to justify, on high moral grounds, the building up of the british empire: for instance, the possession of egypt and india by britain. how does india happen to be a part of the british realm? every one knows the answer. the east india company was simply the most adventurous and enterprising trading company then in the world. it grew rich trading with the orient, established the supremacy of the british merchant marine, got into difficulties with french rivals and native rulers, fought brilliantly for its rights, as it had every reason to do, conquered territory and consolidated its possessions, ruling chiefly through native princes. it became so powerful that it did not seem wise to the british government to permit a private corporation to exercise such ever-growing political authority. it was regulated, and in the end abolished, by act of parliament; its possessions were taken over by the crown; the conquests were extended and completed, and india today is a gem in the crown of the british empire. what justifies britain, as far as she has justification, is the remarkable wisdom and generosity with which she has extended, not onlylaw and order and protection to life and property, but freedom and autonomous self-government, to her colonies and subject populations, with certain tragic exceptions, about as fast as this could safely be done. it is that which holds the british empire together. great irregular empire, stretching over a large part of the globe: but for this it would fall to pieces over night. it would be impossible for force, administered at the top, to hold it together. the splendid response of her colonies in this war has been purely voluntary. that canada has four hundred thousand trained men at the front, or ready to go, is due wholly to her free response to the wise generosity of england's policy, and in no degree to compulsion, which would have been impossible. this justification of the british empire is, nevertheless, as in the case of rome, after the fact, and does not justify morally the building up of the empire. our own hands are not entirely clean. it is true we came late on the stage of history, and, starting as a democracy, were instinctively opposed to empire building. thus our brief record is cleaner than that of the older nations. nevertheless, there are examples of claim-jumping in our history. the most tragic of all is a large part of our treatment of the american indians. it is true, with anglo-saxon hypocrisy, we tried to make every steal a bargain. many an expanse of territory has been bought with a jug of rum. the indian knew nothing about the ownership of land; we did. so we made the deed, and he accepted it. then, to his surprise, he found he had to move off from land where for generations his ancestors had hunted and fought, with no idea of private ownership. so we pushed him on and on. of late decades we have become ashamed, tried in awkward fashion to render some compensation for the wrongs done, but the larger part of the story is sad indeed. there is, of course, another side to all this: the more highly developed nations do owe leadership and service in helping those below to climb the path of civilization; but let one answer fairly how much of empire building has been due to this altruistic spirit, and how much to selfishness and the lust for power and possession. vi the ethics of international relationship we have seen that all empires have been built up by a series of successful aggressions, and that claim-jumping still characterizes the relations of the nations. nevertheless, there has been some progress in applying to groups and nations the moral principles we recognize as binding upon individuals. consider again our internal life: it was twenty years ago that we coined and used so widely the phrase "soulless corporations" for our great combinations of capital in industry. to-day that phrase is rarely heard. one sees it seldom even in the pages of surviving "muck-raking" magazines. why has a phrase, used so widely in the past, all but disappeared? again the answer is illuminating: there has been tremendous growth in twenty years, on the part of our great corporations, in treating their employees as human beings and not merely as cog-wheels in a productive machine. when the greatest corporation in the united states voluntarily raises the wages of all its employees in the country ten per cent., five several times, within a few months, as the steel trust has recently done, something has happened. it may be said, "they did it because it was good business": twenty years ago they would not have recognized that it was good business. it may be said, "they did it to avoid strikes": twenty years ago they would have welcomed the strikes, fought them through and gained what selfish advantage was possible. the point is, there has been vast increase in the consciousness of moral responsibility on the part of corporations toward their artisans. this has been due partly to legislation, but mainly to education and the awakening of public conscience. if you wish to find the greatest arrogance and selfishness now, you will discover it, not among the capitalists: they are timid and submissive--strangely so. you will find it rather in certain leaders of the labor movement, with their consciousness of newly-gained powers. some growth there has been in the application of the same moral principles even to the relations of the nations. for instance: a hundred years ago the napoleonic wars had just come to an end. in the days of napoleon men generally gloried in war; to-day most of them bitterly regret it, and fight because they believe they are fighting for high moral aims or for national self-preservation, whether they are right or wrong. when napoleon conquered a country, often he pushed the weakling king off the throne, and replaced him with a member of his own family--at times a worse weakling. think of such a thing being attempted to-day: it is unimaginable, unless the worst tyranny on earth got the upper hand for the next three hundred years of human history. a more pungent illustration of progress is the feverish desire, shown by each of the combatants in this world struggle, to prove that he did not begin it. now some one began it. a hundred years ago belligerents would not have been so anxious to prove their innocence: then victory closed all accounts and no one went behind the returns. the feverish anxiety each combatant has shown to establish his innocence of initiating this devastating war is conclusive proof that even the worst of them recognizes that they all must finally stand before the moral court of the world's conscience and be judged. the same tendency is shown in the efforts of germany--grotesquely and tragically sophistical as they are-- to justify her ever-expanding, freshly-invented atrocities. at least she is aware that they require justification. this explains why we react so bitterly even on what would have been accepted a century ago. what was taken for granted yesterday is not tolerated to-day, and what is taken for granted to-day will not be tolerated in a to-morrow that maybe is not so distant as in our darker moments we imagine. what would be the conclusion of this process? it would be, would it not, the complete application to the relations of the nations, of the moral principles universally accepted as binding upon individuals? if it is true that the moral order of the universe is one and unchanging, then _what is right for a man is right for a nation of men, and what is wrong for a man is wrong for a nation_; and no fallacious reasoning should be allowed to blind us to that basic truth. this would mean the end of all diplomacy of lying and deceit. the relations of the nations would be placed on the same plane of relative honesty and frankness now prevailing among individuals: not absolute truth--few of us practice that--but that general ability to trust each other, in word and conduct, that is the foundation of our business and social life. it would mean the end of empire building. those empires that exist would fall naturally into their component parts. if those parts remained affiliated with the central government, it would be only through the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling upon the territory. thus every people would be affiliated with the government to which it naturally belonged and with which it wished to be affiliated. it would mean finally a voluntary federation of the nations, with the establishment of a world court of justice; but no weak-kneed, spineless arbitration court: rather a court of justice, comparable to those established over individuals, whose judgments would be enforced by an international military and naval police, contributed by the federated nations. people misunderstand this proposal. they imagine it would mean the giving over of the entire military and naval equipment of each federated nation to the central court. far from it: each nation would retain, for defense purposes, the mass of its manhood and the larger fraction of its limited equipment, while a minor fraction would be contributed to the world court. when this is achieved there will be, for the first time in the history of the world, the dawn of the longed-for era of universal and relatively permanent peace for mankind. it is a far-off dream, is it not? let us admit it frankly, and it seems further off than it did four years ago; for the approximations to it, achieved through international law, we have seen go down in a blind welter, through the invention of new instruments of destruction and the willful perpetration of illegal and immoral atrocities in this horrible war. nevertheless, it is not so far off as in ourdarker moments we fear. if this world war ends justly; which means if it ends so that the people dwelling on any territory are affiliated with the government to which they naturally belong and with which they wish to be affiliated, the dream will be brought appreciably nearer. if the war ends unjustly, which means if it ends with the gratification of the ambitions of aggressive tyranny, the dream will be put remotely far off. if a peace is patched up meantime, with no solution, it will mean europe sleeping on its arms, and the breaking out of the war with multiplied devastation within twenty years. that is why these blithely undertaken peace missions and other efforts at peace without victory, even when not cloaks for pro-german movements, are such preposterous absurdities or else play directly into the hands of tyranny. at best, however, the dream is a long way ahead. men dislike to give up power, nations equally. it will take a long process of international moral education to induce the nations to renounce their arbitrary powers, their right to adjust all their own quarrels, and lead them to enter voluntarily a federation under a world court of justice. this, nevertheless, is the hope of the world, toward which we should work with all our might. vii america's duty in international relations since the world solution is, at best, so remote, our question is: what are we to do meantime? our entrance into the war partially answers the question. we have before us the immediate task of aiding in overthrowing autocracy and tyranny and of defending our liberties and those of the nations that stand for democracy. this is the first duty, but not the only one. more definitely than any other nation we have thrown down to the world the challenge of democracy. we have said, "away with kings, we will have no more of them! away with castes and ruling classes, we will have no more of them!" as a matter of fact, democracies have no rulers--the word survives from an older order of society--they have guides, leaders and representatives. if you wish to use the word, in a democracy every man is the ruler--and every woman too, we hope, before long. to this ideal we are committed and it carries certain obligations; for every right carries a duty, and every duty, a right. often the best way to get a privilege is by assuming a responsibility. that is a truth it would be well for the leaders of the feminist and labor movements to recognize. the obligations carried by the challenge of our democracy are clear. we americans should have done, once and for all time, with the diplomacy of lying and deceit. fortunately our recent traditions are in harmony with this demand; but we should not depend upon the happy accident of an administration which takes the right attitude. it should be the open and universal demand of the american people that those who represent us shall place the relations we sustain to other nations permanently on the same plane of frank honesty, generally prevailing among individuals. incidentally, any politician or statesman who, at this heart-breaking crisis of the world's life, dares play party politics with our international relations, should be damned forever by the vote of the american people. further, it is our duty to have done with all dream of empire building. it is not for us: let us abandon it frankly and forever. those dependencies which have come to us through the accidents of our history should be granted autonomous self-government at the earliest moment at which they can safely take it over--which does not necessarily mean to-morrow. if they remain affiliated with us it should be only through the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling upon them. it is, moreover, our duty to lead the world in the effort to form a federation of the nations and establish the aforesaid world court of justice, with the international military and naval police to enforce its judgments. more than this is demanded: on the basis of the challenge of our democracy, it is our duty to rise to the point of placing justice higher than commercial interest. it is a hard demand; but, with the latent idealism in our american life, surely we can rise to it. for instance, the vexed puzzle of the tariff will never be justly and permanently settled, till it is settled primarily as a problem of moral international relationship, and not as one merely of economic interest and advantage. for example, a tariff wall between the united states and canada is as preposterous an absurdity as would be a long line of bristling fortifications along the three thousand and more miles of international boundary. we are not protecting ourselves from slave labor over there. they are not protecting themselves from slave labor here. barring a few lines of industry, there are the same conditions of labor, production and distribution both sides of the line. the only reason for a tariff wall is their wish, or our wish, or the wish of each, to gain some advantage at the expense of the other party. now every business man knows that any trade that benefits one and injures the other party to it is bad business, as well as bad ethics, in the long run. good business benefits both traders all the time. on the other hand, when it comes to protecting our labor from competition with slave labor in other quarters of the earth, we have not only the right, but the duty to do it. so when it is a matter of protecting our industries from being swamped by the unloading of vast quantities of goods, produced under the feverish and abnormal conditions, sure to prevail in europe after the war, we have again, not only the right, but the duty to do it. finally, a still higher call is upon us: we must somehow rise to the point of placing humanity above the nation. it is true, "charity begins at home," certainly justice should. one should educate one's own children, before worrying over the children of the neighborhood; clean up one's own town, before troubling about the city further away. often the whole is helped best by serving the part; but it is with national patriotism as it is with family affection. the latter is a lovely quality and the source of much that is best in the world; but when family affection is an instrument for gaining special privilege at the expense of the good of society, a means of attaining debauching luxury and selfish aggrandisement, it is an abomination. the man who prays god's blessing on himself, his wife and his children, and nobody else, is a mean man, and he never gets blessed--not from god. similarly, the man who seeks the interest of his own nation, against the welfare of mankind, who prays god's blessing only on his own people, is equally a mean man, and his prayer, also, is never answered from the most high. the world has advanced too far for the spirit of a narrow nationalism. the recrudescence of such a spirit is one of the sad consequences of this world war. only in a spirit of international brotherhood, in dedication to the welfare of humanity, can democracy go towards its goal. these are the obligations following upon the challenge of democracy we have proclaimed to the nations. viii the gospel and the superstition of non-resistance the first condition of fulfilling the responsibilities imposed upon us by the challenge of our democracy is, now and hereafter, readiness and willingness for self-respecting self-defense, defense of our liberties and of the principles and ideals for which we stand. there is much nonsense talked about non-resistance to evil. it is a lovely thing in certain high places of the moral life. it was well that socrates remained in the common criminal prison in athens and drank the hemlock poison; but nine times out of ten it would have been better to run away, as he had an opportunity to do. it was good that jesus healed the ear of the servant of the high priest,--and good that st. peter cut it off. in other words, acts of non-resistance and self-sacrifice are fine flowers of the moral life; but you cannot have flowers unless their roots are below ground, otherwise they quickly wither. thus, to have sound value, these acts of non-resistance and self-sacrifice must rest on a solid foundation of self-affirmation and resistance to evil. as with the individual, so with the nation: there come high moments in a nation's life, when a strong people might resist and deliberately chooses not to. as an illustration, take our mexican problem. the announcement that under no circumstances would we intervene, may have led to misunderstanding. our purpose to let the mexican people work out their own problem may have been taken to mean that we would not justly protect ourselves, with consequent encouragement to border raiding. nevertheless, if there has been any error in handling the situation, it has been on the better side--on the side of patience, generosity, long-suffering, giving the other fellow another chance, and another and another, even though he does not deserve them. now that is not the side on which human nature usually errs. the common temptation is to selfishness and unjust aggression. since that is the case, if we cannot strike the just balance, it is better to push too far on the other side and avoid the common mistake. suppose, after the war, japan, alone or in conjunction with one or another european power, closes the door to china: one can imagine circumstances where we, with the right to insist that the door be kept open, and perhaps, by that time, something of the strength to enforce that right, might deliberately say, "no, we will not resist." not that, with our present situation, such action is desirable, but that one can imagine conditions arising where it might be the higher choice. let me repeat that, for the nation as with the individual, these high moments must rest on something else. they are the high mountain peaks of the moral life; but detached mountain peaks are impossible,--except as a mirage. they must rest upon the granite foundation of the hills and plateaus below. so these high virtues of non-resistance, magnanimity and self-sacrifice must always rest upon the granite foundation of the masculine virtues of self-affirmation, endurance, heroism, strong conflict with evil. it takes strength to make magnanimity and self-sacrifice possible, if their lesson is not lost. a weak man cannot be magnanimous, since his generosity is mistaken for servile cowardice. after all, the best time to forgive your enemy, for his good and yours, is not when he has his foot on your neck: he is apt to misunderstand and think you are afraid. it is often better to wait until you can get on your feet and face him, man to man, and then if you can forgive him, it is so much the better for you, for him and for all concerned. thus there are two opposite lines of error in the moral life. the philosophy of the one is given by nietzsche, while tolstoy, in certain extremes of his teaching, represents the other. nietzsche, i suppose, should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything important; but the ancestors of nietzsche were goethe and ibsen, with their splendid gospel of self-realization. nietzsche, on the contrary, with his contempt for the morality of christianity as the morality of slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation apart--nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house. it has always seemed to me not without significance that his own life ended there. on the other hand, when tolstoy responded to an inquirer that, if he saw a child being attacked by a brutal ruffian, he would not use force to intervene and protect the child: that, too, is non-resistance fit for the insane asylum. one of these is just as far from sane, balanced human morality as the other. it is a terrible thing to suffer injustice; it is far worse to perpetrate it. if one had to choose between being victim or tyrant, one would always choose to be victim: it is safer for the moral life and there is more recovery afterward. if, however, it is better to suffer injustice than to perpetrate it, better than either is to resist it, fight it and, if possible, overthrow it. it has been said so many times by extreme pacifists that even sane human beings sometimes take it for granted, that "force never accomplished anything permanent in human history." it is false, and the reasoning by which it is supported involves the most sophistical of fallacies. all depends on who uses the force and the purpose for which it is used. the force employed by tyranny and injustice accomplishes nothing permanent in history. why? because tyranny and injustice are in their very nature transient, they are opposed to the moral order of the universe and, in the end, must pass. on the other hand, the force employed on the part of liberty and justice has attained most of the ends of civilization we cherish to-day. the force of the million of mercenaries, collected through asia and africa by darius and xerxes, to overwhelm a few greek cities, accomplished nothing permanent in history; but the force of the ten thousand athenians who fought at marathon and of the other thousands at salamis, saved democracy for europe and made possible the civilization of the occident. the force employed by king louis of france to support a tottering throne and continue the exploitation of the people by an idle and selfish aristocratic caste, accomplished nothing permanent in history; but the force of those frenchmen who marched upon paris, singing the marseillaise, made possible the freedom and culture of the last hundred years. the force employed by king george of england, to wring taxes without representation from reluctant colonies, accomplished nothing permanent in history, but the force which, at bunker hill and concord bridge, "fired the shot heard round the world," achieved the liberty and democracy of the american continent. it may be freely admitted that all use of force is a confession of failure to find a better way. if you use force in the education of a child, it is such a confession of failure. so is it if force is used in controlling defectives and criminals, or in adjusting the relations of the nations; but note that the failure may be one for which the individual parent, teacher, society, state or nation is in no degree responsible. force is a tragic weapon--and the ultimate one. ix preparedness for self-defense since force is still the weapon of international justice, readiness and willingness to use it for defense, when necessary, is then the first condition of fulfilling the aims and serving the causes for which america stands. in other words, since the relations of the nations are still so largely those of individuals under the conditions of frontier life, as with the honest man on the frontier, so for the self-respecting, peace-loving nation to-day, it is well to carry a gun and know how to shoot. carrying a gun is a dangerous practice, for two reasons: it may go off in your pocket; you may get drunk and shoot when you ought not. those are the only two rational arguments against national preparation for defense, in the present state of the world. let us see. the gun may go off in your pocket: that is, if a strong armament for defense is built up, there is always danger that it may be used internally, against the people, unjustly. that, indeed, has been one of the curses of europe for a thousand years. it is a grave danger, but recognizing it is partly forestalling it; moreover, we would better face that danger than one far worse. so with the other menace: you may get drunk and shoot when you ought not. nations get drunk: they get drunk with pride, arrogance, aggressive ambition, revenge, even with panic terror, and so shoot when they should not. this, also, is a grave danger; but here, as well, recognizing it is part way forestalling it, and this danger, too, we would better face than one far more terrible. moreover, it is armament for the gratification of aggressive ambition, and under the control of the arbitrary authority of a despotic individual or group, that tends to initiate war, not armament solely to defend the liberties of a people. thus, under the conditions cited, it is well to be armed and prepared. if a wolf is at large, if a mad dog is loose, if a madman is abroad with an ax, it is the part of wisdom to have an adequate weapon and be prepared to use it. if the athenians had not resisted the hordes of asia, what would have been the history of europe? if the french had not resisted tyranny and injustice in the revolution, what would have been the civilization of the last hundred years? if the english colonists had not resisted taxation without representation, what would be the present status of america? if the artisan groups had not united and fought economic exploitation, what would be their life to-day? if belgium had not resisted germany, what would be the future of democracy in europe? thus, now and after the war, the need is for all necessary armament for self-respecting self-defense and not an atom to gratify aggressive ambition. this does not mean that, once involved in war, the military tactics of democracy should be merely defensive. as has often and wisely been said, in war the best defense is a swift and hard attack. it is widely argued, however, since our aim is peace and a world-court of justice to settle the disputes among the nations, making general disarmament possible, should not one great nation, fortunately free from the quarrels of europe, occupying the major portion of a continent, its shores washed by two great oceans, with peaceful friendship on the north and weak anarchy on the south--should not such a nation take the lead, disarm and set an example to mankind? it is a beautiful dream! would that those who really believe in non-resistance to evil would be logical, and apply it to internal as well as external policy. what is a police force? it is a body of men, trained, employed and paid to use force in resisting evil. if you wish to try out non-resistance, why not let some city apply it? let chicago do it: abolish its police force and set the example to the rest of the benighted cities of the country. what would happen? as long as there are criminals in all cities of the land, how they would flock to that fat pasturage. what devastation of property, destruction of life, injury to innocent women and children! until the best men of chicago would get together, form a vigilance committee, shoot some of the criminals, hang others, drive the rest out; and chicago would get back to law and order, with courts of justice and a regular police body, composed of men trained, employed and paid to use force in resisting evil. the example of canada and the united states is cited, and a noble example it is: three thousand and more miles of international boundary, with never a shining gun or bristling fortress on the entire frontier. a glorious example, prophetic of what is coming all over the world, perhaps more quickly than we dare hope to-day; but what made it possible? agreement in advance, and that at a time when one of the parties was too weak to be feared. canada is getting strong: she has at present four hundred thousand trained men at the front or ready to go. before the war closes she will have over a half million. now suppose canada fortified: we would be compelled to, there would be no other way. thus one nation cannot disarm while the others are strongly armed, and among them are those whose autocratic rulers and imperialistic castes are watching for signs of weakness in order to perpetrate international claim-jumping. it is true that, on the frontier, in the early days, there were individuals who went about unarmed among the gun men, did it successfully, and some of them died peacefully in their beds: christian ministers--sky-pilots, they were called. please note, however, that the sky-pilot never had any money. he had no claims to be jumped. we are not sky-pilots--far from it. as to money: the wealth of the world has been flowing into our coffers in a golden stream, to the embarrassment of our financial institutions, to the exaltation of the cost of living to such a point that, with more money than we ever dreamed of having, we find it more difficult to buy enough to eat and wear. as for claims to be jumped: they are on every hand: panama canal, hawaiian islands, philippine islands, ports of new york and san francisco, vast reaches of unprotected coast. no, we are not sky-pilots, we cannot claim exemption on that ground. suppose, after the war, we attempted to disarm, without the protection of a world court and international police, while the other nations retained war armament. they, the victors and perhaps the defeated, would possess a great army and navy, manned with seasoned veterans, and be burdened with an intolerable debt; for the war has gone too far for any one to be able to pay adequate indemnity. we, rich, young, heedless, sure that no one on earth could ever whip us, chiefly because no one worth while has ever seriously tried: suppose we were completely disarmed. it would require only a little meddling with mexico or brazil, and we should have to give up the monroe doctrine or fight. well, perhaps we shall give it up: it has even been suggested in the halls of congress that we should--to the shame of the suggester, be it said. people do not understand the monroe doctrine: they talk of it as if it were a law. it is in no sense a law, but is merely a rather arrogant expression of our desires. we said to the other nations: "we desire that none of you henceforth shall fence in any part of our front or back yard, or the front or back yard of any of our neighbors, dwelling on the north and south american continents." that is the monroe doctrine, and that is all that it is: an expression of our wishes. all very well if others choose to respect them, but suppose some one does not? perhaps, as stated, we may abandon the monroe doctrine: that is the easiest way, and the easiest way, for a nation or an individual, is usually the way of damnation. even so, suppose the nation in question to say, "my national aspirations demand the panama canal, the philippine islands, or long island and the port of new york." why not? the atlantic ocean is only a mill-pond. it is not half so wide as lake erie was fifty years ago, in relation to modern means of transportation and communication. people say, "do we want to give up our traditional isolation?" they are too late in asking the question: that isolation is irrecoverably gone. that should be now evident even to people dwelling in fatuously fancied security between the alleghenies and the rockies. we are inevitably drawn into relation with the rest of mankind. the question is no longer, "shall we take a part in world problems?", but "what part shall we take?" the point is, that if, under the circumstances cited, any one wished to do so, we could quickly be driven to such a condition of abject humiliation that we should be compelled to fight. now suppose, disarmed, we should enter the conflict utterly unprepared? the result would be, hundreds of thousands of young men, going out bravely in obedience to an ideal--untrained and half equipped--to be butchered, a humiliating peace, and an indemnity of many billions to be groaned under for fifty years. on the other hand, if we were adequately armed for defense, there would be much less temptation to any one to trouble us; and if we were compelled to fight, would it not be better to fight reasonably prepared? there is a story, going the rounds of the press, about the bandit, jesse james: telling how, on one occasion, he went to a lonely farm house to commandeer a meal. entering, he found one woman, a widow, alone and weeping bitterly. he asked her what was the matter, and she replied that, in one hour, the landlord was coming, and if she did not have her mortgage money, she would lose her little farm and home and be out in the world, shelterless. the heart of the bandit was touched. he gave her the money to pay off the mortgage, hid in the brush and held up the landlord on the way back. need the moral be pointed? we have been getting the mortgage money. during the first years of the war it rolled in, an ever-increasing golden stream, until we held a mortgage on numerous european nations. we have the mortgage money, but _beware of the way back!_ thus the agitation, in one nation, for disarmament, unpreparedness and a patched up peace, while the other nations are armed and embittered, not only renders the situation of the one people critically perilous, but actually cripples its power to serve the cause of world peace and humanity. if only the peace-at-any-price people had to pay the price, one would be willing to wait and see what happened; but they never pay it, they take to cover. it is those hundreds of thousands of splendid young men, going out blithely in obedience to duty, to be butchered, it is the millions of women and children, who cannot escape from a devastated area, who pay that price. every people in the past that turned to money and mercenaries for defense has gone down. no people ever survived that was unable and unwilling to fight for its liberties and spend, if necessary, the last drop of its blood for the principles it believed. x reconstruction from the war we have seen how impossible it is to forecast the new world that will follow the war, we know merely that it will be utterly new. nevertheless, the great tendencies already at work we can partly discern and recognize something of what they promise. it is well to try to see them, that we may be not too unready to welcome the opportunity and accept the burden of the world that is being born in pain. peace and prosperity produce a peculiar type of conservatism. people are then relatively free in action and expression, things are going well with them, and they are instinctively inclined to let well enough alone. thus in thought they tend to a conservative inertia. on the other hand, in periods of great strain and suffering, as in war time, thought is stimulated, all ordinary views are broken down and the most radical notions are widely disseminated and even taken for granted by those who, shortly before, would have been scandalized by them. action and certain phases of free speech are, in such a period, much more widely restrained by authority. there is a swift and strong development of social control, urged by necessity. thus, in war time, there is the curious paradox of ever widening radicalism in thought, with constantly decreasing freedom in action and expression. when the discrepancy becomes too great, you have the explosion--revolution. this cause hastened and made more extreme the russian revolution, which had been simmering for a century. it has not yet appeared in germany because of the forty years of successful work in drilling the mind of the german people to march in goose-step; yet the increasing signs of questioning the infallibility of the existing regime and system in germany give evidence that there, too, the conflict is at work. with ourselves, the opposition appears, as yet, only in minor degree. nevertheless, it is here. on the one hand, are the registration, conscription and espionage measures, the effort to control news, the governmental supervision of food supplies, transportation, production and corporation earnings, the war taxes. on the other hand, thought is so stimulated that everything is questioned: our political system, our social institutions--marriage, the family, education. as some one says, "nothing is radical now." we probably shall escape a sudden revolution, but the conflict must produce profound readjustment in every aspect of our life; for thought and action must come measurably together, since they are related as soul and body. there are singular eddies in the main current both ways. for instance, the exigencies and sufferings of war produce a reaction toward narrower, orthodox forms of religion and a harsher spirit of nationalism; while in fields of action apart from the struggle, freedom and even license may increase, as in sex-relations. nevertheless these cross-currents, while they may obscure, do not alter the main tendencies, which move swiftly and increasingly toward the essential conflict. even before our actual entrance into the war, its profound influence upon both our thinking and our conduct and institutions was evident. now that we are in the conflict that influence is multiplied. we are aroused to new seriousness of thought. the frivolity and selfish pleasure-seeking that have marked our life for recent decades are decreasing. we may reasonably hope that the literature of superficial cleverness and smart cynicism, which has been in vogue for the last period, will have had its day, that the perpetrators of such literature will be, measurably speaking, without audience at the conclusion of the war. the philosophy of complacency, at least, will be at an end, and the world will face with new earnestness the problem of life. this generation will be tired, perhaps exhausted, by the titanic struggle; but youth comes on, fresh and eager, with exhaustless vital energy, and the generations to come will take the heritage and work out the new philosophy. as nature quickly and quietly covers the worst scars we make in her breast, so man has a power of recovery, beyond all that we could dream. it is to that we must look, across the time of demoniac destruction. we may even dare to hope that the next half-century will see a great development of noble literature in our own land. war for liberty, justice and humanity always tends to create such a productive period in literature and the other fine arts. the struggle with persia was behind the periclean age in athens. it was the conflict of england with the overshadowing might of spain that so vitalized the elizabethan period. the revolution was behind the one important school of literature our own country has produced hitherto. since this war is waged on a scale far more colossal than any other in human history, and since liberty and democracy are at stake, not only in one land, but throughout the world and for the entire future of humanity, it is reasonable to expect that the stimulation to the creation of art and literature will be far greater than that following any previous struggle. where the sacrifice for high aims has been greatest, the inspiration should be greatest, as in france. the literature currently produced, as in the books of loti, maeterlinck and rolland, is scrappy and disappointing, it is true; but that is to be expected when the whole nation is strained to its last energy and gasping for breath, under the titanic struggle, and is no test of what will be. in spite of the destruction of so large a fraction of her manhood, france will surely rise from the ashes of this world conflagration regenerated and reinspired. the pessimism of her late decades will be gone. the literature and other art she will produce will be instinct with new earnestness and exalted vision, and she may excel even her own great past. we too are awakening. since the war began, all over the united states, men and women have been thinking more earnestly and have been more willing to listen to the expression of serious thought than ever before for the last quarter century. now that the hour of sacrifice has struck, this earnestness must greatly deepen. perhaps we, too, may have our golden age of art. the same inspiration carries naturally into the religious life. it is true, as we have seen, that there is a cross-current of reversion to narrower orthodoxy, caused by the war. the gods of war are all national and tribal divinities. while they rule, the face of the god of humanity is veiled. the kaiser's possessive attitude toward the divine is but the extreme case of what war does to the religious life. even among ourselves the tendency shows in such phenomena as the current popular evangelism--an eloquent, if artfully calculated and vulgarized preaching of the purely personal virtues, with an ignorance that there is a social problem in modern civilization, profound as that displayed by a mediaeval churchman. the evangelist's list of inmates, whom he relegates to the kingdom of the lost, makes the place singularly attractive to the lover of good intellectual society. nevertheless, the reversion to narrower creeds but indicates the newly awakened hunger of the religious life. men who sacrifice live with graver earnestness than those who are carelessly prosperous. cynicism and pessimism are children of idleness and frivolity, never of heroic sacrifice and nobly accepted pain. these latter foster faith in life and its infinite and eternal meaning. thus, with all the tragic submerging of our spiritual heritage the war involves, we may hope that it will cause a revival, not of emotional hysteria, but of deepened faith in the spirit, in the supreme worth of life, until at last we may see the dawn of the religion of humanity. xi the war and education equally far-reaching are the changes the war must produce in our education. temporarily, our higher institutions will be crippled by the drawing off of the youth of the land for war. this is one of the unfortunate sacrifices such a struggle involves. we must see to it that it is not carried too far. one still hears old men in the south pathetically say, "i missed my education because of the civil war." let us strive to keep open our educational institutions and continue all our cultural activities, in spite of the drain and strain of the war. for never was intellectual guidance and leadership more needed than in the present crisis. the paramount effect of the war on education is, however, in the multiplied demand for efficiency. this is the cry all across the country to-day, and, in the main, it is just. our education has been too academic, too much molded by tradition. it must be more closely related to life and to the changed conditions of industry and commerce. each boy and girl, youth and maiden, must leave the school able to take hold somewhere and make a significant contribution to the society of which he or she is an integral part. vocational training must be greatly increased. the problems of the school must be increasingly practical problems, and thought and judgment must be trained to the solution of those problems. this is all a part of that socialization of democracy which must be achieved if democracy is to survive in the new world following the war. there is, nevertheless, an element of emotional hysteria in the demand for efficiency and only efficiency. efficiency is too narrow a standard by which to estimate anything concerning human conduct and character. in the effort to meet and conquer germany, let us beware of the mistake of germany. one of the world tragedies of this epoch is the way in which germany has sacrificed her spiritual heritage, first for economic, then for purely military efficiency. when we recall that spiritual heritage, as previously described, when we think of schiller, herder and goethe, froebel, herbart and richter, tauler, luther and schleiermacher, kant, fichte and schopenhauer, mozart, beethoven and wagner, we stand aghast at the way in which she has plunged it all into the abyss,--for what? shall it profit a people, more than a man, if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul? in such a time, then, all of us who believe in the spirit must hold high the torch of humanistic culture. education is for life and not merely for efficiency. of what worth is life, if one is only a cog-wheel in the economic machine? it is to save the spiritual heritage of humanity that we are fighting, and it is that heritage that education must bring to every child and youth, if it fulfills its supreme trust. education for the purposes of autocratic imperialism seeks to make a people a perfect economically productive and militarily aggressive machine. education for democracy means the development of each individual to the most intelligent, self-directed and governed, unselfish and devoted, sane, balanced and effective humanity. xii socialism and the war one of the surprises of the war was the complete breakdown of international socialism. not only socialists, but those of us who had been thoughtfully watching the movement from without, had come to believe that the measure of consciousness of international brotherhood it had developed in the artisan groups of many lands, would be a powerful lever against war. we were wrong: the superficial international sympathy evaporated like mist under the rays of a revived nationalism. the socialists fell in line, almost as completely as any other group, with the purely nationalist aims in each land. this must have gratified certain despots; for one cause of the war, not the cause, was undoubtedly the preference on the part of various autocrats, to face an external war rather than the rising tide of democracy within the nation. temporarily, they have been successful, but surely only for a brief time. the victory of democracy will vastly accelerate the growth of the spirit of brotherhood throughout the world. the terrible waste of the war must of itself produce a reaction of the people on kings and castes in all lands. the suffering that will follow the war, in the period of economic readjustment, will accentuate this. surely the _people_, in england, france, america, italy, russia, and among the neutral nations, will strive that no such war may come again. even in germany, when the people find out what they have paid and why, inevitably they must struggle so to reform their institutions that no ruler or class may again plunge them into such disaster for the selfish benefit or ambitions of that ruler or class. how our hearts have warmed to liebknecht! the realignment of nations must work to the same end. war, like politics, makes strange bed-fellows. germany and austria, for centuries rivals, and, at times, enemies, we behold united so completely that it is difficult to imagine them disentangled after the war. france and england, long regarding each other as natural enemies, are fused heart and soul. strangest of all, we have seen england struggling to win for russia that prize of constantinople, which for generations it has been a main object of british diplomacy to keep from russian grasp. most impressive of all, has been the new consciousness of unity and common cause among the nations of the earth, and the groups within all nations, standing for democracy. thus the tide, checked for a time, will inevitably break forth with renewed force. it is probable that the next fifty years will be a period of great change--even of revolutions, peaceful or otherwise, throughout the earth. to understand the effect on the whole socialist movement, one must distinguish clearly the two contrasting types of socialism. it is the curse of the orthodox, or marxian, type of socialism, that it was "made in germany." its economic state is modeled directly on the prussian bureaucratic and paternalistic state. its dream realized, would mean prussian efficiency carried to the _nth_ power, in a society of as merciless slavery as that prevailing among the ants and the bees. it is doubtless this characteristic that has made so many bureaucratic or orthodox socialists instinctively pro-german in sentiment and sympathy during the war. the contrasting type of socialism is that which is really the full development of democracy, its movement from a narrow individualism to ever wider voluntary co-operation. it moves, not toward government ownership, but toward ownership by the people, of natural monopolies. it means, not the turning over to a bureaucratic government, of plants and instruments of production, but the progressive cooperative ownership of them by the workers themselves. it will end, not in the overthrow of the capitalist regime, but in all workers becoming co-operative capitalists, and all capitalists, productive workers, since no idle rich--or poor, will be tolerated. such socialism, if it be so called, will depend upon the highest individual initiative, the most voluntary co-operation and will include the individualism which is the cherished boon of democracy. it is significant that those who represent this type of socialism and who think for themselves, are breaking away from the orthodox party, under the courageous leadership and example of john spargo, in increasing numbers, since our entrance into the war. they are as instinctively american and democratic in sympathy, as those of the opposite type are pro-german. even in the most democratic countries, however, the war has caused a vast increase of the undesirable type of socialism: that is one of its temporary penalties. to carry on such a war successfully, it is necessary to multiply the authority of the central government. that has been the experience of england, now being repeated here. men, who were _citizens_ of a democracy, become, as soldiers, and in part as workers, _subjects_ of the government in war. to some extent we are forced to imitate the tendencies we deplore and seek to overthrow in germany, to be able to meet and defeat germany. even so, the difference is profound. the subordination to the government is, for the people as a whole, voluntary, achieved through laws passed by chosen representatives of the people, and not by the arbitrary will of a kaiser and ruling caste. thus the freedom, voluntarily relinquished for a time, can be quickly regained when the crisis is past. subjects will become citizens again, when soldiers return to civil life. nevertheless, there will be no return to the old, selfishly individualistic regime. the lesson of organized action will have been learned, and a vast increase of voluntary co-operation, that is, of the socialism that is true democracy may be anticipated as a beneficent result of the war. this will be one of the great compensations for the waste of our heritage, spiritual and material, through the war. _the voluntary socialization of previously individualistic democracy will be the next great forward movement of the human spirit_. xiii the war and feminism of all consequences of the war, perhaps none is more significant than its effect upon the position of women. militarism and feminism are counter currents in the tide of history. all recrudescence of brute force carries the subjugation of women. in the degree to which professional militarism prevails in any society, women are forced into hard industrial activities, despised because fulfilled by women. on the other hand, a group of carefully protected women is held apart as a fine adornment of life. both ways militarism accentuates the property idea in reference to women: the one type, useful, the other, adorning, property. the one shows in marriage by purchase, the other in the dowry system. it is hard to say which is more dishonoring to women. it would, perhaps, seem preferable and less offensive to be bought as useful, rather than accepted with a money payment, as an adorning but expensive possession, where, as with the automobile, "it is the upkeep that counts." surely, however, either attitude is degrading enough. the accentuation, in the present war, of the notion of women as property, is evident in more brutal form in the horrors of rape, in the deliberate and organized use of women as breeders, with the same efficiency with which germany breeds her swine. nevertheless, here, too, strong counter currents are at work. as this is a war of nations, not of armies, it is the whole people that, in each instance, has had to be mobilized and organized. in all the democracies women have voluntarily risen to this need, just as citizens have voluntarily become soldiers. thus women, by the legion, are working in munition factories, on the farms, in productive plants of every kind, in public service and commerce organizations. the noble way in which women have accepted the double burden has created a wave of reverent admiration throughout the world. thus where professional militarism tends to despise the industrial activities into which it forces women, war for defense and justice causes reverence for the same socially necessary activities and for the women who so courageously undertake them for the sake of all. moreover, the increased freedom of action for women will outlast its temporary cause. once so admitted to new fields of industrial, business and professional activity, women can never be generally excluded from them again. thus when the soldiers become citizens, many of the women will remain producers, working beside men under new conditions of equality. the result, with the general stimulation of radical thinking that the war involves, will be a profound acceleration of the feminist movement throughout, at least, the democracies of the world. already it is being recognized that all valid principles of democracy apply to women equally with men. regenerated, if chaotic, russia takes for granted the farthest reaches of feminism. the regime in england, that bitterly opposed suffrage for women, is now voluntarily granting it before the close of the war. thus the victory of the allied nations will mean the fruition of much of the feminism that is a phase of humanism. it will mean freeing women from outgrown custom and tradition, from unjust limitations in industrial, social and political life. it will mean men and women working together, on a plane of moral equality, with free initiative and voluntary co-operation, for the fruition of democracy. just as that fruition will see the end of idle rich and poor, so there will be no more women slaves or parasites, none regarded or possessed as property, but only free human beings, each self-directed and self-controlled, and responsible for his or her own personality and conduct. xiv the transformation of democracy the nineteenth century was the period of rapid growth in adhesion to those ideals of democracy for which the war is being fought. it is not so well recognized that during the same hundred years democracy was so transformed as to be to-day a new thing under the sun. up to the time of the french and american revolutions democracy rested largely upon certain abstract ideas of human nature. rousseau could argue that in primitive times men sat down together to form a state, each giving up a part of his natural right to a central authority, and thus justifying it. we now know that nothing of the kind ever happened, that society had undergone a long process of development before men began to think about it at all. we continue to repeat the splendid at all. i refer, of course, to the women of antiquity. where respectable, these were the head of the household slaves, scarcely removed from the condition of the latter. the few women who did achieve freedom of thought and action, and became the companions of cultivated men--the aspasias of antiquity--bought their freedom at a sad price. so rome is called a republic, and it is true that, during the first half of her long history, freedom gradually broadened down from the patrician class to the plebeian multitude. when rome reached out, however, to the mastery of the most impressive empire the world has seen, she never dreamed of extending that freedom to the conquered populations. if she did grant roman citizenship to an occasional community, to enjoy the rights and exercise the privileges of that citizenship, it was necessary to journey to rome. it was the city and the world: the city ruling the world as subject. the same principle holds with the republics developing at the close of the middle age, in italy, in the towns of the hanseatic league and elsewhere. always the freedom achieved was for a city, a group or a class, never for all the people. our dream, on the contrary, is to take all the men and women in the land, ultimately in the world, and help them, through the free and cooperative activity of each with all the rest, on toward life, liberty, happiness, intelligence--all the ends of life that are worth while. if we demand life for ourselves, we ask it only in harmony with the best life for all. we want no special privilege, no benefit apart, bought at the price of the best welfare of humanity. "we," unfortunately, does not yet mean all of us, but it does signify an increasing multitude, rallying to this that is the standard of to-morrow. a third transformation, at least equally important with these, is in the invention, for it is no less, of representative government. political thinkers, such as john fiske, have tried to make us understand what this invention means: we do not yet realize it. the development of representative government is the cause, first of all, of the tremendous expansion of the area over which we apply democracy. plato, in the _laws_, limits the size of the ideal state--the one realizable in this world--to citizens. why? well, the exact number has a certain mystical significance, but the main reason is, plato could not imagine a much larger body of citizens than meeting together in public assembly and fulfilling the functions of citizenship. we have extended democracy over a hundred millions of population, dwelling on the larger part of a continent; and if one travels north, south, east, west, to-day, one is impressed that, in spite of unassimilated elements, everywhere men and women are proud, first of all, of being american citizens, and only in subordinate ways devoted to the section or community to which they belong. this has been made possible by the invention and development of representative government. that is not all: it is representative government that takes the sting out of all the older criticisms of democracy. plato devotes one of the saddest portions of his _republic_ to showing how in a brief time, democracy must inevitably fall and be replaced by tyranny. with the democracy plato knew this was true. it was impossible for athens to protect and make permanent her constitution. she might pass a law declaring the penalty of death on any one proposing a change in the constitution. it did no good. let some demagogue arise, sure of the suffrage of a majority of the citizens: he could call them into public assembly, cause a repeal of the law, and make any change in the constitution he desired. there was no way to prevent it. it is the invention and development of representative government that has changed all that. we chafe under the slow-moving character of our democracy--over the time it takes to get laws enacted and the longer time to get them executed. we may well be patient: this slow-moving character of democracy is the other side of its greatest safe-guard. it is because we cannot immediately express in action the popular will and opinion, but must think two, three, many times, working through chosen and responsible representatives of the people, that our democracy is not subject to the perils and criticisms of those of antiquity. the voice of the people in the day and hour, under the impulse of sudden caprice or passion, is anything but the voice of god: it is much more apt to be the voice of all the powers of darkness. it is common thought, sifted through uncommon thought, that approaches as near the voice of god as we can hope to get in this world. it is not the surface whim of public opinion, it is its _greatest common denominator_ that approximates the truth. it behooves us to remember this at a time when changes are coming with such swiftness. our life has developed so rapidly that the old political forms proved inadequate to the solution of the new problems. as a practical people, we therefore quickly adopted or invented new forms. doubtless this is, in the main, right, but we should understand clearly what we are doing. for instance, one of the great changes, recently inaugurated, is the election of national senators by popular vote. our forefathers planned that the national upper house should represent a double sifting of popular opinion. we elected state legislatures; they, in turn, chose the national senators: thus these were twice removed from the popular will. it proved easy to corrupt state legislatures; the national senate came to represent too much the moneyed interests; and so, through an amendment to the constitution, we changed the process, and now elect our senators by direct vote of the people. this makes them more immediately representative of the popular will, and perhaps the change was wise; but we should recognize that we have removed one more safe-guard of democracy. a story, told for a generation, and fixed upon various british statesmen, will illustrate my meaning. the last repetition attributed it to john burns. on one occasion, while he was a member of parliament, it is said he was at a tea-party in the west end of london. the hostess, pouring his cup of tea, anxious to make talk and show her deep interest in politics, said, "mr. burns, what is the use of the house of lords anyway?" the statesman, without replying, poured his tea from the cup into the saucer. the hostess, surprised at the breach of etiquette, waited, and then said, "but mr. burns, you didn't answer my question." he pointed to the tea, cooling in the saucer: that was the function, to cool the tea of legislation. that was the function intended for our national senate. the trouble was, the tea of legislation often became so stone cold in the process that it was fit only for the political slop-pail, and that was not what we wanted. so we have changed it all, but one more safe-guard of democracy is gone. so with other reforms, loudly acclaimed, as the initiative and referendum. with the new problems and complications of an extraordinarily developed life, it is doubtless wise that the people should be able to initiate legislation and should have the final word as to what legislation shall stand. on the other hand, if we are not to suffer under a mass of hasty and ill-considered legislation, if laws are to stand, they must always be formulated by a body of trained legislators, and not by the changing whim of popular opinion. so with the recall, now so widely demanded in many sections of the country. in the old days, our candidates were most obsequious and profuse in promises to their constituents _before_ election; but once elected, only too often they turned their backs on their constituents, went merrily their own way, making deals and bargains, in the spirit that "to the victor belong the spoils." therefore we justly demanded some control of them, after, as before, election: hence the recall. again the movement is right; but if the fundamentals of democracy are to be permanent, that body of men, concerned with the interpretation of the constitution and the fundamental law of the land, must not be subject to the immediate whim of mob mind, and the power to recall those judges occupied with this task would be a graver danger than advantage. they will make mistakes, at times they will be ultra conservative and servants of special interests, but that is one of the incidental prices we have to pay for the permanence of free institutions. the problem is to keep the basic principles of democracy unchanged, the forms on the surface as fluid and adjustable as possible. it is these three transformations--the abandonment of the old abstract notions and the testing of democracy by its results, the expansion of its application over the entire population, and the invention and development of representative government--it is these three changes that make our democracy a new order of society, new in its problems, its menaces, its solutions. xv democracy and education all just government is a transient device to make ordered progress possible. in the kingdom of heaven there would be no government, for if all human beings saw the best, loved the best and willed the best, the function of government would be at an end. obviously there is no hope or fear that we shall get into the kingdom of heaven soon, and the necessity for government will exist for an indefinitely long time. nevertheless, government is due to the imperfection of human nature and, as stated, its aim is ordered progress. progress without order is anarchy; order without progress is stagnation and death. it must frankly be admitted, moreover, that democracy is not the shortest road to good government nor to economic efficiency. that we recognize this as a people is proved by the drift of our opinion and of the changes in our lesser institutions. take, for instance, our city government. a few decades ago our cities were so notoriously misgoverned that they were the scandal of the world. our boards of aldermen or councilmen, representing ward constituencies, with all sorts of local strings tied to them, were clumsy and unwieldy and easily subject to corruption. so, about twenty years ago, all across the country went the cry, "get a good mayor, and give him a free hand." that is the way our great industries are conducted: a wise captain of industry is secured and given full control. being a practical people, and imagining ourselves to be much more practical than really we are, we said, let us conduct our city business in the same way. why not? plato showed long ago that you can get the best government in the shortest time by getting a good tyrant, and giving him a free hand. there arc just two objections. the first is incidental: it is exceedingly difficult to keep your tyrant good. arbitrary authority over one's fellows is about the most corrupting influence known to man. no one is great and good enough to be entrusted with it. responsible power sobers and educates, irresponsible power corrupts. nevertheless we pay the price of this error and learn the lesson. the other objection is more significant. it is the effect on the rank and file of the citizenship, for the meaning of democracy is not immediate results in government, but the education of the citizen, and that education can come only by fulfilling the functions of citizenship. thus it is better to be the free citizen of a democracy, with all the waste and temporary inefficiency democracy involves, than to be the inert slave of the most perfect paternal despotism ever devised by man. thus the movement away from democratic city government is gravely to be questioned, no matter what economic results it secures. the same argument applies to more recent changes, as the commission form of city government. as in the previous case, reacting upon the scandalous situation, we said, "let us choose the three to five best men in the community, and let them run the city's business for us." nearly every time this change has been made, the result has been an immediate cleaning up of the city government; but why? chiefly because "a new broom sweeps clean,"--not so much for the reason that it is new, as because you are interested in the instrument. you can get a dirty room remarkably clean with an old broom, if you will sweep hard enough. the cleaning up is due, not primarily to the instrument, but to the hand that wields it. to speak less figuratively: the cleaning up of the city government with the inauguration of the commission system, came because the change was made by an awakening of the good people of the community. good people have a habit, however, of going to sleep in an astoundingly short time; but _the gang never sleeps_. now suppose, while the good people are dozing in semi-somnolence, assured that the new broom will sweep of itself, the gang gets together and elects the three to five worst gangsters in the city to be the commission? is it not evident that the very added efficiency of the instrument means greater graft and corruption? equally the argument applies to the most recent device suggested--the city manager plan. as we have largely taken our schools out of politics, and have a non-partisan educational expert as superintendent, so it is suggested we should conduct our city business. again, suppose the gang appoints the city manager: he will be an expert in graft, rather than in government. the moment a people gets to trusting to a device it is headed for danger. there is just one safeguard of democracy, and that is _to keep the good people awake and at the task all the time_. some instruments are better and some are worse, but the instrument never does the work, it is the hand and brain that wield it. if there is one field where we could reasonably expect to find pure democracy, it is in our higher educational institutions. in a college or university, where a group of young men and women, and a group of older men and women are gathered apart, out of the severer economic struggle, dedicated to ideal ends: there, surely, we could expect pure democracy in organization and relationship; yet the tendency has been steadily toward autocracy. one can count the fingers of both hands and not cover the list of college and university presidents who have taken office during the last fifteen years, only on condition that they have complete authority over the educational policy of the institution, and often over its financial policy as well. the reason is obvious: we run a railroad efficiently by getting a good president and giving him arbitrary control; why not a university? there are just the two objections cited above: even in a university, it is difficult to keep your tyrant good. this, again, is the minor objection. the real evil is in the effect upon the rank and file of those governed by the autocrat. there are men in university faculties to-day who say, privately, that if they could get any other opportunity, they would resign to-morrow, for they feel like clerks in a department store, with no opportunity to help determine the educational policy of the institutions of which they are integral parts. the german university, under all the autocracy and bureaucracy of the german state, is more democratic in its organization than our own. its faculty is a self-governing body, electing to its own membership. the rectorship is an honor conferred for the year on some faculty member for superior worth and scholarship. each member of the faculty may thus feel the self-respect and dignity, resulting from the power and initiative he possesses as a free citizen of the institution. let me suggest what would be the ideal democratic organization of a college or university. why not apply the same division of functions of government that has proved so successful in the state? the board of trustees is the natural judiciary; the president, the executive. the faculty is the legislative body, with the student body as a sort of lower house, cooperating in enacting the legislation for its own government. where has such a plan been tried? if the primary purpose of democracy is thus, not immediate results in government, but the education of the citizen, on the other hand, democracy rests, for its safety and progress, on the ever better education of the citizen. under the older forms of human society, laws may be passed and executed that are far in advance of public opinion. that cannot be done in a democracy. the law may be a slight step in advance, and so perhaps educate public opinion to its level; but if it goes beyond that step, after the first flurry of interest in the law is past, it remains a dead letter on the statute books--worse than useless, because cultivating that dangerous disrespect for all law, which we have seen growing upon us as a people. thus from either side, the problem of democracy is a problem of education. it rests upon education, its aim is education. in a democracy, the supreme function of the state is, not to establish a military system for defense, or a police system for protection, it is not the enforcement of public and private contract: it is to take the children and youth of each generation and develop them into men and women able to fulfill the responsibility and enjoy the opportunity of free citizenship in a free society. xvi menaces of democracy since modern democracy is a new thing under the sun, so its menaces are new, or, if old, they take misleadingly new forms. for instance, the greatest danger in the path of our democracy is the world-old evil of selfishness, but it does take surprisingly new form. it is not aggressive selfishness that we have primarily to dread. there are those, it is true, who believe we may soon be endangered by the ambitions of some arrogant leader in the nation. the fear is unwarranted, for our people are still so devoted to the fundamental principles of democracy, that if any leader were to take one clear step toward over-riding the constitution and making himself despot, that step would be his political death-blow. no, we are not yet endangered by the aggressive ambitions of those at the front, but we are in grave danger from the negative selfishness of indifference, shown in its worst form by just those people who imagine they are good because they are respectable, whereas they may be merely good--for nothing. plato argued that society could never have patriotism in full measure until the family was abolished. a singular notion that any school boy to-day can readily answer, yet here is the curious situation. family life, among ourselves, in its better aspects, has reached a higher plane than ever before in any people. more marriages are made on the only decent basts of any marriage. this is the woman's land. children have their rights and privileges, even to their physical, mental and moral detriment. it is here that men most willingly sacrifice for their families, slaving through the hot summer in the cities, to send wife and children to the seashore or the mountains; yet it is just here that men most readily unhinge their consciences when they turn from private to public life. some cynic has said that there is not an american citizen who would not smuggle to please his wife. of course the statement is not true, but if you have ever crossed the ocean on a transatlantic liner, and watched the devices to which ordinarily decent men--men who would be ashamed to steal your pocket handkerchief or to lie to you as an individual--will resort, in order to lie to the government or steal from the government, you begin to wonder if the cynic was not right. the law, obviously, may be unjust: if so, protest against it and seek to have it changed, but while it is the law, does it not deserve your respectful obedience, unless you would add to the dangerously growing disrespect for all law? next to the menace of selfishness is that of ignorance, and this, too, takes confusingly new form. it is not ignorance of scientific fact and law, dangerous as that is, that threatens, but ignorance of what our institutions mean, of what they have cost, of the ideal for which we stand among the nations. the celerity with which, even during the past two decades, the younger generation has abandoned old standards and ideals, is an ominous illustration. it is true: "new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient goods uncouth; 'they must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of truth." those words of lowell's are as fully applicable to the present crisis, as to that for which lowell wrote them; but to give up the past, without knowing that you are letting go, is surely not the part of wisdom. a third menace shows in that fickleness of temper and false standard of life that cause us to admire the wrong type of leader. probably one half of all the attacks on men of unusual wealth and success come from other men, who would like to be in the same situation with those they attack, and have failed of their ambition. part of the attack is sincere, no doubt, but if you assumed that all the abuse heaped upon conspicuous men came from moral conviction, you would utterly misread the situation. on the other hand, men of moral excellence make us ashamed. now it takes a rarely magnanimous spirit to be shamed and not resent it. we are apt to feel that, if we can pull another down, we raise ourselves. to realize this, consider the growl of joy that comes from the worse sort of citizen and newspaper when some public leader is caught in a private scandal. as if pulling him down, raised us! we are all tarred with his disgrace. there are, indeed, two ways of stating the ideal of democracy: you can say, "i am just as good as any one else," which in the first place, is not true, and, in the second, would be unlovely of you to express, were it true. you can say, on the contrary, "every other human being ought to have just as good a chance as i have," which is right; and yet you will hear the ideal of democracy phrased a dozen times the first way, where it is expressed once in the second form. that democracies are fickle is one of the oldest criticisms upon them. we had thought that we were not subject to that criticism, and in the old days we were not. we had the country debating club and the village lyceum. we were an agricultural people, sober and slow-moving. we had few books, they were good books and we read them many times. we had few newspapers, we knew the men who wrote in them, and when we read an editorial, our mind was actively challenged by the sincere thinking of another mind. to-day, everywhere, we have moved into the cities. the strength of the country-side is sobriety and slow incubation of the forces of life. its vice is stupidity. the strength of the city is keen wittedness, versatility, quick response. its vice is fickleness, morbidity, exhaustion. we have our great blanket sheet newspapers, representing a party, a clique, a financial interest, with writers lending their brains out, for money, to write editorials for causes in which they do not believe. we have the multitude of books, incessantly and hastily produced; we read much, and scarcely think at all. we have got rid of the old "three decker" novel, reduced it to a single volume, and then taken out the climax of the story, publishing it in the corner of the daily newspaper, as the short story of the day, so that he who runs may read. if he is a wise man he will run as fast as he can and not read that stuff at all. we have our ever increasing "movies," with their incessant titillation of the mind with swift passing impressions, as disintegrating to intellectual concentration, as they are injurious to the eyes. the result of it all is an increasing fickleness of temper, so that the same people who shout most loudly when the popular hero goes by, the next week cover his very name with vituperation and abuse, if he offends their slightest whim. this evil breeds another: fickleness in the people means demagoguery in the leader, inevitably. we have said to our public men--not in words, but by the far more impressive language of our conduct--"get money, power, success, and we will give you more money, power and success, and not ask you how you got them nor what ends you serve in using them." that so many have refused the bribe is to their credit, not ours; we have done what we could to corrupt them. finally, we are the most irreverent people in the world. we believe in youth, we scorn age. we have splendid enthusiasm, we do not know what wisdom means. one hears college presidents say--half jokingly, of course--that there is no use appointing a man over thirty to the faculty these days. so one hears christian ministers, in those denominations where the minister is called by the particular church, say there is no use trying to get another call after one is fifty! of course, it is not true, but it is true enough to be a serious criticism upon us. for what other vocation is there where the mellowness that comes only from time and long experience, from presiding at weddings and standing beside open graves, sharing the joys and sorrows of innumerable persons, is so indispensable, as in the pastor, the physician of the spirit? still, we will turn out some wise, shy, mellow old man, just ripened to the point of being the true minister to the souls of others, and replace him with a recent graduate of a theological school, because the latter can talk the language of the higher criticism or whatever else happens to interest us for the moment. obviously, we pay the price, but think what it indicates of our civilization. xvii the dilemma of democracy we have seen that the gravest menaces of democracy are the faults in mind and character in the multitude. selfishness, fickleness, ignorance, irreverence in the people, with demagoguery in the leader-- these are the menaces of american democracy. how then can the people be trusted, since democracy depends upon trusting them? this is an old indictment, searching to the very heart of democracy. plato made it of ancient athens, while, more recently and trenchantly, ibsen has made it for all modern society. the argument runs thus: democracy means the rule of the majority. well, there are more fools than wise men in the world, more ignorant than intelligent. thus the rule of the majority must mean the rule of the fools over the wise men, of the ignorant over the intelligent. such is the significant indictment, and we are compelled to admit that our political life is filled with illustrations that would seem to substantiate it. the ward bosses, the demagogues and grafters who are given power by the multitude, one campaign after another, would seem to justify the pessimism of plato and ibsen. is there not, however, a subtle fallacy in the very phrasing of the indictment? the majority does not "rule": it elects representatives who guide. that is something entirely different. when the worst is said of them those representatives of the people are distinctly above the average of the majorities electing them. take the roll of our presidents, for instance. with all the corruption and vulgarity of our national politics, that list, from washington, through such altitudes as jefferson and lincoln, to the present occupant of the white house, is superior to any roster of kings or emperors in the history of mankind. what does this mean? it means that _the hope of democracy is the instinctive power in the breast of common humanity to recognize the highest when it appears_. were this not true, democracy would be the most hopeless of mistakes, and the sooner we abandoned it, with its vulgarity and waste, the better it would be for us. the instinctive power is there, however: to recognize, not to live, the highest. how many have followed the example of socrates, remaining in prison and accepting the hemlock poison for the sake of truth? yet all who know of him thrill to his sacrifice. of all who have borne the name, christian, how many have followed consistently the footsteps of jesus and obeyed literally and unvaryingly the precepts of the sermon on the mount? of the millions, perhaps ten or twenty individuals--to be generous in our view; but _all the world recognizes him_. here, then, is the hope that takes the sting from the indictment of plato, ibsen and how many other critics of democracy. plato said, "until philosophers are kings, . . . cities will never have rest from their evils,--no, nor the human race, as i believe." once, perhaps once only, plato's dream was realized: in that noblest of philosopher emperors, wholly dedicated to the welfare of the world he ruled with autocratic power; yet the soul of marcus aurelius was burdened with an impossible task. it is one of the tragic ironies of history that, in this one realization of plato's lofty dream, the noble emperor could postpone, he could not avert, the colossal doom that threatened the world he ruled. so he wrapped his roman cloak about him and lay down to sleep, with stoic consciousness that he had done his part in the place where zeus had put him, but relieved that he might not see the disaster he knew must swiftly come. how different our dream: it is no illusion of a happy accident of philosopher kings. we want no arbitrary monarchs, wise or brutal: from the noblest of emperors to the butcher of berlin, we would sweep them all aside, to the ash-heap of outworn tools. our dream is the awakening and education of the multitude, so that the majority will be able and glad to choose, as its guides, leaders and representatives, the noblest and best. when that day comes, there will be, for the first time in the history of mankind, the dawn of a true _aristocracy_ or rule of the best; and it will come through the fulfillment of democracy. a long and troubled path, with many faults and evils meantime? yes, but not so hopelessly long, when one considers the ages of slow struggle up the mountain and the swiftly multiplying power of education over the mind of all. xviii paternalism versus democracy the contrast between paternalism and democracy in aim and method is thus extreme. paternalism seeks directly organization, order, production and efficiency, incidentally and occasionally the welfare of the subject population. democracy seeks directly the highest development of all men and women, their freedom, happiness and culture, in the end it hopes this will give social order, good government and productive power. it is willing, meantime, to sacrifice some measure of order for freedom, of good government for individual initiative, of efficiency for life. paternalism seeks to achieve its aims, quickly and effectively, through the boss's whip of social control. democracy works by the slower, but more permanently hopeful path of education, never sacrificing life to material ends. paternalism ends in a social hierarchy, materially prosperous, but caste-ridden and without soul. democracy ends in the abolishment of castes, equality of opportunity, with the freest individual initiative and finest flowering of the personal spirit. which shall it be: god or mammon, men or machines? there is no doubt that efficiency can be achieved most quickly under a well-wielded boss's whip, but at the sacrifice of initiative and invention. moreover, remove the whip, and the efficiency quickly goes to pieces. on the other hand, the efficiency achieved by voluntary effort and free cooperation comes much more slowly, but it lasts. moreover, it develops, hand in hand, with initiative and invention. the negro, doubtless, has never been so generally efficient as before the civil war, in the south, under the overseer's whip; yet every negro who, to-day, has character enough to save up and buy a mule and an acre of ground, tills it with a consistent and permanent effectiveness of which slave labor is never capable. in the one case, moreover, there is the average economic result, in the other, the gradual development of manhood. organize a factory on the feudal lines so prevalent in current industry. get a strong, dominating superintendent and give him autocratic authority. quickly he will show results. always, however, there is the danger of strikes, and if the strong hand falters, the organization disintegrates. on the other hand, let a corporation take its artisans into its confidence, give each a small proportionate share in the annual earnings. each worker will feel increasingly that the business is his business. he will take pride in his accomplishment. gradually he will attain efficiency, and work permanently, without oversight, with a consistent earnestness no boss's whip ever attained, the experience of the national cash register company at dayton, ohio, proves this. the experiments of henry ford are a step toward the same solution. so, in lesser measure, is the plan of the steel trust to permit and encourage its employees to purchase annually its stock, somewhat below the current market price, giving a substantial bonus if the stock is held over ten years. if you wish an illustration on a larger scale, consider the mass formation tactics of the german soldiers, in contrast to the individual courage, initiative and action of the french. there are the two types of efficiency in sheerest contrast, but beyond is always the question of their effect on manhood. france has saved and regenerated her soul; but germany--? further, the breakdown of paternalistically achieved efficiency has been evident in germany's utter failure to understand the mind of other peoples, particularly of democracies. she had voluminous data, gathered by the most atrociously efficient spy system ever developed, yet she utterly misread the mind of france, england and the united states. the same break-down is evident in germany's failure in colonization in contrast to england's success. for offensive war, it must be admitted, the efficiency under the boss's whip will go further. for defensive war, or war for high moral aims, it is desirable that the individual soldier should think for himself, respond to the high appeal. thus for such warfare the efficiency of voluntary effort and cooperation is superior. an autocracy would better rule its soldiers by a military caste; there can be no excuse for such in a democracy. thus, the utmost possible fraternization of officers and men is desirable, and social snobbery, the snubbing of officers who come up from the ranks, and other anachronistic survivals, should be stamped out, as utterly foreign to what should be the spirit of the military arm of democracy. further, in estimating the two types, one must remember that paternalism may exercise its power in secret and that it accomplishes much in the dark. democracy, on the other hand, is afflicted and blessed with pitiless publicity. thus its evils are all exposed, it washes all its dirty linen in public; but the main thing is to get it clean. when it comes to invention and initiative, as already indicated, democracy has the advantage, immediately, as in the long run. we are the most inventive people on earth, and that quality is a direct result of our democratic individualism. it is a significant fact that most of the startling inventions used in this war were made in america--but _developed and applied in germany._ there, again, are evident the contrasting results of the two types of social organization. the indefatigably industrious and docile german mind can work out and apply the inventions furnished it, with marvelous persistency and effectiveness, under paternal control. we have the problem of achieving by voluntary effort and cooperation a persistent thoroughness in working out the ideas and inventions that come to us in such abundant measure. the path of democracy is education. xix the solution for democracy when we say that the path of democracy is education, we do not mean that there is an easy solution of its problem. there is no patent medicine we can feed the american people and cure it of its diseases. there is no specific for the menaces that threaten. eternal vigilance and effort are the price, not only of liberty, but of every good of man. let things alone, and they get bad; to keep them good, we must struggle everlastingly to make them better. leave the pool of politics unstirred by putting into it ever new individual thought and ideal, and how quickly it becomes a stagnant, ill-smelling pond. leave a church unvitalized, by ever fresh personal consecration, and how quickly it becomes a dead form, hampering the life of the spirit. leave a university uninfluenced by ever new earnestness and devotion on the part of student and teacher, and how soon it becomes a scholastic machine, positively oppressing the mind and spirit. there is a true sense in which the universe exists momentarily by the grace of god. take light away, and you have darkness. take darkness away, and you have not necessarily light; you might have chaos. take health away, and you have disease. take disease away, and you have not necessarily health; you may have death. take virtue away, and you have vice. take vice away, and you have not necessarily virtue; you might have negative respectability. thus it is the continual affirmation of the good that keeps the heritage of yesterday and takes the step toward to-morrow. nevertheless, if there is no easy solution of the problem, there are certain big lines of attack. if we are right in our diagnosis, that the problem of democracy is a problem of education, then our whole system of education, for child, youth and adult, should be reconstructed to focus upon the building of positive and effective moral personality. american education began as a subsidiary process. children got organic education in the home, on the farm, in the work shop. they went to school to get certain formal disciplines, to learn to read, write and cipher and to acquire formal grammar. with the moving into the cities, the industrial revolution and the entire transformation of our life, the school has had to take over more and more of the process of organic education. if children fail to get such education in the school, they are apt to miss it altogether. with this entire change in the meaning of the school, old notions of its purpose still survive. probably no one is so benighted to-day as to imagine that the chief function of the school is to fill the mind with information; but there are many who still hold to the tradition that the chief purpose of education is to sharpen the intellectual tools of the individual for the sake of his personal success. this notion is a misleading survival, for tools are of value only in terms of the character using them. the same equipment may serve, equally, good or bad ends. only as education focusses on the development of positive and effective moral character can it aid in solving the problem of democracy. need it be added that this does not mean teaching morals and manners to children, thirty minutes a day, three times a week? that is a minor fragment of moral education. it means that all phases of the process-- the relation of pupil and teacher, school and home, the government and discipline, the lessons taught in every subject, the environment, the proportioning of the curriculum, of physical, emotional and intellectual culture--all shall be focussed and organized upon the one significant aim of the whole--_character_. further, if education is to overcome the menaces and solve the dilemma of democracy, it must be carried beyond childhood and youth and outside the walls of academic institutions. the ever wider education of adult citizenship is indispensable to the progress and safety of democracy. it is one of the glaring illustrations of the inefficiency of our democracy that there are still communities where school boards build school houses with public money, open them five or six hours, five days in the week, and refuse to allow them to be opened any other hour of the day or night, for a civic forum, parents' meeting, public lecture or other activity of adult education; and yet we call ourselves a practical people! surely, in a democracy, the state is as vitally interested in the education of the adult citizen as of the child. herein is the significance of those various extensions of education, developing and spreading so widely to-day. university-extension and chautauqua movements, civic forums, free lectures to the people by boards of education and public libraries, summer schools, night schools for adults--all are illustrations of this movement, so vital to the progress of democracy. through these instrumentalities the popular ideal may be elevated, the public mind may be trained to more logical and earnest thought, citizenship may be made more serious and intelligent, and finally a most helpful influence may be exerted on the academic institutions themselves. it is an easily verifiable truth that any academic institution that builds around itself an enclosing scholastic wall, refuses to go outside and serve and learn in the larger world of humanity, in the long run inevitably dies of academic dry rot. in the endeavor to solve the problem of democracy cannot we do more than we have done hitherto in cultivating reverence for moral leadership--the quality so much needed in democracy at the present hour? this may be achieved through many aspects of education, but especially through contact with noble souls in literature and history. history, above all, is the great opportunity, and, from this point of view, is it not necessary to rewrite our histories: instead of portraying solely statesmen and warriors, to fill them with lofty examples of leadership in all walks of life? women as well as men: for surely ideals of both should be fostered. a colleague, interested in this problem, recently took one of the most widely used text-books of american history, and counted the pages on which a woman was mentioned. of the five hundred pages, there were four: not four pages devoted to women; but four mentioning a woman. what does it mean: that women have contributed less than one part in a hundred and five to the development of american life? surely no one would think that. what, then, are the reasons for the discrepancy? there are several, but one may be mentioned: men have written the histories, and they have written chiefly of the two fields of action where men have been most important and women least, war and statesmanship. surely, however, if american history is to reveal the american spirit, exercise the contagion of noble ideals and develop reverence for true moral leadership, it must present types of both manhood and womanhood in all fields of action and endeavor. one who has stood with socrates in the common criminal prison in athens and watched him drink the hemlock poison, saying "no evil can happen to a good man in life or after death," who has heard the oration of paul on mars hill or that of pericles over the athenian dead, who has thrilled to the heroism of joan of arc and edith cavell, the noble service of elizabeth fry and florence nightingale, the high appeal of helen hunt jackson and elizabeth barrett browning, who has heard giordano bruno exclaim as the flames crept up about him, "i die a martyr, and willingly," who has responded to the calm elevation of marcus aurelius, the cosmopolitan wisdom of goethe, the sweet gentleness of maeterlinck's spirit and the titan dreams of ibsen, can scarcely fail to appreciate the brotherhood of all men and to learn that reverence for the true moral leader, that dignifies alike giver and recipient. xx training for moral leadership since the path of democracy is education, moral leadership is more necessary to it, than in any other form of society; yet there are exceptional obstacles to its development. we speak of "the white light that beats upon a throne": it is nothing compared to the search light played upon every leader of democracy. with our lack of reverence, we delight in pulling to pieces the personalities of those who lead us. thus it is increasingly difficult to get men of sensitive spirit to pay the price of leadership for democracy. is it not possible to do more than we have done, consciously to develop such leadership? where is it trained? in life, the college and university, the normal school, the schools of law, medicine and theology. yes, but if not one boy and girl in ten graduates from the high school, surely we want one man and woman in ten to fulfill some measure of moral leadership, and the high school is directly concerned with the task of furnishing such leadership for american democracy. if that is true, is it not a pity that the high school is so largely dominated from above by the demand of the college upon the entering freshman? it is not to be taken for granted that the particular regimen of studies, best fitting the student to pass the entrance examinations of a college or university, is the best possible for the nine out of ten students, who go directly from the high school into the world, and must fulfill some measure of moral leadership for american democracy. the presumption is to the contrary. college professors are human--some of them. they want students prepared to enter as smoothly as possible into the somewhat artificial curricula of academic studies they have arranged. the latin professor wishes not to go back and start with the rudiments of his subject, as the professor of mathematics with the beginnings of algebra and geometry. the result is they demand of the high school what fits most smoothly into their scheme. now if it is not possible to serve equally the needs of both groups, would it not be better to neglect the one tenth of the students, going on to college, even assuming they are the pick of the flock, which they are not always? they have four more years to correct their mistakes and round out their culture. if any one must be subordinated, it would be better to neglect them, and focus upon the needs of the nine out of ten, who go directly from the high school into life and have not another chance; yet there are states in the union, where it is possible for a committee of the state university at the top to say to every high school teacher in the state, "conform to our requirements, or leave the state, or get out of the profession." the threat, moreover, has been carried out more than once. that situation is utterly wrong. we want organization of the educational system, with each unit cooperating with the next higher, but if education is to solve the problem of democracy and furnish moral leadership for american life, we want each unit to be free, first of all, to serve its own constituency to the best of its power. the problem is not serious for the big city high school, with its multiplied elective courses, but for the small rural or town high school, with its limited corps of teachers and its necessarily fixed courses, the burden is onerous indeed. is the american college and university doing all that it might do in cultivating moral leadership for american democracy? the last decades have seen an astounding and unparalleled development of higher education in america. in the old days, the college was usually on a denominational foundation. it was supported by the dollars and pennies of earnest religionists who believed that education was necessary to religion and morality. the president was generally a clergyman of the denomination; he taught the ethics course, and all students were required to take it. there was compulsory chapel attendance, and once a day the entire student body gathered together to listen to some moral and religious thought. then came the immense expansion of higher education. courses were multiplied and diversified. universities were established or endowed by the state. academies became colleges, and colleges, universities. institutions were generally secularized. compulsory chapel attendance was rightly abandoned. each department served its own interest apart. until to-day certain of our great universities are not unlike vast intellectual department stores, with each professor calling his goods across the counter, and the president, a sort of superior floorwalker, to see that no one clerk gets too many customers. it is an impressive illustration of what has happened to our higher institutions that, in certain of them, the one regular meeting place of the entire student body in a common interest, is the bleachers by the athletic field. one continues to believe in college athletics, in spite of the frequent absurdities and worse, done in their name; only if the numbers of those playing the game and those exercising only their lungs and throats from the bleachers, were reversed, better all-round athletic education would result. is it not, however, a trenchant criticism on the situation in our higher education, that so often the one common interest should be in something that is, at least, aside from the main business of the institution? moreover, no institution can rightly serve democracy, unless it is itself democratic. thus the growth of an aristocratic spirit in our colleges and universities is an ominous sign. for instance, it is still true that any boy or girl, with a sound body and a good mind and no family to support, can get a college education. money is not indispensable: it is possible to work one's way through. will this always be true? one wonders. it is significant that it is easiest to work your way through college, and keep your self-respect and the respect of your fellows, in the small, meagerly endowed college on the frontier. it is most difficult, with a few exceptions one gladly recognizes, in the great, rich universities of the east. what does that mean? straws show the tide: it was announced some time ago by the president of one of our richest and oldest universities that henceforth scholarships in that institution would be given solely on the basis of intellectual scholarship, as tested by examination; and applause went up from the alumni all across the country; yet what does it mean? it means that the boy who has to work on a threshing machine, sell books to an unsuspecting public, or do some other semi-honorable work all summer to get back into college in the fall, cannot pass those examinations equally with a rich man's son of equal mind, who can take a tutor to the seashore or the mountains and coach up all summer. thus foundations, established by well-meaning people to help poor boys self-respectingly through college, become intellectual prizes for those who do not need them. that is all wrong. take the special student problem. when a college or university is founded, it needs students: they are the life-blood of the institution. really all that is needed to make a college is a teacher and some students: buildings are not indispensable, but students the school must have. thus it is apt to keep its bars down and its entrance requirements flexible. special students, often mature men and women, who are not prepared to pass the freshman examinations, are admitted on the recommendation of heads of d epartments, to special courses they are well fitted to take. students are admitted freely, and then sifted out afterward, if they prove unworthy of their opportunity: not a bad method, by the way. a dozen years pass, and the institution wants to become respectable. it is just as with the individual: the man, at first, is absorbed in money-getting, and when he has it, yearns for respectability. now getting respectable, for a college or university, is called "raising the standard of scholarship." let this not be misunderstood: painstaking, infinitely laborious, accurate scholarship is a noble aim, well worth the consistent effort of a lifetime; but there are two sides to raising the standard of scholarship. does an educational institution exist for the sake of its reputation, or to serve its constituency? if it seeks to advance its reputation at the expense of its fullest and best service to those who need its help, is it not recreant to its duty and opportunity? well, in the mood cited, the institution raises and standardizes its entrance-requirements and generally excludes special students. one readily sees why: it is much easier to work with the regularly prepared freshman, he fits much more smoothly and comfortably into the machinery of the institution. many a wise teacher will admit, nevertheless, that the best students he ever taught and the ones whose lives he is proudest of having influenced, were often men and women, thirty, forty, fifty years of age--teachers who suddenly realized that the ruts of their calling had become so deep they could no longer see over them, ministers awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action-- working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman cannot imagine--he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and often for them useless, work of preparing to pass the examinations for entrance to the freshman class. that, too, is all wrong. the american college and university stands to-day at the parting of the ways: this generation will largely determine its future. if the american college and university ever becomes a social club for the sons and daughters of the rich, an institution making it easy for them to secure business and professional opportunity and advancement, to the exclusion of their poorer fellows, it may be as necessary to disestablish the foundations of our great universities, as statesmen in europe thought it necessary to disestablish the monastic foundations at the close of the middle age. they, too, began as educational institutions. if, on the other hand, the american college and university remains true to its task, if it keeps its doors open and its spirit democratic, if it seeks to render ever larger service to the great public and to develop moral leadership for american democracy, then, indeed, it will go ever forward upon its noble path. xxi democracy and sacrifice we have seen the conflict of ideas in the war: the german philosophy that man exists for the state, the contrasting idea of democracy that the state exists for man. we may well ask why any institution should be regarded as sacred, except as it has the adventitious sacredness, coming from time, convention and hoary tradition. it was said long ago that "the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath," and the statement may be universalized. every institution on earth--marriage, the family, education, the church, the state--was made for man and not man for the institution. humanity must always be the end. why should we perpetuate any institution that does not serve life? kant voiced the principle in his second imperative of duty: "always treat humanity, whether in thine own person or that of any other, as an end withal, and never as a means only." kant was a prussian philosopher: one wonders what he would have thought of the "kanonen-futter" theory of manhood! an organization or institution is only a machine, an instrument for a purpose. thus always it is a means, never an end: its value lies in serving its purpose--the end of human life. so the whole existing order must justify itself. where it rests on forms of injustice, it must be broken or destroyed, and there is no reason to fear the breaking. thus there is no "divine right" of kings. they represent a vested interest, surviving from the past. they must justify themselves by the service of those under them, or pass. similarly, there is no divine right of a class or caste, enjoying supremacy or special privilege. it also is a surviving vested interest, that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an incubus. the same test applies to an empire. it, too, is a vested interest, developed out of conditions prevailing in the past. if it does not justify itself by the largest service of all within it, then it, too, is an anachronistic survival, no longer to be tolerated. the principle is universal: the institution of private property, the controlling power of captains of industry, the capitalistic system, finally, the state itself, in every form: all are vested interests that may be permitted to continue in the exercise of power only as they prove their superiority to any other form of organization in serving the good of all. this does not mean that, under democracy, the individual shall fail of sacrifice and the dedication to something higher than himself. that is the glory of life, transfiguring human nature, and without it, life sinks to sordid selfishness. your life is worth, not what you have, but what you are, and what you are is determined by that to which you dedicate yourself. is it creature comforts, pleasure, selfish privilege, or the largest life and the fullest service of humanity? what you have is merely the condition, the important question is, what do you do with it? is it wealth, prosperity: do you sit down comfortably on the fact of it, to secure all the selfish pleasures possible; or do you regard your fortunate circumstances as so much more opportunity and obligation of leadership and service? is it poverty, even starvation: do you whine and grovel, or stand erect, with shut teeth, andwring heroic manhood from the breast of suffering? that is why peace can never be an end: it, too, is merely a condition or means. the question is, what do you do with your peace, for peace may mean merely sloth and cowardly ease, where war may mean unselfish heroism. that is what the peace promoters forget. war has its brutalities, and terrible indeed they are: unleashed hate, lust, cruelty and revenge; but war has its heroisms. it calls out the devotion to something higher than the individual from even the commonest of men. to-day all over the earth, ordinary men are quietly going out to probable death or mutilation in its most horrible forms, and going for the sake of an ideal larger than themselves. women are doing even more than that. for it is not so hard to die, but to send out those you love, dearer than life itself, to almost certain death--that, indeed, is difficult, and women are doing it everywhere with a smile on their lips and choked-back tears. peace, on the other hand, has its virtues: the softening and refining of life, gradual development of sympathy, achievement of comfort and beauty; but peace has its vices. in times of peace and prosperity there seems to be no great cause at stake. of course, always it is there, but we do not see it. we become increasingly absorbed in selfish interests, in the good of our immediate family. thus petty, time-serving selfishness is the vice peculiarly characteristic of times of peace and prosperity. consider, for instance, the spirit of france during the closing years of the nineteenth century, and at the present dark, but pregnant, hour of destiny. thus the question is not whether you have peace or war, but what you do with your peace or war. it is not whether you are rich or poor, but what you do with your riches or poverty. suppose we were able to reconstruct our entire social and industrial world, so that every human being would have plenty to eat, plenty to wear and a comfortable house to live in: would we have the kingdom of heaven? not necessarily: we might have merely a comfortable, well-decorated pig-sty, if men lived to nothing higher than pigs. "man cannot live by bread alone," important as bread is, but by dedication to the things of the spirit. thus there must ever be the capacity for self-forgetfulness, self-sacrifice, the dedication of life to supreme aims, but that does not mean the dedication of man to the institution. rather it is the consecration to the welfare of humanity. man for the state means autocracy and imperialism; man for mankind is the soul of democracy. that is the ideal to which we must rise, if democracy is to prove itself worthy to be the form of human society for the great future. this ideal is realized through many lesser forms and instruments, but always with the same final test. the family, for instance, is one of these lesser forms, and the subordination of the individual to the family unit is just. thus there is a measure of right in seeking first the interest of the family group; but when this is sought to the end of special privilege and debauching luxury, against the welfare of all, it becomes, as we have seen, an evil. there is, similarly, a certain justice in the subordination of the individual to the social class or group interest. it is right that artisans should unite in trade unions, that employers should get together in associations for common benefit. one need only contrast the conditions where each workman had to bid in competition against all others, and each manufacturer, the same, to realize the advance made through group union and cooperation. when either group, however, seeks to further its own interest at the expense of the welfare of the whole society, as in securing class legislation, achieving monopolies, holding efficient workers to the level of production of the slowest and least capable of the group, then the class or group spirit becomes an evil that must be fought for the good of all. it is exactly the same with the nation. its interest is justly served only in harmony with the welfare of humanity. any current problem will illustrate the principle, as, for instance, that of immigration. certainly the nation has the right to prohibit immigration which produces unassimilated plague-spots and threatens to cause racial deterioration, as in phases of oriental immigration to the pacific coast. similarly, it is right to restrict immigration that would further economic prosperity, at the expense of the manhood of the nation. we must answer the question, whether we want factories or men. it is desirable to have some of both, of course, but when one is to be obtained at the expense of the other, it is manhood that must be the deciding end. on the other hand, when it comes to refusing a refuge to the poor and oppressed, who are physically and morally acceptable, but lack a small amount of money, or are unable to respond to a literary test, then the welfare of humanity demands the opposite decision. better give them the fifty dollars--a healthy slave was worth more than that in the old days. so teach them to read and write. the nation, can readily pay the small economic price and accept the incidental difficulties for the sake of the larger end. thus the deciding principle must always be the welfare, happiness, growth, intelligence, helpfulness of each individual in harmony with all others. humanity is incarnatein each man. while, therefore, the individual must dedicate and, at times, sacrifice himself, it is for the sake, not of the state, church or other institution, but for the welfare of all--_man for mankind_. from so many sources the view finds expression that modern life has been "weakened by humanitarianism." if there is truth in the view, we would better take account of it and radically revise our ethical philosophy. if it is false, it is a damning error, the reiteration of which tends to undermine all that has been achieved for the spirit. an interesting comment on the view is the fact that, in spite of all its horrors, this war has given _no attested instance of arrant cowardice on any front_. cruelty, lust, brutality, hate: these have appeared in unspeakable guise, but apparently no cowardice or weak timidity; yet the mail clad heroes of ancient wars, who met their adversaries face to face, were subjected to no such strain as the men standing in trenches waiting momentarily death or mutilation from an unseen foe. no, modern life has not lost strong fiber and is capable of supreme heroism. the old society secured its leadership through _noblesse oblige_--the obligation of nobility. men of aristocratic family and rank felt that, because they stood above the people, they owed a certain leadership and service, and they gave it, often in abundant measure, but always condescendingly from above. we have lost "noblesse oblige": we may even be glad it is gone, if we can substitute for it something larger and better. it is not the obligation of nobility, but the obligation of humanity that is the need: to realize that all power is obligation. as you can, you owe; and as you know, you owe. if you have money, it is so much obligation of leadership and service. if you have talent, education, social or political influence, it is all so much obligation of leadership and service. if, as individuals, we can generally realize that and act upon it, then indeed we may hope to carry to successful completion the experiment of democracy and see our beloved country fulfill the measure of moral leadership to which we believe she is called among the nations of the earth, but fulfilling it not as master over slave, nor as one empire among others, but as a more experienced brother toward others following the same open path. xxii the hour of sacrifice the supreme world crisis is on. we have entered the war in the purest spirit of democracy. we state frankly in advance that we want no indemnity, no extension of territory. we war with no people, except as that people identifies itself with aggressive autocracy and imperialism, imperilling our safety, as of all democracies, and seeking to ride tyrannically and unjustly over the rights and liberties of other peoples. thus we enter the war solely for the cause of democracy and humanity. the hour of sacrifice has struck for the american people: will it rise to the test? when one considers the characteristics of our surface life for recent decades--the devotion to money-getting, the rapid increase of senseless and debauching luxury, the reckless frivolity, the unthinking haste and selfish pleasure-seeking--one questions. underneath, however, is a tremendous latent idealism. we are young, enthusiastic, capable of glorious consecration. cynical disillusionment is all upon the surface --the cult of the clique of cleverness, uprooted from the soil of common life and the deeps of the eternal verities. beneath in the great mass of the people is profound faith in life, deep trust in the ideal, belief in the great future of humanity. democracy will justify itself. we shall rise to the test; but how we need to hear and heed the call! "awake america" means americans awake! for in democracy the individual is the soul. on each person rests the responsibility. let us accept the bitter burden and meet the supreme test, giving time, money, service, life and those we love better than life, for the sake of the safer, freer, nobler world that is to be. since we stood apart so long and entered the horrible devastation so late, it is our privilege to do all we can to save the spiritual heritage of humanity, to keep our hearts clean from the corrosive acid of national and racial hatred, to do all in our power to remove it from the breasts of others. injustice in high places is possible only because there is injustice in the hearts of men. to overthrow tyranny is but the initial step of emancipation: unless the tyrant hate in the heart is dethroned, the external tyrant, in some form of social injustice will surely return. he who conquers hate and the lust for revenge in his own breast is spiritually free and master of the tyrant that wrongs him. thus it is our privilege and duty to hate no one; but to hate injustice, greed, tyranny, aggressive selfishness, the wicked ambitions of autocratic imperialism, to resist and help to overthrow them, and so do our part in bringing in the free brotherhood of the nations and peoples in one humanity, that will be the dawn of the longed-for era of universal and permanent peace for mankind. * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note: | | | | inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | obvious typographical errors have been corrected. for | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * proclaim liberty! also by gilbert seldes on related subjects your money and your life mainland the years of the locust against revolution the stammering century the seven living arts the united states and the war (london, ) this is america (moving picture) and the movies come from america the movies and the talkies the future of drinking the wings of the eagle lysistrata (a modern version) _proclaim_ liberty! _by_ gilbert seldes proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto them.... leviticus xxv, . [illustration] the greystone press new york printed in the united states of america by the william byrd press, inc. richmond, virginia to the children who will have to live in the world we are making acknowledgements thanks are given to the macmillan company for their permission to quote several paragraphs from arthur koestler's _darkness at noon_ in my first chapter. _the grand strategy_ by h.a. sargeaunt and geoffrey west, referred to in chapter two, is published by thomas y. crowell co. g.s. contents page chapter i total victory chapter ii strategy for the citizen chapter iii united...? chapter iv "the strategy of truth" chapter v the forgotten document chapter vi "the population of these states" chapter vii address to europe chapter viii the science of short wave chapter ix definition of america chapter x popularity and politics chapter xi the tools of democracy chapter xii democratic control chapter xiii the liberty bell proclaim liberty! chapter i total victory the peril we are in today is this: for the first time since we became a nation, a power exists strong enough to destroy us. this book is about the strength we have to destroy our enemies--where it lies, what hinders it, how we can use it. it is not about munitions, but about men and women; it deals with the unity we have to create, the victory we have to win; it deals with the character of america, what it has been and is and will be. and since character is destiny, this book is about the destiny of america. the next few pages are in the nature of counter-propaganda. with the best of motives, and the worst results, americans for months after december , , said that pearl harbor was a costly blessing because it united all americans and made us understand why the war was inevitable. a fifty-mile bus trip outside of new york--perhaps even a subway ride within its borders--would have proved both of these statements blandly and dangerously false. american unity could not be made in japan; like most other imports from that country, it was a cheap imitation, lasting a short time, and costly in the long run; and recognition of the nature of the war can never come as the result of anything but a realistic analysis of our own purposes as well as those of our enemies. what follows is, obviously, the work of a citizen, not a specialist. for some twenty years i have observed the sources of american unity and dispersion; during the past fifteen years my stake in the future of american liberty has been the most important thing in my life, as it is the most important thing in the life of anyone whose children will live in the world we are now creating. i am therefore not writing frivolously, or merely to testify to my devotion; i am writing to persuade--to uncover sources of strength which others may have overlooked, to create new weapons, to stir new thoughts. if i thought the war for freedom could be won by writing lies, i would write lies. i am afraid the war will be lost if we do not face the truth, so i write what i believe to be true about america--about its past and present and future, meaning its history and character and destiny--but mostly about the present, with only a glance at our forgotten past, and a declaration of faith in the future which is, i hope, the inevitable result of our victory. we know the name and character of our enemy--the axis; but after months of war we are not entirely convinced that it intends to destroy us because we do not see why it has to destroy us. destroy; not defeat. the desperate war we are fighting is still taken as a gigantic maneuvre; obviously the axis wants to "win" battles and dictate "peace terms". we still use these phrases of , unaware that the purpose of axis war is not defeat of an enemy, but destruction of his national life. we have seen it happen in france and poland and norway and holland; but we cannot imagine that the nazis intend actually to appoint a german governor general over the mississippi valley, a gauleiter in the new england provinces, and forbid us to read newspapers, go to the movies or drink coffee; we cannot believe that the axis intends to destroy the character of america, annihilating the liberties our ancestors fought for, and the level of comfort which we cherished so scrupulously in later generations. in moments of pure speculation, when we wonder what would happen "at worst", we think of a humiliating defeat on land and sea, bombardment of our cities, surrender--and a peace conference at which we and britain agree to pay indemnities; perhaps, until we pay off, german and japanese soldiers would be quartered in our houses, police our streets; but we assume that after the "shooting war" was over, they would not ravish our women. _victory_ (_axis model_) all this is the war of . in the purpose of axis victory is the destruction of the american system, the annihilation of the financial and industrial power of the united states, the reduction of this country to an inferior position in the world and the enslavement of the american people by depriving them of their liberty and of their wealth. the actual physical slavery of the american people and the deliberate taking over of our factories and farms and houses and motor cars and radios are both implied in an axis victory; the enslavement is automatic, the robbery of our wealth will depend on axis economic strategy: if we can produce more _for them_ by remaining in technical possession of our factories, they will let us keep them. we cannot believe this is so because we see no reason for it. our intentions toward the german and italian people are not to enslave and impoverish; on the contrary, we think of the defeat of their leaders as the beginning of liberty. we do not intend to make venice a tributary city, nor essen a factory town run by american government officials. we may police the streets of berlin until a democratic government proves its strength by punishing the ss and the gestapo, until the broken prisoners of dachau return in whatever triumph they can still enjoy. but our basic purpose is still to defeat the armed forces of the axis and to insure ourselves against another war by the creation of free governments everywhere. (neither the american people nor their leaders have believed that a responsible peaceable government can be erected _now_ in japan. toward the japanese our unclarified intentions are simple: annihilation of the power, to such an extent that it cannot rise again--as a military or a commercial rival. the average citizen would probably be glad to hand over to the chinese the job of governing japan.) fortunately, the purposes of any war alter as the war goes on; as we fight we discover the reasons for fighting and the intensity of our effort, the cost of victory, the danger of defeat, all compel us to think desperately about the kind of peace for which we are fighting. the vengeful articles of the treaty of versailles were written after the armistice by politicians; the constructive ones were created during the war, and it is quite possible that they would have been accepted by americans if the united states had fought longer and therefore thought longer about them. we shall probably have time to think out a good peace in this war. but we will not create peace of any kind unless we know why an axis peace means annihilation for us; and why, at the risk of defeat in the field and revolution at home, the axis powers had to go to war on the united states. if we impose our moral ideas upon the future, the attack on pearl harbor will stand as the infamous immediate cause of the war; by axis standards, pearl harbor was the final incident of one series of events, the first incident of another, all having the same purpose, the destruction of american democracy--which, so long as it endured, undermined the strength of the totalitarian powers. why? why are hitler and mussolini and tojo insecure if we survive? why were we in danger so long as they were victorious? the answer lies in the character of the two groups of nations; in all great tragedy, the _reason_ has to be found in the character of those involved; the war is tragic, in noble proportions, and we have to know the character of our enemy, the character of our own people, too, to understand why it was inevitable--and how we will win. our character, molded by our past, upholds or betrays us in our present crisis, and so creates our future. that is the sense in which character is destiny. we know everything hateful about our enemies; long before the war began we knew the treachery of the japanese military caste, the jackal aggression of mussolini, the brutality and falseness of hitler; and the enthusiastic subservience of millions of people to each of these leaders. but these things do not explain why we are a danger to the axis, and the axis to us. "_historic necessity_" the profound necessity underlying this war rises from the nature of fascism: it is a combination of forces and ideas; the forces are new, but the basic ideas have occurred at least once before in history, as the feudal order. democracy destroyed feudalism; and feudalism, returning in a new form as fascism, must destroy democracy or go down in the attempt; the new order and the new world cannot exist side by side, because they are both expanding forces; they have touched one another and only one will survive. we might blindly let the new despotism live although it is the most expansive and dynamic force since ; but it cannot let us live. we could co-exist with czarism because it was a shrinking force; or with british imperialism because its peak of expansion was actually reached before ours began. we could not have lived side by side with trotskyite communism because it was as aggressive as the exploding racialism of the german nazis. as it happened, stalin, not trotsky, took over from lenin; socialism in one country supplanted "the permanent revolution". stalin made a sort of peace with all the world; he called off his dogs of propaganda; he allowed german communism to be beaten to death in concentration camps; and, as trotsky might have said, the "historical obligation" to destroy capitalist-democracy was undertaken not by the bearded old marxian enemies of capital, but by capital's own young sadists, the storm troopers, called in by the frightened bankers and manufacturers of italy and germany. that is why, since , realist democrats have known that the enemy had to be hitler, not stalin. it was not a choice between ideologies; it was a choice between degrees of expansion. moreover, stalin himself recognized the explosive force of fascism in germany and shrank within his own borders; he withdrew factories to the urals, he dispersed his units of force as far from the german border as he could. by doing so, he became the ideal ally of all those powers whom hitler's expanding pressure was discommoding. the relatively static democratic nations of europe, the shrinking semi-socialist states like france and austria, were bruised by contact with hitler; presently they were absorbed because the nazi geography demanded a continent for a military base. the destruction of america was a geographical necessity, for hitler; and something more. geographically, the united states lies between hitler's enemies, england and russia; we are not accustomed to the thought, but the fact is that we are a transatlantic base for england's fleet; so long as we are undefeated, the fleet remains a threat to germany. look at the other side: we are a potential transpacific base for russia; our fleet can supply the soviets and china; russia can retreat toward siberian ports and join us. so we dominate the two northern oceans, and with russia, the arctic as well. that is the geographic reason for hitler's attack on us. the moral reason is greater than the strategic reason: the history of the united states must be destroyed, its future must turn black and bitter; because fasci-feudalism, the new order, cannot rest firmly on its foundations until democracy perishes from the earth. so long as a democracy (with a comparatively high standard of living) survives, the propaganda of fascism must fail; the essence of that propaganda is that democratic nations cannot combine liberty and security. in order to have security, says hitler, you must give up will and want, freedom of action and utterance; you must be disciplined and ordered--because the modern world is too complex to allow for the will of the individual. the democracies insist that the rich complexity of the world was created by democratic freedom and that production, distribution, security and progress have not yet outstripped the capacity of man, so that there is room for the private life, the undisciplined, even the un-social. the essential democratic belief in "progress" is not a foolish optimism, it is basic belief in the desirability of _change_; and we, democratic people, believe that the critical unregimented individual must have some leeway so that progress will be made. the terror of change in which dictators live is shown in their constant appeal to permanence; we know that the only thing permanent in life is change; when change ceases, life ceases. it does not surprise us that the logic of fascism ends in death. so long as the democratic nations achieve change without revolution, and prosperity without regimentation, the nazi states are in danger. in a few generations they may indoctrinate their people to love poverty and ignorance, to fear independence; for fascism, the next twenty years are critical. unless we, the democratic people, are destroyed now, the fascist adults of to will still know that freedom and wealth co-exist in this world and are better than slavery. so much--which is enough--was true even before the declaration of war; since then the nazi-fascists must prove that democracies cannot defend themselves, cannot sacrifice comfort, cannot invent and produce engines of war, cannot win victories. and we are equally compelled, for our own safety, to destroy the _principle_ which tries to destroy us. the alternative to victory over america is therefore not defeat--or an inconclusive truce. the alternative is annihilation for the fascist regime and death for hundreds of thousands of nazi party men. they will be liquidated because when they are defeated they will no longer have a function to perform; their only function is the organization of victory. the fascist powers are expanding and are situated so that with their subordinates, they can control the world. and the purpose of their military expansion is to exclude certain nations from the markets of the world. even for the "self sufficient" united states, this means that the standard of living must go down--drastically and for ever. the policy is not entirely new. it develops from tariff barriers and subsidies; we have suffered from it at the hands of our best friends--under the stevenson act regulating rubber prices, for instance; we have profited by it, as when we refused to sell helium to germany or when our tariff laws kept britain and france out of our markets, so that they never were able to pay their war debts. this means only that we have been living in a capitalist world and have defended ourselves against other capitalists, as well as we could. _revolution in reverse_ the new thing under nazi-fascism is the destruction of private business, buying and selling. as trade is the basic activity of our time, nazi-fascism is revolutionary; it is also reactionary; and there is nothing in the world more dangerous than a reactionary revolution. the communist revolution was radical and whoever had any stake in the world--a house, a car, a job--shied away from the uncertainty of the future. but the reactionary revolution of mussolini and hitler instantly captivated the rich and well-born; to them, fascism was not a mere protection against the reds, it was a positive return to the days of absolute authority; it was the annihilation of a hundred and fifty years of democracy, it blotted out the french and american revolutions, it erased the names of napoleon and garibaldi from continental european history, leaving the name of metternich all the more splendid in its isolation. the manufacturers of motor cars and munitions were terrified of reds in the factories; the great bankers and landowners looked beyond the momentary danger, and they embraced fascism because they hoped it would destroy the power let loose by the world war--which was first political and then economic democracy. this was, in theory, correct; fascism meant to destroy democracy, but it had to destroy capitalism with it. the idiots who ran the financial and industrial world in the 's proved their incompetence by the end of ; but their frivolous and irresponsible minds were exposed years earlier when they began to support the power which by its own confessed character had to destroy them. it is a pleasant irony that ten minutes with karl marx or lenin or with a parlor pink could have shown the great tycoons that they were committing suicide. only an enemy can really appreciate karl marx. the faithful have to concentrate on the future coming of the communists' millenium; but the sceptic can admire the cool analysis of the past by which marx arrived at his criticism of the capitalist system. in that analysis marx simplifies history so: no economic system lives for ever. each system has in it the germ of its own successor. the feudal system came to its end when columbus broke through its geographical walls. (gutenburg and leonardo and a thousand others broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and luther through the social and religious barriers.) with these clues we can see that democratic capitalism is the successor to feudalism. from this point marx had to go into prophecy and according to his followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in the 's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in . he did not see all its results--the enormous increase in the number of prosperous families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into communism. but to the sceptic only one thing in the marxian prophecy is important. he says that in the later stages of capitalism, it will become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change into a _new_ system. (according to marx, this new system will be communism.) there were moments under the grim eyes of mr. hoover when all the parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. there are apparently some americans who wish that the new deal had not interposed itself between the gold standard and the red flag. these are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have studied marx before flirting with the fascists. for even the rudimentary analysis above shows that capitalism cannot _grow into_ fascism; fascism moves _backward_ from democratic capitalism, it moves into the system which democracy destroyed--the feudal system. the capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has no future if it goes back to the past. and fascism is the discarded past of capitalism. we think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have declared war on us. now we see how natural is the alliance between the european states who wish to restore feudalism and the asiatic state which never abandoned it. now we recognize the nazi or fascist party as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. but we do not yet see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free state--and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as hitler is to destroy democracy. we strike back at japan because japan attacked us, and fight germany and italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war until we understand that the axis had to attack us and that we must destroy the system which made the attack inevitable. _walled town and open door_ at first glance, the feudal nature of fascism seems unimportant. in pure logic, maybe, feudal and democratic systems cannot co-exist, but in fact, feudal japan did exist in and the united states was enjoying jacksonian democracy. there must be something more than abstract hostility between the two systems. there is. feudalism is a walled town; democracy is a ship at sea and a covered wagon. the capitalist pioneer gaps every wall in his path and his path is everywhere. the defender of the wall must destroy the invader before he comes near. in commercial terms, the fascists must conquer us in order to eliminate us as competitors for world trade. we can understand the method if we compare fascism at peace with democracy at war. in the first days of the war we abandoned several essential freedoms: speech and press and radio and assembly as far as they might affect the conduct of the war; and then, with more of a struggle, we gave up the right to manufacture motor cars, the right to buy or sell tires; we accepted an allotment of sugar; we abandoned the right to go into the business of manufacturing radio sets; we allowed the government to limit our installment buying; we neither got nor gave credit as freely as before; we gave up, in short, the system of civil liberty and free business enterprise--in order to win the war. six hundred years ago, all over europe the economy of peace was exactly our economy of war. in the middle ages, the _right_ to become a watchmaker did not exist; the guild of watchmakers accepted or rejected an applicant. by this limitation, the total number of watches produced was roughly governed; the price was also established (and overcharging was a grave offense in the middle ages). foreign competition was excluded; credit was for financiers, and the installment system had not been invented. the feudalism of six hundred years ago is the peace-time fascism of six years ago. the fascist version of feudalism is state control of production. in nazi germany the liberty to work at a trade, to manufacture a given article, to stop working, to change professions, were all seriously limited. the supply of materials was regulated by the state, the number of radios to be exported was set by the state in connection with the purchase of strategic imports; the state could encourage or prevent the importation of coffee or helium or silk stockings; it could and did force men and women to raise crops, to make fuses, to learn flying, to stop reading. it created a feudal state far more benighted than any in the actual middle ages; it was in peace _totally_ coordinated for production--far more so than we are now, at war. the purpose of our sacrifice of liberty is to make things a thousand times faster than before; to save raw materials we abolish the cuff on our trousers and we use agate pots instead of aluminum; we work longer hours and work harder; we keep machines going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week--all for the single purpose of maximum output. for the same purpose, the fascist state is organized _at peace_--to out-produce and _under-sell_ its competitors. the harried german people gave up their freedom in order to recover prosperity. they became a nation of war-workers in an economic war. a vast amount of their production went into tanks and stukas; another segment went into export goods to be traded for strategic materials; and only a small amount went for food and the comforts of life. almost nothing went into luxuries. _burning books--and underselling_ that is why the _internal_ affairs of germany became of surpassing importance to us. whether we knew it or not, we were in competition with the labor battalions. when we denounced the nazi suppression of free speech, the jailing of religious leaders, the silencing of catholics, the persecution of jews, we were as correct economically as we were ethically; the destruction of liberty had to be accomplished in germany as the comfort level fell, to prevent criticism and conflict. because liberals were tortured and books burned and jews and catholics given over to satisfy a frightful appetite for hatred, the people of germany were kept longer at their work, and got less and less butter, and made more and more steel to undersell us in soviet russia or the argentine; they made also more and more submarines to sink our ships if we ever came to war. every liberty erased by hitler was an economic attack on us, it made slave labor a more effective competitor to our free labor. the concentration camp and the blackguards on the streets were all part of an _economic_ policy, to create a feudal serfdom in the place of free labor. if the policy succeeds, we will have to break down our standard of living and give up entirely our habits of freedom, in order to meet the competition of slave labor. it means today that we will not have cheap motor cars and presently it may mean that we will not have high test steel or meat every day. victory for the axis system means that we work for the germans and the japanese, literally, actually, on their terms, in factories bossed by their local representatives; and anything less than complete victory for us means that we work harder and longer for less and less, paying for defeat by accepting a mean standard of living, not daring to fight our way into the markets of the world which fascism has closed to us. readers of _you can't do business with hitler_ will not need to be convinced again that the two systems--his and ours--are mutually incompatible. fortunately for us, they are also mutually destructive. the basis of fascism is, as i have noted, the feudal hope of a fixed unchangeable form of society which will last forever; the basis of democracy is change (which we call progress). hitler announces that nazism will last a thousand years; the japanese assert that their society has lasted longer; and the voice of mussolini, when it used to be heard, spoke of ancient rome. we who are too impatient of the past, and need to understand our tradition, are at any rate aware of one thing--it is a tradition of change. (jefferson to lincoln to theodore roosevelt--the acceptance of change, even of radical change, is basic in american history.) we might tolerate the tactics of fascism; the racial hatred, the false system of education, the attack on religion, all might pass if they weren't part of the great strategic process of the fascists, which is our mortal enemy, as our process is theirs. they exclude and we penetrate; they have to _destroy_ liberty in order to control making and buying and selling and using steel and bread and radios, and we have to _create_ liberty in order to create more customers for more things. they have to suppress dissent because dissent means difference which no feudal system can afford; we have to encourage criticism because only free inquiry destroys error and discovers new and useful truths. these hostile actions make us enemies because our penetration will not accept the axis wall thrown up around nations normally free and friendly to us; and the axis must make us into fascists because there can be no exceptions in a system dedicated to conformity. the whole world must accept a world-system. in particular, we must be eliminated because we do expose the fraud of fascism--which is that liberty must be sacrificed to attain power. this is an open principle of fascism, as it is of all dictatorships and "total" states. it is very appealing to tyrants and to weaklings, and the ruthlessness of the attack on liberty seems "realistic" even to believers in democracy--especially during the critical moments when action is needed and democracies seem to do nothing but talk. the truth is that our executive is tremendously prompt and unhampered in war time; the appeaser of fascism does not tell the truth; he wants an end to talk, which is dangerous, because he is always at war and the secret fascist would have to admit that his perpetual war is against the people of the united states. so he says only that in modern times, liberty is too great a luxury, too easily abused; he says that a great state is too delicately balanced to tolerate the whims and idiosyncrasies of individuals; if the state has discovered the best diet for all the citizens, then no citizen can "prefer" another diet, and no expert may cast doubt on the official rations. to cause uncertainty is to diminish efficiency; to back "wrong" ideas is treason. one of the best descriptions of this state of mind occurs in a page of arthur koester's _darkness at noon_. it is fiction, but not untrue: "a short time ago, our leading agriculturist, b., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash. no. is all for potash; therefore b. and the thirty had to be liquidated as _saboteurs_. in a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war. if no. was in the right, history will absolve him, and the execution of the thirty-one men will be a mere bagatelle. if he was wrong.... "it is that alone that matters: who is objectively in the right. the cricket-moralists are agitated by quite another problem: whether b. was subjectively in good faith when he recommended nitrogen. if he was not, according to their ethics he should be shot, even if it should subsequently be shown that nitrogen would have been better after all. if he was in good faith, then he should be acquitted and allowed to continue making propaganda for nitrate, even if the country should be ruined by it.... "that is, of course, complete nonsense. for us the question of subjective good faith is of no interest. he who is in the wrong must pay; he who is in the right will be absolved. that is the law of historical credit; it was our law." intellectual fascists are particularly liable to the error of thinking that this sort of thing is above morality, beyond good and evil. the "cricket-moralists" are people like ourselves and the english, who are agitated because "innocent" men are put to death; the hard-headed ones answer that innocence isn't important; effectiveness is what counts. yet the democratic-cricket-morality is in the long run more realistic than the tough school which kills its enemies first and then finds out if they were guilty. the reason we allow a scientist to cry for nitrates after we have decided on potash is that we have to keep scientific investigation alive; we cannot trust ourselves for too long to the potash group. in five years, both nitrate and potash may be discarded because we have found something better. and no scientist will for long retain his critical pioneering spirit if an official superior can reject his research. (an army board rejected the research of general william mitchell and it took a generation for army men to recover initiative; and this was in an organization accustomed to respect rank and tradition. in science, which is more sensitive, the only practical thing is to reward the heretic and the explorer even while one adopts the idea of the orthodox.) this question of heresy, apparently so trifling, is critical for us because it is a clue to the weakness of hitlerism and it provides us with the only strategy by which hitlerism can be destroyed. chapter ii strategy for the citizen there is a tendency at this moment to consider hitler a master strategist, master psychologist, master statesman. his analysis of democracy, however, leaves something unsaid, and the nervous strong men who admire hitler, as well as the weaklings who need "leadership", are doing their best to fill in the gaps. the hitlerian concept of totality allows no room for difference; an official bread ration and an official biochemistry are equally to be accepted by everyone; in democracy hitler finds a deplorable tendency to shrink from rationing and to encourage deviations from the established principles of biochemistry. this, he says, weakens the state; for one thing it leads to endless discussion. (hitler is an orator, not a debater; dislike of letting other people talk is natural; his passion for action on a world-scale, immense in space, enduring for all time, has the same terrific concentration on himself.) hitler's admirers in a democracy take this up with considerable pleasure; in each of his victories they see an argument against the bill of rights. then war comes; sugar is wanting and we accept a ration card; supreme commands are established in various fields; and the sentiment spreads that "we can only beat hitler by becoming a 'total' state". (no one dares say "nazi".) hitler, discerning in us a toleration of dissent, has driven hard into every crevice, trying to split us apart, like cannel coal. he has tried to turn dissent into disunion--and he has been helped by some of the most loyal and patriotic americans almost as much as he has been helped by bundists. we have not known how to deal with dissent; we stopped looking for the causes of disagreement; even when war came, we confused the areas of human action in which difference is vital with the areas in which difference is a mortal danger. the moment we saw the direction of hitler's drive, which was to magnify our differences, we began to encourage him by actively intensifying all our disagreements; the greater our danger, the more we were at odds. the results were serious enough. no policy governing production had been accepted by industry; no policy governing labor relations had been put into practise so that it was operating smoothly; no great stock of vital raw materials was laid up; no great stock of vital war machinery had been created; no keen awareness of the significance of the war had become an integrated part of american thought; no awareness of all the possibilities of attack had become an integrated part of military and naval thought. to this pitch of unreadiness the technique of "divide and disturb" had brought us--but it had, none the less, failed. for the purpose of disruption in america was to paralyze our will, to prevent us from entering the war, to create a dangerous internal front if we did enter the war. what we proved was this: dissent is not a symptom of weakness, it is a source of strength. it is the counterpart of the great scientific methods of exploration, comparison, proof. our dissents mean that we continue to search; they mean that we do not rule out improvement after we have accepted a machine or a method. (we carried this "dissent" to an extreme in "yearly models" of motor cars and almost daily models of lipstick; but we did manufacture in quantity, and the error of _change before production_ which stalled our aircraft program of was not repeated.) _why we can't use hitler_ if we "need a hitler" to defeat hitler, we are lost, at this moment, irretrievably, because the _final_ triumph of hitlerism is to make us need hitler. the truth is we cannot use a hitler, we cannot use fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the one field where totality has always existed, which is war. so far as war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field; but not "total government". we have to be told (since it is not a matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (the united states army has officially declared against complete regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it, because "the war department considers that every american soldier should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.") we cannot use a hitler because we lack the time. we cannot catch up with hitler on hitlerism. we cannot wait ten years to re-condition the people of america, the ten vital years which hitler spent enslaving the german mind were spent by us in digging the american people out from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in . we are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the new deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual, argumentative. we cannot be changed over to the german model. perhaps in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an american-type dictator, a huey long; in wartime, when people undergo incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. otherwise people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. that is why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator. the alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which hitler calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential substance of unity). i do not mean five admirals disputing command of one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different aeroplane engines. i mean the combination of elements, as they are combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are combined in the people we are. we have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of our state; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two things--the standard and the variant. now we face death--called totality. for us it is death; and we can not avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by destroying whatever is deadly to us. it is hard for a layman to translate the "strategy of variety" into terms of production or naval movement. the translation is being made every day by men in the factories and in the field; instinctively they follow the technique of variety because it is natural to them. all the layman can do is to watch and make sure that out of panic we do not betray ourselves to the enemy. it is not a matter of military technique, but of common sense that we can only destroy our enemy out of our strength, striking at his weakness; we can never defeat him by striking with our weakest arm against his strongest. and our strong point is the variety, the freedom, the independence of our thought and action. hitler calls all this a weakness, because he has destroyed it in his own country; and so gives us the clue to his own weak spot. _has hitler a weakness?_ in the face of the stupendous victories of germany, it is hard to say that hitler's army has a weak spot; but it did not take london or moscow in its first attempts, nor suez. somewhere in this formidable strength a weakness is to be discovered; it will not be discovered by us if we are intimidated into imitation. we have to be flexible, feeling out our adversary, falling back when we have to, lunging forward in another place or on another level; for this war is being fought on several planes at once, and if we are not strong enough today on one, we can fight on another; we are, in fact, fighting steadily on the production front, intermittently on the v (or foreign-propaganda) front, on the front of domestic stability, on the financial front (in connection with the united nations); and the war front itself is divided into military and naval (with air in each) and transport; our opportunity is to win by creating our own most effective front, and keep hammering on it while we get ready to fight on the ones our enemies have chosen. every soldier feels the difference between his own army and any other; every general or statesman knows that the kind of war a nation fights rises out of the kind of nation it is. this is the form of strategy which the layman has to understand--in self-defense against the petrified mind which either will not change the methods of the last war, or will scrap everything in order to imitate the enemy. the layman knows something of warfare now, because the layman is in it. he knows that the tank and the stuka and the parachute troop were separate alien inventions combined by the german high command; but combinations of various arms is not an exclusively german conception. the new concept in this war is ten years old, it is the sacrifice of a nation to its army, the creation of mass-munitions, the concentration on offensive striking power. all of these are successful against broken and betrayed armies in france, against small armies unsupported by tanks and planes; they are not entirely successful against huge armies, fighting under trusted leaders, for a civilization they love, an army of individual heroes, supported by guerillas on one side, and an incalculable production power on the other. possibly the soviet union has discovered one weakness in the german war-strategy; it may not be the weakness through which we can strike; we may have to find another. we have to find the weakness of japan, too--and we are not so inclined to imitate them. there is a famous picture of winston churchill, hatless in the street, with a napkin in his hand, looking up at the sky; it was in antwerp in and churchill had left his dinner to see enemy aircraft in the sky--an omen of things to come. at antwerp churchill had tried to head off the german swing to the sea, but antwerp was a defeat and churchill returned to london, still looking for some way to refuse the german system of the trench, the bombardment, and the breakthrough. he tried it with the tank; he tried it at gallipoli; finally the allies tried it, half-heartedly, at salonika. the war, on germany's terms, was a stalemate and germany might have broken through; the war ended because the balance was dislocated when america came in and, simultaneously, both england and america began to fight the war also on the propaganda level. by that time churchill was "discredited"; he had tried to shorten the war by two years and the british forces, with success in their hands, had failed to strike home, failed to send the one more battleship, the one more division which would have insured victory--because kitchener and the war office and the french high command wanted to keep on fighting the war in the german way. _escape from despair_ the desperation which overcomes the inexpert civilian at the thought of fighting the military machines of germany and japan is justified _only_ if we propose to fight them on their terms, in the way they propose to us. analogies are dangerous, but there is a sense in which war is a chess game (as chess is a war game). white opens with queen's pawn to qu , and black recognizes the gambit. he can accept or decline. if he accepts, it is because he thinks he can fight well on that basis, but black can also reject white's plan of campaign. the good player is one who can break out of the strategy which the other tries to impose. we have felt ourselves incapable of fighting hitler because we hate hitlerism and we do not want to think as he does, feel as he does, act as he does--with more horror, more cruelty, more debasement of humanity, in order to defeat him. and the public statements of our leaders have necessarily concealed any new plan of attack; in fact we have heard chiefly of super-fascist production, implying our acceptance of the fascist tactics in the field; the best we can expect is that soon we, not they, will take the offensive. if this were all, it would still leave us fighting the fascist war. the civilian's totally untrained dislike of this prospect is of considerable importance because it is a parallel to the citizen's authoritative and decisive objection to the hitlerian strategy of propaganda; and if the civilian holds out, if he discovers our native natural strategy of civil action in the war, the army will be constantly recruiting anti-fascists, will live in an atmosphere of inventive anti-fascism, and therefore will never completely fall under the spell of the enemy's tactics. that is why it is important for the citizen to know that he is right. _we do not have to fight hitler in his way_; that is what hitler wants us to do, because _if we do we can not win_. there is another way--although we may not have found it yet. in its celebrated "orientation course" the united states army explains the strategy of the war to every one of its soldiers, not to make them strategists, but to make them better soldiers. the civilian needs at least as much knowledge so that he is not over-elated by a stroke of luck or too cast down by disaster. the jokes about amateur strategists and the high command's justifiable resentment of ignorant criticism are both beside the point; civilians do not need text books on tactics; they need to know the nature of warfare. they needed desperately to know in february, , why general macarthur was performing a useful function in bataan and why bombers were not sent to his aid; and this information came to them from the president. but the president is not the only one who can tell civilians how long it takes to transport a division and put it into action; how air and sea power interact; what a beach action involves; and a few other facts which would allay impatience and give the worker in the factory some sense of the importance of his work. the civilian in war work or out of it should know something about war, and in particular he should know that there are several kinds of war, one of which is correct and appropriate and effective for us. _military mummery_ it might be a good thing if some of the mumbo-jumbo about military strategy were reduced to simple terms, so that the civilians, whose lives and fortunes and sacred honor are involved, would know what is happening to them. the military mind, aided by the military expert, loves to use special terms; until recently the commentator on strategy was as obscure and difficult as a music critic, and despatches from the field as obscure as prescriptions in latin. it is supposed that doctors wrote in latin not only because it was an exact and universal language, but because it was not understood by laymen, so it gave mystery and authority to their prescriptions. latin is still not understood, but the simple art of advertising has destroyed a vast amount of business for the doctors because ads in english persuaded the ignorant to use quack remedies and patent and proprietary medicines, without consulting the doctor. a rebellion like this against the military mind may occur; experts are now writing for the popular press, and talking in elementary terms to millions by radio. they cannot teach the techniques of correlated tank and air attack any more than music critics can teach the creation of head tones. but they can expound the fundamentals--and so expose the military leadership to the _criticism it desperately needs_ if it is to function properly. the essentials of warfare are dreadfully simple--the production manager of any great industrial concern deals with most of them every day. you have to get materials and equipment; train men to use certain tools and instruments; bring power to bear at chosen points, in sufficient quantity, at the right time, for the right length of time; you have to combine the various kinds of force at your disposal, and arrange a schedule, as there is a schedule for chassis and body work in a motor car factory, so that the right chassis is in the right place as its body is lowered upon it; you have to stop or go on, according to judgments based on information. the terrifying decisions, the choice of place and time, the selection of instruments, the allocation of power to several points, are made by the high command on the grand scale or by a sergeant if his officer is shot down; and the right judgments distinguish the great commander or the good platoon leader from the second rate. the civilian, without information, cannot decide what to do; but, as britain's _civilian_ courts of inquiry have shown, he can tell whether the right decisions have been made. he can tell as well as the greatest commander, that indecision and dispersion of forces made success at the dardanelles impossible in ; or that lack of a unified plan of tank attack made the wreck of france certain in . the civilian american who has taken a hundred detours on motor roads can understand even the purely military elements of a flanking movement; the industrial american need not be baffled by the problems of fire-power, coordination, or supply. we can understand the war if the mystery is stripped away, and if we are allowed to understand that the wrong strategy is as fatal to us as the wrong prescription. i believe that we will have to strip the false front from international diplomacy, from warfare, from all the inherited "mysteries" which are still pre-revolutionary in essence. we will have to bring these things up to date because our lives depend on them, we can no longer depend on the strategy of gustavus adolphus or the diplomacy of metternich. five million soldiers in khaki, with a nation's life disrupted for their support, require a different strategy from that of burgoyne's hired hessians; and a hundred and thirty million individuals simply do not want the intrigue and congress-dances diplomacy which traded territory, set up kings, and found pretexts for good wars. we have destroyed a good deal of the mummery of economics--not without help; politics has become more familiar to us, we now know that a thief in office is a thief, that tariffs are not made by abstract thinkers, but by manufacturers and farmers and factory workers; we know, with some poignancy, that taxes are paid by people like ourselves and we are beginning to know that taxes are spent to keep people alive and healthy and in jobs and, to a minute extent, also to keep people cheerful, their minds alert, their spirits buoyant. the very fact that we are now _all_ critics of spending is a great advance, because it means we are all paying; when we are all critics of foreign policy it will mean that we are all signing contracts with other nations; and when we are all critics of war, it will mean that we are all fighting. as a student, i know what a layman can know about strategy; less about tactics; as a citizen i should be of greater service to my country if i knew more. what i have learned, from many sources, seems to hold together and to demonstrate one thing: behind strategy in the field is a strategy of a people in action; and victory comes to the leaders who organize and use the national forces in keeping with the national character. i have gone to several authorities to discover whether the "tactics of variety" (a "natural" in propaganda) has any counterpart in the field. i cannot pretend that it is an accepted idea; it is hardly more than a name for an attitude of mind; but i did find authority for the feeling that an american (or united nations) strategy need not be--and must not be--the strategy of hitler. so much the civilian can take to his bosom, for comfort. _a variety of strategies_ the greatest comfort to myself was in a little book published just in time to corroborate a few guesses and immensely to widen my outlook; it is called _grand strategy_; the authors are h.a. sargeaunt, a specialist in poison gas and tank design, a scientist and historian; and geoffrey west, biographer and student of politics; both british. although there are some difficult pages and some odd conclusions, this book is a revelation--particularly it shows the connection between war and the social conditions of nations making war; in the authors' own words, "war and society condition each other"; they connect war with progress and show how each nation can develop a strategy out of its own resources. the hint we all got at school, that the french revolution is responsible for vast civilian armies, is carried into a history of the nineteenth century--and into this war. the authors have their own names for each kind of war--each is a "solution" to the problem of victory. each adds a special factor to the body of strategy known at the time, and this added special factor rises from the country which uses it--from its methods of production, its education, its religion, its banking and commercial habits, and its whole social organization. napoleon's solution was based on the revolutionary enthusiasm of the french people; he added zeal, the intense application of force, speed of movement, repeated hammering, throwing in reserves. all of these things demand devotion, patriotic self-sacrifice, and these qualities had been created, for the french, by the republic; they were not qualities known to the mercenaries and small standing armies of napoleon's enemies. against napoleon's total use of the strategy of force, the british opposed a strength based on the way they lived; it was a sea-strength of blockade, but also on land they refused to accept the challenge of napoleon. they would not come out (until they were ready at waterloo) and let napoleon find their weak spot for the exercise of his force. wellington defeated napoleon at waterloo, but the turning point came years earlier at torres vedras in spain; as napoleon increased force, wellington increased "persistence"; it is called the "strategy of attrition" and it means that wellington's "aim was to wear down the enemy troops by inducing them to attack [where wellington] could withdraw to take up positions and fight again." today, getting news of a campaign like wellington's in spain, the average man would repeatedly read and hear headlines of retreat; he would get the impression of an uninterrupted series of defeats. but the peninsular war was actually a triumph for british arms. it was a triumph because wellington refused to fight in any way not natural to the british; his masterly retreats did not disturb the "inborn toughness and phlegm, that saving lack of imagination" which makes the british, as these british authors say, "good at retreats". moreover, this war of slow retreats gave britain time to develop a tremendous manufacturing power, to organize the blockade of napoleon and the merchant fleet for supply to spain. the whole history of modern england, its acceptance of the factory system, its naval supremacy, its relation to the continent, and its internal reforms--all rise from the kind of war wellington made, and the kind he refused to make. for the curious, the later "solutions" are: under bismark and moltke, increased training and use of equipment and material resources; under hitler, "synchronized timing" (connected with air-power and the impossibility of large-scale surprise; also connected with "alertness and intelligence" in the individual soldier, a frightening development under a totalitarian military dictatorship); and finally, under churchill, "the national sandbag defense", increasing "usable morale and initiative". sandbag defense gets its name from the battle of london; but it refers to all sorts of defensive operations--a bullet is shot into sand and the dislodged grains of sand form themselves again so that the next bullet has the same depth of sand to go through--unless the bullets come so fast in "synchronized timing" or blitzkrieg that the sand hasn't time to close over the gap again. the defense "demands that every person in the nation be capable of sticking to his task even without detailed orders from others, regardless of the odds against him and though it may mean certain death. _every_ person--not merely the trained minority. this happened at dunkirk...." at dunkirk the grains of sand were hundreds of small yachts, motor boats, trawlers, coasting vessels, many of which were taken to the dreadful beach by civilians virtually without orders; some of them became ferry-boats, taking men off the shore to the transports which could not get close enough, going back and forth, without stop--the grains of sand reforming until an army was rescued. these examples drive home the principle that a form or style of warfare must be found by each nation corresponding to the state of the nation _at that time_; the "psychology" of the nation may remain constant for a century, but the way to make war will change if the methods of production have changed. if the nation has lost (or won) colonies, if education has reached the poor, if child labor has ended (so that youths of eighteen are strong enough for tank duty), if women are without civil rights, if a wave of irreligion or political illiberality has swept over the country--if any vital change has occurred, the style of war must change also. every social change affects the kind of war we can fight, the kind we must discover for ourselves if we are to defeat an enemy who has chosen his style and is trying to impose it on us. the analysis of hitler's war-style must be left to experts; if its essence is "synchronized timing", our duty is to find a way of upsetting the time-table, not only by months, but by minutes. possibly the style developed by stalin can do both--by pulling back into the vast spaces of russia, stalin created a battlefield without shape or definition, which may have prevented the correlation of the parts of hitler's armies; by encouraging guerillas, he may have upset the timing of individual soldiers, tanks, and planes. the success of the eighth route army in china was based on a totally different military style, the only completely communist style on record; for the army was successful because it built a communist society on the march, actually and literally, establishing schools, manufacturing arms, bearing children, and fighting battles at the same time, so that at the end of several years the army had extricated itself from a trap, crossed and recrossed miles of enemy territory, reformed itself with more men and arms than it had at the beginning--and had operated as a center of living civilization for hundreds of thousands. the operations of chiang kai chek against the japanese are another example of rejecting the enemy's style; over the enormous terrain of china, the defending armies could scatter and hide from aircraft; the cities fell or were gutted by fire; but the people moved around them, the armies remained. japan's attack on britain and ourselves began with islands, where the lesson of china could not be applied; and the islands were dependencies, not free nations like china, so the psychology of defense was also different; in the opening phases there was no choice and the japanese forced us to accept their way of making war. their way, it appears, is appropriate to their beliefs, their requirements in food, their capacity to imitate europe, and dozens of other factors, not precisely similar to ours. their experience and outlook in life and ideas of honor may lead to the suicide bomber; ours do not. our dive bombers feel no shame if they miss a target; they have a duty which is to save their ships and return for another try; it is against the whole natural tradition of the west that a man should kill himself for the honor of a ruler; we would not send out an army with orders to gain honor by death, as we prefer to gain honor by victory. so in the true sense it would be suicidal for us to imitate the japanese; our heroism-to-the-death is the arrival, at the final moment, of a last reserve of courage and devotion; it is not a planned bravery, nor a communal devotion, it is as private as liberty--or death. our heroism rises out of our lives. our science of victory will have to be based on our lives, too, on the way we manufacture, play games, read newspapers, eat and drink and bring up children. it is the function of our high command to translate what we can do best into a practical military strategy. the civilian's function is to provide the physical and moral strength needed to support the forces in the field. here the civilian is qualified to make certain demands, because we know where our intellectual and moral strength lies; we can work to keep the tactics of variety operative in the field of public emotion. the next two chapters are a translation of the tactics of variety into terms of propaganda and its objective, which is unity of action. chapter iii united...? when i began to write this book the unity "made in japan" was beginning to wear thin; when i finished people were slowly accustoming themselves to a new question: they did not know whether an illusion of unity was better than no unity at all. we know now that we were galvanized into common action by the shock of attack; but to recoil from a blow, to huddle together for self-protection, to cry for revenge--are not the signs of a national unity. before the war was three months old it was clear that we were not united on any question; while we all intended to win the war, the new appeasers had arrived--who wanted to buy themselves off the consequences of war by not fighting it boldly; or by fighting only japan; or fighting japan only at hawaii; we disagreed about the methods of warfare and the purpose of victory; there were those who wanted the war won without aid from liberals and those who would rather the war were lost than have labor contribute to victory; and those who seemed more interested in preventing profit than in creating munitions; it was a great chance "to put something over"--possibly the radicals could be destroyed, possibly the rich; possibly the president or his wife could be trapped into an error, possibly a sales tax would prevent a new levy on corporations, possibly labor could maneuvre itself into dominance; the requirements of war could be a good excuse for postponing all new social legislation and slily dropping some of the less vital projects; and the inescapable regimentation of millions of people, the necessary propaganda among others, could be used as an opportunity for new social experiments and indoctrination. in these differences and in the bitterness of personal dislike, people believed that the war could not be won unless their separate purposes were also fulfilled; our activities were not designed to fit with one another, and we were like ionized particles, held within a framework, but each pulling away from the others. the attack on pearl harbor silenced the pacifists; not even the most misguided could suggest that the president had maneuvred japan into the attack; the direct cause of the war, including the war which italy and germany declared on us, was self-protection. we were not fighting for england, for the jews, for the munition makers. but did we know what we _were_ fighting for? the president had said that we did not intend to be constantly at the mercy of aggressors; and the atlantic charter provided a rough sketch of the future. but we did not know whether we were to be allied with britain, reconstruct europe, raise china to dominance in the far east, enter a supernational system, withdraw as we did at the end of the last war, or simply make ourselves the rulers of the world. matching our casual uncertainty was the dead-shot clear-minded intention of our enemies--to conquer, to subjugate, to rule; by forgetting all other aims, eliminating all private purposes; by putting aside whatever the war did not require and omitting nothing necessary for victory; by making war itself the great social experiment, using war to destroy morals, habits and enterprises which did not help the war, destroying, above all, the prejudices, the rights, the character of civilized humanity as we have known them. have we a source of unity which can oppose this totality? according to hitler, we have not: we are a nation of many races and people; we are a capitalist country divided between the rich and the poor; we break into political parties; we reject leadership; we are given up to private satisfactions and do not understand the sacrifices which unity demands. therefore, in the hitlerian prophecy, america needs only to be put under the slightest tension and it will fall apart. the strains under which people live account for their strength as well as their weakness; we are strong in another direction precisely because we are not "unified" in the nazi sense. actually the nazis have no conception of unity; their purpose is totality, which is not the same thing at all. a picture or a motor has unity when all the _different_ parts are arranged and combined to produce a specific effect; but a canvas all painted the same shade of blue has no unity--it is a totality, a total blank; there is no unity in a thousand ball-bearings; they are _totally_ alike. if the nazi argument is not valid, why did we first thank japan for unity, and then discover that we had no unity? why were we pulling against one another, so that in the first year of the war we were distracted and ineffective, as france had been? if outright pacifism was our only disruptive element, why didn't we, after we were attacked, embrace one another in mutual forgiveness, high devotion to our country, and complete harmony of purpose? months of disaster in the pacific and the grinding process of reorganizing for production at home left us unaware of the sacrifices we had still to make, and at the mercy of demagogues waiting only for the right moment to start a new appeasement. perhaps next summer, when the american people won't get their motor trips to the mountains and the lakes; perhaps next winter when coal and oil may not be delivered promptly; perhaps when the first casualty lists come in.... we were not a united people and were not mature enough, in war years, to face our disunion. when we become mature we will discover that unity means agreement as to purpose, consent as to methods, and willingness to function. all the parts of the motor car have to do their work, or the car will not run well; that is their unity; and our unity will bring every one of us jobs to do for which we have to prepare. we can remember pearl harbor with banners and diamond clasps, but until we forget pearl harbor and do the work which national unity requires of us, we will still be children playing a war game--and still persuading ourselves that we can't lose. _the background of disunion_ in the urgency of the moment no one asked how it happened that the united states were not a united people. no one wondered what had happened to us in the past twenty years to make religious and racial animosities, political heresy-hunts, and class hatreds so common that they were used not only by demagogues, but by men responsible to the nation. no one asked whether the unity we had always assumed was ever a real thing, not a politician's device, for use on national holidays only. and, when the disunion of the people's leaders began to be apparent, and the people began to be ill-at-ease--then they were told to remember pearl harbor, or that we were all united really, but were helping our country best by constructive criticism. the fatal circumstance of our disunity we dared not face. no one who _could_ unite the people was willing to work out the basis of unity--and everyone left it to the president, as if in the strain of battle, a general were compelled to orate to the troops. the president's work was to win over our enemies; it should not have been necessary for him to win us over, too. the situation is grave because we have no tradition of early defeat and ultimate victory; we have no habit of national feeling, so that when hardships fall on us we feel alone, and victimized. we do not know what "all being in the same boat" really signifies; we will, of course, pull together if we are shipwrecked; but the better way to win wars is to avoid shipwrecks, not to survive them. we cannot improvise a national unity; we can only capitalize on gusts of anger or jubilation, from day to day--these are the tactics of war propaganda, not its grand strategy. for our basic unity we have to go where it already exists, we have to uncover a great mother-lode of the true metal, where it has always been; we have to _remind_ ourselves of what we have been and are, so that our unity will come from within ourselves, and not be plastered on like a false front. for it is only the strength inside us that will win the war and create a livable world for us when we have won it. we have this deep, internal, mother-lode of unity--in our history, our character, and our destiny. we are awkward in approaching it, because in the past generation we have falsified our history and corrupted our character; the men now in training camps grew up between the treaty of versailles and the crash of ; they lived in the atmosphere of normalcy and debunking; of the ku klux klan and bolshevism; of boom and charity; and it is not surprising that they were, at first, bewildered by the sudden demands on their patriotism. _losing a generation_ we have to look into those twenty years before we can create an effective national unity; what we find there is a disaster--but facing it is a tonic to the nerves. what happened was this: for the first time since the civil war, progressivism--our basic habit of mind--disappeared from effective politics. the moral fervor of the abolitionists, the agrarian anger of the populists, the evangelical fervor of william j. bryan, the impulsive almost boyish square deal of theodore roosevelt, the studious reformism of woodrow wilson, all form a continuity of political idealism; from to a party, usually out of office, was bringing the fervor and passion of moral righteousness into politics. the passion was defeated, but the political value of fighting for morally desirable ends remained high; and in the end the wildest demands of the "anarchists" and enemies of the republic were satisfied by congresses under roosevelt and wilson and taft. this constant battle for progressive principles is one of the most significant elements in american life--and we have unduly neglected it. james bryce once wrote that there was no basic difference in the philosophy of democrats and republicans, and thousands of teachers have repeated it to millions of children; intellectuals have neglected politics because the corruption of local battles has left little to choose between the vare machine in philadelphia, the kelly in chicago, the long in louisiana. for many years, in the general rise of our national wealth, politics seemed relatively unimportant and "vulgar"; and the figure of the idealist and social reformer was always ludicrous, because the reformers almost always came from the land, from the midwest, from the heart of america, not from its centers of financial power and social graces. so constant--and so critical--is the continuity of reformist politics in america, that the break, in , becomes an event of extreme significance--a symptom to be watched, analysed and compared. why did america suddenly break with its progressive tradition--and what was the result? the break occurred because the reformist, comparatively radical party was in power in when the war ended; all radicalism was discredited by the rise of bolshevism in russia, with its implied threat to the sanctity of property. disappointment in the outcome of the war, wilson's maladroit handling of the league of nations, and his untimely illness, doomed the democratic party to impotence and the republicans to reaction, which is often worse. so there could be no effective, respectable party agitating for reform, for a saner distribution of the pleasures and burdens of citizenship; in the years that followed, certain social gains were kept, some laws were passed by the momentum gained in the past generation, but the characteristic events were the ohio scandals, the lowering of income taxes in the highest brackets, the failure of the child labor amendment, and the heartfelt, complete abandonment of america to normalcy--a condition totally abnormal in american history. it is interesting to note that the only reformer of this period was the prohibitionist; the word changed meaning; a derisive echo clings to it still. the new deal hardly ever used the word; and the reformers of the new deal were called revolutionists because reform was no longer in the common language--or perhaps because reforms delayed _are_ revolutionary when they come. the disappearance of liberalism as an active political force left a vacuum; into it came, triumphantly, the wholly un-american normalcy of harding and coolidge and, in opposition, the wholly un-american radicalism of the marxists; the republicans gave us our first touch of true plutocracy and the reds our most effective outburst of debunking. between them they almost ruined the character of an entire generation. for years the united states had tried to do two things: first, allow as many people as possible to make as much money as possible and, second, prevent the rich from acquiring complete control of the government. as each new source of power grew, the attempt to limit kept pace with it; under jackson, it was the banking power that had to be broken; under lincoln the manufacturing power was somewhat balanced if not checked by the grant of free land; the interstate commerce commission regulated rates and reduced the power of the railroads; the sherman act, relatively ineffective, was directed against trusts; changes in tariff laws occasionally gave relief to the victims of "infant industries". under theodore roosevelt the railroads and the coal mine owners were held back and a beginning made in the recognition of organized labor; under wilson the financial power was seriously compromised by the federal reserve act, and industrial-financial power was balanced, a little, by special legislation for rural banking; under taft the income tax amendment was passed and an effort made to deduct from great fortunes a part of the cost of the government which protected those fortunes. _robbers and pharisees_ the era of normalcy was unique in one thing, it made the encouragement and protection of great fortunes the first concern of government. nothing else counted. through its executives and administrators, through cabinet members and those closest to the white house, normalcy first declared that no moral standard, no patriotism, no respect for the dead, should stand in the way of robbing the people of the united states; and so cynically did the rulers of america steal the public funds, that the people returned them to power with hardly a reproach. the rectitude of calvin coolidge made his party respectable; his dry worship of the money power was as complete a betrayal as harding's. he spoke the dialect of the new england rustic, but he was false to the economy and to the idealism of new england; his whole career was an encouragement to extravagance; he was ignorant or misled or indifferent, for he watched a spiral of inflated values and a fury of gambling, and helped it along; he refused even to admonish the people, although he knew that the mania for speculation was drawing the strength of the country away from its functions. money was being made--and he respected money; money in large enough quantities could do no harm. even after the crash, he could not believe that money had erred. when he was asked to write a daily paragraph of comment on the state of the nation, he was embarrassed; he had been the president of prosperity and he did not want to face a long depression; he asked his friends at morgan and company to advise him and they told him that the depression would be over almost immediately, so he began his writings, admitting that "the condition of the country is not good"; but the depression outlasted his writing and his life. by the usual process of immediate history, this singularly loquacious, narrow-minded, ignorant, and financially destructive president stands in public memory as the typical laconic yankee who preached thrift and probably would have prevented the depression if we had followed his advice. his successor was a reformed idealist. he had fed the belgians, looked after the commercial interests of american businessmen, and promised two cars in every american garage. at last plutocracy was to pay off in comfort--but it was too late. not enough americans had garages, not enough cars could be bought by the speculators on wall street, to make up for the lack of sales among the disinherited. _no more ideals_ normalcy was a debasement of the normal instincts of the average american; it deprived us of political morality, not only because it began in corruption, but because it ended with indifference; normalcy destroyed idealism, particularly the simple faith in ideals of the common man, the somewhat uncritical belief that one ought "to have ideals" which intellectuals find so absurd. in the attack on american idealism, our relations with europe changed and this reacted corrosively on the great foundations of american life, on freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, on the political equality of man. by the anti-american policy of harding and coolidge we lost the great opportunity of resuming communication with europe; a generation grew up not only hostile to the nations of europe ("quarrelsome defaulters" who "hired the money") but suspicious of europeans who had become americans. the ku klux klan, ford's and coughlin's attacks on the jews, pelley's attacks on the jews and the catholics, and a hundred others--were reflections in domestic life of our withdrawal from foreign affairs. _left deviation_ parallel to normalcy ran the stream of radicalism, its enemy. broken from political moorings by the collapse of wilsonian democracy, progressives and liberals drifted to the left and presently a line was thrown to them from the only established haven of radicalism functioning in the world: moscow. not all american liberals tied themselves to the party line; but few found any other attachment. the progressive party of lafollette vanished; the liberal intellectuals were unable to work into the democratic party; and, in fact, when franklin delano roosevelt was elected and called his election a victory for liberals, no one was more impressed than the liberals themselves. that the new president was soon to appear as a revolutionary radical was unthinkable. what had happened to the constant american liberal tradition? what had rendered sterile the ancient fruitful heritage of american radicalism? the apoplectic committees investigating bolshevism cried aloud that moscow gold had bought out the american intellectuals, which was a silly lie; but why was moscow gold more potent than american gold, of which much more was available? (american gold, it turned out, was busy trying to subsidize college professors and ministers of god, to propagandize against public ownership of public utilities.) it was not the gold of moscow, but the iron determination of lenin that captivated the american radical. at home the last trace of idealism was being destroyed and in russia a new world was being created with all the harshness and elation of a revolutionary action. the direction in america was, officially, _back_ (to normalcy; against the american pioneering tradition of forward movement); the direction of russia was forward--to the unknown. few reached moscow; few were acceptable to the stern hierarchy of communism; but all american liberal intellectuals were drawn out of their natural orbit by the attraction of the new economic planet. most of them remained suspended between the two worlds--and in that unhappy state they tried to solace their homelessness by jeering at their homeland. the american radical's turn against america was a new thing, as new as the normalcy which provoked it. in the th century a few painters and poets had fled from america; the politicians and critics stayed home, to fight. they fought for america, passionately convinced that it was worth fighting for. the populists and later the muck-rakers and finally the progressives were violent, opinionated, cross-grained and their "lunatic fringe" was dangerous, but none of them despised america; they despised only the betrayers of america: the railroads, the bankers, the oil monopolies, the speculators in wall street, the corrupt men in city hall, the bribed men in congress. it was not the time for nice judgments, not the moment to distinguish between a plunderer like gould and a builder like hill. what rockefeller had done to _save_ the oil industry wasn't seen until long after he had destroyed a dozen competitors; what the trusts were doing to prepare for large-scale production and mass-distribution wasn't to be discovered until the trusts themselves were a memory. so the radicals of and were unfair; they usually wanted easy money in a country which was getting rich with hard money; they wanted the farmer to rule as he had ruled in jefferson's day, but they did not want to give up the cotton gin and the machine loom and the reaper and the railroads which were transferring power to the city and the factory. the radical seemed often to be as selfish and greedy as the fat republicans who sat in congress and in bankers' offices and juggled rates of interest and passed tariffs to make industrial infants fat also. yet the liberal-radical until was a man who loved america and wanted only that america should fulfill its destiny, should be always more american, giving our special quality of freedom and prosperity to more and more men; whereas the radical-critic of the 's wept because america was too american and wanted her to become as like europe as we could--and not a living europe, of course. the europe held before america as an ideal in the 's was the europe which died in the first world war. _working both sides of the street_ the radical attack on america completed the destruction begun by the plutocrats; they played into each other's hands like crooked gamblers. the plutocrat and the politician made patriotism sickening by using it to blackjack those who saw skullduggery corrupting our country; and the radical critic made patriotism ridiculous by belittling the nation's past and denying its future. the politicians supported committees to make lists of heretics, and tried to deny civil rights to citizens in minority parties; and the intellectuals pretended that the ku klux klan was the true spirit of america; the plutocrats and the politicians murdered sacco and vanzetti and the radicals acted as if no man had ever suffered for his beliefs in france or england or germany or spain. the debasement of american life was rapid and ugly--and instead of fighting, the radical critic rejoiced, because he did not care for the america that had been; it was not communist and not civilized in the european sense--why bother to save it? in i summed up years of disagreement with the fashionable attitude under the (borrowed) caption, _the treason of the intellectuals_. looking back at it now, i find a conspicuous error--i failed to bracket the politician with the debunker, the plutocrat with the radical. i was for the average man against both his enemies, but i did not see how the reactionary and the radical were combining to create a vacuum in american social and political life. the people of the united states were--and are--"materialistic" and in love with the things that money can buy; but the ascendancy of speculative wealth in the 's was not altogether satisfying. more people than ever before gambled in wall street; but considering the stakes, the steady upswing of prices, the constant stories of success, the open boasting of our great industrialists and the benign, tacit assent of calvin coolidge--considering all these, the miracle is that eight out of ten capable citizens did not speculate. the chance to make money was part of the american tradition--for which millions of europeans had come to america; but it did not fulfill all the requirements of a purpose in life. it wasn't good enough by any standard; it allowed a class of disinherited to rise in america, a fatal error because our wealth depended on customers and the penniless are not good risks; and the riches-system could not protect itself from external shock. europe began to shiver with premonitions of disaster, a bank in austria fell, and america loyally responded with the greatest panic in history. long before the money-ideal crashed, it had been rejected by some of the american people. it would have been scorned by more if anything else had been offered to them, anything remotely acceptable to them. the longest tradition of american life was cooperative effort; the great traditions of hardship and experiment and progressive liberalism and the mingling of races and the creation of free communities--all these were still in our blood. but when the plutocrat and politician tried to destroy them by neglect or persecution, the intellectual did not rebuild them; he told us that the traditions had always been a false front for greed, and asked us to be content with laughing at the past; or he told us that nothing was good in the future of the world except the russian version of karl marx. _we l'arn the furriner_ the crushing double-grip of the anti-americans of the right and left was most effective in foreign affairs. normalcy wanted back the money which europe had hired, as president coolidge said; and normalcy wanted to hear nothing more of europe. at the same time the radical was basically internationalist; the true believer in lenin was also revolutionist. sheer isolationism didn't work; we were constantly on the side lines of the league of nations; we stepped in to save germany and presumably to help all europe; we trooped to the deathbed of old europe (with the exchange in our favor); the sickness made us uneasy at last--but we could not break from isolation because normalcy and radicalism together had destroyed the common, and acceptable, american basis of friendly independent relations with europe. internationalism, with a communistic tinge, was equally unthinkable; and presently we began to think that a treaty of commerce might somehow be "internationalist". europe, meanwhile, broke into three parts, fascist, communist, and the victims of both, the helpless ones we called our friends, the "democracies". by economics had destroyed isolation and hitler began to destroy internationalism. the american people had for twelve years shrunk from both, now found that it had no shell to shrink into--america had repudiated all duty to the world; it had tried to make the league of nations unnecessary by a few pacts and treaties; it had flared up over china and, rebuffed by england, sunk back into apathy. it was uninformed, without habit or tradition or will in foreign affairs; without any ideal around which all the people of america could gather; and with nothing to do in the world. the new deal repaired some of the destruction of normalcy, but it could not allay the mischief and unite the country at the same time. loyalty to the gold standard and devotion to the principle of letting people starve were both abandoned; the shaming moral weakness of the hoover regime, the resignation to defeat, were overcome. the direct beneficiaries of the new deal were comparatively few; the indirect were the middle and upper income classes. they saw president roosevelt save them from a dizzy drop into revolution; a few years later the danger was over, and when the rich and well-born saw that the president was not going to turn conservative, they regretted being saved--thinking that perhaps the revolution of might have turned fascist, and in their favor. these were extremists. the superior common man was not a reactionary when he voted for landon or willkie. after the blue eagle was killed by the supreme court and the supreme court was saved by resignations, the average american could accept ninety percent of the objectives of fdr--and ask only for superior efficiency from the republican party. the newspapers of the country were violent; martin dies was violent; john l. lewis was violent; but labor and radicals and people were _not_ violent. we were approaching some unity of belief in america's national future when the war broke out. _quarterback vs. pedagogue_ the new deal had no visible foreign policy, but president roosevelt made up for it by having several, one developing out of the other, each a natural consequence of events abroad in relation to the state of public opinion at home. to a great extent this policy was based on the president's dislike of tyranny and his love for the navy, a fortunate combination for the people of the united states, for it allied us with the atlantic democracies and compeled us to face the prospect of war in the pacific. so far as we were at all prepared to defend ourselves, we are indebted to the president's recognition of our position as a naval power requiring a friend at the farther end of each ocean, britain in the atlantic, russia and china in the pacific. the president's policy, singularly correct, was not the people's policy. it was not part of the new deal; it was not tied into domestic policies; it subsisted in a dreadful void. mr. roosevelt, who once called himself the nation's quarterback, never had the patient almost pedantic desire to teach the american people which was so useful to wilson. the notes to germany, scorned at the time, were an education in international law for the american people; by the people were aware of the war and beginning to discover a part in it for themselves. mr. roosevelt's methods were more spectacular, but not as patient, so that he sometimes alienated people, and he faced a wilier enemy at home; wilson overcame ignorance and roosevelt had to overcome deliberate malice, organized hostility to our system of government, and a true pacificism which has always been native to america. racial, religious, and national prejudices were all practised upon to prevent the creation of unity; it was not remarked at the time that class prejudice did not arise. the defect of roosevelt's method led to this: the american people did not understand their own position in the world. the president had appealed to their moral sense when he asked for a quarantine of the aggressors; he appealed to fear when he cited the distances between dakar and des moines; but he had no unified body of opinion behind him. the republican party might easily have nominated an isolationist as a matter of politics if not of principle; and it was a stroke of luck that politics (not international principles) gave the opportunity to wendell willkie. yet the boldest move made by mr. roosevelt, the exchange of destroyers for bases, had to be an accomplished fact, and a good bargain, before it could be announced. even mr. willkie's refusal to play politics with the fate of britain did not assure the president of a country willing to understand its new dangers and its new opportunities. nothing in the past twenty years had prepared america; and the isolationists picked up the weapons of both the plutocrat and the debunker to prevent our understanding our function in a fascist world. the grossest appeal to self-interest and the most cynical imputation of self-interest in others, went together. there were faithful pacifists who disliked armaments and disliked the sale of armaments even more; but there were also those who wanted the profit of selling without the risk; there were the alarming fellow travelers who wished america to be destroyed until they discovered the ussr wanted american guns. there were snide businessmen who wanted hitler even more than they wanted peace, and a mob, united by nothing--except a passion for the cruelty and the success of the nazis. the spectacle of america arguing war in was painful and ludicrous and one sensed changes ahead; but it had one great redeeming quality, it was in our tradition of public discussion and a vast deal of the discussion was honest and fair. the war did not change americans over night. the argument had not united us; but in the first days we dared not admit this; we began a dangerous game of hypnotizing ourselves. chapter iv "the strategy of truth" the consequences of building on a unity which does not exist are serious. we have discovered that all war is total war; we have also found that while our enemies lie to us, they do not lie to their high commands. total war requires total effort from the civilian and we have assumed that, in america, this means enthusiasm for our cause, understanding of our danger, willingness to sacrifice, confidence in our leaders, faith in ultimate victory. we may be wrong; total effort in germany is based more on compulsion and promise than on understanding. but we cannot immediately alter the atmosphere in which we are living. if we could, if our leaders believed that total effort could be achieved more quickly by lies than by truth, it would be their obligation to lie to us. in total war there is no alternative to the most effective weapon. only the weapon must be effective over a sufficient length of time; the advantage of a lie must be measured against the loss when the lie is shown up; if the balance is greater, over a period of time, than the value of the truth, the lie still must be told. if we are a people able to recognize a lie too fast for it to be effective, the lie must not be used; if we react "correctly" to certain forms of persuasion (as, say, magazine ads and radio commercials), the psychological counterparts of these should be used, at least until a new technique develops. this is a basis for "the strategy of truth" which archibald macleish set in opposition to the nazi "strategy of terror". the opposition is not perfect because the nazis have used the truth plentifully in spreading terror, especially by the use of moving pictures. their strategy, ethically, is a mixture of truth and lies, in combination; practically speaking, this strategy is on the highest ethical plane because it saves nazi lives, brings quick victory, protects the state and the people. it is, however, ill-suited to our purposes. _ethics of lying_ mr. macleish is being an excellent propagandist in the very use of the phrase, "strategy of truth", which corresponds to the president's "solemn pact of truth between government and the people"; there are a hundred psychological advantages in telling us that we are getting the truth; but propaganda has no right to use the truth if the truth ceases to be effective. lies are easier to tell, but harder to handle; in a democracy they are tricky and dangerous because the conditions for making lies effective have not been created; such conditions were created in germany; they came easily in other countries where no direct relations between people and government existed. before propaganda can lie to us, safely and for our own preservation, honorably and desirably, it must persuade us to give up our whole system of communication, our political habits, our tradition of free criticism. this could be done; but it would be difficult; no propagandist now working in america is cunning and brutal enough to destroy our civil liberties without a struggle which would cost more (in terms of united effort) than it would be worth. we cannot stop in the middle of a war to break down one system of persuasion and create another; the frame of mind which advertising men call "consumer acceptance" is, as they know, induced by a touch of newness in a familiar framework; the new element catches attention but it has to become familiar before it is effective. our propagandists, therefore, must use the truth, as they incline to do, but they have to learn its uses. we gain prestige by advertising the truth, even though the use of truth is forced upon us; but we have not yet won approval of the suppression of truth. it is good to use truth as flattery ("you are brave enough to know the truth") but truth also creates fear which (advertisers again know this) is a potent incentive to action. finally, the use of truth requires the canalization of propaganda; it is too dangerous to be handled by everyone. the propagandists of our cause include everyone who speaks to the people, sells a bond, writes, broadcasts, publishes, by executive order or private will; they vary in skill and in detailed purpose; they blurt out prejudices and conceal information useful to the citizen. they have not, so far as any one has discovered, lied to the people of america, contenting themselves at first with concealing the extent, or belittling the significance, of our reverses; presently the same sources began to abuse the american people for not being aware of the danger threatening them; and no one officially recognized the connection between ignorance and concealment. _maxims for propagandists_ it is easy to mark down the detailed errors of propaganda. the more difficult work is to create a positive program; and it is possible that we have been going through an experimental period, while such a program is being worked out in washington. a few of the requirements are obvious. _propaganda must be used._ our government has no more right to deprive us of propaganda than it has to deprive us of pursuit planes or bombers or anti-aircraft guns or antitoxin. propaganda is the great offensive-defensive weapon of the home front; if we do not get it, we should demand it. if what we get is defective, we should protest as we would protest against defective bombsights. _propaganda must be organized._ otherwise it becomes a diffused babel of opinion. _propaganda must be unscrupulous._ it has one duty--to the state. _propaganda must not be confused with policy._ if at a given moment the grand strategy of the war absolutely requires us to offer a separate peace to italy or to make war on rumania, propaganda must show this need in its happiest light; if the reverse is required, propaganda's job does not alter. policy should not be made by propagandists and propagandists should have no policy. _propaganda must interact with policy._ if at a given moment, the grand strategy has a free choice between recognizing or rejecting a danish government-in-exile, the action which propaganda can use to best advantage is the better. _propaganda must have continuity._ the general principles of propaganda have to be worked out, and followed. the principle, in regard to direct war news, may be to tell all, to tell nothing, or to alter the dosage according to the temper of the people. the choice of one of these principles is of the gravest importance; it must be done, or approved, by the president. after the choice is made, sticking to one principle is the only way to build confidence. except for details of naval losses, the british official announcements are prompt and accurate; the british people generally do not go about in the fear of hidden catastrophe. the italian system differs and may be suited to the temper of the people; the russian communiques are exactly adapted to stalin's concept of the war: the red soldier is cited for heroism, in small actions, the germans are always identified as fascists, the vast actions of the entire front are passed over in a formal opening sentence. the german method has its source in hitler; the announcements of action are rhetorical, contemptuous, and sometimes threatening; the oratory which accompanies the official statements has, for the first time, had a setback, since the destruction of the russian army was announced in the autumn of , but no one has discovered any serious reaction as a result. the german people have been conditioned by action; and action has worked with propaganda for this result. the concentration camp, the death of free inquiry, and the triumph of munich have been as potent as goebbels' lies to prepare the german people for total war; so that they have not reacted against hitler when a prediction has failed or a promise gone sour. each of these methods has been consistently followed. our propagandists on the home front began with the knowledge that a great part of the country did not want a war; a rather grim choice was presented: to frighten the people, or to baby them. the early waverings about pearl harbor reflected the dilemma; the anger roused by pearl harbor gave time to the propagandist to plan ahead. the result has been some excellent and some fumbling propaganda; but no principle has yet come to light. _propaganda must supply positive symbols._ the symbol, the slogan, the picture, which unites the citizen, and inspires to action, can be created by an individual, but can only be made effective by correct propaganda. the swastika is a positive symbol, a mark of unity (because it was once a mark of the revolutionary outcast); we have no such symbol. uncle sam is a cartoonists' fiction, too often appearing in comic guises, too often used in advertising, no longer corresponding even to the actuality of the american physique. the minute-man has an antique flavor but is not sufficiently generalized; he is a brilliant defensive symbol and corresponded precisely to the phase of the militia, an "armed citizenry" leaping to the defense of the country. with my prejudice it is natural that i should suggest the liberty bell as a positive symbol of the thing we fight for. it is possible to draw its form on a wall--not to ward off evil, but to inspire fortitude. _propaganda must be independent._ it is a fighting arm; it has (or should have) special techniques; it is based on researches, measurements, comparisons, all approaching a scientific method. it should therefore be recognized as a separate function; mr. gorham munson, preceded by mr. edward l. bernays in , has proposed a secretary for propaganda in the cabinet, which would make the direct line of authority from the executive to the administrators of policy, without interference. the conflicts of publicity (aircraft versus navy for priorities, for instance) will eventually force some organization of propaganda. the confusion of departmental interests is a constant drawback to propaganda, even if there is no direct conflict. _propaganda must be popular._ since the first world war several new ways of approaching the american people have been developed. these have been chiefly commercial, as the radio and the popular illustrated magazine; the documentary moving picture has never been popular, except for the march of time, but it has been tolerated; in the past two years a new type, the patriotic short, has been skilfully developed. the full length picture has hardly ever been used for direct communication; it is a "morale builder", not a propaganda weapon. _propaganda must be measured._ at the same time the method of the selective poll has been developed in several forms and a quick, dependable survey of public sentiment can be used to check the effectiveness of any propaganda. recent refinements in the techniques promise even greater usefulness; the polls "weight" themselves, and, in effect, tell how important their returns should be considered. the objections to the polling methods are familiar; but until something better comes along, the reports on opinion, and notably on the fluctuations of opinion, are not to be sneered away. to my mind this is one of the basic operations of propaganda; and although i have no evidence, i assume that it is constantly being done. _who can do it?_ an effective use of the instruments is now possible. we may blunder in our intentions, but technical blunders need not occur; the people who have used radio or print or pictures are skilled in their trade and they can use it for the nation as they used it for toothpaste or gasoline. and the people of america are accustomed to forms of publicity and persuasion which need not be significantly altered. moreover, we can measure the tightness of our methods in the field, not by rejoicing over "mail response", or newspaper comment, but by discovering exactly how far we have created the attitude of mind and the temper of spirit at which we aim. the advertising agency and the sampler of public opinion can supply the groundwork of a flexible propaganda method. they cannot do everything, because certain objectives have always escaped them. but they are the people who have persuaded most effectively and reported most accurately the results of persuasion. they cannot create policy, not even the policy of propaganda; but they can propagandize. all of this refers to propaganda at home. it need not be called propaganda, but it must _be_ propaganda--the organized use of all means of communication to create specific attitudes, leading to--or from--specific action. _what is morale's pulse?_ this is, of course, another way of saying that morale is affected by propaganda. i avoid the word "morale" because it has unhappily fallen into a phrase, "boosting morale", or "keeping morale at a high level." we have it on military authority that morale is an essential of victory, but no authority has told us how to create it, nor exactly to what high level morale should be "boosted". the concept of morale constantly supercharged by propaganda is fatally wrong; it confuses morale with cheerfulness and leads to the dangerous fluctuations of public emotion on which our enemies have always capitalized. morale should be defined as a desirable and effective attitude toward events. as despair and defeatism are undesirable, they break up morale; as cheerfulness leads at times to ineffectiveness, it is bad for morale. to induce cheerfulness in the week of singapore, the burning of the normandie, and the escape of the german battleships from brest, would have been the worst kind of morale-boosting; to prevent elation over a substantial victory would have been not quite so bad, but bad enough. there is a "classic example" of the effect of belittling a victory. the british public first got details of the battle of jutland from the german announcement of a naval victory, including names and number of british vessels sunk. the first british communique was no more subdued than usual, but coming _after_ the german claims and making no assertions of victory, taking scrupulous care to list _all_ british losses and only positively observed german losses, the announcement pulled morale down--not because it gave bad news, but because it put a bad light on good news; it did not allow morale to be level with events. the best opinion of the time considered jutland a victory lacking finality, but with tremendous consequences; and churchill was called in as a special writer to do the admiralty's propaganda on the battle after the mischief was done. the time element was against him for a belated explanation is never as effective as a quick capture of the field by bold assertion and proof. mr. churchill was himself belated, a generation later, when he first defended the navy for letting the gneisenau and scharnhorst escape and then, a day later, asserted that the ships had been compelled to leave brest and that their removal was a gain for the british. the point is the same in both cases: the truth or an effective substitute may be used; but it has to correspond to actuality. the admiralty underplayed its statement at jutland. churchill over-explained the situation at brest. both were bad for morale. _the hypodermic technique_ the "shot-in-the-arm" theory of morale is a confession of incompetence in propaganda. for the healthy human being does not need sudden injections of drugs, not even for exceptional labors; and the objective of propaganda is to create an atmosphere in which the average citizen will work harder and bear more discomfort and live through more anxiety and suffer greater unhappiness _without considering his situation exceptional or abnormal_. to "boost morale", to give the public a shot of good news (or even a shot of bad news), is an attempt to make us live above our normal temperature, to speed up our heart-beat and our metabolism. war itself raises the level; and all we have to do for morale is to stay on the new level. the principle that the citizen must not consider his situation exceptional is one of the few accepted by democratic and autocratic states alike. hitler announces that until the war is over he will wear a simple soldier's uniform; churchill refuses to accept a hoard of cigars; the president buys a bond. in every case the conspicuous head of a nation does what the average citizen has to do; and because each citizen is like his leader, all citizens are like one another. a unity is created. _re-uniting america_ this completes the circle which began with our need for unity, and proceeded through propaganda to morale. for the foundation of our war effort has to be unity and the base of good morale is the feeling of one-ness in the privations and in the triumphs of war. we can now proceed to some of the reasons for the breaks in unity, which propaganda has not seen, nor mended. first, the propagandists have rejected certain large groups of americans because of pre-war pacifism; second, they have failed to recognize the use to which isolationism can be put; third, they have not thought out the principles of free criticism in a democracy at war. to rehearse all the other forms of separatist action would be to recall angers and frustrations dormant now, just below the level of conscious action. moreover, a list of the causes of separation, with a remedy for each, would repeat the error of civilian propaganda in the early phases of the war--it would still be negative, and the need now is to set in motion the positive forces of unity, which have always been available to us. _the accord we need is for free and complete and effective action, for sweating in the heat and crying in the night when disaster strikes, for changing the face of our private world, for losing what we have labored to build, for learning to be afraid and to suffer and to fight; it is an accord on the things that are vital because they are our life: what have we been, what shall we do, what do we want--past, present, future; history, character, destiny._ the propaganda of the first six months of the war was not directed to the creation of unity in this sense; it was not concerned with anything but the immediate daily feeling of americans toward the day's news; the civilian propagandists insisted that "disunity is ended" because all americans knew what they were fighting for, so that it became faintly disloyal to point out that reiteration was not proof and that disunity could end, leaving mere chaos, a dispersed indifferent emotion, in its place. the end of dissension was not enough; unity had to be created, a fellow-feeling called up from the memory of the people, binding them to one another because it bound them to our soil and our heroes and our myths and our realities; and the act of creation of unity automatically destroyed disunion; when the gods arrive, not only the half-gods, but the devils also, depart. _myth and money_ faintly one felt a lack of conviction in the propagandists themselves. they were afraid of the debunkers, under whose shadow they had grown up. they did not venture to create an effective myth. myth to them was washington's cherry tree, and lincoln's boyish oath against slavery and theodore roosevelt's wild west; so they could not, with rhetoric to lift the hearts of harried men and women, recall the truth-myth of america, the loyalty which triumphed over desertion at valley forge, the psychological miracle of lincoln's recovery from self-abasement to create his destiny and shape the destiny of the new world; the health and humor and humanity of the west as roosevelt remembered it. at every point in our history the reality had something in it to touch the imagination, the heart, to make one feel how complex and fortunate is the past we carry in us if we are americans. the propagandists were also afraid of the plutocrats--as they were afraid of the myth, they were afraid of reality. they did not dare to say that america was an imperfect democracy whose greatness lay in the chance it gave to all men to work for perfection; they did not dare to say that the war itself must create democracy over again, they did not dare to proclaim liberty to this land or to all lands; in the name of unity they could not offend the enemies of human freedom. moreover, the propagandists for unity had to defend the administration. the rancor of politics had never actually disappeared in america, during wars; it was barely sweetened by a trace of patriotism three months after the war began. as a good fight needs two sides, defenders of the president were as happy as his opponents to call names, play politics, and distress the country. the groundwork for defeating the nation's aims in war was laid before those aims had been expressed; and one reason why we could make no proclamation of our purpose was that our purpose was clouded over; we had not yet gone back to the source of our national strength; and we had not yet begun to use our strength to accomplish a national purpose. we were effecting a combination of individual capacities--not a unity of will. we were adding one individual to another, a slow process: we needed to multiply one by the other--which can only be done in complete union of purpose. some of the weakness of propaganda rose from its mixed intentions: to make us hate the enemy, to make us understand our allies, to harden us for disaster, to defend the conduct of the war, to make us pay, to assure us that production was terrific, and then to make us pay more because production was inadequate; to silence the critics of the administration, to appease the men of violence crying for vichy's scalp or the men of violence crying for formulation of war aims. all these things _had_ to be done, promptly and effectively. they would have to be done no matter how unified in feeling we were; and they could not be done at all unless unity came first. _call back the pacifists_ small purposes were put first because the propagandists suffered from their own success. they had gone ahead of all and had brilliantly been teaching the american people the meaning of the european war; they were among the president's most potent allies and they deserve well of the country; the committee to defend america by aiding the allies and the other active interventionist groups were a rallying point for the enemies of hitler, and a strong point for attack by all the pacifists. but the moment the aim of these committees was accomplished and war was declared, the first objective must have been the re-incorporation of the pacifist % of our population into the functioning national group. the actual enemies of the country soon declared themselves; the hidden ones could be discovered. the millions who did not want to go to war had to be persuaded first of all that _we_ understood why _they_ had been pacifists; we could not treat them as cowards, or pro-germans, or reds, or idiots. we needed the best of them to unite the country, and all of them to fight for it. our propagandists did not know how to turn to their advantage the constant, native, completely sensible pacifism of the american people, especially of the midwestern americans. if the history of the united states has meaning, the pacifism of the midwest is bound to become dominant; our part in the first world war achieved grandeur because the people of the middle west, at least, meant it to be a war to end war, a war to end pacifism also, because there would be no need for it. the people of the middle west want our position in the world to keep us out of the wars of other nations; they saw no wars into which we could be drawn. they were wrong--but their instincts were not wrong. they do not believe that the wars of the united states have been like the wars of other nations; nor that the united states must now look forward to such a series of wars as every nation of europe has fought for domination or survival. this may be naive, as to the past and the future; but it is a naivete we cannot brush aside. it rises from too many natural causes. and the people of the middle west may, if need be, fight to make their dream of peace come true; they will have to fight the american imperialists, whom they have fought before; and this time they will have new allies; for the pacifist of the midwest will be joined by the pacifists of the industrial cities; and the great hope of the future is that the pacifists of america will help to organize the world after the war. _they will not help if they remain isolationists; and they will remain isolationist, in the middle of a global war, until they are certain that a world-order they can join is to be the outcome of the war._ again, our propagandists have to understand isolationism, an historic american tradition in one sense, a falsehood in another. our dual relation to europe is expressed in two phrases: we _came from_ europe. we _went away from_ europe. for a time we were anti-european; now we are non-europe; if europe changes, we may become pro-european; but we can never be part of europe. isolation is half our story; communication the other. on the foundation of half the truth, the isolationist built the fairy tale of physical separation; the interventionist, on the basis of our communication with europe, built more strongly--the positive overbore the negative. yet the whole structure of our relation to europe has to be built on both truths, we have to balance one strength with the other. we cannot make war or make peace without the help of the isolationists; and to jeer at them because they failed to understand the mathematics of air power and sea-bases is not to reconcile them to us; nor, for that matter, is it peculiarly honest. for few of those who wanted us to go to war against england's enemy warned us that we should have to fight japan also; and none, so far as i know, told us that the task of a two-ocean war might be for several years a burden of losses and defeat. the defeat of pacifist isolationism was not accomplished by the interventionists, but by japan. the interventionists, because they were better prophets, gained the appearance of being truer patriots; they were actually more intelligent observers of the war in europe and more passionately aware of its meaning. but they can be trusted with propaganda only if they recognize the positive value of their former enemies, and do not try to create a caste of ex-pacifist "untouchables." that is the method of totality; it is hitler declaring that liberals cannot take part in ruling germany, and communists cannot be germans. unity does not require us to destroy those who have differed with us, it requires total agreement as to aims, and temporary assent as to methods; we cannot tolerate the action of those who want hitler to defeat us, just as the body cannot tolerate cells which proliferate in disharmony with other cells, and cause cancer. we cannot afford the time to answer every argument before we take any action, so temporary assent is needed (the executive in war time automatically has it because he orders action without argument). in democratic countries we add critical examination after the event, and free discussion of future policy as correctives to error. none of these break into unity; none requires the isolation of any group except the enemies of the state. the purpose of unity is effective action--more tanks and planes, delivered more promptly; more pilots, better trained; more people helping one another in the readjustments of war. it is part of the groundwork of morale; in a democracy it is based on reconciliation, not on revenge. _the limits of criticism_ the pacifists and the isolationists are being punished for their errors if their legitimate emotions are not recognized as part of the natural composition of the american mind. criticism presents a problem more irritating because it is constantly changing its form and because no principle of action has been evolved. at one of the grimmest moments of the war, a correspondent of the _new york times_ wrote that "for a while not politics but the war effort appeared to have undergone an 'adjournment'". at another, the president remarked that he did not care whether democrats or republicans were elected, provided congress prosecuted the war energetically, and comment on this was that the president wanted to smash the two-party system, in order to have a non-critical congress under him as he had had in . both of these items suggest, that propaganda has not yet taught us how to criticize our government in war time. the desirable limits of criticism have not been made clear. every attack on the administration has been handled as if it were treason; and there has been a faint suggestion of party pride in the achievements of our factories and of our bombers. neither the war nor criticism of the war can be a party-matter; and no party-matter can be tolerated in the path of the war effort. all americans know this, but the special application of this loyalty to our present situation has to be clarified. it has been left obscure. for the question of criticism is connected with the problem of unity in the simplest and most satisfying way. the moment we have unity, we can allow all criticism which rises from any large group of people. off-center criticism, from small groups, is dangerous. it does not ask questions in the public mind, and its tendency is to divert energies, not to combine them; small groups, if they are not disloyal, are the price we pay for freedom of expression in war time; it is doubtful whether, at present, any american group can do much harm; it is even a matter of doubt whether eugene v. debs or several opposition senators were a graver danger to the armies of the united states in . small groups may be tolerated or, under law, suppressed; large groups never expose themselves to prosecution, but their criticism is serious and unless it is turned to advantage, it may be dangerous. the tendency of any executive, in war time, is to consider any criticism as a check on war effort. it is. if a commanding officer has to take five minutes to explain an order, five minutes are lost; if the president, or the head of opm, has to defend an action or reply to a critic, energy is used up, time is lost. but time and energy may be lost a hundred times more wastefully if the explanation is not given, if the criticism is not uttered and grows internally and becomes suspicion and fear. freedom of criticism is, in our country, a positive lever for bringing morale into logical relation to events. the victims of criticism can use it positively, their answers can create confidence; and best of all, it can be anticipated, so that it can do no harm. but this is true only if the right to criticize is subtly transformed into a duty; if, in doing his duty, the citizen refuses to criticize until he is fully informed; if the state makes available to the citizen enough information on which criticism can be based. then the substance and the intention of criticism become positive factors in our fight for freedom. since it is freedom we are fighting for. freedom, nothing else, is the source of unity--our purpose in the war, our reason for fighting. on a low level of survival we have forgotten some of our differences and combined our forces to fight because we were attacked; on the high level which makes us a nation we are united to fight for freedom, and this unites us to one another because it unites us with every american who ever fought for freedom. most particularly our battle today unites us with those who first proclaimed liberty throughout the land. chapter v the forgotten document to distract attention, to put people's minds on useless or bewildering projects is a bit of sabotage, in a total war. it is well enough to divert people, for a moment, so that they are refreshed; but no one has the right to confuse a clear issue or to start inessential projects or to ask people to look at anything except the job in hand. for five minutes, i propose a look at the declaration of independence, because it is the one document essential to our military and moral success; it is the standard by which we can judge the necessity of all projects; and although our destiny, and the means to fulfill it, are written into it, the declaration is the forgotten document of american history. we remember the phrases too often repeated by politicians and dreamers; we do not study the hard realistic plan of national action embodied in every paragraph of the instrument. the famous phrases at the beginning give the moral, and revolutionary, reason for action; the magnificent ground plan of the character and history of the american people is explained in the forgotten details of the declaration; and nothing in the conservative constitution could do more than delay the unfolding of the plan or divide its fruits a little unevenly. i suggest that the declaration supplies the _motive_ of action for today; the moment we understand it, we have a definition of america, a specific blueprint of what we have been, what we are, and what we can become--and the action necessary for our future evolves from this; moreover the unnecessary action is likewise defined. our course before we were attacked and our plans for the world after the war may seem the mere play of prejudice and chance; but the destiny of america will be determined not by the affections of one group or the fears of another, nor by hysteria and passion; our fate will be determined by the whole course of our history--and by our decision to continue its direction or to reverse it. the rest of this book flows out of this belief in the decisive role of the declaration, but it does not attempt to indicate a course of action in detail. for the sake of illustration i cite these instances. _q._ should the u.s. try to democratize the germans or accept the view that the germans are a race incapable of self-government? _a._ the history of immigration, based on the declaration, proves that germans are capable of being good and great democratic citizens. _q._ can the u.s. unite permanently with any single nation or any exclusive group of nations? _a._ our history, under the declaration, makes it impossible. _q._ can the u.s. join a world federation regulating specific economic problems, such as access to raw materials, tariffs, etc.? _a._ nothing in the declaration is against, everything in our history is for, such a move. _q._ can the u.s. fight the war successfully without accepting the active principles of the totalitarian states? _a._ if our history is any guide, the only way we can _lose_ the war is by failing to fight it in our own way. i have already indicated the possibility that our whole military grand plan must be based on variety, which is the characteristic of america created by specific passages in the declaration; i am sure that the whole grand plan of civilian unity (the plan of morale and propaganda) has to return to the leading lines of our history, if we want to act quickly, harmoniously and effectively; and the peace we make will be another versailles, with another article x in the covenant, if we make it without returning to the sources of our strength. so, if we want to win in the field and at home, win the war and the peace, we must be aware of our history and of the principles laid down in and never, in the long run, betrayed. _to whom it may concern_ the declaration is in four parts and all of them have some bearing on the present. the first explains why the declaration is issued. the words are so familiar that their significance is gone; but if we remember that days were spent in revision and the effect of every word was calculated, we can assume that there are no accidents, that the declaration is precise and says what it means. here is the passage: "_when, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation._" the first official utterance of america is based on _human necessity_--not the necessity of princes or powers. it is the utterance of a people, not a nation. it invokes first nature and then nature's god as lawgivers. it asks independence and equality--in the same phrase; the habit of nations, to enslave or be enslaved, is not to be observed in the new world. and finally "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; the first utterance of america is addressed not to the nations of the world, but to the men and women who inhabit them. _human--people--nature--nature's god--mankind._ these are the words boldly written across the map of america. a century and a half of change have not robbed one of them of their power--because they were not fad-words, not the catchwords of a revolution; they were words with cold clear meanings--and they destroyed feudalism in europe for a hundred and sixty years. the practical application of the preamble is this: whenever we have spoken to the people of other nations, as we did in the declaration, we have been successful; we have failed only when we have addressed ourselves to governments. the time is rapidly coming when our only communication with europe must be over the heads of its rulers, to the people. it does not seem practical; but we shall see later that, for us, it has always been good politics. _the logic of freedom_ the next passage in the declaration is the one with all the quotations. there can be little harm in reprinting it: "_we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experiences hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evidence a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former system of government the history of the present king of great britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. to prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world._" starting off with a rhetorical device--the pretense that its heresies are acceptable commonplaces, this long paragraph builds a philosophy of government on the unproved and inflammatory assumptions which it calls "self-evident". the self-evident truths are, in effect, _the terms agreed upon by the signers_. these signers now appear for the first time, they say "_we_ hold", they say that, to themselves, certain truths are self-evident. the first three of "these truths" are some general statements about "all men"; the fourth and fifth tell why governments are established and why they should be overthrown. these two are the objective of the first three; but they have been neglected in favor of adolescent disputation over the equality of men at birth, and they have been forgotten in our adult pursuit of happiness which has often made us forget that life and liberty, no less than large incomes, are among our inalienable rights. the historians of the declaration always remind us of john locke's principle that governments exist only to protect property; when states fail they cease to be legitimate, they can be overthrown; and locke is taken to be, more than rousseau, the inspiration of the declaration. the declaration, it happens, never mentions the right to own property; but the argument for revolution is essentially the same: when a government ceases to function, it should be overthrown. the critical point is the definition of the chief duty of a government. the colonists, in the declaration, said it is to secure certain rights to all men; not to guarantee privileges granted by the state, but to protect rights which are born when men are born, in them, with them--inalienably theirs. so the declaration sets us for ever in opposition to the totalitarian state--for that state has all the inalienable rights, and the people exist only to protect the state. the catalogue of rights is comparatively unimportant; once we agree that the state exists to secure inherent rights, the great revolutionary stride has been taken; and immediately we see that our historic opposition to old europe is of a piece with our present opposition to hitler. the purpose of our state is not the purpose of the european states; we might work with them, side by side, but a chemical union would result only in an explosion. there is one word artfully placed in the description of the state; the declaration does not say that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. it says that governments instituted among men to protect their rights "derive their _just_ powers from the consent of the governed". always realistic, the declaration recognizes the tendency of governors to reach out for power and to absorb whatever the people fail to hold. the idea of consent is also revolutionary--but the moment "inalienability" is granted, consent to be governed _must_ follow. the fascist state recognizes _no_ inalienable right, and needs no consent from its people. it is "self-evident", i think, that we have given wrong values to the three elements involved. we have talked about the "pursuit of happiness"; we have been impressed by the idea of any right being ours "for keeps", inalienable; and we have never thought much about the fundamental radicalism of the declaration: that it makes government our servant, instructed _by us_ to protect our rights. the chain of reasoning, as the declaration sets it forth, leads to a practical issue: all men are created equal--their equality lies in their having rights; these rights cannot be alienated; governments are set up to prevent alienation; power to secure the rights of the people is given by the people to the government; and if one government fails, the people give the power to another. so in the first three hundred words of the declaration the purpose of our government is logically developed. _blueprint of america_ there follows first a general and then a particular condemnation of the king of england. this is the longest section of the declaration. it is the section no one bothers to read; the statute of limitations has by this time outlawed our bill of complaint against george the third. but the grievances of the colonials were not high-pitched trifles; every complaint rises out of a definite desire to live under a decent government; and the whole list is like a picture, seen in negative, of the actual government the colonists intended to set up; and the basic habits of american life, its great traditions, its good fortune and its deficiencies are all foreshadowed in this middle section. here--for the sake of completeness--is the section: "_he has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good._ "_he has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend them._ "_he has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only._ "_he has called together legislative bodies at places, unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures._ "_he has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people._ "_he has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within._ here i omit one "count", reserved for separate consideration. "_he has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers._ "_he has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries._ "_he has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance._ "_he has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures._ "_he has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power._ "_he has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation: for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: for protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states: for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world: for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury: for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses: for abolishing the free system of english laws in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies: for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments: for suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever._ "_he has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us._ "_he has plundered our seas, ravished our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people._ "_he is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation._ "_he has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands._ "_he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. a prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. nor have we been wanting in attention to our british brethren. we have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. we have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. we have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. they too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. we must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends._" the eighteen paragraphs of denunciation fall into seven general sections: the king has thwarted representative government; he has obstructed justice; he has placed military above civil power; he has imposed taxes without the consent of the taxed; he has abolished the rule of law; he has placed obstacles in the way of the growth and prosperity of the colonies; he has, in effect, ceased to rule them, because he is making war on them. so the bill of complaint signifies these things about the founders of our country: they demanded government with the consent, by the representatives, of the governed. they cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not tolerate any power superior to law--whether royal or military. they wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats, wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil. they wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no restraints on commerce and industry. they intended to be prosperous. they considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so. these were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in england or france; they were the practical application of locke and rousseau and the encyclopedists and the roundheads. little in the whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies; troops had been quartered in ireland, trial by jury suspended in england, tyrants then as now created their praetorian guard or storm troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early time had been considered as tributaries of the mother country. _the practical "dream"_ the american colonists were about to break the traditions of european settlement, and with it the traditions of european government. and, with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence, they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one specification which had never been made before, and _could_ never have been made before: "_he has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands._" this amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on representative government; it is so important that it comes before the items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. it is a critical factor in the history of america; if we understand it, we can go forward to understand our situation today. the other complaints point toward our systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be. this brief paragraph condemns the crown for obstructing the two processes by which america was made: immigration pioneering with absolute clairvoyance the declaration sets naturalization, which means political equality, in between the two other factors. naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth, the new thing in the new world, that one could _become_ what one willed and worked to become--one could, regardless of birth or race or creed, _become an american_. so long as the colonies were held by the crown, the process of populating the country by immigration was checked. the colonists had no "dream" of a great american people combining racial bloods and the habits of all the european nations. they wanted only to secure their prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to westphalia and the palatinate to induce good germans to come to america, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in platt-deutsch, promising not utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not a dream, but something grander and greater--citizenship, equality under the law, and land. across this traffic the king and his ministers threw the dam of royal prerogative; they meant to keep the colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands from the appalachians to the mississippi--or as much of it as they could take from the spaniards and the french. so as far back as , the crown took over _all_ title to the , square miles of land which are now indiana and illinois and michigan and minnesota, the best land lying beyond the alleghenies. into this territory no man could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no common law ran. suddenly the natural activity of america, uninterrupted since , stopped. the right of americans to move westward and to take land, the right of non-americans to become americans, both were denied. the outcry from the highlands and the forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that america was one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not across the ocean. and to make the unity clear, the crown which had taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the colonies was broken; they were cut off from europe, forbidden to bring over its men, forbidden to send over their goods. for the first time america was isolated from europe. so the british crown touched every focal spot--and bruised it. the outward movement, to and from europe, always fruitful for america, was stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. the energies of america had always expressed themselves in movement; when an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then the explosion of forces we call the revolution. and nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the revolution created. the thing that people afterward chose to call "the american dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the substantial fabric of american life--a systematic linking of free land, free trade, free citizenship, in a free society. a grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the constitution. as charles beard is often made the authority for this economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of the declaration may be cited in evidence: the great estates were broken up; the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally broken; in the new states, the property qualification was never accepted and it disappeared steadily from the old. and the ordnance of , last great act of the continental congress, inspired by the declaration, created the northwest territory, the heart of america for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and intelligence which the constitution in all its wisdom did not surpass. that is what the declaration accomplished. it set in action _all_ the forces that ultimately made america. the action rose out of the final section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as "representatives of the united states of america", the signers declare that "these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states...." in this clear insight, the declaration says that the things separating one people from another have already happened--differences in experiences, desires, habits--and that the life of the colonies is already so independent of britain that the purely political bond must be dissolved. "_we, therefore, the representatives of the united states of america, in general congress, assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor._" so finally, as a unity of free and independent states, the new nation arrogates to itself four specific powers: to levy war conclude peace contract alliances establish commerce. only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant that they had to be separately written down; three of them--war--peace--alliances--are wholly international; the fourth, commerce, at least partly so. the signers of the declaration made no mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain independent, they were fighting _against_ isolation. the error we must not make about the declaration is to think of it as a purely domestic document, dealing with taxes and election of representatives and redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our life out of english hands; and the moment this is done, the declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations, and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of europe. at this moment our intercourse with the nations of europe is a matter of life and death--death to the destroyer of free europe or death to ourselves; but if we live, life for all europe, also. like parachute troops, our address to europe must precede our armies; we have to know what to say to europe, to whom to say, how to say it. and the answer was provided by the declaration which let all europe come to us--but held us independent of all europe. chapter vi "the population of these states" in the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and it is never like ourselves. the image has changed from generation to generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to prove a point. we have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to the picture it distorts. _english-speaking aliens_ the immigrant-cartoon since has been the south-european: slavic, jewish, italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying beard; and eager children around them. this is not a particularly false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the most valuable this country has had. but it erases from our mind the bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly _one third of all_ the immigrants to the united states, were english-speaking. for several decades, the bulk of all immigration was from great britain and ireland. if one takes the three principal sources of immigration for every decade between and , one finds that germany and ireland were among the leaders for sixty years; italy for forty; russia only thirty; the great scandinavian movement to the middle west lasted a single decade; but great britain was one of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably was the principal source for thirty years more--from until --during which time no official figures were kept. out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the tradition of anglo-saxon self-government; some had suffered from british domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all knew what liberty and respect for law meant. many of these millions fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or political persecution. many millions came to relatives and friends already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the country; many millions were already educated. the cost of their upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and willing to work. they fell quickly into the american system, without causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the national groups which had fought the revolution and created the new nation. it is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants; they made themselves into americans and helped to make america; they helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by abandoning others. for this is essential: the british immigrant, even when he came to a country predominantly anglo-saxon, did not remain british and did not make the country anglo-saxon. the process of change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the minorities. it was a little easier for a kentish man to become an american than it was for a serbian; but it was just as hard for the man from kent to remain a briton as it was for the serbian to remain a serb. both became americans. neither of them tried to remake america in the mold of his old country. _who asked them to come?_ the next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it makes us feel smug and benevolent. it is the image of america, the foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later the scum of the old world. it is true that the oppressed came to america, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals as well as saints. the picture is false not only in perspective, but in basic values. for in many generations, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the great inrush of europeans, the united states actively desired and solicited immigration. obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell off; irish famine and german reaction sent us floods of immigrants who had not been individually urged to come. but their fathers and elder brothers had been invited. the colonies and the states in their first years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens into the declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the railroads of the country and imported irish and chinese to help the civil war veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for shipping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor. moreover, the congress of the united states refused to place any restrictions upon immigration. the vested interest of labor might demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner (the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a fixed policy of the united states not to discourage immigration. the only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. it did not lower the totals. _america was fulfilment!_ the moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact without self-righteousness. the fact is that arrival in america was the end toward which whole generations of europeans aspired. it did not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to the only poverty which is degrading--the poverty which is accepted as permanent and inevitable. the shock of reality in the strike-ridden mills around pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the dakotas, brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steamship agents and labor bosses. but in one thing america never failed its immigrants--the promise and hope of better things for their children. america was not only promises; america was fulfilment. no one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater comfort and freedom. in america this belief in the future was only a projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction against the european habit of assuming that the children would, with luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income, in the same way. the elder son was fairly assured of this; war and disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others. the less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much. at various times the jew in russia, the liberal in germany, the sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless irish, and families in a dozen other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the new world. and this confidence--which was always justified--became as much a part of the atmosphere of america as our inherited parliamentary system, our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from all other nations. the immigrant knew his children would be born americans; for himself there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he could _become_ an american. it was not a cant phrase; it had absolute specific meaning. the immigrant became in essence one of the people of the country. as soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the government placed anything in the way of social equality; the immigrant's life was his own to make. this did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a slav or saxon or latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or brunette. the immigrant became a part of american life because the life of america was prepared to receive him and could not, for six generations, get along without him. _america is various_ during the years in which big business solicited immigration and organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an unfortunate shift. the question was whether the melting pot was "working", whether immigrants could be americanized. there were people who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old americans" were wearing capes; (the "old americans" wore shawls when they arrived, forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with an "accent" different from the particular american speech developed at the moment. there were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. employers of unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial americanization; sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately isolated from earlier arrivals and native americans; wages could be kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of comfort, not at ours. others felt the danger (foreseen by franklin and jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories, living outside the circle of common interests. the actual danger to the american system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with america but with their homeland. (this is precisely what happened in argentina, by the deliberate action of the german government, and it is not an invention of hitler's. thomas beer reports that "in ... a german imperialist invited the reichstag to secure the ... dismemberment of the united states by planting colonies of civilized europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious leaders, speaking their own language; german leaders never could accept the american idea of change; in hitler's mind a mystic "blood" difference makes changing of nationality impossible.) the first world war proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from south europe, as well as the germans, could keep their ancient customs and be good americans; then observers saw that their worries over "assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of america's existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find a place--not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding uniformity. in the flush of the young century william james, as typical of america as edison or theodore roosevelt, looking about him, seeing an america made up of many combining into one, made our variety the base of his religious outlook. he had studied "the varieties of religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a universe not necessarily totalitarian. he saw us building a country out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. he saw infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed america to admit that the important action of creating america had come to an end. james "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future "could be far better, totally other than the past". he was living in an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far better, totally other" than they had been. he looked to a better world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one king, one ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. he said that there was no proof of the one single truth. he threw out all the old totalitarians, and cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. we were building it politically every day; without knowing it, james helped to fortify us against the totalitarians who were yet to come. this was, to be sure, not americanization. it was the far more practical thing: becoming american. americanization was something celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done _to_ the foreigners. the truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to be allowed to experience america; then slowly, partially, but consistently, he became an american. the immigrant of did not become an american of the type of ; he became an american as americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the america of the next generation. and in every generation, the native born and the older immigrants wept because _their_ america and their way of becoming american had been outmoded. the process passed them by; america had to be reborn. so long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and prolific parenthood, the process of becoming american was not observed, and the process of americanization seemed obvious and relatively unimportant. the tremendous revolution in human affairs was hidden under social discords and economic pressures. people began to think it was time to slacken the flow of immigrants until we had absorbed what we had. good land was scarce; foreigners in factions began to join unions; second-generation children grew up to be great tennis players and took scholarships; the pure costless joy of having immigrants do the dirty work was gone. the practical people believed something had to be done. but the practical people forgot the great practical side--which is also the mystical side--of our immigration. for the first time since the bright days of primitive christianity, a great thing was made possible to all men: they could become what they wished to become. as peter said to the romans, and paul to the athenians, that through faith and desire and grace they could become christians, equal, in the eyes of god, to all other christians, so the apostles of freedom spoke to the second son of an english lord, to the ten sons of a russian serf, to old and young, ignorant and wise, befriended or alone, and said that their will, their ambition, their work, and their faith could make of them true americans. the instant practical consequences of this new element in human history are incalculable. they are like the practical consequences of early christianity, which can be measured in terms of empires and explorations and crusades. the transformation of millions of europeans into americans was like the conversion of millions of pagans to christianity; it was accompanied by an outburst of confidence and energy. the same phenomena occurred in the renaissance and reformation, a period of conversion accompanied by a great surge of trade, invention, exploration, wealth, and vast human satisfaction. this idea of becoming american, as personal as religion, as mystical as conversion, as practical as a contract, was in fact a foundation stone of the growth and prosperity of the united states. it was a practical result of the exact kind of equality which the declaration invoked; it allowed men to regain their birthright of equality, snatched from them by tyrants. it persuaded them that they could enjoy life--and allowed them to produce and to consume. in that way it was as favorable to prosperity as our land and our climate. and it had other consequences. for, as it stemmed from equality, it went deep under the roots of the european system--and loosened them so that a tremor could shake the system entirely. _change and status_ for the european system stood against _becoming_; its objective was to remain, to be still, to stand. its ancient greatness and the tone of time which made it lovely, both came from this faith in the steady long-abiding changelessness of human institutions. all that it possessed was built to endure for ever; its cathedrals, its prisons, its symbols, its systems--including the symbols and the systems by which it denied freedom to its people. each national-racial-religious complex of europe was a triple anchor against change; it prevented men from drifting as the great winds of revolution and reform swept over europe. nor were men permitted to change, as they pleased. nations waged war and won land, but neither the czars nor the german emperors thought of the poles as their own people; the poles were irrevocably poles, excluded from the nobler society of russians, austrians and germans. religious societies made converts, but looked with fear or hatred or suspicion against the very people from whom the converts came--the jew was irretrievably a jew, the catholic a catholic. in each country one religion was uppermost, the rest tolerated. in each country one folk-group was dominant, the rest tolerated or persecuted. and in each country one class--the same class--ruled, and all other classes served. by ones or twos, men and women might be accepted into the established church, marry into the dominant race, rise to the governing class; but the exceptions proved nothing. the european believed in his _station_ in life, his civil _status_, the _standing_ of his family in the financial or social world. the englishman settling in timbuctoo remained an englishman because the englishman at home remained a middle-class bank clerk or "not a gentleman" or a marquess; and while an alien could become a subject of the king, he never for a moment imagined that he could become an englishman--any more than a scot. the english knew that names change; men do not. _only when they came to america, they did._ they did because the basic american system, the dynamics of becoming american, rejected the racialism of europe; it rejected aggressive nationalism by building a new nation; it rejected an established religion; and almost in passing it destroyed the class-system. to the familiar european systems of damnation--by original sin, by economic determinism, by pre-natal influence--has been added a new one--damnation by racial inferiority; the chamberlain-wagner-nietzsche-rosenberg-hitler myth of the superior race-nation means in practise that whoever is not born german is damned to serve germany; there is no escape because the inferiority is inherent. this is the european class-system carried to its loftiest point. we say that this system is inhuman, unscientific, probably suicidal. the poverty-system on which europe "prospered" for generations and into which we almost fell, was also inhuman, unscientific and probably suicidal; there is no logic in the british aristocratic system coupled with a financial-industrial overlordship and universal suffrage; there is little logic even in our own setup of vast organizations of labor, huge combinations of money, unplumbed technical skill hampered by both capital and labor, and some forty million underfed and half sick human beings in the most productive land in the world. it is not logic we look for in the framework of human society; we look for operations. what does it do? for all its failures, our system works toward human liberty; for all its success, the nazi system works against human liberty. we tend to give more and more people an opportunity to change and improve; their system is based on the impossibility of change. our system is a nation built out of many races; theirs is a nation excluding all but one race. our system has lapses, we do not grant citizenship to certain orientals nor social equality to negroes; but we do not write racial inferiority into our laws, we do not teach it in _our_ schools (it may be taught in sectional schools we tolerate, but do not support); and this is important. so long as we accept the ideal of political equality, hope lives for every man. the moment we abandon it, we nazify ourselves--and destroy the foundation of the republic. _americans all_ turning from the brutal leveling and uniformity of the nazis, good americans have begun to wish that more of the folk qualities of our settlers had been preserved. at every point america is the enemy of fasci-feudalism, and this is no exception. our music, our dancing, the language we speak, the foods we eat, all incorporate elements brought from europe; but we have not deliberately encouraged the second generation to preserve clothes and cooking any more than we have encouraged the preservation of political habits. there has been a loss in variety and color; and now, while there is still time, efforts are being made to create a general american interest in the separate cultures combined here. it has to be carefully done, so that we do not lose sight of the total american civilization in our enthusiasm for the contributing parts. there is always the chance that descendants of norwegians, proud and desperate as they consider the plight of their country, will become nationalistic here; and that they will not be interested in the music or the art of ukrainians in america; and that americans of italian descent may be the only ones concerned in adding to the italian contribution to american life. this is the constant danger of all work concerned with immigrant groups; and the supersensitiveness of all these groups, in a period of intense %-ism, tends to defeat the purpose of assaying what each has done to help all the others. yet some success is possible. in i worked with the office of education on a series of broadcasts which drew its title from the president's remark to the daughters of the american revolution, that we are all the descendants of immigrants. (the president also added "and revolutionaries", but this was not essential in our broadcasts.) everything i now feel about the focal position of the immigrant in american life is developed from the work done on the immigrants all series and, especially, from the difficulties encountered, as well as from one special element of success. i set down some basic principles: that the programs would not _glorify_ one national group after another; that the interrelation of each arriving group to the ones already here would be noted; the vast obligation of every immigrant to those who had prepared the way would be stressed; cooperation between groups would be dramatically rendered if possible; the immigrants' contribution to america would be paralleled by america's contribution to the immigrant; and the making of america, by its natives and its immigrants, would overshadow the special contribution of any single group. these were principles. in practise, some disappeared, but none was knowingly violated. from time to time, enthusiasts for a given group would complain that another had been more warmly treated; more serious was the indifference of many leaders of national and folk groups to the general problem of the immigrant, to any group outside their own. we were, by that time, in a period of sharpened national sensibilities; but this did not entirely account for an apparently ingrained habit of considering immigrant problems as problems of one's own group, only. suspicion of other groups went with this neglect of the problem as a whole; the natives born with longer american backgrounds were the ones who showed a clearer grasp of the whole problem; they were not bothered by jealousies and they were interested in america. on the other side, the series had an almost spectacular success. more than half of the letters after each weekly broadcast came from men and women who were _not_ descendants of the national group presented that week. after the program on the irish, some % of the letters were from irish immigrants or native-born descendants of the irish; the other % came from children of serbs and ffv's and jews and portuguese, from sicilians and germans and scots, scandinavians and englishmen and greeks. it was so for all of the programs; the defects of the scripts were forgotten, because the people who heard them were so much better americans than anyone had dared predict. of a hundred thousand letters, almost all were american, not sectarian in spirit; the bitterness of the cheap fascist movements had not affected even a fringe of the listeners. all in all, we were encouraged; it seemed to us that the immigrant was accepted as the co-maker of america. much of our future depends on the exact place we give to the immigrant. it has been taken for granted that immigration is over and that the proportions of racial strains in america today are fixed for ever. it is not likely that vast immigration will head for the united states in the next decade; but the principle of "becoming american" will operate for the quotas and the refugees; and it is now of greater significance than ever because the great fascist countries have laid down the principle of unchangeable nationality. the nazi government has pretended a right to call german-born american citizens to the colors; and a regular practise of that government is to plant "colonies" as spies. if we do not re-assert the principle of change of nationality (the legal counterpart to the process of becoming american) we will be lost in the aggressive nationalism of the nazis, and we will no longer be safe from racialism. preposterous as it will seem to scholars, degrading as it will be to men of sense, racialism can establish itself in america by the re-assertion of anglo-saxonism (with variations). _are we anglo-saxon?_ at this point the direct political implications of "becoming american" become evident. toward the end of this book there are some questions about union with britain; the point to note here is that so far as union-now (or any variant thereof) is based emotionally on the anglo-saxonism of the united states of america, it is based on a myth and is politically an impossible combination; if we plan union with britain, let it be based on the actuality of the american status, not on a snobbish desire. we cannot falsify our history, not even in favor of those who did most for our history. there is a way, however, of imputing anglo-saxonism to america, which is by starting with the great truth: the english and the scots--and the scots-irish--founded the first colonies (some time after the spaniards to be sure, but that is "a detail"); they established here certain basic forms of law and cultivated the appetite for freedom; they were good law-abiding citizens, and accustomed to self-discipline; they were great pioneers in the wilderness; they suffered for religious liberty and more than any other national or racial group, they fought the war of independence. can we say these men created the true, the original america; and everything since then has been a corruption of its % goodness and purity? this would allow us to rejoice in andrew carnegie, but not in george w. goethals; in hearst but not in pulitzer; in cyrus mccormick but not in eleuthère dupont; in the wright brothers, but not in boeing and bellanca; in edison (partly as he was not all scot) but not in his associate berliner; in bell who invented the telephone but not in pupin who created long distance. we should have to denounce as un-american the civil service work of carl schurz and bela schick's test for diphtheria and goldberger's work on pellagra (which was destroying the pure descendants of the good americans); we would have to say that america would be better off without audubon and agassiz and thoreau; or boas and luther burbank; or john philip sousa and paul robeson and jonas lie. when we have denied all these their place in america, we can begin to belittle the contribution of still others to our national life. for the later immigrants had less to give to transportation and basic manufactures and to building the nation. these things were done by the earlier immigrants. the later ones gave their sweat and blood, and presently they and their children were troubling about education, or civil service, or conservation of forests, or the right of free association, or art or music or philanthropy. if our own special fascists lay their hands on our traditions, the burning of books will be only a trifle; for they will tear down the museums and the settlement houses, the kindergartens and the labor temples--and when they are done they will say, with some truth, that they have purged america of its foreign influence. all reform, all culture will be destroyed by the new klansmen, and they will re-write history to make us believe that wave after wave of corruption came from europe (especially from catholic and greek orthodox and jewish europe) to destroy the simple purity of anglo-saxon america. that is why, now, when we can still assess the truth, when we need the help of every american, we must declare the truth, that there never was a purely anglo-saxon united states. frenchmen and swedes and spaniards and negroes and walloons and hollanders and portuguese and finns and germans and german swiss were here before ; quakers, catholics, freethinkers and jews fought side by side with huguenots, episcopalians, calvinists and lutherans in the wars with the indians. in the colony of georgia, in the year washington was born, men of six nations had settled: german lutherans, italian protestants, scots, swiss, portuguese, jews and english. in four times as many germans arrived in pennsylvania as english and irish together. _the creative anglo-saxon_ the greatness of the anglo-saxon contribution to america--the gift greater than all their other great gifts--was the conception of a state making over the people who came here, and made over by them. by the end of the revolution, power and prestige were in the hands of the anglo-saxon majority; and in three successive instruments they destroyed the idea of anglo-saxon superiority: the declaration of independence, the ordnance of , the constitution. "becoming" was not an ideal and it was not the base of anglo-saxon society in england; the concept of change and "becoming" was based on actuality; on what was happening all over the colonial dominion. people were becoming american, even before a new nation was born. all that followed--the vast complexity of creating america, would have been impossible without that first supreme act of creative self-sacrifice. when the statesmen of our revolutionary period established the principles of statehood and naturalization and citizenship in terms of absolute equality, they knew the risk they ran. in pennsylvania the official minutes were printed in both english and german; in maryland the catholics were dominant; there were still some influential dutch along the upper hudson who might secede from new york. on the western boundary, unsettled, uneasy, lay the spaniards and the french. there was danger of division, everywhere; but the great descendants of the english immigrants did not withdraw. their principle was equality; since men were born free, they could _become_ equal if artificial barriers were removed. the statesmen of that day declared for america; they knew that men did not, in this country, remain dutch or portuguese; but grew into something else. with their own eyes they had seen it happen. they pledged their lives and sacred honor that it would happen again. so, if ever we re-write history to prove that all the other nations contributed nothing and failed to become americans, we will also have to write it down that the anglo-saxons failed more miserably than the others. for the great idea, the practical dynamics of equality, was theirs; they set it in motion, guarded it, and saw it triumph. in the next ten years it will be impossible to extemporize an immigration policy for the united states. the world economy will change all around us; the dreadful alternations of plenty and starvation may be adjusted and controlled; we may enter a world order in which we will be responsible for a given number of souls, and some of these may be admitted to our country. by that time we will have learned that nationalist fascism and international communism are powerless here; and no one but professional haters of america will be left to bait the foreigners and persecute the alien. but above all, by that time we will have had time to reassert the great practical idea behind immigration and naturalization--the idea of men making themselves over--as for a century and a half they have made themselves into americans. _an experiment in evolution_ note: i have used the phrase "becoming american" and defined it as it defined itself; legally, in the customs of the country, it seems to mean becoming a citizen; experimentally "becoming" has happened to us, we have seen it happen, it means that we recognize an essential affinity between an immigrant and americans, living or dead. yet to many people the words may be vague; to others they may seem a particularly dangerous lie. those who are interested in certain foreign groups, less promptly "americanized", will protest that for all this "becoming", some are not accepted as american; those who are basically haters of all foreigners will say that the _law_ accepts citizens, but no power on earth can make them americans. it is my experience that the phrases created by poets, politicians and people are often the truest words about america; and one of the profound satisfactions of life is to see the wild imagery of the poet or the lush oratory of the politician come true, literally and exactly true, scientifically demonstrated and proved. in this particular case, absolute proof is still lacking, because we are dealing with human beings, we cannot make controlled experiments. we can observe and compare. under the inspiration of the eminent anthropologist dr. franz boas, the research has been made; so far as it goes it proves that the children of foreigners do become americans. specifically, their gestures, the way they stand and the way they walk, their metabolism and their susceptibility to disease, all tend to become american. in all of these aspects, there is an american norm or standard; and the children of immigrants forsaking the norm or standard of the fatherland, grow to that of america. the most entertaining of these researches was in the field of gesture. the observers took candid movie shots of groups of italians and of jews; they differ from one another and both differ from the american mode (which is a composite, with probably an anglo-saxon dominant). the observers found that the extreme gesture of the foreign-born jew is one in which a speaker gesticulates with one hand while with the other he holds his opponent's arm, to prevent a rival movement; and one case was noted in which the speaker actually gesticulated with the other man's arm. to the american of native stock this is "foreign"; and research proves that the american is right; such gestures are foreign even to the american-born children of the foreigner himself. the typical foreign gesture disappears and the typical american gesture takes its place. and this is not merely imitation; it is not an "accent" disappearing in a new land. because metabolism and susceptibility to disease are as certainly altered as gait and posture. the vital physical nature changes in the atmosphere of liberty--as the mind and the spirit change. the frightened lie of racial doom which has fascinated the german mind (under its meaner guise of racial superiority) was never needed in america. seeing men become americans, the fathers of our freedom declared that nothing should prevent them; they were not afraid of any race because they knew that the men of all races would become americans. their faith of begins to be scientifically proved today; a hundred and sixty-six years of creative america proved it in action. it is on the basis of what europeans became in america, that we now have to consider our relations with the europeans who remained in europe. chapter vii address to europe the communications of america and europe have always run in two channels: our fumbling, foolish diplomacy, our direct, candid, successful dealings with the people. our first word was to the people of europe; the declaration of independence tried to incite the british people against their own parliament; and the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" refers to citizens, not to chancelleries. the declaration was addressed to the world; it was heard in paris and later in a dozen provinces of germany, and in savoy and in manchester, and presently along the nevski and the yellow river. since , the people of the world have always listened to us, and answered. we have never failed when we have spoken to the people. after the declaration, the american people spoke to all the people of europe in the most direct way: they invited europeans to come here, offering them land, wages, freedom; presently our railroads and steamship lines solicited larger numbers; and the policy of the government added inducements. free immigration, and free movement, demanded in the declaration, made possible by laws under the constitution, were creating america. in domestic life we saw it at once; but the effects of immigration on our dealings with europe were not immediate. we need only remember that for a hundred and twenty years the peoples of europe and the people of the united states were constantly writing to one another; not merely doing business together, but exchanging ideas, mingling in marriage, coming together as dispersed families come together. whatever went on in the mississippi valley was known along the fjords and in the volga basin and by the danube; if sulphur was discovered in louisiana it first impoverished sicily--then brought sicilians to louisiana; greeks knew that sponges were to be found off tampa. and more and more people in america knew what was happening in europe--a famine, a revolution, a brief era of peace, a repressive ministry, a reform bill. the constant interaction of europe and america was one beat of our existence--it was in counterpoint to the tramp of the pioneer moving westward; immigration and migration meshed together. our government from time to time spoke to the governments of europe. a tone of sharp reproof was heard at times, a warm word for revolutionaries was coupled with indignation against tyrants: turkey, the dual monarchy, the tsar, all felt the lash--or congress hoped they felt it; in the boer war, england was the victim of semi-official criticism; and whenever possible, we were the first to recognize republics, even if they failed to maintain themselves on the ruins of monarchy. we fluttered official papers and were embarrassed by protocol, not believing in it anyhow, and were outwitted or out-charmed by second-rate diplomatists of europe. _people and protocol_ the campaign platforms always demanded a "firm, vigorous, dignified" diplomacy; the diplomacy of europe was outwardly correct, inwardly devious, shifting, flexible, and in our opinion corrupt. but our address to the _people_ of europe was, in all this time, so candid, so persuasive, that we destroyed the chancelleries and recaptured our losses. the first great communication, after , was made by lincoln--it was not a single speech or letter, it was a constant appeal to the conscience of the british people, begging them, as the declaration had done, to override the will of their rulers. and this appeal also was successful; few events in our relations with england are more moving than the action of the starving midlanders. their government, like their men of wealth and birth, like their press and parliament, were eager to see america split, and willing to see slavery upheld in order to destroy democracy. but the men and women of manchester, starved by the northern blockade of cotton, still begged their government not to interfere with the blockade--and sent word to lincoln to assure him that the _people_ of britain were on the side of liberty, imploring him "not to faint in your providential mission. while your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let the work be finished effectually. leave no root of bitterness to spring up and work fresh misery to your children." nor did lincoln fail to respond; americans who could interest britain in the northern cause were unofficial ambassadors to the people; and our minister, charles francis adams labored with all sorts and conditions of men to make the government of britain accept the will of the british people. the emancipation proclamation was a final step in the domestic statesmanship of the war; it was also a step in the diplomacy of the war, for it insured us the good will of the british people; and that good will was vital to the success of the union. the north was coming close to war with the _government_ of britain, and the people's open prejudice in favor of lincoln and freedom kept england from sufficient aid to the confederacy. the next address of the united states to the people of europe is a long tragedy, its consequences so dreadful today that we can barely analyze the steps by which the great work for human freedom was destroyed. _wilson to the world_ following the precedent of the declaration, woodrow wilson began in to address himself to the people of the nations at war in europe. to ministries, german and british both, wilson was sending expostulations on u-boats and embargos; to the peoples of europe he addressed those speeches which were made at home; presently he wrote inquiries to the ministers which they were compelled to make public (since publication in neutral countries was certain). then, after the soviets of russia had gone over the heads of the foreign offices, to appeal to the workers of the world, wilson carried his own method to its necessary point and, after we entered the war, began the masterly series of addresses to the german people which were so effective in creating the atmosphere of defeat. they created at the same time the purposes of allied victory. the war ended and one of the magnificent spectacles of modern times occurred: the people of europe were for a moment united, and they were united by an american declaring the objectives of american life. the moment was so brief that few knew all it meant until it had passed; in the excitement of spectacles and events, of plots and processions, this moment when europe trembled with a new hope passed unnoticed. what happened later to woodrow wilson is tragic enough; but nothing can take away from america this great moment in european history--to which every observer bears testimony, even the most cynical. the defeated people of germany saw in america their only defence against the rapacity of clemenceau, the irresponsible, volatile opportunism of lloyd george, the crafty merchandising of orlando; the first "liberal" leader, prince max, had deliberately pretended acceptance of the fourteen points in order to embarrass wilson; but he spoke the truth when he said that wilson's ideals were cherished by the overwhelming majority of the german _people_; and quite correctly the germans saw that nothing but american idealism stood between them and a peace of vengeance. the enthusiasm of the victorious peoples was less selfish, but it was equally great; a profound distrust of their leaders had grown in the minds of realistic frenchmen and britons, they sensed the incapacity of their leaders to raise the objectives of the war above the level of the "knockout blow" or the _revanche_. as the germans cried to be protected in their defeat, the victorious people asked to be protected from such fruits of victory as europe had known for a thousand years. the demagogues still shouted hoarsely for a noose for the kaiser and the old order in germany began to plan for the next time--but the people of europe were united; they had gone through the same war and, for the first time in their history, they wanted the same peace. it was the first time that an american peace was proposed to them. _how wilson was trapped_ woodrow wilson made a triumphal tour of the allied capitals and by the time he returned to paris for the actual business of the peace, he had become the spiritual leader of the world. he was not, however, the political leader of his own country--he had lost the congressional elections and he allowed the diplomats of europe to make use of this defeat. they began to cut him off from the people of europe; he fell into the ancient traps of statesmanship, the secret sessions, the quarrels and departures; once he recovered control, ordered steam up in the george washington to take him home; but in the end he was outguessed--in the smart word, he was outsmarted. he had imagined that he could defeat the old europe by refusing to recognize its intrigues. he had, in effect, declared that secret treaties and all commitments preceding the fourteen points couldn't exist; he had hoped that they would be cancelled to conform to his pious pretence of ignorance. and clemenceau and lloyd george kept him quarreling over a mile of boundary or a religious enclave within a racial minority; they stirred passions; they starved german children by an embargo; they rumored reparations; they promised to hang the kaiser; they drew wilson deeper into smaller conferences; they promised him a league about which their cynicism was boundless, and he let them have war guilt and reparations and the betrayal of the russian revolution and the old european system triumphant. they had fretted him and tried him and they had made their own people forget the passionate faith wilson had inspired; they made wilson the agent of disillusion for all that was generous and hopeful in europe. they could do it because the moment wilson began to talk to the premiers, he stopped talking to the people. from the moment he allowed the theme of exclusive war guilt to be announced, he cut himself off from all germany; he did not know the temper of the working class in europe, and he refused to listen to the men he himself had sent to report on russia, which did not help him with the radical trade unions in france or the liberals in england. one by one the nations fell back into their ancient groove, the italians sullenly nursing a grievance, the french whipping up a drama of revenge and memory in the hall of mirrors at versailles, the british "isolating" themselves in virtual control of the continent, everybody frightened of russia--and everyone still listening for another word of honest truth from wilson, who was silent; for america was starting on a long era of isolation from europe (the first in a century), an aberration in american life, against all its actual traditions, in keeping only with its vulgar oratory. _the excommunication of europe_ the united states had no obligations to the nations which emerged out of the treaty of versailles, only a human obligation to their people to keep faith with them. the people of germany believed in all fervor that they had gained an armistice and sought peace on the basis of the fourteen points; the people of france and england believed that their own governments had accepted the same points. and the same people might have been stirred to insist on a peace of reconciliation--not with princes and ministers, but with peoples--if wilson and the americans had continued to communicate with them. we withdrew into a stuffy silence. just as we played a queer game of protocol and refused to "recognize" the ussr, so we sulked because the old bitch europe wasn't being a gentleman--the only communication we made to europe was when we dunned her for money. we have seen how the years of harding and coolidge affected our domestic life; they were not only a reaction against the fervor of the war months; they were a carefully calculated reaction against basic american policy at home and abroad; they betrayed american enterprise, delivered industry into the hands of finance, degraded government, laughed at corruption, and under the guise of "a return to normalcy" attempted to revive the dead conservatism of mckinley and penrose in american politics. in this period, it is no wonder that we failed to utter one kind word to help the first democratic government in germany, that we trembled with fear of the reds, sneered at british labor until it became respectable enough to send us a prime minister, and excluded more and more rigorously the people of europe whose blood had created our own. slowly, as the depression of - squeezed us, we began to see that our miseries connected us with europe; it was a republican president who first attempted to address europe; but mr. hoover's temperament makes it difficult for him to speak freely to anyone; the talks with ramsay macdonald were pleasurable; the offer of a moratorium was the first kindness to europe in a generation of studied american indifference. it failed (because france still preferred to avenge herself on germany); and thereafter we had too many unpleasant things to do at home. _one good deed_ we had, in the interval, spoken once to all the world. on the day the japanese moved into manchuria we had, in effect, notified the british that we chose not to accept the destruction or dismemberment of a friendly nation. the cynical indifference of sir john simon was the first intimation of the way europe felt about american "idealism". it was also the first step toward "non-intervention" in spain and the destruction of europe at the hands of adolf hitler. when we were rebuffed by downing street, we sulked; we did not attempt to speak to the people of asia, or try to win the british public to our side. we had lost the habit. we were not even candid in our talks with the chinese whose cause we favored because we had japan (and american dealers in oil and scrap iron) to appease. in adolf hitler was elected leader of a germany which had been out of communication with us for a generation. the united states which had been in the minds of generations of germans, was forgotten by the people. in a few years hitler had overthrown the power of france on the continent, challenged communism as an international force, and frightened the british empire into an ignoble flutter of appeasement. to that dreary end our failure of communication had tended. we were the one power which might have held europe together--in a league, in a mere hope of friendship and peace between nations, in the matrix of the fourteen points if nothing more. the moment we withdrew from europe, its nations fell apart, not merely into victors and vanquished, but into querulous, distrustful, and angry people, each whipped into hysteria by demagogues or soothed to complaisance by frightened ministers. the obligation to address europe is no longer a moral one. for our own security, for the cohesion of our own people, for victory over every element that works to break america into hostile parts--now we have the golden opportunity again, to speak to europe, and to ask europe to answer. as we look back on our ancient triumphs with the peoples of europe and the sour end to which we let them come, this new chance is heaven-sent, undeserved, as if we could live our lives over again. and it is nearly so--for if we want to have a life to live in the future, if it is still to be the confident, secure life of a united america, we must speak now to europe. chapter viii the science of short wave what we say to europe is to be an incitement to revolution, a promise of liberation, a hope of a decent, orderly, comfortable living, in freedom; but it must be as hard and real and un-dreamlike as the declaration, which was our first word to the people of the world. we have to begin by telling all the peoples of europe, our friends and our enemies, what they have done for america, and what america has done for them. we have to destroy the slander that the italians were kept at digging ditches, the yugoslavs in the mills, the hungarians and poles and czechs in the mines and at the boilers, the greeks at the fruit stands; we must destroy the great lie that all the "lesser races" whom hitler now enslaves were first slaves to our economic system. we can begin by reading the roster of the great names, the men who came to america and were liberated from poverty and prejudice, and made themselves fame or wealth, and deserved well of the republic, and were honored. _ million freemen_ directly after the great names, we have to tell the story of the nameless ones, the thirty-eight million who came here and suffered the pains of transportation, but took root and grew, understanding freedom as it came to them, making their way in the world, becoming part of america, deprived of no civil rights, fighting against exploitation with other americans, free to fight against oppression, and with a fair chance of winning. there is no need to prettify the record; the record, as it stands, in all its crude natural colors, is good enough. the immigrant was exploited, greedily and brutally; and twenty years later he or his sons exploited other immigrants in turn, as greedily and brutally as the law allowed. the ancient passions of race and ritual were not dead in america; but they were never embodied into law, nor entirely accepted by custom; and as the unity of america was enriched by the blood of more races and nations, prejudice had to be organized, it had to be whipped up and put on a profit basis, as the klan did, or it would have died away. _the new world was new_ for nearly a hundred and fifty years the peoples of europe wanted to come to america; they knew, from those who were already here, what the plight of the foreigner was in pittsburgh or in tontitown, on buzzards bay or puget sound. they knew that outlanders were sometimes mocked and often cheated; that work was hard in a new land; that those who came before had chosen the best farms and worked themselves into the best jobs; they knew that for a time life would be strange, and even its pleasures would be alien to them. they knew, in short, that america was not the new eden; but they also knew that it _was_ the new world, which was enough. we have no apologies to make to the immigrant; except for those incivilities which people often show to strangers. our law showed them nothing but honor and equity. the errors we made were grave enough; but as a nation we never committed the sin of considering an immigrant as an alien first, and then as a man. the economic disadvantages he suffered were the common misfortunes of alien and native alike. we could have gained more from our immigrants if we and they were not in such haste to slough off the culture they brought us. but we can face europe with a clear conscience. what we have to say to europe is not only that "we are all the descendants of immigrants"; we go forward and say that the hunkie, the wop, the bohunk, the big dumb swede, the yid, the polack, and all the later immigrants, created billions of our wealth, built our railroads and pipe lines and generators and motor cars and highways and telephone systems; and that we are getting our laws, our movies, our dentistry, our poems, our news stories, our truck gardening, and a thousand other necessities of life, from immigrants and from first generation descendants of immigrants; and that they are respected and rewarded, as richly as a child of the dar or the ffv's would be in the same honored and needed professions; we have to give to europeans statistical proof of their fellow-countrymen's value to us, and cite the high places they occupy, the high incomes they enjoy, the high honors we give them; all these things are true and have to be said, so that europe knows why america understands her people, why we can, without smugness or arrogance, talk to all the people of europe. and when that is said, we have to say one thing, harder to say honorably and modestly and persuasively: _that all these great things were done because the europeans who did them were free of europe, because they had ceased to be europeans and become americans._ _the soil of liberty_ this is the true incitement to revolution. not that nations need americanize themselves; the image of freedom has many aspects, and the customs in which freedom expresses itself in france need not be the same as those in britain or germany. but the base of freedom is unmistakable--we know freedom as we know pure air, by our instincts, not by formula or definition. and it was the freedom of america which made it possible for forty million men and women to flourish, so that often the russian and the irish, the bulgar and the sicilian, the croatian and the lett, expressed the genius of their country more completely in america than their contemporaries at home; because on the free soil of america, they were not alien, they were not in exile. one can ask what was contributed to medicine by any japanese who remained at home, comparable to the work of noguchi or takamine in america; or whether any spaniard has surpassed the clarity of a santayana; any czech the scrupulous research of a hrdlicka; any hungarian the brilliant, courageous journalism of a pulitzer; any serb the achievements of michael pupin. the lives of all peoples, all over the world, are incalculably enriched by men set free to work when they came to america, and, it seems, only to america. the warm hospitality of france to men of genius did not always work out; americans and russians and spaniards and english flocked to paris and became precious, or disgruntled; they felt expatriated; in america men from all over the world felt repatriated, it was here they became normal, and natural, and great. beyond this--which deals with great men and is flattering to national pride--we have to say to the men and women of europe that their own people have created democracy, proving that no european need be a slave. the great lie hitler is spreading over the world is that there are "countries which love order", and that they are by nature the enemies of the anglo-saxon democracies. it is a lie because our democracy was created by all these "order-loving" peoples; america is anglo-saxon only in its origin; the answer to hitler is in what all the people of europe have created here. they have also annihilated the myth of race by which hitler's germany creates a propaganda of hatred. _all_ the peoples of europe have lived together in amity in america, all have intermarried. nothing in america--not even its crimes--can be ascribed to one group, nation, or race. even the kkk, one suspects, was not % aryan. as the world has seen the german people, for the second time in twenty years, support with enthusiasm a regime of brutal militarism, a sinister retrogression into the bestiality of the dark ages, people have wondered whether the german people themselves may not be incapable of civilization. their eagerness to serve any master sufficiently ignorant, if they can brutalize people weaker than themselves, is a pathological strain. their quick abandonment of the effort at self-government is sub-adolescent. so it seems. _germans as freemen_ if it is so, then the great triumph of america is that in america even the germans have become good citizens, lovers of liberty, quick to resent dictation. they have fought for good government from the time of carl schurz; for freedom of the press since the days of zenger; they have hated tyranny and corruption since the time of thomas nast; they have fought for the oppressed since the time of altgeld. of the six million germans who emigrated, the vast majority were capable of living peaceably and serviceably with their fellowmen. of these six, one million fled from reactionary governments after the democratic revolution of had failed, millions of others came to escape the harsh imperialism of victorious germany after . to them, the germany of the kaiser was undesirable, the germany of hitler unthinkable. yet their countrymen, left behind, tolerated one and embraced the other with sickening adulation. it is as if america had drawn off the six million germans capable of understanding and taking part in a democratic civilization, leaving the materials for hitlerism behind. in any case, the germans in america have proved that hitler lies to the germans; they are neither a superior race nor a people incapable of self-government; they will not rule the world, nor be a nation of slaves. _the brotherhood of the oppressed_ we can say this to the germans, destroying their illusions and their fears at one stroke. how much more we can say to the great patient peoples whom germany now enslaves! they have seen the german conquest of continental europe; the ascendancy of the teutonic-aryan is complete. what can the norwegian or the bulgar or the rumanian believe, except that there is a superior race--and it is not his own? fortunately for us, the european has never ceased to believe in america, in us. not as a military race, not as a race at all; but as people of incredible good fortune in the world. and we can say to every man who has bowed his head, but kept his heart bitter against hitler, that we have the proof of the equal dignity of every man's soul, a proof which hitlerism can never destroy. we can say to the greeks who see the swastika over the parthenon and the norwegian whose bed is stripped of its comforters, and to the serb still fighting in the mountain passes, the one thing hitler dares not let them believe--that they are as good as other men. we have the proof that under liberty croats and finns and catalans and norwegians are as good as germans--because they are men, because under liberty there is no end to what they and their children may accomplish. if we ever again think that this is oratory, we shall lose our greatest hope of a free world. the orators were too often promising too much because they were betraying america on the side; still they could not falsify the truth which the practical men and the poets both had discovered: _america means opportunity_. now we can see the vast implications of the simple assertion. because america meant opportunity, we can incite riot against hitler in the streets of oslo and prague and even in vienna; we have proved that given opportunity, freed of artificial impediments, men walk erect, do their work, collaborate to rule over and be ruled by their fellowmen; and that there is no master race, no master class. this is our address to the people of europe--that we believe in them, because we know them. we know they can free themselves because they have shown the instincts of free men here; we know they are destined to create a free europe. the people of europe have to know that we are their friends. it will be hard for us to make some of them believe it--as the french did not believe it when we failed to break the british blockade in their favor. but we must persuade them--we have their brothers and mothers and sons here to speak for us. it was not easy for woodrow wilson to speak to the germans and the austrians. he had no radio; his facilities for pamphleteering were limited. but he succeeded. our task is formidable enough; because the radio is so guarded, it may be harder for us to reach the captured populations. but it can be done and will be, as soon as we see how necessary the job is. _our first effective front_ we have a job with germans and italians, too. not with germany and italy, which must be defeated; not with their rulers who must be annihilated; but with the people, the simple, ignorant masses of people, the day laborers and the housewives; and with the intelligent section of the middle class which resisted fascism too little and too late, but never accepted it. we have to revive the spirit of moderate liberation which fell so ignominiously between communism and fascism; and we have to restore communication with the socialists in dachau, the communist cells in italy and germany. i am not trying to predict the form of our propaganda. we shall probably try to scare our enemies and to cajole them; to prove them misled; to promise them security if they revolt. none of these things will be of much use if we forget to tell _the people_ that their brothers are here with us--and that we are not enemies. it has seemed to us in the past year that we have a quarrel with more of the german people than we had in ; we are contemptuous of the italians; but it is still our business to distinguish between the storm troopers and their unfortunate victims, between the lackeys of fascism and the easy-going italian peasant who never knew what had hit him. there are millions of germans and italians in america, who were once exactly like the germans and italians in europe; they have undergone the experience of liberty while their brothers have been enslaved; but we must be hard-headed enough to know that our greatest potential allies, next to the embittered captives of the nazi regime, are the italians and germans who could not come to america in the past twenty years. the golden opportunity of talking to the people of europe before we went to war has been missed. now it is harder for us, but it is not impossible. we have to counter the despair of europe with the hope of america. the desperation of the occupied territories rises from the belief that the germans are invincible and that they themselves are doomed to servility; to that we reply with the argument of war--but in the first part of our war, the argument will be hard to follow; we shall be pushed back, as the british were, because we are not yet ready for the offensive; so for a year perhaps our very entrance into the war will tend to increase the prestige of our enemies. therefore, in this time, we must use other powers, our other front, to touch sources of despair: our counter-propaganda must rebuild the self-respect of the europeans, of those who resisted and were conquered and even of those who failed to resist. we can send them the record of heroism of their fellow-countrymen in our armies; if we can reach them, we should smuggle a sack of flour for every act of sabotage they commit; and we should send them at once a rough sketch, if not a blueprint, of a post-war world in which they will have a part--with our plans for recovering what was stolen from them, rebuilding what was destroyed, and restoring the liberty which in their hearts they never surrendered. and there is a special reason why we must speak promptly. we have to declare our unity to europe in order to destroy the antagonisms which our enemies will incite at home. it will be good fascist propaganda to lead us to attack americans of german and italian birth or parentage; our enemies will say that the unity of america is a fraud, that we have only welcomed italians and germans to make them support the anglo-saxon upper classes--and that "good europeans" can never become good americans. the moment we give any pretext for this propaganda, our communication with _all_ of europe is lost. _short wave to ourselves_ we cannot afford to lose our only immediate weapon. we have to anticipate the italo-german blow at our national unity by our own attack, led by italians and germans who are americans. we have to remain united so that we can deal effectively with europe and every time we speak to europe, we can reinforce the foundations of unity at home. we have not achieved a perfect balance of national elements, and in the past few years we have tolerated fascist enemies, we have seen good americans being turned into fascists and bundists while our leaders made loans to mussolini or dined with goering and came back to talk of peace. it is possible that a true fifth column exists and, more serious, that a deep disaffection has touched many americans of european birth. we have to watch the dangerous ones; the others have to be re-absorbed into our common society--and we can best take them in by the honesty and the friendliness of our relation with their fellowmen abroad. we have to tell the italians here what we are saying to the umbrian peasant and the factory worker in milan and the clerk in a roman bank whose movements are watched by a german soldier; the germans, too. and what we say has to be confident and clear and consistent. for months the quarrel about short wave has continued and americans returning from europe have wept at the frivolity and changeableness and lack of imagination in our communications to men who risk their lives to hear what we have to say; it was incredible to them that this vital arm of our attack on hitler should have been left so long unused, that anyone who could pay could say something to someone in europe, within the limits of safety, to be sure, but not within the limits of a coordinated policy. one could advise the swedes to declare war or assure them that we understood why they did not; one could do almost as much for france. short wave to europe is a mystery to the average citizen; he does not pick it up, and would be only mildly interested if he did. in his mind, that sort of propaganda should be left to the experts; as it is in other lands. but in our case, there are re-echoes at home. not a "government in exile" speaks from america, but we have here part of many nations, emigrated and transformed, but still with understanding of all that was left behind. we have to think of the norwegians in minnesota when we speak to the norwegians in the lofotens; the germans in yorkville and the poles in pittsburgh should know what we say to berlin and to warsaw. our words have to help win the war, and to begin the reconciliation of europe without which we are not safe. that reconciliation we have turned into a positive thing, a cooperative life which has made us strong; we have to tell europe what we have done, how europe has lived in us. we may have to promise and to threaten, too; but mostly we will want to destroy the myth of america-against-europe by showing the reality of europe-in-america; we will want to destroy the lie of an anglo-saxon america by letting all the voices be heard of an american america; we will want to destroy the rumor of a disunited america by uniting all the voices in one declaration of ultimate freedom--for europe and for ourselves. europe will ask, if it can reach us, what freedom will mean, how we will organize it, how far we mean to go. if we want to answer honestly, we will have to take stock quickly of what we have--and can offer. chapter ix definition of america we have two prodigious victories to gain--the war and the world after the war. the chatter about not "defining war aims" because specific aims are bound to disturb us, is dangerously beside the point, because the kind of world we will create depends largely on the kind of war we wage. if we nazify ourselves to win, we will win a nazified world; if we communize ourselves, we will probably share a modified marxian world with the soviets; and if we win by intensification of our democracy, we will create the only kind of world in which we can live. and, as noted in discussing the strategy of the war, the chances are that we can only win if we divine the essential nature of our people and create a corresponding strategy. in addition to the direct military need for knowing what kind of people we are, there is the propaganda need, so that we can create a national unity and put aside the constant irritation of partisanship, the fear of "incidents", the wastage of emotional energy in quarrels among ourselves. and there is a third reason for an exact and candid review of what we are: it is our future. when this war ends we will make, in one form or another, solemn agreements with the nations of the world, our allies and what is left of our enemies. we know almost nothing about any of them--we, the american people. our state department knows little enough; what it knows, it has not communicated to us; and we have never been interested enough to make discoveries of our own. we are about to commit a huge international polygamy, with forty picture brides, each one in a different national costume. some conditions of this mass marriage are the subject of the next section of this book. here i am concerned with the one thing we can do to make the preliminary steps intelligent. we cannot learn all we need to know about all the other nations of the world; but we can reflect on some things within ourselves, we can know ourselves better; and on this knowledge we can erect the framework into which the other nations will fit; or out of which they will remain if they choose not to fit. we can, by knowing a few vital things about ourselves, learn a lot about south america and europe and asia and australia; what _we_ are will determine whom we will marry, whom reject, and whom we will set up, if agreeable, in an unsanctified situation. the laws of man, in many states, require certificates of eligibility to marry, the services of the church inquire if an obstacle exists. before we enter into compacts full of tragic and noble possibilities, we might also make inquiries. something in us shies away from the pomp of the old diplomacy--what is that something? we used to like revolutionaries and never understood colonial exploitation--how do these things affect us now? are we prepared to deal with a government in one country and a people in another? is it possible for us to ally ourselves to communists, reformed fascists, variously incomplete democracies, cooperative democratic monarchies, and centralized empires, all at the same time? is there anything in us which requires us to make terms with britain about india, with russia about propaganda, with sweden about exports, before we make a new world with all of them? can we, honorably, enter any agreement, with any state or with all states, while they are ignorant of our character--as ignorant, possibly, as we are of theirs? the difficulty we are in is nicely doubled, because introspection is no happy habit and we say that we _know_ all about america, or we say that america cannot be known--it is too big, too varied, too complicated. and these two opposite statements are in themselves a beginning of a definition. america, by this testimony, is a country, large, varied, complex, inhabited by people who either understand their country perfectly or will not make an effort to understand it. i would not care to rest on this definition--but it shows the need of definition. _mathematics of character_ by "definition of america" i mean neither epigrams nor statistics; we are defined by everything which separates and distinguishes us from others. we are, for instance, the only country lying between the atlantic and pacific oceans, and ° ' and ° north latitude. this definition is exact and complete; it is neither a boast nor a criticism; it establishes no superiority or inferiority; it is a fact, the consequences of which are tremendously significant (our varied climate, our resources, our bigness with _its_ consequences in the temper of the people, all go back to this mathematical _fact_.) not all the distinguishing marks of our country can be expressed in mathematical terms; if they could be, we would avoid the danger of jingo pride, the logical error of making every difference into a superiority. moreover, if we had mathematics, we should be able to put on one side what we have in common with other countries, on the other what is exclusively ours--and make a comparison, a guide to international conduct "on scientific principles". we would know how far our likeness joined us to others, so that we could lay a firm basis for action; and how far our differences required compromises or made compromise impossible. we lack mathematics; our physical boundaries are fixed, but our social boundaries are fluid, our national "genius" escapes definition. yet we can describe these imponderables even if we cannot force them into a diagram, and their vital significance is as great as any statistics can be. it is a fact that millions of people came to america in the hope of a better life--the number who came can be written down, the intensity of hope can be guessed; and only a compassionate imagination can say what this country gained by the hopes fulfilled or lost by those which ended in despair. yet the elation and the disillusion of men and women are both reflected in our laws and customs; and so far as they did not occur in other lands, they are factors in defining the great complex of our national character. we are defined by events--immigration was an event. but immigrants came to other countries as well, to canada and brazil and england. when they came and in what numbers becomes the defining mark for us. it is self-evident that we are different from all other nations both absolutely and relatively; no other nation lies within our boundaries or has all our habits, because none has had our history--that is the base of absolute difference; all other nations share something with us, but we differ from each relatively--in some degree. this would not be worth mentioning if chauvinism did not insist that we differed (and were superior) in all things, while a base cosmopolitanism insisted that we were alike in all things and should be made more so. the corrective for each of these errors is to see what we are. _the revolution in property_ when this country was settled the ownership of land was the most important economic factor in the lives of all western peoples. the ruling class in europe was a "landed aristocracy"; the poor had become poorer because they had usually been gradually driven off the land (as in england) or forced to pay outrageous rents (as in france). in the thirteen original colonies alone we had almost as many square miles of land as france and england together and this seemingly immeasurable area was only the fringe, the shore line, of continental america; the mississippi valley had been explored, and the southwest, so that the french and spanish people shared, to an extent, in the hopes which unlimited land offered to the dispossessed. before the declaration of independence had been uttered, a revolution in the deepest instincts of man had taken place--land became a commodity of less permanence than a man's musket or horse. in europe, land was to be built upon (literally and symbolically; ducal or royal houses were founded on land); land was _real_ estate, everything else was by comparison trifling; land was guarded by laws, property laws, laws of inheritance, laws of trespass, laws governing rents and foreclosures; far above laws governing human life was the law governing property, and the greatest property was land; title to property often carried with it what we call "a title" today; count and marquis, their names signify "counties" and "marches" of land; and the prince (or _princeps_) was often the first man in the land because he was the first owner of the land. land was the one universal permanent thing; upon it men were born; over it they slaved or rode in grandeur; in it they were buried. the american pioneer began to abandon his land, his farm in the clearing of the wilderness, before . he moved away, westward, and complained against king george's legal fence around the land beyond the alleghenies. the european transplanted to america often founded a house, notably in the aristocratic tradition of the virginia tidewater; but most of the colonists lacked money or inclination to buy land in quantities; they went inland and took what they needed (often legally, often by squatters' right--which is the right of work, not of law); and then, for a number of reasons, they left the land and went further into the wilderness and made another clearing. there is something magnificent and mysterious about this mania to move which overtook men when they came to america. perhaps the primal instinct of man, to wander with his arrow or with his flock, reasserted itself after generations of the hemmed-in life of european cities; perhaps it was some uneasiness, some insecurity in themselves--or some spirit of adventure which could not be satisfied so long as a river or a forest or a plain lay unexplored. romance has beglamored the pioneer and he has been called rude names for his "rape of a continent". i have once before quoted lewis mumford's positively puritan rage at the pioneer who did not heed wordsworth's advice to seek nature "in a wise passiveness"--advice based on the poet's love for the english lake district, about as uncivilized then as northern vermont is today. the raging pioneer, says mumford, "raped his new mistress in a blind fury of obstreperous passion". our more familiar figure of the pioneer in a coonskin cap, leading the way for wife and children, is the romantic counterpart of this grim raper who wasn't aware of the fact that rousseau and wordsworth didn't like what he was doing. he was doing more to undermine the old order than rousseau ever did. the moment land ceased to be universally the foundation of wealth and position, the way was open for wealth based on the machine--which is wealth made by hand, not inherited, wealth made by the _industry_ of one man or group of men; it was wealth made by things in motion, not by land which stands still. the whole concept of aristocracy began to alter--for the worse. if wealth could be made, then wealth became a criterion; presently the money-lender (on a large scale) became respectable; presently money itself became respectable. it was divorced from land, from power, and from responsibility; a few generations later the new money bought up land to be respectable--but not responsible. _the consequences of free land_ this was the revolution in which america led the way and it had astounding consequences. the american pioneer did not care for the land--in two senses, for he neither loved it nor took care of it. the european peasant had to nourish the soil before it would, in turn, nourish him and his family; the american did not; he exhausted the soil and left it, as a man unchivalrously leaves an aging wife for a younger; there was so much land available that only an obstinate unadventurous man would not try a hazard of new fortunes. this may be morally reprehensible, but politically it had a satisfactory result: the american farmer exhausted the soil, but did not let the soil exhaust him; so that we established the tradition of waste, but escaped the worse tradition of a stingy, frightened, miserly, peasant class. the more aesthetic american critics of america never quite forgave us for not having peasant arts and crafts, the peasant virtues, the peasant sturdiness and all the rest of the good qualities which go with slavery to the soil. so the physical definition of america leads to these opening social definitions: we first destroyed the land-basis of wealth, position and power; we were the first nation to exhaust and abandon the soil; we were supremely the great wasters of the world; we were the first great nation to exist without a peasant class. from this beginning we can go on to other effects: our myths grew out of conquest of the land, not out of war against neighboring states; we created no special rights for the eldest son (as the younger could find more and better land); the national center of gravity was constantly changing as population moved to take up new land; we remained relatively unsophisticated because we were constantly opening new frontiers; our society, for the same reason, was relatively unstable; we lived at half a dozen social levels (of comfort and education, for instance) at the same time; we created a "various" nation, and when the conditions of owning and working land changed, we were plunged into a new kind of political revolution, known then as the populist movement. the effects of a century of fairly free land are still the dominant psychological factor in america; the obvious effects are that the land invited the immigrant and rewarded the pioneer--who between them created the forms of society and established half a dozen norms of character. in addition, the opportunities offered kept us ambitious at home and peaceful abroad. once we felt secure within our territorial limits, we became basically pacifist, and it took the "atrocities" of the spaniards in cuba to bring us into our first war against a european nation since . this pacifism was more intense in the more agricultural states and was fed by the settlement there of pacific scandinavians whose country's record of avoiding wars was better than ours. pacifism was constantly fed by other immigrants, from germany and russia and minor states, who fled from compulsory military service (for their children, if not for themselves). in revenge for this un-european pacifism we created a purely american lawlessness--and a toleration of it which is the amazement of nazi germany, where the leaders prefer the sanctions of law for their murders; civilized europe, having lived through duels and massacres, is still shocked by our constant disregard of law, which began with the absence of law in pioneering days, and was met, later, by our failure to educate new citizens to obedience or adapt our laws to their customs. _america on the move_ one more thing, directly, the land did: it made us a mobile people and all the changes of three hundred years (since the first settlers struck inland from plymouth and upland from jamestown) have not altered us. the voyage which brought us here often lost momentum for a generation; but the pioneer in the conestoga wagon was moving into the northwest territory as soon as the revolution was over; then new england began to move to the west; the covered wagon followed trails broken by outriders to the western ocean; the gold rush pulled men through the wintry passes or around the horn, and by then our passion for moving swiftly over great distances had given us the clipper ship; after the civil war the homestead act started a new move to the west, and the railroads began to make movement less romantic, but regular and abundant. if the 's were not marked by great migrations of men, they were scored into the earth by the tremendous drives of cattle, north from texas in the summer, south from wyoming as winter threatened, hundreds of thousands of them, herded across state lines and prairies and riverbeds, back and forth, until the last drive to the railheads at abilene or kansas city. we were moving a bit more slowly, chiefly from the country to the cities, but the far northwest was beginning to grow; then, when it seemed that we could move no more, the motor car, which had been a luxury for the few in europe, developed as a common tool for the average family, and america was mobile again, first with naive pleasure in movement (and a satisfaction in the tool itself), then in an extraordinary outburst of activity which has not been sufficiently studied--the tin can tourist, the first middle-class-on-the-march in history. this search for the sun, with its effects on florida and california, broke the established habits of the middle-class and of the middle-aged; it wrote a new ending to the life of the prudent, industrious american, it required initiative and if it ended in the rather ugly tourist camp, that was only a new beginning. the great migration of negroes to the north followed the first world war; since then the mobility of americans is the familiar, almost tragic, story of a civilization allowing itself to be tied almost entirely to one industry, and not providing for the security of that one. every aspect of american life was altered by the quantity-production of motor cars; the method of production itself caused minor mass-movements, small armies of unemployed marching on key cities, small armies marching back; and the universal dependence on trucks, busses and cars, which bankrupted railroads, shifted populations away from cities, slaughtered tens of thousands annually, altered the conditions of crime and pursuit, and, in passing, made the country known to its inhabitants; moreover, the motor car which created only a small number of anti-social millionaires, made some twenty million americans feel equal to the richest and the poorest man on the road. mobility which in the pioneer days had created the forms of democracy came back to the new democracy of the filling station and the roadside cabin. "everybody" had a car in america, but there was no "peoples' car"; that was left for dictators to promise--without fulfilment. the cars made in america were wasteful; they were artificially aged by "new models" and the sales pressure distracted millions of americans from a more intelligent allocation of their incomes; these were the errors, widely remarked. that the motor car could be used--was being used--as a civilizing agent, escaped the general attention until the war threatened to put a new car into the old barn, beside the buggy which had rested there for thirty years--but might still be good for transport. in one field america seemed to lag: aviation. because the near frontiers of europe made aircraft essential, all european _governments_ subsidized production; the commercial possibilities were not so apparent to americans; no way existed for doing two things--making planes in mass production, and getting millions of people to use them. the present war has anticipated normal progress in methods of production by a generation; it may start the motor car on a downward path, as the motor car dislodged the trolley and the train; but this will only happen if the aeroplane fits into the basic american pattern of machines for mobility. "_the richest nation on earth_" from free land to free air, movement and change have produced a vast amount of wealth in america. because land could not be the exclusive base of riches, wealth in america began to take on many meanings and, for the first time in history, a wealthy people began to emerge, instead of a wealthy nation. we were, in the economist's sense, always a wealthy nation. the overpowering statistics of our share of all the world's commodities are often published because we are not afraid of the envy of the gods; of coal and iron and most of the rarer metals used to make steel, we have an impressive plenty; of food and the materials for shelter and clothing, we can always have enough; from south america, we can get foods we cannot raise but have become accustomed to use; of a few strategic materials in the present war economy, we have nothing; except for these, we are copiously supplied; but we should still be poor if we lacked ability and knack and desire to make the raw materials serviceable to all of us. so that our power to work, our way of inventing a machine, our habit of letting nearly everybody in on the good things of life, is specifically a part of our wealth. we have a tradition about wealth, too. the government, to some degree, has always tried to rectify the worst inequalities of fortune; and the people have done their share: they have not long tolerated any artificial bar to enterprise. "_rugged individuals_" government's care of the less fortunate struck some twenty million americans as something new and dangerous in the early days of the hoover depression, and in the sudden upward spiral of the first new deal. perhaps the most hackneyed remark was that "real americans" would reject federal aid--a pious hope usually bracketed with remarks about valley forge. it was forgotten that the men who froze and swore at valley forge demanded direct government aid the moment the republic was established; and that the cumberland road, the artery from fredericksburg, maryland to uniontown, pennsylvania, was built by the government of the united states for its citizens. government gave bounties and free land; government gave enormous sums of money to industry by way of tariff, and gave million acres of land to railroads. there was never a time when the federal government was not giving aid, in one form or another, to some of the citizens. the outcry when government attempted to save _all_ the citizens indicated an incomplete knowledge of our history. in particular, the steady reduction of the price of land was a subsidy to the poor, a chance for them to start again. the country, for all its obedience to financial power, never accepted the theory of inevitable poverty. after the era of normalcy, when the new deal declared that one-third of a nation was ill clothed and ill fed, the other two-thirds were astonished--and not pleased; the fact that two-thirds had escaped poverty--the almost universal condition of man throughout the world--was not enough for america. it is an evil thing that we have not conquered poverty or the stupidity and greed which cause poverty; but our distinguishing mark in this field is the expectation of success. we are the first large nation reasonably planning to abolish poverty without also abolishing wealth. the axis countries may precede us; on the lowest level it is possible that hitler has already succeeded, for like the administration in , hitler can say that no one dies of starvation. our intention has always been a little different; it is to make sure that no one lacks the essentials of life, not too narrowly conceived, and that the opportunity to add to these essentials will remain. this may betray a low liking for riches--but it has its good points also. it has helped to keep us free, which is something. "_ye shall live in plenty_" wealth--and the prospect of wealth--are positive elements in the american makeup. we differ from large sections of europe because we take a positive pleasure in working to make money, and because we spend money less daintily, having a tendency to let our women do that for us; this evens things up somewhat, for if men become too engrossed in business, women make the balance good by undervaluing business and spending its proceeds on art, or amenity, or foolishness. the tradition that we could all become millionaires never had much to do with forming the american character, because no one took it too seriously; the serious thing was that americans all believed they could prosper. those who did not, suffered a double odium--they were disgraced because they had failed to make good and they had betrayed the american legend. the legend existed because it corresponded to some of the facts of american life; only it persisted long after the facts had been changed by industrialism and the closing of the frontiers and our coming of age as a financial power had changed the facts. we were heading toward normalcy and the last effort to preserve equality of opportunity was choked off when wilson had to abandon domestic reform to concentrate on the war. social security, a possible eighty dollars a month after the age of sixty-five, are poor substitutes for a nation of spend-thrifts; we accept the new prospect grimly, because the general standard of living and the expectation of improvement are still high in most parts of america. in spite of setbacks, the general belief is still, as herbert croly said it was in , "that americans are not destined to renounce, but to enjoy". normal as enjoyment seems to us, it is not universal. there have been people happier than ours, no doubt, with a fraction of our material goods; religious people, simple races, people born to hardship, have their special kinds of contentment in life. but with minor variations, most western people, since the industrial revolution, are trying to get a share of the basic pleasures of life; in a great part of the world it is certain that most people will get very little; in america it is assumed that all will get a great deal. the struggle for wealth is so ingrained in us that we hate the thought of giving it up; we are submitting reluctantly to rules which are intended to equalize opportunity, if opportunity comes again. _america invented prosperity_ in this new organization of our lives, money becomes purely a device of calculation, since the costs of the war exhaust all we have; we can now look back on america's "money-madness" with some detachment; without balancing the good and evil done to our souls by the effort to become rich, we should estimate how powerful the incentive still is--and then use it, or defeat it, for the best social advantage. for it has its advantages, if we know how to use them, and fear of money is not the beginning of a sound economy. people occasionally talk as if the desire for money is an american invention; actually our invention is the satisfaction of the desire, which we call prosperity. for prosperity is the truth of which wealth is the legend, prosperity is the substantial fact and wealth the distorted shadow on the wall. the economics implied in the declaration of independence and the constitution alike indicate a new intent in the world, to create a prosperous people. the great men who proclaimed liberty in have often been blamed because they did not create "economic freedom" to run beside their political freedom. actually they did not create either, leaving it to the separate states to say whether one man with one vote was the true symbol of equality, whether he who paid ten times the average tax should have ten times the voice in spending it. as for economic equality, which is what later critics really want, it would have been inappropriate to the undeveloped resources of the country and impossible in the political climate of the time. the people of the new nation had suffered from centralized government; they would not have tolerated the only practical way of establishing economic controls--a highly concentrated government over a single, not a federated, nation. the men who fought the war of independence did not even set up an executive, only a committee of thirteen to act while congress was not in session; they erected no system of national courts; and congress, with the duty of creating an army and navy, could not draft men to either, nor pay them if they volunteered. when this system of confederation broke down, the constitution was carefully built up, to prevent government from regulating the lives of the people; and the people, who were confident that they could make their own way, wanted only to be secure against interference. they did not ask government to equalize anything but opportunity. the "rich and well-born" managed to turn the constitution to their own advantage; their opportunities were greater than the immediate chances of the poor farmer and the city rabble; but government by the men of property was never made permanent, and the most critical historian of the constitution is the one who says that "in the long reach of time ... the fair prophecy of the revolutionary era was surprisingly fulfilled." the intention, so commonplace to us, was wildly radical in its time; poets and philosophers had imagined a world freed from want (usually also a world peopled by ascetics); the promise of the united states was a reasonable gratification of the desires of all men. that was the reason for giving land to migrants, and citizenship to foreigners, and statehood to territories. when the french revolution began to settle down, the people had acquired rights, they had been freed of intolerable taxes, the great estates had been cut up; but the expectation of steadily improving conditions of life did not become a _constant_ in the french character; nor did the upheaval in england in and under the chartists leave a permanent hope for better things in the mind of the lower classes. the idea of class and the idea of a "station in life", a "lot" with which one must be content, persisted after _all_ the revolutions in europe in the th century. only in america the revolution set out to--and did--destroy the principle of natural inevitable poverty. we have not actually destroyed poverty, and this gap between our intent and our achievement has been publicized. but what we intended to do and what we accomplished and what we still have power to do are more significant than the part we failed to do. we created for the first time in history a nation which did not accept poverty as inevitable. this had profound effects on ourselves and on the rest of the world. we became restless and infected europe with our instability. we became optimistic and europe rather deplored our lack of philosophy. we enjoyed many things and became "materialistic", and europe sent us preachers of renunciation and the simple life. it became clear that, for good and evil, our character was departing from any european mold, and parts of europe were tempted to join the confederacy in or spain in in the hope of destroying us. _our fifty years of class war_ from about to we were moving into a new system of government; in the midwest the children of new england and the children of scandinavia agreed to call this system plutocracy--the system of great wealth which is based on poverty; it threatened to displace the system of almost equally great wealth which is based on prosperity. the constant radicalism of america, based on free land, frequent movement, and belief in the future, flared up in the 's and for generations this country was engaged in a class war between the rich and the poor (as it had been in shays' time and in jackson's). our political education was won in this time, but populism died under the combined effects of a war against spain and a new process of extracting gold; it was revived under theodore roosevelt, under woodrow wilson, and under franklin delano roosevelt, all of whom tried to shift the base of wealth without cracking the structure itself. wealth had come into conflict with some other american desires, it had begun to _limit_ enterprise and, in its bad spots, was creating a peasantry and a proletariat. with some feeling that europe must not repeat itself in america, the people on three occasions chose liberal presidents and these men built on the "wild" ideas of the 's the safeguards of economic democracy which seemed needed at the time. we are a nation in which the continental european class system has not become rooted; it is socially negated and politically checked; we are a democracy tempered by the special influence of wealth and, more important, by the special position of working-wealth; (inherited money counts so little that the great inheritors of our time fight their way back into production or politics, with a dosage of liberal principles). according to radicals we are still governed by massed and concentrated finance-capital, and according to certain congressmen we are living under a labor-dictatorship. very little perspective is required to see that we are living as we always have lived, our purposes not fully realized, our errors a little too glaring, our capacity to change and improve not yet impaired. _labor troubles_ the reason we seem to be particularly unsure of ourselves now is that we are creating a national labor policy forty years late. we are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional american eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. so the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in america. the forty year lag in the labor situation had evil effects on all concerned: the government was too often uncertain, and the leaders of labor too often unfit. like other organized groups, labor unions did not always consult the public good and criminals were found among them; but organized labor should be compared with organized production or organized banking or medicine or law; all of these have long traditions, all have the active support of the public; yet their ethics are quite as often dubious, they act out of basic self-interest, and the criminals among them, utility magnates stealing from stockholders, doctors splitting fees, manufacturers bribing legislators, are as shocking as the grafters and racketeers of the labor unions. the temporary dismay over labor's advances and obstinacy will pass, the laws will finally be written; but we will still be a country backward in the _habits_ of organized dealing between management and labor. the advantage lies in the past; we did not create a basic hostile relationship because the laborer was always on the point of becoming a foreman or thought he would start his own shop; or a new wave of high wages "settled" strikes without any settled principles--to the dismay of the few statesmen among labor leaders. firm relations imply some permanence. the employer expected to retain his business; the worker expected to better it. consequently, the basic american labor policy is not grounded in despair; it does not represent endless poverty, or cruelty, or a desire to revenge ancient wrongs. nor does it represent fear. the disgraces of memorial day in chicago and of gate four in detroit will come again if the laws we create do not correspond to the facts; but the habits of americans have not created two sullen armies, of capital with its bullies, of labor with its demagogues. these exist on the frontiers, where border clashes occur. the main bodies are not hostile armies, but forces capable of coordinated effort. theodore roosevelt was prepared to send the troops of the united states to take over the pennsylvania coal mines, because the mine owners (with "divine right" baer to guide them) refused to deal with the unions under john mitchell; as soon as that was known, the possibility of creating a labor policy became bright, because roosevelt was, in effect, restoring the balance lost when cleveland sent troops to pullman. the position of government as the impartial but decisive third party was sketched, and some forty years later we are beginning to see a labor policy in which the government protects both parties and provides the machinery for the settlement of all disputes. our immaturity and peevishness about an established routine for labor disputes has to be counted on as a factor in our character, chiefly because we shall remain for some time behind the other great industrial countries in the smoothness of operation. in normal times a british contractor did not have to allow for strikes, an american did; and our present war effort, our propaganda, and our plans for the future, all have to take this element into consideration. the false unity of december, , resulted in a serious pledge of "no strikes, no lockouts"; but within three months the national labor relations board was admitting that it needed guidance to create a policy, and worse than sporadic trouble was in the wind. so much the more did we have to know what we were like in labor affairs, and without self-imposture, act accordingly. the war gave an opportunity for statesmen to make a new amalgam of the elements in the labor situation; but the war also made people hysterical about unrealities, and the labor situation was treated in two equally bad ways: as if we could have maximum production without any policy, or as if no policy could be evolved, and we would have to fight the axis while the administration destroyed capital and congress destroyed labor. _the danger of godlessness_ i am listing certain actualities of american life, with notes on their sources, as a guide to conduct--particularly the conduct of the war (which should be built on our character) and the conduct of civilian propaganda which must, at times, effect temporary alterations in our habits. i have, so far, named those aspects of our total outlook which come from the size and many-sided wealth of the country, and from our confident, unskilled attempts to deal with wealth and labor and the shifts of power which are bound to occur in a democracy. i come now to items which are no less potent because they are impalpable. any effort which counts on bringing the whole strength of america into play must count also on these. we are a profoundly irreligious people. we are highly sectarian and we are a church-going people; but in the sense that religion rises from our relation to a higher power, we are irreligious. we are not constantly aware of any duty: to the state, to our fellowmen, to mankind, to the universal principle, to god. we live unaware even of a connection between ourselves and anything we do not instantly touch or see or hear; we have grown out of asking for help or protection, and disasters fall on us heavily because we are separated from our fellowmen, having no common needs, or faith. the coming together, in freedom, of many faiths, and the rise of material happiness in the great era of scepticism, left us without a functioning state religion; the emancipation of each individual man from political tyranny and economic degradation left us without any sense of the universal; we have been able to gratify so many private purposes, that we are unaware of any great purpose beyond. as for the mystic's faith, it never makes itself felt, and the name "mystic" itself, far from connoting a deeper insight into the nature of god, is now associated with flummery and hoax. we are irreligious because we have set out to conquer the physical world and deliver a part of the spoils to every man. in our good intention to create and to distribute wealth, creating democracy in our stride, we approach a new relation to others. we are capable of cooperation; but religious people do not cooperate with god; they seek his will and bow to it. we exalt our own will. this has to be taken into account, because it makes the creation of a practical unity difficult. if we had felt ourselves linked through god with one another, it would have been easier to join hands in any job we had to do. i do not know whether any of the western democratic countries had a remnant of this mystical religion; but the appeal to the "blood" and the "race" of both japan and germany, the appeal to universal brotherhood in both china and soviet russia, indicate what a deep source of strength can be found in man if he can be persuaded to abandon himself. and as this is the fundamental demand of the state in war time, means must be found to compensate for the absence of deep universally shared feeling in america. we shall not find a substitute for religion and we will do well to concentrate on the non-religious actions and emotions which bring men together. common fears we already have and we may rediscover our common hopes; common pleasures we are enjoying and preparing to sacrifice them for the common good. (fear and hope and sacrifice and the common good all lie on the periphery of religious feeling; and point toward the center.) but i doubt whether the american people would accept "a great wave of religious feeling" which would be artificially induced to persuade us that all our past was a mistake and that our childish pleasure in good things was as vain as our hope for better. _the alger factor_ the end result of all the separate elements, the land, the people, the departure from europe, the struggle for wealth, the fight against wealth, was to make us a people of unbounding optimism, which was our horatio alger substitute for religious faith. the cool realistic appraisal of man's fate which an average frenchman makes, the trust of the englishman that he will "muddle through", the ancient indifference of the russian peasant, the resignation of the orient, are matched in america by an intense and confident appeal to _action_, in the faith that action will bring far better things than have been known. the vulgar side of this is bustle and activity for its own sake and a childish confusion between what is better and what is merely bigger or newer or more expensive or cheaper; we have to accept all this because on the other side our faith in action has broken the vise of poverty in which man has been held since the beginning of modern history; it has destroyed tyranny and set free the bodies and the minds of the hundred millions who have lived in a new world. we have rejected some of the most desirable and beautiful creations of other peoples, the arts of europe, the asiatic life of contemplation, the wisdom of philosophers, the exaltation of saints--but we have also rejected the slavery on which these rest or the negation of life to which they tend. the "materialism" of america is not as terrible as it looks; and it must be respected by those who want us to make sacrifices. what aristocratic europeans call gross in us is a hundred million hands reaching for the very things the aristocrats held dear. in the scuffle, some harm is done; the first pictures reproduced on magazine covers were not equal to the mona lisa; within fifty years the mona lisa could be reproduced in a magazine for ten million readers, but the aristocrats still complained of vulgarizing. the first music popularized by records or radio was popular in itself; within fifty years records and radio will have multiplied the audience for the greatest music, popular or sublime, ten thousand fold; it is possible that on one saturday or sunday afternoon music, good even by pedantic standards, is heard by more people than used to hear it in an entire year. and both of these instances have another special point of interest: each is creating new works on its own terms, so that pictures, very good ones, are painted for multiple reproduction and music, as good as any other, is specially composed for radio. i shall return to the special field of creative work presently. on a "lower" level, note that some (not all) europeans and all american expatriates condemn our preoccupation with plumbing. we multiply by twenty million the number of individuals who can take baths agreeably, without servants hauling inadequate buckets of hot water up three flights of stairs; and are materialistic; but the aristocrat who goes to an hotel with "modern comfort" is spiritual because he doesn't think constantly of plumbing. the truth is that the few can buy themselves out of worry, letting their servants "live for them"; and it is equally true that the only way, short of sainthood, to forget about the material comforts of life is to have them always at hand. _the morals of plenty_ we have never formulated the morals of prosperity, nor understood that nearly all the practical morality we know (apart from religion) is based on scarcity; it is intended to make man content with less than his share, it even carries into the field of action and praises those who do not try too hard to gain wealth. this was not good morality for a pioneering country, so poor richard preached the gospel of industry and thrift, which is not the gospel of resignation to fate. (industry clears the wilderness, thrift finances the growth of a nation; franklin was economically right for his time; in we were preaching leisure and installment buying, the exact opposite; but we never accepted the reverse morality of working for low wages and living on less than we needed.) the morals of plenty, by which we are usually guided, have created in our minds a few fixed ideas about what is good: it is good to work and to get good wages, so as to have money beyond our instant needs; it is bad to be ill and to be inefficient and to disrupt production by demanding high wages. (like most moralities, this one has several faces; like most american products it adapts itself to a variety of needs.) in a broader field our morality denies that anything is too good for the average man (if it can be made by mass production). mass production put an end to the old complaint that the poor would only put coal into the bathtub--mass production of tubs and central heating in apartments. the morality of scarcity reserves all that is good for the few, who must therefore be considered "the best", the "elite" (which means, in effect, the chosen), the "civilized minority". democracy began by declaring men born equal and proceeded in a hundred and seventy years to create equality because it needed every man as a customer. incomplete this was, perhaps only two-thirds of the way; it was nonetheless the practical application of the declaration, by way of the system of mass production; it was a working morality. _merchant prince to -and-dime_ we came a long way from nabob-morality, based on a splendor of spending; money is not our criterion of excellence, but the reverse; cheapness is the democratic equivalent of quality, and the five-and-ten cent store is the typical institution of our immediate time. we may deplore the vanishing craftsman and long for the time when the american will make clay pots and plaited hats as skillfully as the guatemalan; but our immediate job is to understand that the process which killed the individual craftsman is also the process that substituted the _goods_ of the many for the good of the few. the five-and-ten had its parallels in europe before the war, but it remains a distinguishing mark of america, and whoever wants to enlist us or persuade us has to touch that side of our life. it is as near to a universal as we possess; i have known people who have never listened to the radio (until ) and never went to the movies, but i have never known anyone who did not with great pleasure go to the five-and-ten. it is a combination of good value and attractive presentation; it is shrewdly managed and pleasantly staffed. one finds cheap substitutes, but one also finds new commodities made for the five-and-ten trade. the chain five-and-ten is, moreover, big business. in all these things the five-and-ten is a great american phenomenon; characteristic of the twentieth century as the crossroads general store was of the nineteenth. the hominess of the country store is gone and is a loss; but the gain in other directions is impressive. it is impressive, too, that a store should be so typical of american methods and enterprise and satisfactions. small commerce is not universally held in esteem. when one remembers the fussiness of the average french bazaar and the ancient prejudice against trade in england, the five-and-ten as a key to our intentions becomes even more effective. _prosperity and politics_ our persistent intention is to make good the declaration of independence; often minor purposes get in the way, or we are in conflict with ourselves. we attempted equal opportunity (with free land) and at the same time contract labor in the mines; we fought to emancipate the negro and we created an abominable factory system in the same decades; at times we slackened our check on abuses, because in spite of them we flourished; all too often we let the job of watching over our liberties fall into the hands of newcomers; sometimes we were so engrossed in the fact, the necessary work, that we forgot what the work was for; a ruling group forgot, or a political party, or a generation--but america did not forget. each time we forgot, it seemed that the lapse was longer and it took more tragic means to recall us to the straight line of our purpose; but each time we proved that we could bear neglect and forgetfulness and would come back to create a free america. there was reason always for the years when we marked time; our prosperity increased so that the redistribution of wealth was harder to do, but was more worth doing; and even the black backward era of normalcy served us with proof that america could create the materials for a high standard of life, although we could not put them into the proper hands. we justified supremely stalin's compliment to capitalism: "it made society wealthy"; and we did it so handsomely as to leave questionable his further statement that socialism will displace capitalism "because it can furnish society with more products and make society wealthier than the capitalist system can." we planned and eventually produced the machinery for making our lives comfortable; our industrial methods interacted with our land and immigration policy, from the day eli whitney put the quantity system into action; and all of them required the same thing--equality of political rights, indifference to social status, a high level of education, the maximum of civil freedom. our factories wanted free speech for us as certainly as our philosophers did; a free people, aware of novelties, critical of the present, anticipating the future, capable of earning and not afraid to spend--these are the customers required by mass production. and the same freedom, the same intention to be sceptical of authority, the same eagerness to risk all in the future, are the marks of a free man. our economic system with all its iniquities and stupid faults, worked around in the end to liberate men from poverty and to uphold them in their freedom. the fact that individual producers were afraid of debs in and whimpered for mussolini in is a pleasing irony; for these reactionaries in politics were often radicals in production; they had contributed to our freedom by their labors and our freedom was the condition of their prosperity. only free people fulfill their wants, and it is not merely a coincidence that the freest of all peoples should be also the freest spenders. the consequences of the declaration are now beginning to be understood. the way we took the land and left it, or held it until it failed us; the way we brought men of all nations here and let them move, as we moved, over the face of a continent; our absorption in our own capacities and our persistent endeavor to create national well-being for every man; our parallel indifference to our fellowmen, our state, and our god; our wealth and our endless optimism and our fulfilment of democracy by technology are some of the basic elements in our lives. whoever neglects them, and their meaning, in practical life, will not ever have us wholeheartedly on his side; whoever starts with these, among other, clues to discover what america is, will at least be on the right way. all we have to do in the war will rise out of all we have done in our whole history; our past is in the air we breathe, it runs in our veins, it is what we are. chapter x popularity and politics there are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and examined briefly by themselves. in the united states every week million families listen on an average four hours a day to the radio; million individual movie admissions are bought; million men and women go bowling at least once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses, juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter million hunting licenses are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families take their cars and go driving. these are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady, attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. for the most part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication. sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient greeks did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are actually making their own fun. the same ignoble but useful desire for money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves. sport began to come into its own after populism and theodore roosevelt's square deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even withstood the prosperity of harding and coolidge. _means of communication_ the other elements i have mentioned, movies, radio and a new journalism, are the products of our immediate time. although the moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular just before the first world war, and was promptly recognized as a prime instrument of propaganda by lenin as he began to build the socialist state in ; the moving picture may have been colossal then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered. by that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established itself in its present commercial base. radio was first conceived as an instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless telegraphy, when the soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the heads of their governments--although this appeal still had to be printed, the radio receiver did not exist. when the necessary inventions were working (and the tinkering american forced the issue by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to serve the public. among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the election results in the harding-cox campaign, crop reports, and music. the entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals of the community. by the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in the early days of vallee and amos and andy, a new form of publication had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture, devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old straight fiction magazine had offered. these three new means of mass communication are revolutionary inventions of democracy. to use them is the first obligation of statesmanship. they have been seized by dictators; literally, for the first move of a _coup d'etat_ is to take over the radio and the next is to divert the movies into propaganda. before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated. _words and pictures_ of the fact and picture publications _life_ and _look_ are the best examples; _time_ and _news-week_ are fact and illustration magazines which is basically different, although their success is also important. the appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; _time_ and the _readers' digest_ become the great magazine phenomena of our time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. their faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public services. the word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and image is yet to come. it is probably the most significant development in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and newspapers. it is odd that book publication, the oldest use of quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively small circulations. changes now are apparent. the most interesting developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the pocketbook series. both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old methods and the artiness of book "shoppes" which always got in the way of good book-sellers. the text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. the art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the visual. the economic and technical problems of the use of color have been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by the contrast and clarity which color provides. a new language is in process of being formed. until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for this new language is great. for neither the movies nor radio can be used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation. radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with the right materials; but when president roosevelt asked his audience to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could not do. the movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group presence. by this the movies also gain when they use the right materials. the use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a mobile reserve of propaganda. when the radio and the movies have established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is carried to the ward meeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory--where the action is determined by men and women in private discussion. _universal languages_ radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies, which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great mass inventions of america. the patents may have been taken out elsewhere, but it was in america that these two forms of mass communication were instantly placed at the service of all people. the errors of judgment have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of the hands of the bureaucrat. for a generation we deplored the vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and discovered that the only other effective movies were made by dictators, to falsify history, as the russians did when the miserable trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every film made by hitler. for a generation we wept over the commercialism of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under compulsion. the intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. some great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by british radio (which is government owned, but not government operated); some exceptional and important films were made for the few. but the dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea--movies and the radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking of _all_ the people. this universality lies in the nature of the instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited reception of the broadcasts; and only hitler and stalin and the sponsors have been happy to understand this. like all those who are habituated to the movies, i have suffered much from hollywood, my pain being all the greater because i am so devoted; like all those who work in radio, i am acutely conscious of its faults; but the faults and the banalities are not in question now. now we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our purposes. we have to discover what the ignoramus in hollywood and the businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for. the one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. we have to learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation; and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to accomplish an end. moreover, we have to study the field so that we know when _not_ to use these instruments, what we must not take from them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal. a coordinated use of _all_ the means of persuasion is required; to let the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or most effectively on the air. there are many things to be done; we need excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other. if we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one ill-timed, but brilliantly made, documentary on production rendered futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. when the means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have to use all of them together. the movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem to rise on the international horizon of the 's, to have no link with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world. with these, it is true, we return to the universals of human expression and communication. but what we have done with them is unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. that is why i have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have enormous inertia, the slightest error may accumulate tremendous consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most complete protection against disaster at home. we have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have to remind the american people of other tools and instruments they have neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a passion with us to invent the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use against us. chapter xi the tools of democracy the tools of democracy are certain civil actions, certain inventions, certain habits. they can be used against us--but only if we fail to use them ourselves. the greatest tools are civil liberties which we have been considering as "rights" or "privileges". the right to free speech is a great one; free speech probably was originally intended to protect property; it preserves liberty; the rights of assembly, of protest for redress, of a free press all have this double value, that they guarantee the integrity of the private man and protect the state. the great debate on the war brought back some long forgotten phenomena: broadsides, street meetings, marches, and brawls. before they began, virtually _all_ the civil rights were being used either by newcomers to america or by enemies of the american system. the poor had no access to the radio; they used a soap box instead and genteel people shrank away; the bundist and the american communist assembled and protested and published and spoke; the believers in america waited for an election to roll around again, and then did nothing about it. the enemies of the people sent a hundred thousand telegrams to congressmen, signing the names of dead men to kill the regulation of utilities, but the believer in the democratic process didn't remember the name of his congressman. bewildered aliens got their second papers and were inducted into political clubs; the old line americans never found out how the primaries worked. _public addresses_ a dangerous condition rose. no families from beacon street spoke in boston common; therefore, whoever spoke on the common was an enemy of beacon street; all over america the well-born (and the well-heeled) retired from direct communication with the people, and all over america the privilege of talking to the citizens fell into the hands of radicals, lunatics, and dangerous enemies of the republic--so that in time the very fact that one tried to exercise the right of free speech became suspect; and beacon street and park avenue could think of no way to protect themselves from boston common and union square--except to abolish free speech entirely. they did not dare to say it, but the remarkable frank hague, mayor of jersey city, said it for them: "whenever i hear anyone talk about civil liberties, i know he's not a good american". the dreadful humiliation was that it came so close to the truth. the red and the bundist, clamoring or conspiring against america, were almost the only ones doing what all americans had the right to do. we hated cranks, we did not want to be so conspicuous, we hadn't the time, the police would attend to it, if they didn't like it here let them go back ... we allowed our most precious rights to atrophy. when suddenly they were remembered, as they were by the bonus marchers of , we yelled revolution and the president of the united states called out the troops to shoot down the defenders of our country. it was the first time that a petition for redress had been offered by good citizens, by veterans, by men of notable american stock--and it frightened us because they were doing what "only foreigners" or "dangerous agitators" used to do; they were in fact being americans in action. what is not used, dies. the habit of protecting our freedom was dying in the united states. there was no conspiracy of power against us; there was no need. we were carrying experimental democracy forward so far on several planes--the material and social planes particularly--that we let it go by default on the vital plane of practical politics. we did not go into politics, we did not electioneer, we did not threaten ward bosses or county chairmen, we did not form third parties, we did nothing except vote, if it was a fair day (but not too fair if we meant to play golf). as for private action to defend our liberties, it was unnecessary and vulgar and bothersome. the depression scared us, but not into free speech; by that time free speech was red; and the deeper we floundered in the mire of defeatism, the more intimidated we were by shouting congressmen and super-patriots; it was only after the new deal pulled us out of our tailspin that we saw the light: we too could have been obscure men speaking at street corners, we did not have to give all the soap boxes to men like sacco and vanzetti; we too could have published pamphlets like the dreadful communists, and held meetings and badgered our congressmen. suddenly the people were reincorporated into their government; suddenly the people began to be concerned with government; and the tremendous revitalization of political anger was one of the best symptoms of democratic recovery in our generation. _return to politics_ the merciless pressure of taxation and then the grip of war have pushed us forward and in a generation we will be again as politically aware as our great-grandfathers were when they had one newspaper a week, and only their determination to rule themselves as a principle of action. perhaps we shall take the trouble they took; they travelled a day's journey to hear a debate and discussed it for a fortnight; they thought about politics and studied the meaning of events. and they quite naturally did their duties as citizens; they dug their neighbors out of snow-blocked roads, they nominated their candidates, they watched and rebuked their representatives. it was not a political utopia, but it was a more intelligent use of political power than ours has been. the usual excuse for the breakdown of political action in america is that so many "foreigners" came, to whom the politics of freedom were alien. this may have been true of some of the later arrivals; but the irish were captivated by, and presently captured, city politics wherever they settled; the germans were the steadiest of citizens and so were the scandinavians, their studious earnest belief in our institutions shaming our flippant disregard. the southern slavs, the russian jews and the italians were farthest removed from our political habits; but their passion for america was great. it could have been worked into political action, and often was worked into political skulduggery by bosses of a more political bent. many of these immigrants came after the exhaustion of free lands; many were plunged into slums and sweatshops and steel mills on a twelve hour day; and they emerged on the angry side, as disillusioned with america as some of its most ancient families. that political action dwindled after the great immigrations is true; but it was not the immigrant who refused to act; it was the old family and the typical american; the grafting politicians and the sidewalk radical both kept politics alive; the real americans were slowly smothering politics. we shall never quite repay our debt to tammany hall and the communists; between them political machines and saintly radicals managed to keep the instruments of democratic action from rusting. now we have to take them back and learn how to use them again. fortunately we have no choice. we neglected our rights because we wanted to sidestep our duties; today the war makes our duties inescapable and we are already beginning to use our rights. for in spite of censorship and regimentation, we will use more of our instruments of democracy than ever; we will because we are fighting for them and they have become valuable to us. the radio, the movies, and popular print are the three tools by which we can create democratic action. the action itself will be appropriate to our time and our conditions; we will not travel ten miles to hear a debate, so long as the radio lasts; but we will have to form units of self-protection in bombed cities; we may need other associations, to apportion food, to house the homeless, to support the bereaved. we will have to learn how to live together, to share what was once as private as a motor car, to elect a village constable who may have our lives in his hands a dozen times a day. in the process we will be reverting to old and good democratic habits--in a city block in atlanta or in a prairie village outside emporia, or in a chic suburb along lake michigan. something like the town-meeting is taking place in a thousand apartment houses where air-raid precautions and the disposal of waste paper are discussed and mothers who have to work trade time with wives who want to go to the movies; the farmers have, since , been meeting; the suburbanites are discussing trains and creation of bus-routes. we are making the discovery that it is our country and we can decide its destiny. we are not to let others rule us; for in this emergency every man must rule himself; the man who neglects his political duty is as dangerous today as the man who leaves his lights on in a blackout. in the early months of the war our democratic processes were muscle-bound. we hadn't been doing things together; whenever we had organized, it was against some one else; we didn't fall naturally into a simple cooperative effort. and within two months we were breaking into hostile particles, until, in desperation, we discovered that men can work together. the obstructionist manufacturer and the stubborn labor leader could hold up an entire industry; but two men, one from each side, could set each factory going again. the creation of the labor-management committees of two was the first light in the darkness of our domestic policy. still to come was the spontaneous outbreak of fervor and the cold organization for victory. we had forgotten the tools of democracy which we had to work together, as simply as men had to work on a snowbound country road together. in a small town of ohio a pleasant event occurred which had a stir of promise; dorothy thompson's report was: "they got together in the old-fashioned american way: in the old opera house. they warmed and instilled enthusiasm and resolution into one another, by the mass of their presence, and by music, and prayer. "mr. sweet had put the f.f.a. (the future farmers of america and the older brothers of the four-h clubs) to work, and they had made a survey of the existing resources of the community, in trucks, autos, combines, tractors. and he proposed to them that they use these resources, _as a community_, getting the greatest work out of them with the greatest conservation of them; organizing transportation to the factory where war production was going on, so that no auto travelled for its owner alone, but for as many workers as it could carry." _democratic action_ there is a field of endeavor in war time where this sort of spontaneous, amateur organization is best; and our government will be wise if it prevents the inexpert from building bombers but lets them, as far as possible, get children to and from school by local effort. we want to feel that we are being used, that our powers are working for the common good. so far we have been irritated by sudden demands, and frightened by long indifference to our offers--until an angry man has done something, as mr. fred sweet did in mt. gilead. a government determined to win this war will create the opportunities for democratic action without waiting for angry men. the combination of maximum control (the single head of production) and maximum dispersion (two men in each factory solving the local problem) is exactly what we understand; to translate civilian emotion into terms of maximum use is the next step. already this is happening to us: on one side we are grouping ourselves into smaller units; on the other we are discovering that we are parts of the whole nation. it is a tremendous release of energies for us; we are discovering what we had hoped--that america is of indescribable significance to us and that we for the first time signify in america--we, not bosses or financiers or critics or cliques or groups or movements--but we ourselves. something almost dead stirs again and we know that we shall be able to work with our fellowmen, and work with our government, and watch those we chose to speak for us, and challenge corruption, and see to it that we, who are the people, are not betrayed. we may not revive the _forms_ of democracy as they existed in lincoln's time, but we will never again let the _spirit_ of his democracy come so near to being beyond all revival. we will use the weapons we have and invent new ones; and we had better be prompt. because we have a victory to win with these weapons and a world to make. we have to work democracy because we have to create a world in which democracy can live. there is no time to lose. chapter xii democratic control the shape of this war was created in dark back rooms of cheap saloons, in a lodging house in geneva, in several prison cells, in small half secret meetings, up back flights of stairs, behind drawn shades, in boarding houses over the dining table, in the lobbies of movie-houses, at lectures attended by the idle and the curious and the hopeless, in the kitchen of a new york restaurant where waiters talked more about the future than about tips; it was molded also in british pubs and by the sullen lives of dole-gatherers; it took a definable shape and could have been re-formed but was not, so that its shape today is the result of the pressure of those who willed to act and the missing pressure of groups which failed to meet and talk and plan. the earth-shaking events of our time may have been created by the great and mysterious forces of history, but their exact form was fixed by obscure people: the russian revolution by lenin and trotsky, students, impractical men, and the homeless stalin; and the war by hitler, the house painter, the despised little man, the corporal who couldn't get over his military dreams. these were the leaders, the conspicuous ones. they planned--and wrote--and gathered a few even more obscure followers, and talked and lived in utter darkness until the time came for them to fight. for a thousand years the destiny of mankind will be shaped by what these men did in countries barely emerging into freedom--and we to whom the gods have given all freedom, sit by and hesitate even to talk about the future, folding our hands and piously saying that in any case it will be decided for us. that is the result of forgetting our democratic rights and duties; with them we have forgotten that the future is ours to make. it will not be made for us; it will not be made in our favor unless we make it for ourselves; the weapons with which we fight the war will be strong and terrible when we come to create the peace. and we will create it either by using the weapons or by dropping them and running away from our triumph, which is also our responsibility. we will not escape the responsibility by saying that we cannot control "the great forces", the "wave" of events. we can do what hitler and lenin did, when they were starving and fanatic and obscure: we can work and wait and work again. we must not say that we are helpless in the face of international intrigue. we--not churchill and roosevelt--wrote the atlantic charter, and we can un-write it and write it over again; we the people, not henry cabot lodge, crushed the league of nations by our indifference; we, not congressmen bribed by scrap-iron dealers, armed japan by our greed, and we, all of us, let hitler go ahead by our ignorance. we have done all these things without working; and the only thing we have not tried, is to put out our hands and take hold of our destiny. in the first dreadful crisis of our war, we saw china begin to plan the world after the war, preparing a democratic center of million people in asia, putting pressure on britain to proclaim liberty for india, taking hold of the future with faith and confidence--while we said not one open word to asia, and had barely spoken to our nearest friends, the oppressed of europe, to tell them that our purpose was liberty. we cannot let the shape of the future be molded by other hands. the price of living as we want to live is more than sweat and blood and tears: we have to make the grim effort of thinking and take the risk of making decisions. a painful truth comes home to us: we are no longer the spoiled children of destiny--our destiny is our action. _record of isolation_ for more than a hundred years the people of the united states did not have to act and avoided the consequences of democracy in international affairs. officially we had nothing to do with europe, except on special occasions when we snapped at britain, frightened the barbary pirates, helped napoleon i, drove napoleon iii out of mexico. we had no continuing policy and the details of foreign affairs were not submitted to the voter. this was natural enough; the eyes of america turned away from the atlantic seaboard toward the mississippi valley; turned back from the pacific to chicago and the east; turned again to detroit and birmingham and kansas city. we have not yet got the habit of thinking steadily about other nations. our post-war suspicion of the league, our terror of the ussr, our pious agreements with england and japan, our weak dislike of mussolini and hitler, still left us unconcerned with _policy_. we remained in the diplomatic era of william jennings bryan while europe marched back into the era of metternich or talleyrand. yet the voters have, since , determined some aspects of our foreign policy. they did not vote on a loan to china, but they did keep in power the party that made war in spain, bought the philippines, protected cuba, and policed central america. this tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the republican party had always a better one, which was prosperity. in the early twentieth century, the american voter only accepted, he did not directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook. our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is another--the tradition of democratic control. it has not begun to operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to clear our minds of some romantic illusions. our future lies balanced between europe and asia; the disagreeable certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that we cannot escape the world. we still think of participation in world affairs negatively as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined from our shores. the prospect is disagreeable because we, the people, have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. we have begun to send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we trust our ambassadors--because the journalists have begun to democratize diplomacy. they have told us more, they have often represented us more completely, and represented international business less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart european capitals. the correspondents have taken the characteristic american democratic way of altering an ancient european institution, by shrewdly publicised disrespect. whenever we have had a strong secretary of state, something further has been done; but the permanent officials of our state department have completely accepted the european style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the atlantic sheets, that all the brash independence of america has been hushed; our leading career diplomats have never been americanized by the middle west; they came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented the east, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent america. on occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into the state department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for the _gaffes_ and _gaucheries_ of american diplomacy. these awkward americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the chancelleries of europe; but they were not falling into the hands of the european diplomats. neither the fumbles of our occasional ignorant envoys nor the correct discretion of the career men gave us any habit of thinking about other countries. on the west coast there is a tradition of wariness about the orient--but it rises from immigration, not international relations. we have no habit of hatred as the french had for germany, no cultivated friendships except for the occasional visit of a prince. we are not susceptible to european flattery if we live beyond the atlantic seaboard--or below the $ , income level; for crowds, a hollywood star is at least as magnetic as a balkan queen; and it is not conceivable that we should ever treat the coming of a russian ballet as a part of a political campaign, as the french, quite correctly, did in . we are now paying for our quiet unfortified borders, for the broad seas so suddenly narrowed. we have to learn about foreign affairs, about our own empire (we hardly know that we have one). and this is the hardest thing of all: that while we move in ignorance, _we have to re-work all the basic concepts of international affairs_, or they will destroy us. we will have some support in the people of great britain, in the governments of scandinavia, and in the diplomatic habits of the ussr; but for the most part we must make our way alone. _debunking protocol_ again, as in the case of military strategy, the average man must study the subject to protect himself. he can no longer risk his life, and the fortunes of his family, in the hands of a few career men in the state department, working secretly, studying protocol, forgetting the people of the united states. the amateur statesman is as laughable as the amateur strategist, but the laugh is not always going to be on us. we will popularize diplomacy or it will destroy us. we have first of all to destroy the myth of "high politics". we have to examine macchiavelli and talleyrand and bismarck and disraeli with as much realism as we examine benedict arnold and james j. hill and edison and kruger. we need journalist-debunkers to do the work, a parallel, by the way, to the process of simplifying military discussion, which is being done by newspaper and radio experts. we have to learn that the great tricks, the great arrangements of power, have been as shady as horse-trades, as ruthless as robbery, and often as magnificent as building a railroad--but in all cases they have represented the desires of certain groups, powerful enough at any given time to impose their wishes on the people. war, business, patriotism, medicine, sociology, religion, and sex have all been re-examined and debunked in the past two generations; but diplomacy which can destroy our satisfaction in all of them, still parades as the perfect stuffed shirt, with a red ribbon across it. at the moment no one can say whether hitler has blasted the foreign office and our state department; if he has, it is an achievement equal to taking crete; and we ought to thank him for it. we should learn that diplomacy has swapped national honor, and betrayed it, and used it cynically for the advantage of a few--as well as protected it. we should examine the assertion of "national destiny" before the era of democracy, to see whether the private wealth of a prince and the starvation of a people actually are predestined, whether the mine-owners of france could have allowed german democracy to live, whether locarno satisfied national honor less than munich. and, above all, we should know that this great "game" of european statesmanship, going on from the renaissance to our own time, is a colossal and tragic failure. at times it has brought incalculable wealth to a thousand english families, to a few hundred frenchmen, and power to some others. but it has always ended in the desolation of war--and the suspicion holds that to make war advantageously has been the aim of statesmanship, not to avoid it with honor. we have to rid ourselves of the intolerable flummery of the diplomats because in the future foreign affairs are going to be connected by a thousand wires to our domestic problems, and we propose to see who pulls the wires. the old tradition of betraying a president at home while supporting any stupidity abroad will have to be scrapped; and we will be a more formidable nation, in external affairs, if we conduct those affairs in our way, not in the way of our enemies. _a "various" diplomacy_ it will not be enough to destroy the myth of high diplomacy and reduce it to its basic combinations of chicanery and power-pressure, its motives of pride and honor and greed. we have to take the positive step of creating a new diplomacy, based on the needs of america, and those needs have to be consciously understood by the american people. out of that, we may create a layman's foreign policy executed by professional diplomats; just as we are on the way to create a layman's labor policy, executed by professional statisticians, mediators and agents. we have to recognize diplomacy as a polite war; and, as suggested in connection with actual war, we must not fight in the style or strategy of our enemies. we have always imitated in routine statesmanship; and only in the past twenty years have we begun an american style of diplomacy. the "strategy of variety" may serve us here as on the battlefield; it may not. but the strategy of european diplomacy is their weapon, and their strength; we are always defeated when we attempt it, as wilson was, as stimson was over manchuria. our only successes have been when we sidestepped diplomacy entirely and talked to people. the first step toward creating our own, democratic, diplomacy will be to convince the american people that they will not escape the consequences of this war. many of us believe that we actually escaped the consequences of the first world war by rejecting the league of nations; a process of re-education is indicated, for background. this education can begin with the future and move backward--for our relation to post-war europe can be diagrammed almost as accurately as a fever chart. we withdrew from the league for peace and found ourselves in an alliance for war. it can hardly be called a successful retreat. actually we were in europe, up to our financial necks, from the moment the war ended to the day when the collapse of an austrian bank sent us spiralling to destruction in ; we stayed in it, trying to recover the benefits of the davis and young plans by the hoover moratorium. we did everything with europe except recognize its first weak effort to federalize itself on our model. decisive our part in this war will be, but if we withdraw as we did the last time, leaving the nations of europe to work out their own destiny, we will, as a practical matter, destroy ourselves. the only other certainty we have is that the prosperity of the united states is better served by peace in the world than by war. this is true of all nations; the only difference for us is that the dislocation may be a trace more severe, and that we have no tradition of huge territorial repayments, or indemnities, by which a nation may recoup the losses of war, while its people starve. given that basis, we can observe europe and asia after the present war. _phases of the future_ we ought at once to make a calendar. this war will probably not follow the tradition of the last one; it may not gratify us with an exact moment for an armistice; we may defeat our enemies piecemeal and miss the headlines and tickertape and international broadcasts and cities alight again and all the gaiety and solemn emotion of an end to war. this war breaks patterns and sets new ones, so the first date on our calendar is a doubtful one; but let us say that by a certain day we will have smashed germany and japan; italy would have betrayed them long before. our next step is the "peace conference" stage. again this war may disappoint us; we may have a long armistice and a reorganization of the world's powers, without versailles and premiers in secret conferences; perhaps by that time the peoples of europe and america will have captured their diplomats. still, let us say that an interim between armistice and world-order will occur. the phases of the future grow longer as we progress. we will celebrate the armistice for a day; the interim period may well be a year, because in that time we are going to create the organization which will bring us peace for a century--or for ever. this middle period is the critical one; without much warning, we will be in it; the day after we recover from celebrating the armistice, we will have to begin thinking of the future of the world--and at the same time think about demobilization and seeing whether the old car can still go (if we get tires) and sending food to the liberated territories and smacking down capital or labor as the case may be, and planning the next election--by this time we will have forgotten that the desperate crisis in human history has not passed, but has been transformed into the longer crisis of planning and creating a new world--for which there are even fewer good brains than there are for destroying the old one. we can take cold comfort in this: if we do not work out a form of world-cooperation acceptable to ourselves and the other principal nations, we will bring on an event in europe beside which the rise of hitler will seem trivial; it will be world revolution, the final act of destruction which hitler began. and whatever comes out of it, fascist, communist, or chaos, will be no friend to us; twenty years later we can celebrate the anniversary of a new armistice by observing the start of another european war, which will spread more rapidly to asia and ourselves. those of us who went through the first world war, and are in good moral status because we have been under shell fire, may be resigned to a third act in the 's; but the men who fight this war may be as revolutionary in england and america as they turned out to be last time in russia or in germany. they may want assurance, the day after the war ends, that we have been thinking about them and the future of the world. they will give us the choice between world organization and world revolution, and no amount of good intentions will help us. we will have to choose and to act; fascism may be destroyed, but an army returning to the turbulence of a disorganized world will not lack leaders; we can have modified communism or super-fascism, all beautifully americanized, if we have nothing better, nothing positive to be achieved when the war ends. and by the time it ends we may understand that disorganization at home or abroad will mean starvation and plague and repression and death. _seven new worlds_ forming now, openly or privately, are groups to put forth a number of different alternatives to revolution and chaos. some of these are based on political necessity or the desire to punish the axis; some correspond to the necessities of a single nation, some are more inclusive. they can be summarized so: re-isolating america; collaboration with fascism; collaboration with communism; anglo-american domination; american imperialism; revival of the league of nations; a federal organization of the world. to some people in the united states, none of these seems possible, all of them disastrous. if the confusion of propaganda continues, these people will fall back on the principle of isolation; it is a fatal backward step, but it is better than any of the seemingly fatal forward steps; it is in keeping with part of our tradition; and if europe as always, with asia now added, goes forward to another war, the centre and core of america will say "we want out", and mean it. but isolating america cannot be an immediate post-war policy; if we plan to withdraw, we virtually hand over the world to revolution and hand ourselves into moral and financial bankruptcy. isolation can only be a constant threat to the world, that we will withdraw unless some of our basic terms are met. we have to know our terms, or our threat is meaningless. there is much to be said for isolation, or autarchy; i pass it over quickly because i am not attempting to criticise each sketch of the post-war world; only to note certain aspects of them all--notably their relation to the america which i have described in earlier pages. the next two programs are also easy to assay: they are at the opposite extreme; they rise from no part of our basic tradition, and collaboration with either fascism or communism would have to come either by revolution after defeat or by long skillful propaganda which would disguise the fact and make us think that we were converting the world to our democracy. it is, nevertheless, childish to assume that the thing can't happen. given a good unscrupulous american dictator we could have made peace with the nazis, and the japanese, by squeezing britain out of the atlantic and russia out of the pacific; our gain would have been the whole western hemisphere; this would have gratified both the isolationists and the imperialists; it would have preserved peace and the monroe doctrine; the only disqualification is that it would destroy freedom throughout the world--which is the purpose of fascism. this was possible; it may become possible again. unless britain shows more intellectual strength in the final phases of the war than she did in the earlier ones, the chance to scuttle her will appeal to any anti-european american dictator; liquidate hitler, make peace with the anti-hitlerian nazis, especially the generals, send our appeasers as ambassadors, and in five years we can re-invigorate a defeated germany and start world-fascism going again. the alternative is not so remote. it is a distinct and immediate possibility. _red america_ a socialist england after the war is promised, in effect, by everyone except the rulers of the british empire. add a free china indebted to communist armies; add russia victoriously on the side of democracy; red successor states will rise in italy, germany and the balkans; and our destiny would be the fourth or fifth international. if we say these things are fanciful, we convict ourselves of inability to break out of our own mythology. either collaboration is as likely as complete isolation; neither would shock us if a good american led us into it. sir stafford cripps is certain that the ussr and the usa fight for the same ideals; and collaboration with hitler's enemies is our standing policy today. so that a "revolution" in germany would automatically lead us into friendly relations with the revolutionaries; they will be either fascist or communist, quite possibly they will be hitler's best friends. actually we may approach either a fascist or a communist world order by easy steps, our little hand held by proud propagandists guiding us on our way. _parva carta_ the dominant american relation to europe, now, is expressed in the atlantic charter which is not an alliance, not a step toward union, but a statement of principles. however, the charter has been used as a springboard and been taken as an omen; so it must be examined and its true bearings discovered. it has, for us, two essential points: one of these is the anglo-american policing of the world; it is a curt reminder that this war is not waged to end war; that future wars are being taken for granted and preparations to win them will be made. the charter was, however, a pre-war instrument for us. presently the necessities of war may force us to go further and declare our intention to prevent war entirely. the specific economic point in the atlantic charter promises "all states, great and small, victor and vanquished ... access, on equal terms, to the trade and the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity." this is a mixture of oil and the mercantile philosophy of a hundred years ago. it has a moral value; it knocks on the head all theories of "rights" in colonies; a nation subscribing to the atlantic charter and attempting to isolate a source of bauxite or pitchblende, will have to be hypocritical as well as powerful. "access to", even on equal terms, does not however imply "power to take and use". lapland may have access to montana copper, unhindered by our law; and copper may be deemed vital to lapland's prosperity (by a commission of experts); but lapland will not get our copper unless we choose to let her have it. in effect, the maritime nations, england and america, have said that if they can get to a port in the dutch east indies, they propose to trade there, for oil or ivory or sea shells; and they have also said, proudly, that germany can trade there also, after germany becomes de-nazified. no realistic attempt to face the necessity of organized production and distribution is even implied in this point. instead, president roosevelt was able virtually to write into an international document a statement of his ideals; as woodrow wilson wrote his league of nations into the fourteen points. mr. roosevelt's freedoms are specific; people (not "nations") are to be free from want, from fear, from oppression. freedom from want is the actual new thing in the world; want--need--hard times--poverty--from the beginning of european history these have been the accepted order, the lot of man, the inescapable fate to which he was doomed by being born. the charter rose out of our history and out of england's need. let me outline again the connection with our history. in , the declaration of independence showed a way out of the poverty-labyrinth in the destiny of man; the declaration declared for prosperity (then synonymous with free land) and offered it to all (citizenship and equal rights to the immigrant, the chance to share in this new belief in prosperity by becoming american). in a century and a half europe has scoffed and sneered at this (relatively successful) attempt to break through economic damnation--and at the end, as europe rocks over the edge of destruction, an american offers this still new and imperfect thing as a foundation stone of peace in the world: freedom from want. it has not yet been completely achieved in america; but we know it can be achieved; we have gone far enough on our way to say that it can be achieved in the whole world. the american standard is far above freedom from want. it is based, in fact, on wanting too many things and getting a fair percentage of them. but president roosevelt's point does not involve "leveling"; it is not an equal standard of living all over the world (which is the implied necessity of international communism). the negative freedom from want is not freedom from wanting; it is explicit, as the words are used: it means that men shall have food and shelter and clothes; and medicine against plague; and an opportunity to learn and some leisure to enjoy life; in accordance with the standards of their people. this is a great deal. it was not too much for the soviet republics to promise, and to begin to bring, to kalmucks and tartars and georgians; it is more than we have brought to our own disinherited in the south, in mining towns, in the fruitful valleys of california. our partial failure is a disgrace, but not a disaster; our success, though incomplete, is important. for we have carried forward in the light of the other great freedom which communism has had to sacrifice, which is freedom from fear. all the specific freedoms--to think, to utter, to believe, to act, are encompassed in this freedom from fear. our basic disagreement with communism is the same as our attack on nazi-fascism--both are based on illegitimate power (not power delegated or given, not power with the consent of the governed): hence both live on domination; on their capacity to instil fear. the war will prove how far this fear penetrated in russia and in germany, and how much longer it will be the instrument of coercion in either country. the president's freedoms are a wide promise to the people of the world--a promise made, like woodrow wilson's promises, before entering any agreement with any foreign power. into the atlantic charter, mr. roosevelt also injected his basic domestic policies and, by some astute horsetrading managed to make them _theoretically_ the basis for international agreement. this point promises improved labor standards, economic adjustment, and social security throughout the world. improvement, adjustment, security--they are not absolutes; freedom from want is, in effect, security; any reasonable adjustment between owners and workers will be an improvement in most countries. but the principle behind the labor point is as clear as the inspiration of the points on raw materials and freedom: it is that wars are caused by the miseries of peoples; when the people rule, they will prevent wars unless their miseries are acute; if they are not in dire want, if they have a chance to work, if they are free of coercion and threat, they will not make war--nor will they fall under the hand of the tyrant and the demagogue. in plain practical statesmanship, mr. roosevelt and mr. churchill apologized for versailles, which denied germany access to raw materials and prevented improvement in labor standards and drove millions of europeans into want and fear; and at the same time they acknowledged the connection between high diplomacy and the food and shelter and comforts of the citizen. the eight points reiterate some of the fourteen; they withdraw from others; but the new thing is all american, it is the injection of the rights of the common man into an international document. but there the atlantic charter ends. as an instrument of propaganda and as a basis of making war and peace, it was outlawed by events; it is forgotten. _what is lacking_ the charter could not carry its own logic beyond a first step: since we were not allied to britain we could not discuss a world system--all we could say was that aggressors would be disarmed (by ourselves and great britain, neither gaining a military or naval predominance) and later we also might disarm--when the world seemed safe. this was on the power side; on the economic side, our role was gratifyingly vague. out of the atlantic mists a few certainties rose, like icebergs. we soon saw: . that britain has no method of organizing europe; its tradition is isolation plus alliances. . that britain has no system of production parallel to the slave system of germany, by which europe would restore the ravages of war. . that britain cannot impose its relatively democratic habits and relatively high level of comfort on the continent. in effect, after an uprush of enthusiasm following the defeat of hitler, the democratic countries will face with panic their tragic incapacity to do what the fascists have almost done--unify the nations of europe. _slow union-now_ it was not the function of the charter to outline the new map of europe. but the map is being worked over and the most effective of the workers are those led by clarence k. streit toward union-now. long before the atlantic charter was issued, federal union had proposed free access to raw materials, even for germans if they destroyed their nazi leaders; and the entire publicity, remarkably organized, has a tone of authority which makes it profoundly significant. i do not know that it is a trial balloon of downing street or of the white house; but in america a justice of the supreme court and a member of the cabinet recommend the proposal to the "serious consideration" of the citizens and it has equally notable sponsors in england. i believe that union with the british commonwealth of nations stands in the way of america's actual function after the war; i see it as a sudden reversal of our historic direction, a shock we should not contemplate in war time; it does not correspond to the living actualities of our past or present. but i think we owe the unionists a great deal; they have incited thought and even action; they serve as the committee to aid the allies did before last december, to supply a rallying point for enthusiasts and enemies; we are doing far too little thinking about our international affairs, and federal union makes us think. it has two aims: the instant purpose of combining all our powers to win the war, using the fact of our union as an engine of propaganda in occupied and enemy countries; and second, "that this program be only the first step in the gradual, peaceful extension of ... federal union to all peoples willing and able to adhere to them, so that from this nucleus may grow eventually a universal world government of, by and for the people". (it sounds impractical, but so did the communist manifesto and hitler's "ravings".) as to the immediate program, it would instantly revive the latent isolationism of tens of millions who used to insist that the roosevelt policy would end in the sacrifice of our independence; we should have a unified control of production, but some % of our producers would lose all faith in our government. in the midst of winning the war, we should have to re-convince millions that we had not intentionally betrayed them. military and productive unity can be independent of political unity. unified command was achieved in france in and in the pacific in , without unions. as for effect abroad, propaganda could present a better case to frenchmen who believe britain let them down if complete anglo-american union were not an accomplished fact; and the whole continental and russian and asiatic suspicion of our motives might be allayed if we did not unite completely and permanently with "the people of canada, the united kingdom, eire, australia, new zealand, and the union of south africa" while we were not so fondly embracing the peoples of india, china, and the netherlands east indies. the abiding union of literate, superior, capitalist white men is not going to be taken as a first step to world equality by slavs and orientals; and much as the british empire may wish not to acknowledge the fact, communism has completely undermined the idea of white supremacy, and has given a new hope to asia and africa. it may have been a very bad thing to do, but we cannot stop for recriminations now. there are new soldiers for democracy in the world, and if they are fighting beside us, we cannot ignore them and fall into the arms of their traditional oppressors. we have a great work to do with the chinese and the indians, and all the other peoples who can stand against our enemy; we cannot begin to do it if our first move is accepting british overlordship in the east, uncritically, without pledges or promises. as a post-war program federal union is more persuasive. it begins with a wilsonian peace offer--the influence is strong and supplies the deep emotional appeal of the organization. it guarantees free access to rubber and oil and gold; it accepts any nation whose people had certain minimal freedoms; it implies, of course, free trade--with new markets for our manufactured products, and no duties on british woolens; plans for the union congress "assure the american people a majority" at the start. (as between the united states and the british commonwealth; as soon as "all peoples willing and able" to, enter, the million american and british commonwealthers would be swamped by million chinese and indians and other asiatics.) the average american pays a great tribute to the largeness of the concept of "union-now"--he doesn't believe that anyone really means it. he thinks it is a fancy name for a war alliance, or possibly a new simplified league of nations. the gross actuality of iowa and yorkshire ruled by one governing body, he cannot take in. and as the argument develops, this general scepticism is justified; for the american learns that while he may be ruled, he will not be over-ruled, and he wonders what mr. churchill and the man in the london street will say to that, or in what disguise this plan is being presented to the english or the scots or the new zealanders. so far no responsible british statesman has offered union to the united states, but mr. leslie hore-belisha has said that we need a declaration of inter-dependence and our ambassador to the court of st. james's told an international society of writers that we need a sort of international citizenship. mr. wendell willkie however has said that "american democracy must rule the world." _entry into europe_ by union or by alliance, american or anglo-american rule over the world will have some strange consequences for us, citizens not accustomed to worry over "foreign affairs". perhaps the strangest thing is that the results will be almost the same whether we are partners with britain or alone in our mighty domination, with england as a satellite. an american or anglo-american imperium can only be organized by force; it is, in effect, the old order of europe, with america playing britain's old star part, britain reduced to the supporting role of france or holland or portugal. in any controversy, we step in, with our vast industrial power, our democratic tradition, our aloofness from europe, just as england used to step in with _her_ power and traditions; the atlantic is to us what the channel or north sea was to britain. england's policy was to prevent the rise of any single continental power, so she made an alliance with prussia to fight france in and made an alliance with france to fight prussia in . in an anglo-american alliance, england would be our european outpost, just as prussia or france was england's continental outpost. our policy would still be the balance of power. like england, we should be involved in every war, whether we take up arms or not--as she was involved in the crimea and the balkans, and south africa and north africa; we should have our fashodas and our algeciras and our mafeking; our peace will be uneasy, our wars not our own. the atlantic charter suggests a "policing" of the world after the war; it holds off from anything further; it does not actually hint that a reorganization of power in the world is needed. yet, at the same time, the creation of an oceanic bloc to combat the european land bloc is hinted. it is all rather like a german professor's dream of geo-politics; russia becomes a pacific power and japan, by a miserable failure of geography, is virtually a continental one, while the united states is reduced to two strips of ocean frontage, like a real estate development with no back lot, with no back country, with no background in the history of a continent. the sea-powers unit is as treacherous as "the atlantic group" or "the democratic countries"; the intent is still to create a dominant power and give ourselves (and britain) control of the raw materials and the trade of the world. no matter how naturally the group comes together, by tradition or self-interest, it becomes instantly the nucleus for an alliance; and as the alliance begins to form, nations we omit or reject begin to crystallize around some other centre, and we have the balance of power again, the race for markets and the race for armaments. this will be particularly true if we begin to play the diplomatic game with the stakes greater than those ever thrown--since we are the first two-ocean nation to enter world affairs. at the moment nothing seems more detestable than the policy of japan; but diplomacy overcomes all detestation, and if we are going in for the game of dealing with nations instead of peoples, we can foresee ourselves years from now as the great balance between the atlantic and the pacific, between japan and england, or japan and germany, perhaps the honest broker between the two sets of powers. in we are independent, fighting for freedom, helping all those who fight against tyranny; and we can do this because we have kept out of the groupings and combinations of the powers. but we are being pushed into a combination and we know now that there is only one way to avoid entanglement: we must prevent the combination from coming into existence. _our historic decision_ in an attempt was made, by america, to put an end to all european combinations of power. that attempt was unanimously approved by the people of the united states, some of whom voted for the league while the others endorsed a society of nations, to which w.g. harding promised our adhesion. the society of nations was never seriously proposed, and harding betrayed the american people; at the same time it was monumentally clear that france, with england's help, had sabotaged the actual league by making it a facade for a punitive alliance. between these two betrayals, the idea of world organization was mortally compromised. we may quarrel over the blame for the impotence of the league; did france invade the ruhr because, without us in the league, she needed "protection"? or did we stay out of the league because we knew france would go into the ruhr? that can be argued for ever. we know reasonably well why we kept out of the league; but no one troubles to remember how earnestly we wanted the league and prayed for it and wanted to enter, so that it remained always to trouble us as we tried to sleep through the destruction of ethiopia or spain or czecho-slovakia. the league was not a promise of security to the _people_ of the united states. our government may have felt the need of a world order; we did not; the war had barely touched us, yet even those whom it had touched least were enthusiasts for a new federation of nations. it was neither fear nor any abstract love of peace. the league, or any other confederation of europe, corresponded to our american need, which was to escape alliance with any single power or small group; to escape the danger of europe united against us; and to escape the devil's temptation of imperialism--_because the people of the united states do not want to rule the world_. there is an instinct which tells us that those who rule are not independent; they are slaves to their slaves; it tells us that we are so constituted that we cannot rule over part of europe or join with any part to rule the rest; it is our instinct of independence which forbids us in the end to destroy the liberty of any other nation. this goes back to the thought of union with the british nations. if we unite, and we are dominant, do we not accept the responsibility of domination? the appetite for empire is great and as the old world turned to us in , as the war of the worlds placed us in the centre of action, as more and more we came to make the decisions, as australia, russia, china, britain called to us for help--the image of america ruling the world grew dazzling bright. it was our duty--our destiny; mr. henry luce recognized the american century, seeing us accepted by the world which already accepts our motor cars, chewing gum and moving pictures. to shrink from ruling the world is abject cowardice. did england shrink in ? or france under napoleon? or rome under augustus? or sweden under gustavus adolphus? no. no despotism ever shrank from its "destiny" to destroy the freedom of other nations. but the history of america will still create our destiny--and our destiny is _not_ to rule the world. _our destiny is to remain independent and the only way we can remain independent is by cooperation with all the other nations of the earth. that is the only way for us to escape exclusive alliances, the pull of grandiose imperial schemes, the danger of alliances against us, and a tragic drift into the european war system which can destroy us._ there is an area of action in which nationality plays no part: like labor statistics--and this area is steadily growing; there is another area jealously guarded, the area of honor and tariffs and taxes. we have to mark out the parts of our lives which we can offer up to international supervision and the parts we cannot. it will surprise us to see that we can become more independent if we collaborate more. "_far as human eye can see_" i have no capacity to describe the world order after the war. if, as i have said, the war is fought by us in accordance with our national character, we will create a democratic relationship between the nations of the world; and our experience added to that of britain and the ussr will tend toward a federation of commonwealths; the three great powers have arrived, by three separate experiences, at the idea of federation; two of them are working out the problems of sovereign independent states within a union; the third, ourselves, worked the problem out long ago by expunging states rights in theory and allowing a great deal in practise. as a result of our experience, we dogmatically assert that no federation can be created without the ultimate extinction of independence; we may be right. but the thought persists that independence was wanted for the sake of liberty; that independence without security was the downfall of czecho-slovakia and france; and that we have cherished independence because the rest of the world did not cherish liberty as we did. profoundly as i believe independence to be the key to american action, i can imagine the translation of the word into other terms; we are allied to britain and the netherlands and the soviets today, we have accepted alien command of our troops and ships; we are supplying arms to the soviets and building a naval base in ecuador and have accepted an agreement by which great britain will have a word in the creation of the most cherished of our independent creations, the tariff. independence, so absolute in origin, is like all absolutes, non-existent in fact; we know this in private life, for the man of "independent means" may depend on ten thousand people to pay him dividends; and only the mad are totally independent of human needs and duties. we will not willingly give up our right to elect a president; we may allow the president to appoint an american member to an international commission to allocate east indies rubber; in return for which we will allocate our wheat or cotton or motors--on the advice of other nations, but without bowing our neck to their rule. we have always accepted specific international interference in our affairs--the alabama claims and the oregon boundary and the successive troubles in venezuela prove that our "sovereign right" to do what we please was never exercised without some respect for the opinion of mankind--and the strength of the british navy. indeed recent events indicate that for generations our independence of action, the reality of independence, rested on our faith in the british fleet. the moment we become realistic about our independence we will be able to collaborate effectively with other nations. we got a few lessons in realistic dealings in --lend-lease and the trade for the naval bases were blunt, statesmanlike but most undiplomatic--moves to strengthen the british fleet, to extend our own area of safety, and to give us time against the threat of japan. they protected our independence, but they also compromised it; the british by any concession to japan might have weakened us; we took the risk, and our action was in effect an act of defensive war against germany. like jefferson, buying louisiana to protect us against any foreign power across the mississippi, president roosevelt acted under dire necessity and as jefferson (not roosevelt) put it, was not too deeply concerned with constitutionality. the situation in required not only the bases but the continued functioning of the british fleet in the atlantic; and we got what we needed. the economic agreement of is probably a greater invasion of our simon-pure independence of action; although it empowers a post-war president to decide how much of lend-lease was returned by valor in the field, it specifically binds us to alter our tariff if britain can induce its commonwealth of nations to give up the system of "imperial preference". all our tariffs are horsetrades and the most-favored nation is a sweet device; but heretofore we have not bartered our tariffs in advance. certainly a post-war economic union is in the wind; certainly we will accept it if it comes to us piecemeal, by agreements and joint-commissions and international resolutions which are not binding, but are accepted and become as routine as the law of copyright which once invaded our sacred national right to steal or the international postal union which gave us the right to send a letter to any country for five cents. when we think of the future our minds are clouded by memory of the league; we are psychologically getting ready to accept or reject the league all over again. we are worried over the form--will it be geneva again or will headquarters be in washington; will germany have a vote; will we have to go to war if the supreme council tells us to. these are important if we are actually going to reconstitute the league; but if we are not, the only question is what we want the new world organization to do. in keeping with our political tradition we will pretend that we want it to do as little as possible and put upon it all the work we are too lazy to do ourselves; but even the minimum will be enough. _our standing offer_ everything points to an economic council representing the free nations of the world; the lease-lend principles in time of peace may be invoked, as harold laski has suggested, to provide food and raw materials for less favored nations; and the need for "economic sanctions" will not be lost on the nation which supplied japan with scrap-iron and oil for five years of aggression against china and then was repaid at pearl harbor. if there is any wisdom--in the people or in their leaders--we will not have a formulated league to accept or reject; we will have a series of agreements (such as we have had for generations) covering more and more subjects, with more and more nations. we have drawn up treaties and agreements with twenty south american states, with forty-six nations united for liberty; we can draw up an agreement with russia and rumania and the netherlands so that england and the continent and china get oil; and another agreement may give us tungsten; we may have to take universal action to stop typhus--and no one will be an isolationist then. if the war ends by a series of uprisings we may be establishing temporary governments as part of our military strategy. slowly the form of international cooperation will be seen; by that time it will be familiar to us--and we will see that we have not lost our independence, but have gained our liberty. we began the war with one weapon: liberty. if we fight the war well, we will begin the long peace with two: liberty and production. with them we will not need to rule the world; with them the world will be able to rule itself. all we have to do is to demonstrate the best use of the instruments--and to let others learn. before our part in the war began, it was often suggested that america would feed and clothe europe, send medicine and machinery to china, and make itself generally the post-war stockpile of democracy as it had been the arsenal and treasury during the war; and the monotonous uncrushing answer was about "the money". realities of war have blown "the money" question into atoms; no sensible person pretends that there is a real equation between our production and money value; we can't in any sense "afford" bombers and battleships; if we stopped to ask where "the money" would come from, and if the question were actually relevant, we would have to stop the war. another actuality of war relieves us of the danger of being too generous--the actuality of rubber and tin and tungsten and all the other materials critical to production in peace time. since we will have to rebuild our stocks of vital goods, our practical men will see to it that we get as well as give; we may send food to greece and get rubber from java, but on the books we will not be doing too badly. neither money nor the bogey of a balance of trade is going to decide our provisioning of europe and asia; the cold necessity of preventing revolution and typhus will force us to rebuild and re-energize; in the end, like all enlargements of the market, this will repay us. the rest of the world will know a great deal about mass production by the end of the war: indians and australians will be expert at interchangeable parts; but we will have the immeasurable advantage of our long experience on which the war has forced us to build a true productive system. we will jump years ahead of our schedule of increase and improvement because of the war; and we will be able to face any problem of production--if we want to, or have to. the choice between people's lives and the gold standard will have to be made again, as it was by many nations in the 's; only this time the choice is not without a threat. after wars, people are accustomed to bloodshed; they prefer it to starvation. _alternative to prosperity_ the greatest invention of democracy is the wealth of the people. we discovered that wealth rested more firmly on prosperity than on poverty and the genius of our nation has gone into creating a well-to-do mass of citizens. unfinished as the job is, we can start to demonstrate its principles to others. in return they may refrain from teaching us the principles of revolution. recovery and freedom are our concrete actual offer to the nations of europe, counter to the offer of hitler. without this literal, concrete offer, we shall have to fight longer to defeat hitler--and every added day costs us lives and money and strength inside ourselves which we need to create the new world; if we can defeat hitler without the aim of liberty, our victory will be incomplete; we will not automatically emancipate france or jugo-slavia, or draw rumania back into the orbit of free nations. within each nation a powerful group profits by the nazi-system; within each a vast population, battered, disheartened, diseased, wants only the meanest security, one meal a day, shelter only from the bitter days, something more than a rag for clothing--and an end to the struggle; these are not heroes, they are old people, men and women struck down and beaten and starved so that they cannot rise, but can drag down those who attempt to rise. these we may save only by giving them food and forgetfulness. on the other side there are the young--carefully indoctrinated, worked over to believe that the offer of fascism is hard, but practical; it is an offer of slavery and security; whereas they are told the offer of the democratic countries is an hypocrisy and--worse still--cannot be made good. we have to face the disagreeable fact that the balkan peasant in heard of universal suffrage and high wages in america, and his grandchildren know more about our sharecroppers and race riots and strike breakers than we do--because the goebbels machine has played the dark side of our record a million times. the first year of the war was bound to show the "superiority" of the german production technique over ours, since europe will not know that we are still at the beginning of actual production. the mind of europe knows little good of us; we have not yet begun to undermine the fascist influence by words, and our acts are not yet planned. even after hitler is destroyed, we will have to act to overcome impotence in political action which years of nazi "conditioning" induces, and to compensate for the destruction of technical skill in the occupied areas. to us the end of the war is a wild moving picture of gay processions, swastikas demolished, prisons opened, and the governments-in-exile hailed at the frontiers; all of these things may happen, but the reality, after the parade, will be a grim business of re-making the flesh and the spirit of peoples. the children of israel rejoiced and sang as they crossed the red sea; but they had been slaves. so moses led them forty years in the wilderness, when he could have gone directly to the promised land in forty months, because he wanted a generation of slaves to die, and a generation of hardy freemen to be in full mature power.[a] the generation we will raise to power in the occupied countries will have great experience of tyranny, none of freedom; it will know all about our shortcomings and nothing of our triumphs; it will distrust our motives and methods; it will have seen the nazis at work and know nothing of new techniques of production; we will have to teach them to be free and to work. footnotes: [footnote a: i have not traveled the route; but general sir francis younghusband who had, gave me the figures--and the motive.] chapter xiii the liberty bell above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. we have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not forget--and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is only a word. we do not need to convert the world to a special form of political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us to help. we will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will underwrite. for in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man, freedom can destroy poverty. we have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known before, not even to ourselves. for we have to create enough liberty to take up the shameful slack in our own country. we all know, indifferently, that people (somewhere--where was it?--wasn't there a movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. but we assume that americans always have enough liberty. the senate's committee report on the fascism of organized big-farming in california is a shock which americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not understand that we have been weakened internally, as england was weakened by its distressed areas and its malayan snobbery. we do not yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic system and calculated denials of liberty. we have denied liberty in hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have started the counter-infection of communism. most of the shameful occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. here are the facts in the california case, chosen because the documentation comes from official sources: "unemployment, underemployment, disorganized and haphazard migrancy, lack of adequate wages or annual income, bad housing, insufficient education, little medical care, the great public burden of relief, the denial of civil liberties, riots, strife, corruption are all part and parcel of this autocratic system of labor relations that has for decades dominated california's agricultural industry." the american people do not know that such things exist; no american orator has dared to say "except in three or four states, all men are equal in the eyes of the law"--or, "trial by jury is the right of every man except farm hands in california, who may be beaten at will." when the senate's report is repeated to us from japanese short-wave we will call it propaganda--and it will be the terrible potent propaganda of truth. we will still call for "stern measures", if a laborer who has lost the rights of man on american soil does not go into battle with a passion in his heart to die for liberty, and we will not understand that we have been at fault, because we have not created liberty. we have been living on borrowed liberty, not of our own making. we have not seen that some of our "cherished liberties" are heirlooms, beautiful antiques, not usable in the shape they come to us. we have the right to publish--but we cannot afford to print a newspaper--so that we have to create a new freedom of the press. we have the right to keep a musket on the wall, but our enemies have ceased to prowl, the musket is an antique, and we need a new freedom to protect ourselves from officious bureaucrats. we have the right to assemble, but men of one mind, men of one trade, live a thousand miles apart, so we need a new freedom to combine--and a new restriction on combination, too. freedom is always more dangerous than discipline, and the more complex our lives, the more dangerous is any freedom. this we know; we know that discipline and order are dangerous, too, because they cannot tolerate imperfection. a nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free, but it can exist % free, especially if the direction of life is toward freedom; that is what we have proved in years. but a nation cannot exist % slave--or % regimented--because every degree of order multiplies the power of disorder. if a machine needs fifty meshed-in parts, for smooth operation, the failure of one part destroys forty-nine; if it needs five million, the failure of one part destroys five million. that is the hope of success for our strategy against the strategy of "totality"; the nazis have surpassed the junkers by their disciplined initiative in the field, a genuine triumph; but we still do not know whether a whole people can be both disciplined and flexible; we have not yet seen the long-run effect of hitler's long vituperation of bolshevism, his treaty with stalin, and his invasion of russia--unless the weakening of nazi power, its failure to press success into victory at the gates of moscow and leningrad reflect a hesitation in the stupefied german mind, an incapacity to change direction. whether our dangers are greater than those of fascism may be proved in war; it remains for us to make the most of them, to transform danger into useful action. we have to increase freedom, because as freedom grows, it brings its own regulation and discipline; the dangers of liberty came to us only after we began to neglect it or suppress it; freedom itself is orderly, because it is a natural state of men, it is not chaos, it begins when the slave is set free and ends when the murderer destroys the freedom of others; between the tyrant and the anarchist lies the area of human freedom. it is also the area of human cooperation, the condition of life in which man uses all of his capacities because he is not deprived of the right to work, by choice, with other men. in that area, freedom expands and is never destructive. the flowering of freedom in the past hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create liberty, they destroy only what is already dead. i have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"--as if the freedom of man were a commodity; _and it is_. so long as we think of it as a great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we _make_ liberty it becomes a reality; the declaration of independence _made_ liberty, concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets. liberty, like love, has to be made; the passion out of which love rises exists always, but people have to _make love_, or the passion is betrayed; and the acts by which human beings make liberty are as fundamental as the act of sexual intercourse by which love is made. and as love recreates itself and has to be made, in order to live again, liberty has also to be re-created, or it dies out. whatever lovers do affects the profound relation between them, for the passion is complex; whatever we do affects our liberties, for freedom rises out of a thousand circumstances; and we have to be not only eternally vigilant, but eternally creative; we can no longer live on the liberty inherited from the great men who created liberty in the declaration of independence. all that quantity has been exhausted, stolen from us, misused; if we want to survive, we must begin to make liberty again and proclaim it throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof; and it shall be a jubilee unto them. * * * * * +------------------------------------------------------------+ | typographical errors corrected in text: | | | | page : "what the trust were" replaced with | | "what the trusts were" | | page : "given by the the people" replaced with | | "given by the people" | | page : enterprizes replaced with enterprises | | | | ------------------------------------- | | | | note that on page there are words missing from the | | quoted section of the declaration of independence. | | the missing words "to our british brethren. we have warned | | them" have been inserted in the paragraph that begins: | | "nor have we been wanting in attention (to our british | | brethren. we have warned them) from time to time of | | attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable | | jurisdiction over us." | | | +------------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * copyright (c) by douglas rushkoff. this project gutenberg is also available online at: http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/opensourcedemocracy_page .aspx this ebook is available under the demos open access license, which appears at the end of this text and online at: http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/licence_page .aspx title page: open source democracy how online communication is changing offline politics by douglas rushkoff acknowledgements thanks to tom bentley and everyone at demos for the opportunity to extend this inquiry to a new community of thinkers. thanks also to my editorial assistant, brooke belisle, and to colleagues including andrew shapiro, steven johnson, ted byfield, richard barbrook, david bennahum, red burns, eugenie furniss and lance strate. introduction the emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for cooperation. although it may have disappointed many in the technology industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media through which they are disseminated. those who witnessed, or better, have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are developed, monopolised and challenged. and this knowledge extends, by allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the broader challenges of our time. as the world confronts the impact of globalism, newly revitalised threats of fundamentalism, and the emergence of seemingly irreconcilable value systems, it is incumbent upon us to generate a new reason to believe that living interdependently is not only possible, but preferable to the competitive individualism, ethnocentrism, nationalism and particularism that have characterised so much of late th century thinking and culture. the values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact, help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. thanks to the actual and allegorical role of interactive technologies in our work and lives, we may now have the ability to understand many social and political constructs in very new contexts. we may now be able to launch the kinds of conversations that change the relationship of individuals, parties, creeds and nations to one another and to the world at large. these interactive communication technologies could even help us to understand autonomy as a collective phenomenon, a shared state that emerges spontaneously and quite naturally when people are allowed to participate actively in their mutual self-interest. the emergence of the internet as a self-organising community, its subsequent co-option by business interests, the resulting collapse of the dot.com pyramid and the more recent self-conscious revival of interactive media's most participatory forums, serve as a case study in the politics of renaissance. the battle for control over new and little understood communication technologies has rendered transparent many of the agendas implicit in our political and cultural narratives. meanwhile, the technologies themselves empower individuals to take part in the creation of new narratives. thus, in an era when crass perversions of populism, and exaggerated calls for national security, threaten the very premises of representational democracy and free discourse, interactive technologies offer us a ray of hope for a renewed spirit of genuine civic engagement. the very survival of democracy as a functional reality may be dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. and we may get our best rehearsal for these roles online. in short, the interactive mediaspace offers a new way of understanding civilisation itself, and a new set of good reasons for engaging with civic reality more fully in the face of what are often perceived (or taught) to be the many risks and compromises associated with cooperative behaviour. sadly, thanks to the proliferation of traditional top-down media and propaganda, both marketers and politicians have succeeded in their efforts to turn neighbour against neighbour, city against city, and nation against nation. while such strategies sell more products, earn more votes and inspire a sense of exclusive salvation (we can't share, participate, or heaven forbid collaborate with people whom we've been taught not to trust) they imperil what is left of civil society. they threaten the last small hope for averting millions of deaths in the next set of faith-justified oil wars. as the mainstream mediaspace, particularly in the united states, becomes increasingly centralised and profit-driven, its ability to offer a multiplicity of perspectives on affairs of global importance is diminished. in america, broadcasting the iraq war meant selling the iraq war. each of the media conglomerates broadcast the american regime's carefully concocted narrative, so much so that by the time the war actually began a knight ridder poll found half of americans believed that iraqis had participated directly as hijackers on september . the further embedded among coalition troops that mainstream reporters were, the further embedded in the language and priorities of the pentagon they became. dispatches regularly referred to the deaths of iraqi soldiers as the 'softening of enemy positions', bombing strikes as 'targets of opportunity', and civilian deaths as the now-laughable 'collateral damage'. this was the propagandist motive for embedding reporters in the first place: when journalists' lives are dependent on the success of the troops with whom they are travelling, their coverage becomes skewed. but this did not stop many of the journalists from creating their own weblogs, or blogs: internet diaries through which they could share their more candid responses to the bigger questions of the war. journalists' personal entries provided a much broader range of opinions on both the strategies and motivations of all sides in the conflict than were available, particularly to americans, on broadcast and cable television. for an even wider assortment of perspectives, internet users were free to engage directly with the so-called enemy, as in the case of a blog called dear raed, written by what most internet experts came to regard as a real person living in baghdad, voicing his opposition to the war. this daily journal of high aspirations for peace and a better life in baghdad became one of the most read sources of information and opinion about the war on the web. clearly, the success of sites like dear raed stem from our increasingly complex society's need for a multiplicity of points of view on our most pressing issues, particularly when confronted by a mainstream mediaspace that appears to be converging on single, corporate and government approved agenda. these alternative information sources are being given more attention and credence than they might actually deserve, but this is only because they are the only ready source of oppositional, or even independent thinking available. those who choose to compose and disseminate alternative value systems may be working against the current and increasingly concretised mythologies of market, church and state, but they ultimately hold the keys to the rebirth of all three institutions in an entirely new context. the communications revolution may not have brought with it either salvation for the world's stock exchanges or the technological infrastructure for a new global resource distribution system. though one possible direction for the implementation of new media technology may be exhausted, its other myriad potentials beckon us once again. while it may not provide us with a template for sure-fire business and marketing solutions, the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny. chapter from moses to modems: demystifying the storytelling and taking control we are living in a world of stories. we can't help but use narratives to understand the events that occur around us. the unpredictability of nature, emotions, social interactions and power relationships led human beings from prehistoric times to develop narratives that described the patterns underlying the movements of these forces. although we like to believe that primitive people actually believed the myths they created about everything, from the weather to the afterlife, a growing camp of religious historians are concluding that early religions were understood much more metaphorically than we understand religion today. as karen armstrong explains in a history of god , and countless other religious historians and philosophers from maimonides to freud have begged us to understand, the ancients didn't believe that the wind or rain were gods. they invented characters whose personalities reflected the properties of these elements. the characters and their stories served more as ways of remembering that it would be cold for four months before spring returns than as genuinely accepted explanations for nature's changes. the people were actively, and quite self-consciously, anthropomorphizing the forces of nature. as different people and groups competed for authority, narratives began to be used to gain advantage. stories were no longer being used simply to predict the patterns of nature, but to describe and influence the courses of politics, economics and power. in such a world, stories compete solely on the basis of their ability to win believers; to be understood as real. when the pharaoh or king is treated as if he were a god, his subjects are actively participating in the conceit. but he still needed to prove his potency in real ways, and at regular intervals, in order to ensure their continued participation. however, if the ruler could somehow get his followers to accept the story of his divine authority as historical fact, then he need prove nothing. the story justifies itself and is accepted as a reality. in a sense, early civilisation was really just the process through which older, weaker people used stories to keep younger, stronger people from vying for their power. by the time the young were old enough to know what was going on, they were too invested in the system, or too physically weak themselves, to risk exposing the stories as myths. more positively, these stories provided enough societal continuity for some developments that spanned generations to take root. the old testament, for example, is basically the repeated story of how younger sons attempt to outwit their fathers for an inherited birth right. of course, this is simply allegory for the israelites' supplanting of the first-born civilisation, egypt. but even those who understood the story as metaphor rather than historical fact continued to pass it on for the ethical tradition it contained: one of a people attempting to enact social justice rather than simply receive it. storytelling: communication and media since biblical times we have been living in a world where the stories we use to describe and predict our reality have been presented as truth and mistaken for fact. these narratives, and their tellers, compete for believers in two ways: through the content of the stories and through the medium or tools through which the stories are told. the content of a story might be considered the what, where the technology through which the story is transmitted can be considered the how. in moments when new technologies of storytelling develop, the competitive value of the medium can be more influential than the value of the message. exclusive access to the how of storytelling lets a storyteller monopolise the what. in ancient times, people were captivated by the epic storyteller as much for his ability to remember thousands of lines of text as for the actual content of the iliad or odyssey. likewise, a television program or commercial holds us in its spell as much through the magic of broadcasting technology as its script. whoever has power to get inside that magic box has the power to write the story we end up believing. we don't call the stuff on television 'programming' for nothing. the people making television are not programming our tv sets or their evening schedules; they are programming us. we use the dial to select which program we are going to receive and then we submit to it. this is not so dangerous in itself; but the less understanding and control we have over exactly what is fed to us through the tube, the more vulnerable we are to the whims of our programmers. for most of us, what goes on in the television set is magic. before the age of vcrs and camcorders it was even more so. the creation and broadcast of a television program was a magic act. whoever has his image in that box must be special. back in the s, walter cronkite used to end his newscast with the assertion: "and that's the way it is". it was his ability to appear in the magic box that gave him the tremendous authority necessary to lay claim to the absolute truth. i have always recoiled when this rhetorical advantage is exploited by those who have the power to monopolise a medium. consider, for example, a scene in the third star wars movie, return of the jedi. luke and hans solo have landed on an alien moon and are taken prisoner by a tribe of little furry creatures called ewoks. in an effort to win their liberation, luke's two robots tell the ewoks the story of their heroes' struggle against the dark forces of the empire. c po, the golden android, relates the tale while little r d projects holographic images of battling spaceships. the ewoks are dazzled by r 's special effects and engrossed in c po's tale: the how and the what. they are so moved by the story that they not only release their prisoners but fight a violent war on their behalf! what if the empire's villainous protector, darth vader, had arrived on the alien moon first and told his side of the story, complete with his own special effects? television programming communicates through stories and it influences us through its seemingly magical capabilities. the programmer creates a character we like and with whom we can identify. as a series of plot developments bring that character into some kind of danger, we follow him and within us a sense of tension arises. this is what aristotle called the rising arc of dramatic action. the storyteller brings the character, and his audience, into as much danger as we can tolerate before inventing a solution, the rescue, allowing us all to breathe a big sigh of relief. back in aristotle's day, this solution was called deus ex machina (god from the machine). one of the greek gods would literally descend on a mechanism from the rafters and save the day. in an arnold schwarzenegger movie, the miraculous solution might take the form of a new, super-powered laser gun. in a commercial, the solution is, of course, the product being advertised. tv commercials have honed this storytelling technique into the perfect -second package. a man is at work when his wife calls to tell him she's crashed the car. the boss comes in to tell him he just lost a big account, his bank statement shows he's in the red and his secretary quits. now his head hurts. we've followed the poor guy all the way up aristotle's arc of rising tension. we can feel the character's pain. what can he do? he opens the top desk drawer and finds his bottle of brand a pain reliever and swallows the pills he swallows the pills while an awe-inspiring hi-tech animation demonstrates the way the pill passes through his body. he, and us, are released from our torture. in this passive and mysterious medium, when we are brought into a state of vicarious tension, we are more likely to swallow whichever pill and accept whatever solution that the storyteller offers. interactivity: the birth of resistance interactive media changed this equation. imagine if your father were watching that aspirin commercial back in on his old console television. even if he suspected that he was watching a commercial designed to put him in a state of anxiety, in order to change the channel and remove himself from the externally imposed tension, he would have to move the popcorn off his lap, pull up the lever on his recliner, walk up to the television set and manually turn the dial. all that amounts to a somewhat rebellious action for a bleary-eyed television viewer. to sit through the rest of the commercial, however harrowing, might cost him only a tiny quantity of human energy until the pills come out of the drawer. the brain, being lazy, chooses the path of least resistance and dad sits through the whole commercial. flash forward to . a kid with a remote control in his hand makes the same mental calculation: an ounce of stress, or an infinitesimally small quantity of human effort to move his finger an eighth of an inch and he's free! the remote control gives viewers the power to remove themselves from the storyteller's spell with almost no effort. watch a kid (or observe yourself) next time he channel surfs from program to program. he's not changing the channel because he's bored, but he surfs away when he senses that he's being put into an imposed state of tension. the remote control breaks down the what. it allows a viewer to deconstruct the content of television media, and avoid falling under the programmer's spell. if a viewer does get back around the dial to watch the end of a program, he no longer has the same captivated orientation. kids with remotes aren't watching television, they are watching the television (the physical machine) playing 'television', putting it through its paces. just as the remote control allowed a generation to deconstruct the content of television, the video game joystick demystified its technology. think back to the first time you ever saw a video game. it was probably pong, that primitive black and white depiction of a ping-pong table, with a square on either side of the screen representing the bat and a tiny white dot representing the ball. now, remember the exhilaration you felt at playing that game for the very first time. was it because you had always wanted an effective simulation of ping-pong? did you celebrate because you could practice without purchasing an entire table and installing it in the basement? of course not. you were celebrating the simple ability to move the pixels on the screen for the first time. it was a moment of revolution! the screen was no longer the exclusive turf of the television broadcasters. thanks to the joystick, as well as the subsequent introduction of the vcr and camcorder, we were empowered to move the pixels ourselves. the tv was no longer magical. its functioning had become transparent. just as the remote control allowed viewers to deconstruct the content of storytelling, the joystick allowed the audience to demystify the technology through which these stories were being told. finally, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed a receive-only monitor into a portal. packaged programming was no longer any more valuable, or valid, than the words we could type ourselves. the addition of a modem turned the computer into a broadcast facility. we were no longer dependent on the content of rupert murdoch or corporate tv stations, but could create and disseminate our own content. the internet revolution was a do-it-yourself revolution. we had deconstructed the content of media's stories, demystified its modes of transmission and learned to do it all for ourselves. these three stages of development: deconstruction of content, demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or participatory authorship are the three steps through which a programmed populace returns to autonomous thinking, action and collective self-determination. chapter the birth of the electronic community... and the backlash new forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged content they had in common. in many cases, these contributions took the form not of ideas or text but technology itself. the early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see barbrook ). people developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of financial return. it was gratifying enough to see one's own email program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users. the technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and pop email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this shareware community of software engineers. the university of illinois at champagne urbana, where mozilla, the precursor to netscape, was first developed was a hotbed of new software development. so was cornell and mit, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker groups around the world. invariably, the software applications developed by this community stressed communication over mere data retrieval. they were egalitarian in design. irc chats and usenet groups, for example, present every contributor's postings in the same universal ascii text. the internet was a text-only medium and its user was as likely to be typing into the keyboard as reading what was on screen. it is as if the internet's early developers released that this was not a medium for broadcasting by a few but for the expression of the many. people became the content, a shift that had implications not just for the online community but for society as a whole. the notion of a group of people working together for a shared goal rather than financial self-interest was quite startling to westerners whose lives had been organised around the single purpose of making money and achieving personal security. the internet was considered sexy simply because young people took an interest in it. people who developed internet applications in this way were called cyberpunks or hackers, and their antics were often equated with those of wild west outlaws, hippies, situationists and even communists. but their organisation model was much more complex and potentially far-reaching than those of their countercultural predecessors. many of these early technology and media pioneers would not have considered themselves to be part of a counterculture at all. indeed, many new models for networked behaviour and collaborative engagement were developed at research facilities dedicated to the advancement of military technology. a us government policy requiring all firms working under defense department contracts to test their employees' blood and urine for illegal drug use led to a certain disconnection between most silicon valley firms and the majority of the fledgling computer counterculture. (in fact, of all the silicon valley firms, only sun computing quite conspicuously refused to do drug testing on its employees.) whatever the applications envisioned for the communication technology being developed, the operating principles of the finished networking solutions, as well as the style of collaboration required to create them, offered up a new cultural narrative based in collective self-determination. online communities sprung up seemingly from nowhere. on the west coast in the late s one of ken kesey's merry pranksters, stewart brand (now co-founder of the prestigious global business network), conceived and implemented an online bulletin board called the well (whole earth 'lectronic link). within two years thousands of users had joined the dial-in computer conferencing system and were sharing their deepest hopes and fears with one another. famous scientists, authors, philosophers and scores of journalists flocked to the site in order to develop their ideas collaboratively rather than alone. meanwhile as the internet continued to develop, online discussions in a distributed system called usenet began to proliferate. these were absolutely self-organising discussions about thousands of different topics. they themselves spawned communities of scientists, activists, doctors, and patients, among so many others, dedicated to tackling problems in collaboration across formerly prohibitive geographical and cultural divides. the backlash these new communities are perhaps why the effects of the remote, joystick and mouse represented such a tremendous threat to business as usual. studies in the mid- s showed that families with internet-capable computers were watching an average of nine hours less television per week. even more frightening to those who depended on the mindless passivity of consumer culture, internet enthusiasts were sharing information, ideas and whole computer programs for free! software known as 'freeware' and 'shareware' gave rise to a gift economy based on community and mutual self-interest. people were turning to alternative news and entertainment sources, which they didn't have to pay for. worse, they were watching fewer commercials. something had to be done. and it was. it is difficult to determine exactly how intentional each of the mainstream media's attacks were on the development of the internet and the culture it spawned. certainly, the many executives of media conglomerates who contacted my colleagues and i for advice throughout the s were both threatened by the unchecked growth of interactive culture and anxious to cash in on these new developments. they were chagrined by the flow of viewers away from television programming, but they hoped this shift could be managed and ultimately exploited. while many existing content industries, such as the music recording industry, sought to put both individual companies and entire new categories out of business (such as napster and other peer-to-peer networks), the great majority of executives did not want to see the internet entirely shut down. it was, in fact, the us government, concerned about the spread of pornography to minors and encryption technology to rogue nations, that took more direct actions against the early internet's new model of open collaboration. although many of the leaders and top shareholders of global media conglomerates felt quite threatened by the rise of new media, their conscious efforts to quell the unchecked spread of interactive technology were not the primary obstacles to the internet's natural development. a review of articles quoting the chiefs at timewarner, newscorp, and bertelsman reveals an industry either underestimating or simply misunderstanding the true promise of interactive media. the real attacks on the emerging new media culture were not orchestrated by old men from high up in glass office towers but arose almost as systemic responses from an old media culture responding to the birth of its successor. it was both through the specific, if misguided, actions of some media executives, as well as the much more unilateral response of an entire media culture responding to a threat to the status quo, that mainstream media began to reverse the effects of the remote, the joystick and the mouse. borrowing a term from s social science, media business advocates declared that we were now living in an 'attention economy'. true enough, the mediaspace might be infinite but there are only so many hours in a day during which potential audience members might be viewing a program. these units of human time became known as eyeball-hours, and pains were taken to create tv shows and web sites 'sticky' enough to engage those eyeballs long enough to show them an advertisement. perhaps coincidentally, the growth of the attention economy was accompanied by an increase of concern over the attention spans of young people. channel surfing and similar behaviour became equated with a very real but variously diagnosed childhood illness called attention deficit disorder. children who refused to pay attention were (much too quickly) drugged with addictive amphetamines before the real reasons for their adaptation to the onslaught of commercial messages were even considered. the demystification of media, enabled by the joystick and other early interactive technologies, was quickly reversed through the development of increasingly opaque computer interfaces. while early dos computer users tended to understand a lot about how their computers stored information and launched programs, later operating systems such as windows put more barriers in place. although these operating systems make computers easier to use in some ways, they prevent users from gaining access or command over its more intricate processes. now, to install a new program, users must consult the 'wizard'. what better metaphor do we need for the remystification of the computer? computer literacy no longer means being able to program a computer, but merely knowing how to use software such as microsoft office. finally, the do-it-yourself ethic of the internet community was replaced by the new value of commerce. the communications age was rebranded as the information age, even though the internet had never really been about downloading files or data, but about communicating with other people. the difference was that information, or content, unlike real human interaction, could be bought and sold. it was a commodity. people would pay, it was thought, for horoscopes, stock prices and magazine articles. when selling information online didn't work, businesspeople instead turned to selling real products online. horoscope.com and online literary journals gave way to pets.com and online bookstores. the e-commerce boom was ignited. soon the internet became the world wide web. its opaque and image-heavy interfaces made it increasingly one-way and read-only, more conducive to commerce than communication. the internet was reduced to a direct marketing platform. the burst of the bubble and the re-emergence of community few e-commerce companies made any money selling goods, but the idea that they could was all that mattered. when actual e-commerce didn't work, the internet was rebranded yet again as an investment platform. the web was to be the new portal through which the middle class could invest in the stock market. and which stocks were they to invest in? internet stocks, of course! like any good pyramid scheme, everyone was in on it. or at least they thought they were. news stories about online communities such as the well, or even discussion groups for breast cancer survivors were soon overshadowed by those about daring young entrepreneurs launching multi-million-dollar ipos (initial price offerings of formerly private stock on public exchanges such as the nyse or nasdaq.) internet journalism, written by option-holding employees of media conglomerates, moved from the culture section to the business pages and the dot.com pyramid scheme became the dominant new media story. a medium born out of the ability to break through packaged stories was now being used to promote a new, equally dangerous one: the great pyramid. a smart kid writes a business plan. he finds a few 'angel' investors to back him up long enough to land some first-level investors. below them on the pyramid are several more rounds of investors, until the investment bank gets involved. another few levels of investors buy in until the decision is made to go public. of course, by this point, the angels and other early investors are executing their exit strategy. it used be known as a carpet bag. in any case they're gone and the investing public is left holding the soon-to-be-worthless shares. tragically, but perhaps luckily, the dot.com bubble burst along with the story being used to keep it inflated. the entire cycle, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of stories to the technologies through which they are disseminated. and the whole ordeal may have given us an opportunity for renaissance. back here in the real world, the internet is doing just fine. better than ever. the world wide web, whose rather opaque platform ascended primarily for its ability to serve as an online catalogue, has been adapted to serve many of the internet's original, more technologically primitive functions. usenet discussions have been reborn as web-based bulletin boards such as slashdot, and metafilter. personal daily diaries known as weblogs have multiplied by the thousands. blogger.com provides a set of publishing tools that allows even a novice to create a weblog, automatically add content to a web site or organise links, commentary and open discussions. in the short time blogger has been available, it has fostered an interconnected community of tens of thousands of users. these people don't simply surf the web. they are now empowered to create it. rising from the graveyard of failed business plans, these collaborative communities of authors and creators are the true harbingers of cultural and perhaps political renaissance. chapter the opportunity for renaissance the birth of the internet was interpreted by many as a revolution. those of us in the counterculture saw in the internet an opportunity to topple the storytellers who had dominated our politics, economics, society and religion - in short our very reality - and to replace their stories with those of our own. it was a beautiful and exciting sentiment, but one as based in a particular narrative as any other. revolutions simply replace one story with another. the capitalist narrative is replaced by that of the communist; the religious fundamentalist's replaced by the gnostic's. the means may be different, but the rewards are the same. so is the exclusivity of their distribution. that's why they're called revolutions - we're just going in a circle. this is why it might be more useful to understand the proliferation of interactive media as an opportunity for renaissance: a moment when we have the ability to step out of the story altogether. renaissances are historical instances of widespread recontextualisation. people in a variety of different arts, philosophies and sciences have the ability to reframe their reality. renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. it is the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. a renaissance is a dimensional leap, when our perspective shifts so dramatically that our understanding of the oldest, most fundamental elements of existence changes. the stories we have been using no longer work. take a look back at what we think of as the original renaissance; the one we were taught in school. what were the main leaps in perspective? one example is the use of perspective in painting. artists developed the technique of the vanishing point and with it the ability to paint three-dimensional representations on two-dimensional surfaces. the character of this innovation is subtle but distinct. it is not a technique for working in three dimensions; it is not that artists moved from working on canvas to working with clay. rather, perspective painting allows an artist to relate between dimensions: representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane. another example is calculus, another key renaissance invention. calculus is a mathematical system that allows us to derive one dimension from another. it is a way of describing curves with the language of lines, and spheres with the language of curves. the leap from arithmetic to calculus was not just a leap in our ability to work with higher dimensional objects, but a leap in our ability to relate the objects of one dimension to the objects of another. it was a shift in perspective that allowed us to orient ourselves to mathematical objects from beyond the context of their own dimensionality. the other main features of the renaissance permitted similar shifts in perspective. circumnavigation of the globe changed our relationship between the planet we live on and the maps we used to describe it. the maps still worked, they just described a globe instead of a plane. anyone hoping to navigate a course had to be able to relate a two-dimensional map to the new reality of a three-dimensional planet. similarly, the invention of moveable type and the printing press changed the relationship of author and audience to text. the creation of a manuscript was no longer a one-pointed affair. the creation of the first manuscript still was, but now it could be replicated and distributed to everyone. it was still one story, but now was subject to a multiplicity of individual perspectives. this innovation alone changed the landscape of religion in the western world. individual interpretation of the bible led to the collapse of church authority and the unilateral nature of its decrees. everyone demanded his or her own relationship to the story. our electronic renaissance in all these cases, people experienced a very particular shift in their relationship to, and understanding of, dimensions. understood this way, a renaissance is a moment of reframing. we step out of the frame as it is currently defined and see the whole picture in a new context. we can then play by new rules. it is akin to the experience of a computer game player. at first, a gamer will play a video or computer game by the rules. he'll read the manual, if necessary, then move through the various levels of the game. mastery of the game, at this stage, means getting to the end: making it to the last level, surviving, becoming the most powerful character or, in the case of a simulation game, designing and maintaining a thriving family, city or civilisation. for many gamers, this is as far as it goes. some gamers, though - usually after they've mastered this level of play - will venture out onto the internet in search of other fans or user groups. there, they will gather the cheat codes that can be used to acquire special abilities within the game, such as invisibility or an infinite supply of ammunition. when the gamer returns to the game with his secret codes, is he still playing the game or is he cheating? from a renaissance perspective he is still playing the game, albeit a different one. his playing field has grown from the cd on which the game was shipped to the entire universe of computers where these secret codes and abilities can be discussed and shared. he is no longer playing the game, but a meta-game. the inner game world is still fun, but it is distanced by the gamer's new perspective, much in the way we are distanced from the play-within-a-play in one of shakespeare's comedies or dramas. and the meta-theatrical convention gives us new perspective on the greater story as well. gaming, as a metaphor but also as a lived experience, invites a renaissance perspective on the world in which we live. perhaps gamers and their game culture have been as responsible as anyone for the rise in expressly self-similar forms of television like beavis and butt-head, the simpsons and southpark. the joy of such programs is not the relief of reaching the climax of the linear narrative, but rather the momentary thrill of making connections. the satisfaction is in recognising which bits of media are being satirised at any given moment. it is an entirely new perspective on television, where programs exist more in the form of talmudic commentary: perspectives on perspectives on perspectives. we watch screens within screens, constantly reminded, almost as in a brecht play, of the artifice of storytelling. it is as if we are looking at a series of proscenium arches, and are being invited as an audience to consider whether we are within a proscenium arch ourselves. the great renaissance was a simple leap in perspective. instead of seeing everything in one dimension, we came to realise there was more than one dimension on which things were occurring. even the elizabethan world picture, with its concentric rings of authority - god, king, man, animals - reflects this new found way of contending with the simultaneity of action of many dimensions at once. a gamer stepping out onto the internet to find a cheat code certainly reaches this first renaissance's level of awareness and skill. but what of the gamer who then learns to program new games for himself? he, we might argue, has stepped out of yet another frame into our current renaissance. he has deconstructed the content of the game, demystified the technology of its interface and now feels ready to open the codes and turn the game into a do-it-yourself activity. he has moved from a position of a receiving player to that of a deconstructing user. he has assumed the position of author, himself. this leap to authorship is precisely the character and quality of the dimensional leap associated with today's renaissance. the evidence of today's renaissance is at least as profound as that of the one that went before. the th century saw the successful circumnavigation of the globe via the seas. the th century saw the successful circumnavigation of the globe from space. the first pictures of earth from space changed our perspective on this sphere forever. in the same century, our dominance over the planet was confirmed not just through our ability to travel around it, but to destroy it. the atomic bomb (itself the result of a rude dimensional interchange between submolecular particles) gave us the ability to author the globe's very destiny. now, instead of merely being able to comprehend 'god's creation', we could actively control it. this is a new perspective. we also have our equivalent of perspective painting, in the invention of the holograph. the holograph allows us to represent not just three, but four dimensions on a two-dimensional plate. when the viewer walks past a holograph she can observe the three-dimensional object over a course of time. a bird can flap its wings in a single picture. but, more importantly for our renaissance's purposes, the holographic plate itself embodies a new renaissance principle. when the plate is smashed into hundreds of pieces, we do not find that one piece contains the bird's wing, and another piece the bird's beak. each piece of the plate contains a faint image of the entire subject. when the pieces are put together, the image achieves greater resolution. but each piece contains a representation of the totality. this leap in dimensional understanding is now informing disciplines as diverse as brain anatomy and computer programming. our analogy to calculus is the development of systems theory, chaos math and the much-celebrated fractal. confronting non-linear equations on their own terms for the first time, mathematicians armed with computers are coming to new understandings of the way numbers can be used to represent the complex relationships between dimensions. accepting that the surfaces in our world, from coastlines to clouds, exhibit the properties of both two and three-dimensional objects (just what is the surface area of a cloud?) they came up with ways of working with and representing objects with fractional dimensionality. using fractals and their equations, we can now represent and work with objects from the natural world that defy cartesian analysis. we also become able to develop mathematical models that reflect many more properties of nature's own systems, such as self-similarity and remote high leverage points. again, we find that this renaissance is characterised by the ability of an individual to reflect, or even affect, the grand narrative. to write the game. finally, our renaissance's answer to the printing press is the computer and its ability to network. just as the printing press gave everyone access to readership, the computer and internet give everyone access to authorship. the first renaissance took us from the position of passive recipient to active interpreter. our current renaissance brings us from the role of interpreter to the role of author. we are the creators. as game programmers instead of game players, the creators of testimony rather than the believers in testament, we begin to become aware of just how much of our reality is open source and up for discussion. so much of what seemed like impenetrable hardware is actually software and ripe for reprogramming. the stories we use to understand the world seem less like explanations and more like collaborations. they are rule sets, only as good as their ability to explain the patterns of history or predict those of the future. consider the experience of a cartographer attempting to hold a conversation with a surfer. they both can claim intimate knowledge of the ocean, but from vastly different perspectives. while the mapmaker understands the sea as a series of longitude and latitude lines, the surfer sees only a motion of waves that are not even depicted on the cartographer's map. if the cartographer were to call out from the beach to the surfer and ask him whether he is above or below the rd parallel, the surfer would be unable to respond. the mapmaker would have no choice but to conclude that the surfer was hopelessly lost. but if any of us were asked to choose who we would rather rely on to get us back to shore, most of us would pick the surfer. he experiences the water as a system of moving waves and stands a much better chance of navigating a safe course through them. each surfer at each location and each moment of the day experiences an entirely different ocean. the cartographer experiences the same map no matter what. he has a more permanent model, but his liability is his propensity to mistake his map for the actual territory. the difference between the cartographer and the surfer's experience of the ocean is akin to pre and post-renaissance relationships to story. the first relies on the most linear and static interpretations of the story in order to create a static and authoritative template through which to glean its meaning. the latter relies on the living, moment-to-moment perceptions of its many active interpreters to develop a way of relating to its many changing patterns. ultimately, in a cognitive process not unlike that employed by a chaos mathematician, the surfer learns to recognise the order underlying what at first appears to be random turbulence. events, images, and arrangements that might otherwise have appeared to be unrelated are now, thanks to a world view that acknowledges discontinuity, revealed to be connected. to those unfamiliar with this style of pattern recognition, the connections they draw may appear to be as unrelated as a fortune-teller's tea leaves or tarot cards are from the future events she predicts. nonetheless, the surfer understands each moment and event in his world as a possible reflection on any other aspect or moment in the entire system. what gets reborn the renaissance experience of moving beyond the frame allows everything old to look new again. we are liberated from the maps we have been using to navigate our world and free to create new ones based on our own observations. this invariably leads to a whole new era of competition. renaissance may be a rebirth of old ideas in a new context, but which ideas get to be reborn? the first to recognise the new renaissance will compete to have their ideologies be the ones that are rebirthed in this new context. this is why, with the emergence of the internet, we saw the attempted rebirth (and occasional stillbirth) of everything from paganism to libertarianism, and communism to psychedelia. predictably, the financial markets and consumer capitalism, the dominant narratives of our era, were the first to successfully commandeer the renaissance. but they squandered their story on a pyramid scheme (indeed, the accelerating force of computers and networks tends to force any story to its logical conclusion) and now the interactive renaissance is once again up for grabs. perhaps the most valuable idea to plant now, into the post-renaissance society of tomorrow, is the very notion of renaissance itself. interactivity, both as an allegory for a healthier relationship to cultural programming, and as an actual implementation of a widely accessible authoring technology, reduces our dependence on fixed narratives while giving us the tools and courage to develop narratives together. the birth of interactive technology has allowed for a sudden change of state. we have witnessed together the wizard behind the curtain. we can all see, for this moment anyway, how so very much of what we have perceived of as reality is, in fact, merely social construction. more importantly, we have gained the ability to enact such wizardry ourselves. the most ready examples of such suddenly received knowledge come to us from the mystics. indeed, many early cyber-pioneers expressed their insights (see my cyberia for examples ) in mystical language coining terms such as 'technoshamanism' and 'cyberdelia'. indeed, in some ways it does feel as though our society were at the boundaries of a mystical experience, when we have a glimpse of the profoundly arbitrary nature of the stories we use to organise and explain the human experience. it is at precisely these moments that the voyager wonders: "what can i tell myself - what i can write down that will make me remember this experience beyond words?" of course, most of these mystical scribblings end up being over-simplified platitudes such as 'all is one' or 'i am god'. those that rise above such clich, such as the more mystical tractates of ezekiel or julian of norwich, defy rational analysis or any effort at comprehension. our only choice, in such a situation, might be to attempt to preserve just the initial insight that our maps are mere models, and that we have the ability to draw new ones whenever we wish. this is why the scientists, mathematicians, engineers, businesspeople, religious and social organisers of the late th century, who have adopted a renaissance perspective on their fields, have also proclaimed their insights to be so categorically set apart from the work of their predecessors. chaos mathematicians (and the economists who depend on them) regard systems theory as an entirely new understanding of the inner workings of our reality. they are then celebrated on the pages of the new york times for declaring that our universe is actually made up of a few simple equations called cellular-automata. scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of ant hill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony. more importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change. the greatest benefit of a shift in operating model appears to be the recollection that we are working with a mere model. september : coping by retreat into a world view more than any particular map or narrative we might develop, we need to retain the crucial awareness that any and all of these narratives are mere models for behavioural, social, economic or political success. though provisionally functional, none of them are absolutely true. to mistake any of them for reality would be to mistake the map for the territory. this, more than anything, is the terrible lesson of the th century. many people, institutions and nations have yet to adopt strategies that take this lesson into account. the oil industry and its representatives (some now elected in government) are, for example, incapable of understanding a profit model that does not involve the exploitation of a fixed and limited resources. they continue to push the rest of the industrialised world toward the unnecessary bolstering of cooperative, if oppressive dictatorships, as well as the wars these policies invariably produce. the chemical and agriculture industries, incapable of envisioning a particular crop as anything but a drug-addicted, genetically altered species, cannot conceive of the impact of their innovations on the planet's topsoil or ecosystems. in more readily appreciated examples, the church of england is still consumed with its defence of the literal interpretation of biblical events and many fundamentalists sects in the united states still fight, quite successfully, to prevent the theory of evolution from being taught in state schools. although the terrorist attacks on the united states can find their roots, at least partially, in a legacy of misguided american foreign and energy policy decisions, they have also increased our awareness of a great chasm between peoples with seemingly irreconcilable stories about the world and humankind's role within it. and the lines between these worldviews are anything but clear. hours after the attacks, two of america's own fundamentalist ministers, jerry falwell and pat robertson, were quick to fit the tragic events into their own concrete narrative for god's relationship to humankind. unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic moment as anything but the wrath of god, they blamed the feminists, homosexuals and civil libertarians of new york city for having brought this terrible but heavenly decree on themselves. in a less strident but equally fundamentalist impulse, many american patriots interpreted the attacks as the beginning of a war against our nation's sacred values. this was to be seen as a war against capitalism and a free society. as american flags were raised in defiance of our middle eastern antagonists, just as many american freedoms were sacrificed to the new war on terrorism. our nationalism overshadowed our national values, but our collective story was saved from deconstruction. meanwhile, free-market capitalism's stalwarts, who had already suffered the collapse of the dot.com bubble and the faith-challenging reality of an economic recession, were also reeling from the attack on their most visible symbol of global trade. with its dependence on perpetual expansion, the story of global capitalism was not helped by this sure sign of resistance. might the world not really be ready to embrace the world trade organisation's gifts? with a utopian future of global economic prosperity as central to its basic premise as any fundamentalist vision of a perfect past era in harmony with god, believers in the capitalist narrative responded the only way they could. they sought a war to defend their story. the most injurious rupture, of course, was to the narrative we use to feel safe and protected in an increasingly global society. the attacks on the pentagon and world trade center, pinpointed, devastating, and worst of all perfectly executed, challenged the notion that we were the world's singularly invincible nation. the people we appointed to protect us had proved their inability to do so. president bush's quick rise to an over percent popularity rating shows just how much we needed to believe in his ability to provide us with the omnipotent fatherly protection that his rhetoric commanded. but like a child realising that his parents can't save him from the bully at school, americans were forced to consider that our leaders, our weapons and our wealth offer only so much insulation from a big bad world. our nurtured complacency and our sense of absolute security had always been unfounded, of course. but waking up to the great existential dilemma as suddenly as we did was a traumatic experience. it led us to revert to old habits. anti-semites (and latent anti-semites) around the world used the catastrophe as new evidence of the 'jewish problem'. tsarist and nazi propaganda books, such as protocols of the elders of zion, hit the bestseller lists in countries like saudi arabia where they are still being published by official government presses. newspaper stories revived blood libel (that jews drink the blood of murdered non-jewish teens) and spread the disinformation that jews were warned about the attacks by their rabbis through special radios they keep in their homes. indeed, such informational treachery is nothing new. but in the destabilised atmosphere of disrupted narrative, it spread faster, wider and with greater effect than it otherwise would have. efforts to package america's new war on news channels like cnn further alienated the more cynical viewers from the mainstream account of what had happened. conspiracy theorists, web activists and open-minded leftists, already suspicious of the narratives presented through television, found themselves falling prey to a falsified email letter from a brazilian schoolteacher, claiming that video footage of palestinians celebrating the attacks had actually been shot years earlier during the gulf war. like any other narrative, the extreme counterculture's saga of a 'new world order', directed by the bush family, had to be wrapped around the new data. meanwhile, many jews and christians who hadn't even thought about their religion or their ethnicity for years found themselves instinctively asking: "how will this impact israel?" or "is the armageddon upon us?" they bought memberships in religious institutions for the first time in decades, and packed into their churches and synagogues looking for reassurance, for a way to fit these catastrophes into a bigger story. like everyone else, they hoped to reconstruct the narrative that had been shattered. but surely our worldviews, political outlooks and religions aren't functioning at their best when they provide pat answers to life's biggest questions. the challenge to all thinking people is to resist the temptation to fall into yet another polarised, nationalist, or god-forbid, holy posture. rather than retreating into the simplistic and childlike, if temporarily reassuring, belief that the answers have already been written along with the entire human story, we must resolve ourselves to participate actively in writing the story ourselves. it is not enough to go back to our old models, particularly when they have been revealed to be inadequate at explaining the complexity of the human condition. it is too late for the western world to retreat into christian fundamentalism, accelerating global conflict in an effort to bring on the messianic age. it is too late to push blindly towards a purely capitalist model of human culture. there is simply too much evidence that the short-term bottom line does not serve the needs of people or the environment. there are too many alternative values and cultural threads surrendered to profit efficiency that may yet prove vital to our cultural ecosystem. instead, we must forge ahead into the challenging but necessary task of inventing new models ourselves, using the collaborative techniques learned over the past decade, and based in the real evidence around us. chapter networked democracy the values engendered by our fledgling networked culture may, in fact, prove quite applicable to the broader challenges of our time and help a world struggling with the impact of globalism, the lure of fundamentalism and the clash of conflicting value systems. the very survival of democracy as a functional reality is dependent upon our acceptance, as individuals, of adult roles in conceiving and stewarding the shape and direction of society. religions and ideologies are terrific things, so long as no one actually believes in them. while absolute truths may exist, it is presumptuous for anyone to conclude he has found and comprehended one. true, the adoption of an absolutist frame of reference serves many useful purposes. an accepted story can unify an otherwise diverse population, provide widespread support for a single regime and reassure people in times of stress. except for the resulting ethnocentrism, repression of autonomy and stifling of new ideas, such static templates can function well for quite a while. dictators from adolph hitler to idi amin owed a good part of their success to their ability to develop ethnically based mythologies that united their people under a single sense of identity. the biblical myth of jacob and his sons served to unify formerly non-allied desert tribes (with the same names as jacob's sons) in ancient sinai. they not only conquered much of the region, but created a fairly stable regime for centuries. so these stories enable a certain kind of functionality. their relative stasis, if protected against the effects of time by fundamentalists, can allow for the adoption and implementation of long-term projects that span generations, even centuries. but when one group's absolute truth bumps up against another group's absolute truth, only conflict can result. new technologies, global media, and the spread of international corporate conglomerates have forced just such a clash of worldviews. while cultures have been reckoning with the impact of cosmopolitanism since even before the first ships crossed the mediterranean, today's proliferation of media, products and their associated sensibilities, as well as their migration across formerly discreet boundaries, are unprecedented in magnitude. globalism, at least as it is envisioned by the more expansionist advocates of free market capitalism, only exacerbates the most dangerously retrograde strains of xenophobia. the market's global aspirations (as expressed by global business network co-founder peter schwartz's slogan "open markets good. closed markets bad. tattoo it on your forehead" ) amount to a whitewash of regional cultural values. they are as reductionist as the tenets of any fundamentalist religion. in spite of the strident individualism of this brand of globalist rhetoric, it leaves no room for independent thinking or personal choice, except insofar as they are permitted by one's consumption decisions or the way one chooses to participate in the profit-making game. mistaking the arbitrary and man-made rules of the marketplace for a precondition of the natural universe, corporate capitalism's globalist advocates believe they are liberating the masses from the artificially imposed restrictions of their own forms of religion and government. perceiving the free market model as the way things really are, they ignore their own fabrications, while seeing everyone else's models as impediments to the natural and rightful force of evolution. as a result, globalism to almost anyone but a free market advocate, has come to mean the spread of the western corporate value system to every other place in the world. further, the bursting of the dot.com bubble, followed by the revelation of corporate malfeasance and insider trading, exposed corporate capitalism's dependence on myths; stories used to captivate and distract the public while the storytellers ran off with the funds. the spokespeople for globalism began to be perceived as if they were the th century catholic missionaries that preceded the conquistadors, preparing indigenous populations for eventual colonisation. the free market came to be understood as just another kind of marketing. globalism was reduced, in the minds of most laypeople, to one more opaque mythology used to exploit the uninitiated majority. networked democracy: learning from natural interconnectivity the current renaissance offers new understandings of what it might mean to forge a global society that transcends the possibilities described by the language of financial markets. it might not be too late to promote a globalism modelled on cooperation instead of competition, and on organic interchange instead of financial transaction. again, our renaissance insights and inventions aid us in our quest for a more dimensionalised perspective on our relationship to one another. rather famously the first renaissance elevated the catholic mass into a congregation of protestant readers. thanks to the printing press and the literacy movement that followed, each person could enjoy his or her own personal relationship to texts and the mythologies they described. our own renaissance offers us the opportunity to enhance the dimensionality of these relationships even further, as we transform from readers into writers. it's no coincidence that early internet users became obsessed with the fractal images they were capable of producing. the reassuring self-similarity of these seemingly random graphs of non-linear equations, evoked the shapes of nature. one simple set of fractal equations, iterated through a computer, could produce a three-dimensional image of a fern, a coastline or a cloud. zooming in on one small section revealed details and textures reflective of those on other levels of magnification. indeed, each tiny part appeared to reflect the whole. for early internet users, sitting alone in their homes or offices, connected to one another only by twisted pairs of copper phone lines, the notion of being connected, somehow, in the manner of a fractal was quite inspiring. they began to study new models of interconnectivity and group mind, such as james lovelock's gaia hypothesis and rupert sheldrakes theory of morphogenesis, to explain and confirm their growing sense of non-local community. by the mid s many internet users began to see the entire planet as a single organism, with human beings as the neurons in a global brain. the internet, according to this scheme, was the neural network being used to wire up this brain so that it could function in a coordinated fashion. in another model for group mind, this time celebrated among the rave counterculture, this connectivity was itself a pre-existing state. the internet was merely a metaphor, or outward manifestation, of a psychic connection between human beings that was only then being realised: the holographic reality. as functioning models for cooperative activity, these notions are not totally unsupported by nature. biologists studying complex systems have observed coordinated behaviours between creatures that have no hierarchical communication scheme, or even any apparent communication scheme whatsoever. the coral reef, for example, exhibits remarkable levels of coordination even though it is made up of millions of tiny individual creatures. surprisingly, perhaps, the strikingly harmonious behaviour of the collective does not repress the behaviour of the individual. in fact the vast series of interconnections between the creatures allows any single one of them to serve as a 'remote high leverage point' influencing the whole. when one tiny organism decides it is time for the reproductive cycle to begin, it triggers a mechanism through which hundreds of miles of coral reef can change colour within hours. another more immediately observable example is the way women living together will very often synchronise in their menstrual cycles. this is not a fascistic scheme of nature, supplanting the individual rhythms of each member, but a way for each member of the social grouping to become more attuned and responsive to the subtle shifts in one another's physical and emotional states. each member has more, not less, influence over the whole. these models of phase-locking and self-similarity, first studied by the chaos mathematicians but eventually adopted by the culture of the internet, also seemed to be reflected in the ever-expanding mediaspace. the notion of remote high leverage points (a butterfly flapping its wings in brazil leading to a hurricane in new york) was now proven every day by a datasphere capable of transmitting a single image globally in a matter of minutes. a black man being beaten by white cops in los angeles is captured on a home video camera and appears on television sets around the globe overnight. eventually, this -second segment of police brutality leads to full-scale urban rioting in a dozen american cities. these models for interactivity and coordinated behavior may have been launched in the laboratory, but they were first embraced by countercultures. psychedelics enthusiasts (people who either ingested substances such as lsd or found themselves inspired by the art, writing and expression of the culture associated with these drugs) found themselves drawn to technologies that were capable of reproducing both the visual effects of their hallucinations as well as the sense of newfound connection with others. similarly, the computer and internet galvanized certain strains of both the pagan and the grassroots 'do-it-yourself' countercultures as the 'cyberpunk' movement, which was dedicated to altering reality through technology, together. only now are the social effects of these technologies being considered by political scientists for what they may teach us about public opinion and civic engagement. the underlying order of apparently chaotic systems in mathematics and in nature suggest that systems can behave in a fashion mutually beneficial to all members, even without a command hierarchy. the term scientists use to describe the natural self-organisation of a community is 'emergence'. as we have seen, until rather recently, most observers thought of a colony of beings, say ants, as receiving their commands from the top: the queen. it turns out that this is not the way individuals in the complex insect society know what to do. it is not a hierarchical system, they don't receive orders the way soldiers do in an army. the amazing organisation of an anthill 'emerges' from the bottom up, in a collective demonstration of each ant's evolved instincts. in a sense, it is not organised at all since there is no central bureaucracy. the collective behaviour of the colony is an emergent phenomenon. likewise, the slime mould growing in damp fields and forests all around us can exhibit remarkably coordinated behaviour. most of the time, the sludge-like collection of microorganisms go about their business quite independently of one another, each one foraging for food and moving about on its own. but when conditions worsen, food becomes scarce or the forest floor becomes dry, the formerly distinct creatures coalesce into a single being. the large mass of slime moves about, amassing the moisture of the collective, until it finds a more hospitable region of forest, and then breaks up again into individual creatures. the collective behaviour is an emergent trait, learned through millennia of evolution. but it is only activated when the group is under threat. the processes allowing for these alternative strategies are still being scrutinised by scientists, who are only beginning to come to grips with the implications of these findings in understanding other emergent systems from cities to civilisations. at first glance, the proposition that human civilisation imitates the behaviour of slime mould is preposterous, an evolutionary leap backwards. an individual human consciousness is infinitely more advanced than that of a single slime mould micro-organism. but coordinated human metaorganism is not to be confused with the highly structured visions of a 'super organism' imagined in the philosophical precursors to fascism in the th and th centuries. rather, thanks to the feedback and iteration offered by our new interactive networks, we aspire instead towards a highly articulated and dynamic body politic: a genuinely networked democracy, capable of accepting and maintaining a multiplicity of points of view, instead of seeking premature resolution and the oversimplification that comes with it. this is why it appeared that the decision to grant the public open access to the internet in the early s would herald a new era of teledemocracy, political activism and a reinstatement of the collective will into public affairs. the emergence of a networked culture, accompanied by an ethic of media literacy, open discussion and direct action held the promise of a more responsive political system wherever it spread. but most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as former clinton pollster dick morris's web site www.vote.com, or even the somewhat effective political action site www.moveon.org, are simply new versions of the public opinion poll. billing themselves as the next phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the day. vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy to just another marketing survey. even if it is just the framework for a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally flawed vision of push-button politics. that's the vision shared by most teledemocracy champions today. so what went wrong? why didn't networked politics lead to a genuinely networked engagement in public affairs? interference in the emergence first, by casting itself in the role of cultural and institutional watchdog, governments, particularly in the united states, became internet society's enemy. though built with mostly us government dollars, the internet's growth into a public medium seemed to be impeded by the government's own systemic aversion to the kinds of information, images and ideas that the network spread. the government's fear of hackers was compounded by a fear of pornography and the fear of terrorism. the result was a tirade of ill-conceived legislation that made internet enthusiasts' blood boil. new decency laws aimed at curbing pornography (which were ultimately struck down) elicited cries of curtailment on free speech. unsubstantiated and bungled raids on young hackers and their families turned law enforcement into the keystone cops of cyberspace and the us justice department into a sworn enemy of the shareware community's most valuable members. misguided (and unsuccessful) efforts at preventing the dissemination of cryptography protocols across national boundaries turned corporate developers into government-haters as well. (this tradition of government interference in the rise of a community-driven internet is contrasted by the early participation of the uk's labour government in the funding of internet opportunities there, such as community centres and public timeshare terminals, which were initially exploited mainly by arts collectives, union organisers, and activists. of course all this didn't play very well with the nascent uk internet industry, which saw its slow start compared with the us and other developed nations as a direct result of government over-management and anti-competitive funding policies.) so, the us government became known as the antagonist of cyberculture. every effort was made to diminish state control over the global telecommunications infrastructure. the internet itself, a government project, soon fell into private hands (internic, and eventually industry consortiums). for just as a bacteria tends to grow unabated without the presence of fungus, so too does corporate power grow without the restrictive influence of government. this in itself may not have been so terrible. e-commerce certainly has its strengths and the economic development associated with a profit-driven internet creates new reasons for new countries to get their populations online. but an interactive marketplace is not fertile soil for networked democracy or public participation. as we have seen, the objective of marketers online is to reduce interactivity, shorten consideration and induce impulsive purchases. that's why the software and interfaces developed for the commercial webspace tended to take user's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. the most successful programs, for them, lead people to the 'buy' button and let them use the keyboard only to enter their credit card numbers and nothing else. the internet that grew from these development priorities, dominated by the world wide web instead of discussion groups, treats individuals more as consumers than as citizens. true, consumers can vote with their dollars, and that in a way feels something like direct communication with the entity in charge - the corporation. but this is not a good model for government. sadly, though, it's the model being used to implement these first efforts at teledemocracy. and it's why these efforts suffer from the worst symptoms of consumer culture: they focus on short-term ideals, they encourage impulsive, image-driven decision-making and they aim to convince people that their mouse-clicking is some kind of direct action. anyone arguing against such schemes must be an enemy of the public will, an elitist. teledemocracy is a populist revival, after all, isn't it? perhaps. but the system of representation on which most democracies were built was intended to buffer the effects of such populist revivals. although they may not always (or even frequently) live up to it, our representatives' role is to think beyond short-term interests of the majority. they are elected to protect the rights of minority interests, the sorts of people and groups who are now increasingly cast as 'special interest groups'. achieving the promise of network democracy the true promise of a network-enhanced democracy lies not in some form of web-driven political marketing survey, but in restoring and encouraging broader participation in some of the internet's more interactive forums. activists of all stripes now have the freedom and facility to network and organise across vast geographical, national, racial and even ideological differences. and they've begun to do so. the best evidence we have that something truly new is going on is our mainstream media's inability to understand it. major american news outlets are still incapable of acknowledging the tremendous breadth of the wto protest movement because of the multiplicity of cooperating factions within it. unable to draw out a single, simplified rationale that encompasses the logic of each and every protestor, traditional media storytellers conclude that there is no logic at all. (just as i am writing this section, a newscaster on cnbc, reporting from a wto demonstration, is condescendingly laughing at the word 'neo-liberal' on a placard, believing that the teen protestor holding it has invented the term!) in actuality, the multi-faceted rationale underlying the wto protests confirm both their broad based support, as well as the quite evolved capacity of its members to coalesce across previously unimaginable ideological chasms. indeed, these obsolete ideologies are themselves falling away as a new dynamic emerges from nascent political organism. for politicians who mean to lead more effectively in such an environment, the interactive solution may well be a new emphasis on education, where elected leaders use the internet to engage with constituents and justify the decisions they have made on our behalf, rather than simply soliciting our moment-to-moment opinions. politicians cannot hope to reduce the collective will of their entire constituencies into a series of yes or no votes on the issues put before them. they can, however, engage the public in an ongoing exploration and dialogue on issues and their impacts, and attempt to provide a rationale for their roles in the chamber in which they participate. they must accept that their constituents are capable of comprehending legislative bodies as functioning organisms. in doing so, politicians will relieve themselves of the responsibility for hyping or spinning their decisions and instead use their time with the public to engage them in the evolution of the legislative process. like teachers and religious leaders, whose roles as authority figures have been diminished by their students' and congregants' direct access to formerly secret data, politicians too must learn to function more like partners than parents. in doing so, they will leave the certainty of th century political ideologies behind, and admit to the open-ended and uncertain process of societal co-authorship. whatever model they choose must shun static ideologies, and instead acknowledge the evolutionary process through which anything resembling progress is made. chapter open source: opening up the network democracy one model for the open-ended and participatory process through which legislation might occur in a networked democracy can be found in the 'open source' software movement. faced with the restrictive practices of the highly competitive software developers, and the pitifully complex and inefficient operating systems such as microsoft windows that this process produces, a global community of programmers decided to find a better development philosophy for themselves. they founded one based in the original values of the shareware software development community, concluding that proprietary software is crippled by the many efforts to keep its underlying code a secret and locked down. many users don't even know that a series of arbitrary decisions have been made about the software they use. they don't know it can be changed. they simply adjust. by publishing software along with its source code, open source developers encourage one another to correct each other's mistakes, and improve upon each other's work. rather than competing they collaborate, and don't hide the way their programs work. as a result, everyone is invited to change the underlying code and the software can evolve with the benefit of a multiplicity of points of view. of course this depends on a lot of preconditions. participants in an open source collaboration must be educated in the field they are developing. people cannot expect to be able to understand and edit the code underlying any system until they have taken the time and spent the necessary energy to penetrate it. very often, as in the case of computer software, this also depends on open standards so that the code is accessible to all. but it is also true of many other systems. if those who hope to engage in the revision of our societal models are not educated by those who developed what is already in place, they will spend most of their time inefficiently reverse-engineering existing structures in an effort to understand them. progress can only be made if new minds are educated in the current languages, exposed to the rationale for all decisions that have been made and invited to test new methods and structures. those who are invited to re-evaluate our social and political structures in such a way will stand the best chance of gaining the perspective necessary to see the emergent properties of such systems, as well as avenues for active participation in them. if no one is invited then the first harbingers of emergent paradigms will be those who have been motivated to train themselves in spite of the obstacles set in front of them by those who hope to maintain exclusive control over the code. the new models they come up with may, as a result, end up looking much more like old-style revolutions than true renaissances. the implementation of an open source democracy will require us to dig deep into the very code of our legislative processes, and then rebirth it in the new context of our networked reality. it will require us to assume, at least temporarily, that nothing at all is too sacred to be questioned, re-interpreted and modified. but in doing so, we will be enabled to bring democracy through its current crisis and into its next stage of development. but, like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not impossible to control once they are unleashed. once people are invited to participate in, say, the coding of a software program, they begin to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for discussion. they used to see software as an established and inviolable thing - something married to the computer. a given circumstance. with an open source awareness, they are free to discover that the codes of the software have been arranged by people, sometimes with agendas that hadn't formerly been apparent. one of the most widespread realizations accompanying the current renaissance is that a lot of what has been taken for granted as 'hardware' is, in fact, 'software' capable of being reprogrammed. they tend to begin to view everything that was formerly set in stone - from medical practices to the bible - as social constructions and subject to revision. likewise as public awareness of emergence theory increases, people are beginning to observe their world differently, seeing its principles in evidence, everywhere. formerly esoteric subjects such as urban design or monetary policy become much more central as the public comes to recognize the power of these planning specialties to establish the rules through which society actually comes into existence. this marks a profound shift in our relationship to law and governance. we move from simply following the law, to understanding the law, to actually feeling capable of writing the law: adhering to the map, to understanding the map, to drawing our own. at the very least, we are aware that the choices made on our behalf have the ability to shape our future reality and that these choices are not ordained but implemented by people just like us. unlike the s, when people questioned their authorities in the hope of replacing them (revolution), today's activists are forcing us to re-evaluate the premise underlying top-down authority as an organising principle (renaissance). bottom-up organisational models, from slime mould to wto protests, seem better able to address today's participatory sensibility. indeed, the age of irony may be over, not just because the american dream has been interrupted by terrorism and economic shocks but because media-savvy westerners are no longer satisfied with understanding current events through the second-hand cynical musings of magazine journalists. they want to engage more directly and they see almost every set of rules as up for reinterpretation and re-engineering. applying the theory so what happens when the open source development model is applied to, say, the economy? in the united states, it would mean coming to appreciate the rules of the economic game for what they are: rules. operating in a closed source fashion, the right to actually produce currency is held exclusively by the federal reserve. quietly removed from any relationship to real money such as gold or silver by richard nixon in the early s, us currency now finds its value in pure social construction. whether or not we know it, we all participate in the creation of its value by competing for dollars against one another. for example, when a people or businesses borrows money from the bank (an agent, in a sense, of the federal reserve) in the form of a mortgage they must eventually pay the bank back two or three times the original borrowed amount. these additional funds are not printed into existence, but must be won from others in the closed source system. likewise, every time a student wants to buy one of my books, he must go out into the economy and earn or win some of these arbitrarily concocted tokens, us currency, in order to do it. our transaction is brokered by the federal reserve, who has a monopoly on this closed source currency. meanwhile, the actual value of this currency, and the effort required to obtain it, is decided much more by market speculators than its actual users. speculation accounts for over percent of us currency transactions in any given day. by this measure, real spending and the real economy are a tiny and secondary function of money: the dog is being wagged by its tail. what if currency were to become open source? in some communities it already is. they are not printing counterfeit bills but catalysing regional economies through the use of local currencies, locally created 'scrip' that can be exchanged throughout a particular region in lieu of federal reserve notes or real cash. the use of these currencies, as promoted by organisations such as the e.f. schumacher society, has been shown to accelerate the exchange of goods and services in a region by increasing the purchasing power of its members. there is no federal reserve surcharge on the creation and maintenance of cash, and no danger of government currency depreciation due to matters that have nothing to do with actual production and consumption. like any other bottom-up system, the creation of local currency develops transactional models appropriate to the scale of the actual transactions and the communities in which they occur. while federal notes, or euros for that matter, might be appropriate for a merchant to use across state or national boundaries, local currencies make for greater fluidity and accountability between members of the same community. thanks to the dynamic relationships permitted in a networked society, we need not choose between local and closed currencies. a post-renaissance perspective on economic issues has room for both to exist, simultaneously functioning on different orders of magnitude. in a society modelled on open source ideals, 'think globally, act locally' becomes more than just a catch phrase. the relationship of an individual or local community's action to the whole system can be experienced quite readily. for example, an open source software developer who writes just a few useful lines of code, say the protocol for enabling infrared communications to work on the linux operating system, will see his or her contribution interpolated into the kernel of the operating system and then spread to everyone who uses it. he has done more than distributed a line of computer code. he has also enabled thousands of people using linux to connect cell phones, pda's and other devices to their computers for the first time. and he did it from his home, in his spare time. likewise, a developer who leaves a security hole open in a piece of software quite dramatically sees the results of his action when a software 'worm', written by a computer criminal, penetrates the mail files of thousands of users, sending replicates of itself throughout the internet, sometimes for years to come. members of an open source community are able to experience how their actions affect the whole. as a result, they become more conscious of how their moment-to-moment decisions can be better aligned with the larger issues with which they are concerned. a programmer concerned with energy consumption and the environment might take time to consider how a particular screen-saver routine impacts the total energy consumption pattern of a particular monitor. the programmer already understands that if the code is used on millions of machines, each effort to reduce energy consumption by a minuscule amount can amplify into tremendous energy savings. (indeed, it has been calculated that the energy required to power all the televisions and computers in america that are currently in sleep mode equals the output of an entire average-size power plant.) the experience of open source development, or even just the acceptance of its value as a model for others, provides real-life practice for the deeper change in perspective required of us if we are to move into a more networked and emergent understanding of our world. the local community must be experienced as a place to implement policies, incrementally, that will eventually have an effect on the whole. for example, the environmental advocate who worries about the brazilian rainforest will quit smoking himself before racing off to the next rally held to save the lungs of the planet. the woman organising against genetic engineering in agriculture will refuse to let her children eat at mcdonalds, even if it requires them to bring their own lunch to a friend's birthday party. a consistency between belief and behaviour becomes the only way to make our designs on reality real. closed source: no justice, no power an open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us, or allow us, to confront the issues of our time more directly. using the logic of a computer programmer, when we find we can't solve a problem by attacking one level of societal software, we proceed to the next level down. if necessary we dig all the way down to the machine language. for instance, today's misunderstood energy crisis provides a glaring example of the liability of closed source policymaking. the western world is unnecessarily addicted to fossil fuels and other energy commodities not because alternative energy sources are unavailable, but because alternative business models for energy production cannot be fully considered without disrupting the world's most powerful corporations and economies. it really is as simple as that. solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources are quite ready for deployment in a wide variety of applications. they are not encouraged, not through tax policies nor through venture capital, because they don't make sense to an industry and economy that has based its business model on the exploitation of fixed and precious resources: a closed source model. as a result, we are suffering through a potentially irreversible environmental crisis, as well as a geopolitical conflict that is already spinning wildly out of control. the maintenance of such imbalances is dependent on closed source processes. the power of puppet dictators in the oil-producing middle east is perpetuated not just by us warplanes, but by their own economies which derive all their wealth through the exploitation of resources. were these nations required to compete in the global marketplace through the production of goods or services, then a passive, uneducated population would no longer bring their monarchs the wealth to which they are accustomed. as it is the peasants need only be educated enough to dig. and the closed source mentality travels all the way around the distribution cycle. nowhere is the closed source imperative of an oil-based economy more evident than in the appointment, by america's judicial branch (though not its population), of a president to represent the oil industry. conclusion the new transparency offered by the interactive mediaspace allows even the casually interested reader to learn how the west's foreign and domestic policies have been twisted to a perverse caricature of themselves. i do not wish here to beat the drum for a partisan revolution. instead, i am to demonstrate how a growing willingness to engage with the underlying code of the democratic process could eventually manifest in a widespread call for revisions to our legal, economic and political structures on an unprecedented scale, except in the cases of full-fledged revolution. transparency in media makes information available to those who never had access to it before. access to media technology empowers those same people to discuss how they might want to change the status quo. finally, networking technologies allow for online collaboration in the implementation of new models, and the very real-world organisation of social activism and relief efforts. the good news, for those within the power structure today, is that we are not about to enter a phase of revolution, but one of renaissance. we are heading not toward a toppling of the democratic, parliamentary or legislative processes, but toward their reinvention in a new, participatory context. in a sense, the people are becoming a new breed of wonk, capable of engaging with government and power structures in an entirely new fashion. the current regime, in the broadest sense, will have ended up being the true and lasting one, if it can get its head and policies around these renaissance modalities of increased dimensionality, emergence, scalability and participation. my advice? don't beat them. let them join you. choose to believe that the renaissance i am describing has already taken place. instead of looking forward to a day when justice will be won, declare that we are living in a just world right now. declare that we are simply fighting for more justice. movements, as such, are obsolete. they are incompatible with a renaissance sensibility because of the narrative style of their intended unfolding. they yearn forward towards salvation in the manner of utopians or fundamentalists: an increasing number of people are becoming aware of how movements of all stripes justify tremendous injustice in the name of that deferred future moment. people are actually taken out of their immediate experience and their connection to the political process as they put their heads down and do battle. it becomes not worth believing in anything. this is why we have to advocate living in the now in order to effect any real change. the should be no postponement of joy. once we start down this path, there's can be no stopping. we begin to see the unreality of money. we begin to see how 'salvation' has been traded in for 'retirement' as the new ultimate goal for which westerners suspend their lives and their ethics. (people work for companies they hate, and then invest in corporations whose ethics they detest, in order to guarantee a good retirement). we see the artificial obstacles to appropriate energy policy, international relations, urban planning and affordable healthcare as what they are: artificial. meanwhile, what we can accomplish presents itself on a much more realistic scale when we engage with it in the moment and on a local level. yes, political structures do need to be changed. but we may have to let their replacements emerge from the myriad of new relationships that begin to spawn once people are acting and communicating in the present, and on a realistic scale, instead of talking about a fictional future. the underlying premise is still dependent on the notion of progress. indeed, things must get better or there's no point to any of it. but our understanding of progress must be disengaged from the false goal of growth, or the even more dangerous ideal of salvation. our understanding must be reconnected with the very basic measure of social justice: how many people are able to participate? our marketing experts tell us that they are failing in their efforts to advertise to internet users and cultural progressives because this new and resistant psychographic simply wants to engage, authentically, in social experiences. this should sound like good news to anyone who authentically wants to extend our collective autonomy. this population is made up not of customers to whom you must sell, or even constituents to whom you must pander, but partners on whom you can rely and with whom you can act. treat them as such, and you might be surprised by how much you get done together. karen armstrong, a history of god, (london: vintage, ) first monday, the high-tech gift economy, richard barbrook., , (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue _ /barbrook/) douglas rushkoff, cyeria: life in the trenches of hyperspace, (flamingo, ) wired magazine, jul (see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/ . /longboom_pr.html) open access licence this is the full text of the demos open access licence which encourages the circulation of our work under certain copyright conditions. you can read a summary of the licence conditions at http://www.demos.co.uk/aboutus/openaccess_page .aspx demos - licence to publish the work (as defined below) is provided under the terms of this licence ("licence"). the work is protected by copyright and/or other applicable law. any use of the work other than as authorized under this licence is prohibited. by exercising any rights to the work provided here, you accept and agree to be bound by the terms of this licence. demos grants you the rights contained here in consideration of your acceptance of such terms and conditions. . definitions . 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"deep in the general heart of man" --wordsworth to the memory of eugene montgomery my friend dear was his praise, and pleasant 'twere to me, on whose far grave to-night the deep snows drift; it needs not now; together we shall see how high christ's lilies o'er man's laurels lift february , . preface of the papers contained in this volume "taormina" was published in the _century magazine_; the others are new. the intention of the author was to illustrate how poetry, politics, and religion are the flowering of the same human spirit, and have their feeding roots in a common soil, "deep in the general heart of men." columbia college, february , . contents taormina a new defence of poetry democracy the ride taormina i what should there be in the glimmering lights of a poor fishing-village to fascinate me? far below, a mile perhaps, i behold them in the darkness and the storm like some phosphorescence of the beach; i see the pale tossing of the surf beside them; i hear the continuous roar borne up and softened about these heights; and this is night at taormina. there is a weirdness in the scene--the feeling without the reality of mystery; and at evening, i know not why, i cannot sleep without stepping upon the terrace or peering through the panes to see those lights. at morning the charm has flown from the shore to the further heights above me. i glance at the vast banks of southward-lying cloud that envelop etna, like deep fog upon the ocean; and then, inevitably, my eyes seek the double summit of the taorminian mountain, rising nigh at hand a thousand feet, almost sheer, less than half a mile westward. the nearer height, precipice-faced, towers full in front with its crowning ruined citadel, and discloses, just below the peak, on an arm of rock toward its right, a hermitage church among the heavily hanging mists. the other horn of the massive hill, somewhat more remote, behind and to the old castle's left, exposes on its slightly loftier crest the edge of a hamlet. it, too, is cloud-wreathed--the lonely crag of mola. over these hilltops, i know, mists will drift and touch all day; and often they darken threateningly, and creep softly down the slopes, and fill the next-lying valley, and roll, and lift again, and reveal the flank of monte d'oro northward on the far-reaching range. as i was walking the other day, with one of these floating showers gently blowing in my face down this defile, i noticed, where the mists hung in fragments from the cloud out over the gulf, how like air-shattered arches they groined the profound ravine; and thinking how much of the romantic charm which delights lovers of the mountains and the sea springs from such gothic moods of nature, i felt for a moment something of the pleasure of recognition in meeting with this northern and familiar element in the sicilian landscape. one who has grown to be at home with nature cannot be quite a stranger anywhere on earth. in new lands i find the poet's old domain. it is not only from the land-side that these intimations of old acquaintance come. when my eyes leave, as they will, the near girdle of rainy mountain tops, and range home at last upon the sea, something familiar is there too,--that which i have always known,--but marvellously transformed and heightened in beauty and power. such sudden glints of sunshine in the offing through unseen rents of heaven, as brilliant as in mid-ocean, i have beheld a thousand times, but here they remind me rather of cloud-lights on far western plains; and where have i seen those still tracts of changeful colour, iridescent under the silvery vapours of noon; or, when the weather freshens darkens, those whirlpools of pure emerald in the gray expanse of storm? they seem like memories of what has been, made fairer. one recurring scene has the same fascination for my eyes as the fishers' lights. it is a simple picture: only an arm of mist thrusting out from yonder lowland by the little cape, and making a near horizon, where, for half an hour, the waves break with great dashes of purple and green, deep and angry, against the insubstantial mole. all day i gaze on these sights of beauty until it seems that nature herself has taken on nobler forms forever more. when the mountain storm beats the pane at midnight, or the distant lightnings awake me in the hour before dawn, i can forget in what climate i am; but the oblivion is conscious, and half a memory of childhood nights: in an instant comes the recollection, "i am on the coasts, and these are the couriers, of etna." the very rain is strange: it is charged with obscure personality; it is the habitation of a new presence, a storm-genius that i have never known; it in born of etna, whence all things here have being and draw nourishment. it is not rain, but the rain-cloud, spread out over the valleys, the precipices, the sounding beaches, the ocean plain; it is not a storm, but a season. it does not rise with the moist hyades, or ride with cloudy orion in the mediterranean night; it does not pass like atlantic tempests on great world-currents: it remains. its home is upon etna; thence it comes and thither it returns; it gathers and disperses, lightens and darkens, blows and is silent, and though it suffer the clear north wind, or the west, to divide its veils with heaven, again it draws the folds together about its abode. it obeys only etna, who sends it forth; then with clouds and thick darkness the mountain hides its face: it is the sicilian winter. ii but etna does not withdraw continuously from its children even in this season. on the third day, at farthest, i was told it would bring back the sun; and i was not deceived. two days it was closely wrapped in impenetrable gray; but the third morning, as i threw open my casement and stepped out upon the terrace, i saw it, like my native winter, expanding its broad flanks under the double radiance of dazzling clouds spreading from its extreme summit far out and upward, and of the snow-fields whose long fair drifts shone far down the sides. villages and groves were visible, clothing all the lower zone, and between lay the plain. it seemed near in that air, but it is twelve miles away. from the sea-dipping base to the white cone the slope measures more than twenty miles, and as many more conduct the eye downward to the western fringe--a vast bulk; yet one does not think of its size as he gazes; so large a tract the eye takes in, but no more realizes than it does the distance of the stars. high up, forests peer through the ribbed snows, and extinct craters stud the frozen scene with round hollow mounds innumerable. a thousand features, but it remains one mighty mountain. how natural it seems for it to be sublime! it is the peer of the sea and of the sky. all day it flashed and darkened under the rack, and i rejoiced in the sight, and knew why pindar called it the pillar of heaven; and at night it hooded itself once more with the winter cloud. iii would you see this land as i see it? come then, since etna gives a fair, pure morning, up over the shelving bank to the great eastern spur of taormina, where stood the hollow theatre, now in ruins, and above it the small temple with which the greeks surmounted the highest point. it is such a spot as they often chose for their temples; but none ever commanded a more noble prospect. the far-shining sea, four or five hundred feet below, washes the narrow, precipitous descent, and on each hand is disclosed the whole of that side of sicily which faces the rising sun. to the left and northward are the level straits, with the calabrian mountains opposite, thinly sown with light snow, as far as the cape of spartivento, distinctly seen, though forty miles away; in front expands the open sea; straight to the south runs the indented coast, bay and beach, point after point, to where, sixty miles distant, the great blue promontory of syracuse makes far out. on the land-side etna fills the south with its lifted snow-fields, now smoke-plumed at the languid cone; and thence, though lingeringly, the eye ranges nearer over the intervening plain to the well-wooded ridge of castiglione, and, next, to the round solitary top of monte maestra, with its long shoreward descent, and comes to rest on the height of taormina overhead, with its hermitage of santa maria della rocca, its castle, and mola. yet further off, at the hand of the defile, looms the barren summit of monte venere, with monte d'oro and other hills in the foreground, and northward, peak after peak, travels the close messina range. a landscape of sky, sea, plain, and mountains, great masses majestically grouped, grand in contour! yet to call it sublime does not render the impression it makes upon the soul. sublime, indeed, it is at times, and dull were he whose heart from hour to hour awe does not visit here; but constantly the scene is beautiful, and yields that delight which dwells unwearied with the soul. one may be seldom touched to the exaltation which sublimity implies, but to take pleasure in loveliness is the habit of one who lives as heaven made him; and what characterizes this landscape and sets it apart is the permanence of its beauty, its perpetual and perfect charm through every change of light and weather, and in every quarter of its heaven and earth, felt equally whether the eye sweeps the great circuit with its vision, or pauses on the nearer features, for they, too, are wonderfully composed. this hill of my station falls down for half a mile with broken declivities, and then becomes the cape of taormina, and takes its steep plunge into the sea. yonder picturesque peninsula to its left, diminished by distance and strongly relieved on the purple waves, is the cape of sant' andrea, and beside it a cluster of small islands lies nearer inshore. on the other side, to the right of our own cape, shines our port, with giardini, the village of my fishers' lights, the beach with its boats, and the white main road winding in the narrow level between the bluffs and the sands. the port is guarded on the south by the peninsula of schiso, where ancient naxos stood; and just beyond, the river alcantara cuts the plain and flows to the sea. at the other extremity, northward of sant' andrea, is the cove of letojanni, with its village, and then, perhaps eight miles away, the bold headland of sant' alessio closes the shore view with a mass of rock that in former times completely shut off the land approach hither, there being no passage over it, and none around it except by the strip of sand when the sea was quiet. all this ground, with in several villages, from sant' alessio to the alcantara, and beyond into the plain, was anciently the territory of taormina. the little city itself lies on its hill, between the bright shore and the gray old castle, on a crescent-like terrace whose two horns jut out into the air like capes. the northern one of these is my station, the site of the old temple and the amphitheatre; the southern one opposite shows the facade of the dominican convent; and the town circles between, possibly a mile from spur to spur. here and there long broken lines of the ancient wall, black with age, stride the hillside. a round gothic tower, built as if for warfare, a square belfry, a ruined gateway, stand out among the humble roofs. gardens of orange and lemon trees gleam like oblong parks, principally on the upper edge toward the great rock. if you will climb, as i have done, the craggy plateau close by, which overhangs the theatre and obstructs the view of the extreme end of the town at this point, you will see from its level face, rough with the plants of the prickly-pear, a cross on an eminence just below, and the gate toward messina. the face of the country is bare. here beneath, where the main ravine of taormina cuts into the earth between the two spurs of the city, are terraces of fruit trees and vegetables, and, wherever the naked rock permits, similar terraces are seen on the castle hill and every less steep slope, looking as if they would slide off. almond and olive trees cling and climb all over the hillsides, but their boughs do not clothe the country. it is gray to look at, because of the masses of natural rock everywhere cropping out, and also from the substructure of the terraces, which, seen from below, present banks of the same gray stone. the only colour is given by the fan-like plants of the prickly-pear, whose flat, thick-lipped, pear-shaped leaves, stuck with thorns, and often extruding their reddish fruit from the edge, lend a dull green to the scene. this plant grows everywhere, like wild bush, to a man's height, covering the otherwise infertile soil, and the goats crop it. a closer view shows patches of wild candytuft and marigolds, like those at my feet, and humble purple and blue blossoms hang from crannies or run over the stony turf; but these are not strong enough to be felt in the prevalent tones. the blue of ocean, the white of etna, the gray of taormina--this is the scene. three ways connect the town with the lower world. the modern carriage road runs from the messina gate, and, quickly dropping behind the northern spur, winds in great serpentine loops between the campo santo below and old wayside tombs, roman and arabic, above, until it slowly opens on the southern outlook, and, after two miles of tortuous courses above the lovely coves, comes out on the main road along the coast. the second way starts from the other end of the town, the gate toward etna, and goes down more precipitously along the outer flank of the southern spur, with mola (here shifted to the other side of the castle hill) closing the deep ravine behind; and at last it empties into the torrent of selina, in whose bed it goes on to giardini. the third, or short way, leaps down the great hollow of the spurs, and yet keeps to a ridge between the folds of the ravine which it discloses on each side, with here and there a contadino cutting rock on the steep hillsides, or a sportsman wandering with his dog; or often at twilight, from some coign of vantage, you may see the goats trooping home across the distant sands by the sea. it debouches through great limestone quarries on the main road. there, seen from below, taormina comes out--a cape, a town, and a hill. it is, in fact, a long, steep, broken ridge, shaped like a wedge; one end of the broad lace dips into the sea, the other, high on land, exposes swelling bluffs; its back bears the town, its point lifts the castle. this is the taorminian land. what a quietude hangs over it! how poor, how mean, how decayed the little town now looks amid all this silent beauty of enduring nature! it could not have been always so. this theatre at my feet, hewn in the living rock, flanked at each end by great piers of massive roman masonry, and showing broken columns thick strewn in the midst of the broad orchestra, tells of ancient splendour and populousness. the narrow stage still stands, with nine columns in position in two groups; part are shattered half-way up, part are yet whole, and in the gap between the groups shines the lovely sea with the long southern coast, set in the beauty of these ruins as in a frame. here attic tragedies were once played, and roman gladiators fought. the enclosure is large, much over a hundred yards in diameter. it held many thousands. whence came the people to fill it? i noticed by the roadside, as i came up, saracenic tombs. i saw in the first square i entered those small norman windows, with the lovely pillars and the round arch. on the ancient church i have observed the ornamentation and mouldings of byzantine art. the virgin with her crown, over the fountain, was paltry enough, but i saw that this was originally a mermaid's statue. a water-clock here, a bath there; in all quarters i come on some slight, poor relics of other ages; and always in the faces of the people, where every race seems to have set its seal, i see the ruins of time. these echoes are not all of far-off things. that lookout below was a station of english cannon, i am told; and the bluff over giardini, beyond the torrent, takes its name from the french tents pitched there long ago. the old walls can be traced for five miles, but now the circuit is barely two. i wonder, as i go down to my room in the casa timeo, what was the past of this silent town, now so shrunken from its ancient limits; and who, i ask myself, timeo? iv i thought when i first saw the inaccessibility of this mountain-keep that i should have no walks except upon the carriage road; but i find there are paths innumerable. leap the low walls where i will, i come on unsuspected ways broad enough for man and beast. they ran down the hillsides in all directions, and are ever dividing as they descend, like the branching streams of a waterfall. some are rudely paved, and hemmed by low walls; others are mere footways on the natural rock and earth, often edging precipices, and opening short cross-cuts in the most unexpected places, not without a suggestion of peril, to make eye and foot alert, and to infuse a certain wild pleasure into the exercise. the multiplicity of these paths is a great boon to the lover of beauty, for here one charm of italian landscape exists in perfection. every few moments the scene rearranges itself in new combinations, as on the riviera or at amalfi, and makes an endless succession of lovely pictures. the infinite variety of these views is not to be imagined unless it has been witnessed; and besides the magic wrought by mere change of position, there is also a constant transformation of tone and colour from hour to hour, as the lights and shadows vary, and from day to day, with the unsettled weather. yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which is the better part of my rambles? it is only to say that here i went up and down on the open hillsides, and there i followed the ridges or kept the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now i dropped down into the vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the gushing streams through the orchards. in every excursion i make some discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. yesterday i found the olive slopes over letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, such as i have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the eastern shore of spezzia. i did not doubt when i was told that those orchards yield the sweetest oil in the world. it was the lemon harvest, and everywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples under the slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always a landscape of solitary figures. to-day i found the little beach of san nicolo, not far from the same place. i kept inland, going down the hollow by the campo santo, where there is a cool, gravelly stream in a dell that is like a nook in the berkshire hills, and then along the upland on the skirts of monte d'oro, till by a sharp turn seaward i came out through a marble quarry where men were working with what seemed slow implements on the gray or party-coloured stone. i passed through the rather silent group, who stopped to look at me, and a short distance beyond i crossed the main road, and went down by a stream to the shore. i found it strewn with seaside rock, as a hundred other beaches are, but none with rocks like these. they were marble, red or green, or shot with variegated hues, with many a soft gray, mottled or wavy-lined; and the sea had polished them. very lovely they were, and shone where the low wave gleamed over them. i had wondered at the profusion of marbles in the italian churches, but i had not thought to find them wild on a lonely sicilian beach. once or twice already i had seen a block rosy in the torrent-beds, and it had seemed a rare sight; but here the whole shore was piled and inlaid with the beautiful stone. i have learned now that taormina is famous for these marbles. over thirty varieties were sent to the vienna exhibition, and they won the prize. i got this information from the keeper of the communal library, with whom i have made friends. he recalls to my memory the ship that hieron of syracuse gave to ptolemy, wonderful for its size. it had twenty banks of rowers, three decks, and space to hold a library, a gymnasium, gardens with trees in them, stables, and baths, and towers for assault, and it was provided by archimedes with many ingenious mechanical devices. the wood of sixty ordinary galleys was required for its construction. i describe it because its architect, filea, was a taorminian by birth, and esteemed in his day second only to archimedes in his skill in mechanics; and in lining the baths of this huge galley he used these beautiful taorminian marbles. my friend the librarian told me also, with his sicilian burr, of the wine of taormina, the eugenaean, which was praised by pliny, and used at the sacred feasts of rome; but now, he said sadly, the grape had lost its flavour. the sugar-cane, which nourished in later times, is also gone. but the mullet that is celebrated in juvenal's verse, and the lampreys that once went to better alexandrian luxury, are still the spoil of the fishers, the shrimps are delicate to the palate, and the marbles will endure as long as this rock itself. the rock lasts, and the sea. the most ancient memory here is of them, for this is the shore of charybdis. it is stated in sallust and other latin authors, as well as by writers throughout the middle ages, that all which was swallowed up in the whirlpool of the straits, after being carried beneath the sea for miles, was finally cast up on the beach beneath the hill of taormina. the rock and the sea were finely blended in one of my first discoveries in the land, and in consequence they have seemed, to my imagination, more closely united here than is common. on a stormy afternoon i had strolled down the main road, and was walking toward letojanni. i came, after a little, to a great cliff that overhung the sea, with room for the road to pass beneath; and as i drew near i heard a strange sound, a low roaring, a deep-toned reverberation, that seemed not to come from the breaking waves, loud on the beach: it was a more solemn, a more piercing and continuous sound. it was from the rock itself. the grand music of the rolling sea beneath was taken up by the hollowed cliff, and reechoed with a mighty volume of sound from invisible sources. it seemed the voice of the rock, as if by long sympathy and neighbourhood in that lonely place the cliff were interpenetrated with the sea-music, and had become resonant of itself with those living harmonies heard only in the psalmist's song. it seemed a lyre for the centuries; and i thought over how many a conqueror, how many a race, that requiem had been lifted upon it as they passed to their death on this shore. i came back slowly in the twilight, and was roused from my reverie by the cold wind breathing on me as i reached the top of the hill, pure and keen and frosted like the bright december breezes of my own land. it was the kiss of etna on my cheek. v will you hear the legend of taormina?--for in these days i dare not call it history. noble and romantic it is, and age-long. i had not hoped to recover it; but my friend the librarian has brought me books in which patriotic taorminians have written the story celebrating their dear city. i was touched by the simplicity with which he informed me that the town authorities had been unwilling to waste on a passing stranger these little paper-bound memorials of their city. "but," he said, "i told them i had given you my word." so i possess these books with a pleasant association of sicilian honour, and i have read them with real interest. as i turned the pages i was reminded once more how impossible it is to know the past. the past survives in human institutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air preserve on rock and column the lost speech of nile; so the mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. i have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the old-world i find a narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. i have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you will have patience with such a tract of time, i will set down. my author is monsignore giovanni di giovanni, a taorminian, who flourished in the last century. he was a man of vast erudition, and there is in his pages the old-world learning which delights me. he was born before the days of historic doubt. he tells a true story. to allege an authority is with him to prove a fact, and to cite all writers who repeat the original source is to render truth impregnable. rarely does he show any symptom of the modern malady of incredulity. _scripta littera_ is reason enough, unless the fair fame of his city chances to be at stake. he was really learned, and i do wrong to seem to diminish his authority. he was a patient investigator of manuscripts, and did important service to sicilian history. the simplicity i have alluded to affects mainly the ecclesiastical part of his narrative. a few statements also in regard to the prehistoric period might disturb the modern mind, but i own to finding in them the charm of lost things. in my mental provinces i welcome the cave-man, the flint-maker, the lake-dweller, and all their primitive tribes to the abode of science; but i feel them to be intruders in my antiquity. i was brought up on quite other chronologies, and i still like a history that begins with the flood. i will not, however, ask any one of more serious mind to go back with monsignore and myself to the era of autochthonous sicily, when the children of the cyclops inhabited the land, and demeter in her search for proserpina wept on this hill, and charybdis lay stretched out under these bluffs watching the sea. it is precise enough to say that taormina began eighty years before the trojan war. very dimly, it must be acknowledged, the ancient sicani are seen arriving and driven, like all doomed races, south and west out of the land, and in their place the siculi flourish, and a samnite colony voyages over the straits from italy and joins them. here for three centuries these sparse communities lived along these heights in fear of the sea pirates, and warred confusedly from their mainhold on mount taurus, or the bull, so called because the two summits of the mountain from a distance resemble a bull's horns; and they left no other memory of themselves. authentic history begins toward the end of the eighth century before our era. it is a bright burst; for then, down by yonder green-foaming rock, the young greek mariners leaped on the strand. this was their first land-fall in sicily; that rock, their plymouth; and here, doubtless, the alarmed mountaineers stood in their fastness and watched the bearers of the world's torch, and knew them not, bringing daybreak to the dark island for evermore, but fought, as barbarism will, against the light, and were at last made friends with it--a chance that does not always befall. then quickly rose the lowland city of naxos, and by the river sprang up the temple to guiding apollo, the earliest shrine of the sicilian greeks, where they came ever afterward to pray for a prosperous voyage when they would go across the sea, homeward. they were from the first a fighting race; and decade by decade the cloud of war grew heavier on each horizon, southward from syracuse and northward from messina, and swords beat fiercer and stronger with the rivalries of growing states--battles dimly discerned now. a single glimpse flashes out on the page of thucydides. he relates that when once the messenians threatened naxos with overthrow, the mountaineers rushed down from the heights in great numbers to the relief of their greek neighbours, and routed the enemy and slew many. this is the first bloodstain, clear and bright, on our taorminian land. shall i add, from the few relics of that age, that pythagoras, on the journey he undertook to establish the governments of the sicilian cities, wrought miracles here, curing a mad lover of his frenzy by music, and being present on this hill and at metaponto the same day--a thing not to be done without magic? but at last we see plainly alcibiades coasting along below, and the ill-fated athenians wintering in the port, and horsemen going out from naxos toward etna on the side of athens in the death-struggle of her glory. and then, suddenly, after the second three hundred years, all is over, the greek city betrayed, sacked, destroyed, naxos trodden out under the foot of dionysius the tyrant. other fortune awaited him a few years later when he came again, and our city (which, one knows not when, had been walled and fortified) stood its first historic siege. dionysius arrived in the dead of winter. snow and ice--i can hardly credit it--whitened and roughened these ravines, a new ally to the besieged; but the tyrant thought to betray them by a false security in such a season. on a bitter night, when clouds hooded the hilltop, and mists rolled low about its flanks, he climbed unobserved, with his forces, up these precipices, and gained two outer forts which gave footways to the walls; but the town roused at the sound of arms and the cries of the guards, and came down to the fray, and fought until six hundred of the foe fell dead, others with wounds surrendered, and the rest fled headlong, with dionysius among them, hard pressed, and staining the snow with his blood as he went. this was the city's first triumph. not only with brave deeds did taormina begin, but, as a city should, with a great man. he was really great, this andromachus. do you not remember him out of plutarch, and the noble words that have been his immortal memory among men? "this man was incomparably the best of all those that bore sway in sicily at that time, governing his citizens according to law and justice, and openly professing an aversion and enmity to all tyrants." was the defeat of dionysius the first of his youthful exploits, as some say? i cannot determine; but it is certain that he gathered the surviving exiles of naxos, and gave them this plateau to dwell upon, and it was no longer called mount taurus, as had been the wont, but tauromenium, or the abiding-place of the bull. a few years later andromachus performed the signal action of his life by befriending timoleon, as great a character, in my eyes, as plutarch records the glory of. timoleon had set out from corinth, at the summons of his greek countrymen, to restore the liberty of syracuse, then tyrannized over by the second dionysius; and because andromachus, in his stronghold of taormina, hated tyranny, plutarch says, he "gave timoleon leave to muster up his troops there and to make that city the seat of war, persuading the inhabitants to join their arms with the corinthian forces and to assist them in the design of delivering sicily." it was on our beach that timoleon disembarked, and from our city he went forth to the conquest foretold, by the wreath that fell upon his head as he prayed at delphi, and by the prophetic fire that piloted his ship over the sea. the carthaginians came quickly after him from reggio, where he had eluded them, for they were in alliance with the tyrant; and from their vessels they parleyed with andromachus in the port. with an insolent gesture, the envoy, raising his hand, palm up, and turning it lightly over, said that even so, and with such ease, would he overturn the little city; and andromachus, mocking his hand-play, answered that if he did not leave the harbour, even so would he upset his galley. the carthaginians sailed away. the city remained firm-perched. timoleon prospered, brought back liberty to syracuse, ruled wisely and nobly, and gave to sicily those twenty years of peace which were the flower of her greek annals. then, we must believe, rose the little temple on our headland, the greek theatre where the tongue of athens lived, the gymnasium where the youths grew fair and strong. then taormina struck her coins: apollo with the laurel, with the lyre, with the grape; dionysus with the ivy, and zeus with the olive; for the gods and temples of the naxians had become ours, and were religiously cherished; and with the rest was struck a coin with the minotaur, our symbol. but of andromachus, the founder of the well-built and fairly adorned greek city that then rose, we hear no more--a hero, i think, one of the true breed of the founders of states. but alas for liberty! a new tyrant, agathocles, was soon on the syracusan throne, and he won this city by friendly professions, only to empty it by treachery and murder; and he drove into exile timaeus, the son of andromachus. timaeus? he, evidently, of my casa timeo. i know him now, the once famed historian whom cicero praises as the most erudite in history of all writers up to his time, most copious in facts and various in comment, not unpolished in style, eloquent, and distinguished by terse and charming expression. ninety years he lived in the greek world, devoted himself to history, and produced many works, now lost. the ancient writers read him, and from their criticism it is clear that he was marked by a talent for invective, was given to sharp censure, and loved the bitter part of truth. he introduced precision and detail into his art, and is credited with being the first to realize the importance of chronology and to seek exactness in it. he never saw again his lovely birthplace, and i easily forgive to the exile and the son of andromachus the vigour with which he depicted the crimes of agathocles and others of the tyrants. in our city, meanwhile, the greek genius waning to its extinction, tyndarion ruled; and in his time pyrrhus came hither to repulse the ever invading power of carthage. but he was little more than a shedder of blood; he accomplished nothing, and i name him only as one of the figures of our beach. the day of greece was gone; but those two clouds of war still hung on the horizon, north and south, with ever darker tempest. instead of syracuse and messina, carthage and the new name of rome now sent them forth, and over this island they encountered. our city, true to its ancient tradition, became rome's ever faithful ally, as you may read in the poem of silius italicus, and was dignified by treaty with the title of a confederate city; and of this fact cicero reminded the judges when in that famous trial he thundered against verres, the spoiler of our sicilian province, and with the other cities defended this of ours, whose people had signalized their hatred of the roman praetor by overthrowing his statue in the market-place and sparing the pedestal, as they said, to be an eternal memorial of his infamy. from the roman age, however, i take but two episodes, for i find that to write this town's history were to write the history of half the mediterranean world. when the slaves rose in the servile war, they intrenched themselves on this hill, and in their hands the city bore its siege by the roman consul as hardily as was ever its custom. cruel they were, no doubt, and vindictive. with horror monsignore relates that they were so resolved not to yield that, starving, they ate their children, their wives, and one another; and he rejoices when they were at last betrayed and massacred, and this disgrace was wiped away. i hesitate. i cannot feel regret when those whom man has made brutal answer brutally to their oppressors. i have enough of the old taorminian spirit to remember that the slaves, too, fought for liberty. i am sorry for those penned and dying men; their famine and slaughter in these walls were least horrible for their part in the catastrophe, if one looks through what they did to what they were, and remembers that the civilization they violated had stripped them of humanity. after the slave, i make room--for whom else than imperial augustus? off this shore he defeated sextus pompey, and he thought easily to subdue the town above when he summoned it. but taormina was always a loyal little place, and it would not yield without a siege. then augustus, sitting down before it, prayed in our temple of guiding apollo that he might have the victory; and as he walked by the beach afterward a fish threw itself out of the water before him--an omen, said the diviners, that even so the pompeians, who held the seas, after many turns of varied fortune, should be brought to his feet. pompey returned with a fleet, and in these waters again the battle was fought and augustus lost it, and the siege was raised. but when a third time the trial of naval strength was essayed, and the cause of the pompeians ruined, augustus remembered the city that had defied him, sent its inhabitants into exile, and planted a roman colony in its place. latin was now the language here. the massive grandeur of roman architecture replaced the old greek structures. the amphitheatre was enlarged and renewed in its present form, villas of luxury bordered the coasts as in campania, and coins were struck in the augustan name. the roman domination in its turn slowly moved to its fall; and where should the new age begin more fitly than in this city of beginnings? as of old the greek torch first gleamed here, here first on sicilian soil was the cross planted. the gods of olympus had many temples about the hill slopes, shrines of venerable antiquity even in those days; but if the monkish chronicles be credited, the new faith signalized its victory rather over three strange idolatries,--the worship of falcone, of lissone, and of scamandro, a goddess. i refuse to believe that the citizens were accustomed to sacrifice three youths annually to falcone; and as for the other two deities, little is known of them except that their destruction marked the advent of the young religion. pancrazio was the name of him who was destined to be our patron saint through the coming centuries. he was born in antioch, and when a child of three years, going with his father into judea, he had seen the living christ; now, grown into manhood, he was sent by st. peter to spread the gospel in the isles of the sea. he disembarked on our beach, and forthwith threw lissone's image into the waves, and with it a holy dragon which was coiled about it like a garment and was fed with sacrifices; and he shattered with his cross the great idol scamandro: and so taormina became christian, welcomed st. peter on his way to rome, and entered on the long new age. it was here, as elsewhere, the age of martyrs--pancrazio first, and after him geminiano, guided hither with his mother by an angel; and then san nicone, who suffered with his one hundred and ninety-nine brother monks, and sepero and corneliano with their sixty; the age of monks--luca, who fled from his bridal to live on etna, with fasts, visions, and prophecies; and, later, simple-minded daniele, the follower of st. elia, of whom there is more to be recorded; the age of bishops, heard in roman councils and the palace of byzantium, of whom two only are of singular interest--zaccaria, who was deprived, evidently the ablest in mind and policy of all the succession, once a great figure in the disputes of east and west; and procopio, whom the saracens slew, for the crescent now followed the cross. the ancient war-cloud had again gathered out of africa. the saracens were in the land, and every city had fallen except syracuse and taormina. for sixty years the former held out, and our city for yet another thirty, the sole refuge of the christians. signs of the impending destruction were first seen by that st. elia already mentioned, who wandered hither, and was displeased by the manners and morals of the citizens. i am sorry to record that monsignore believed his report, for only here is there mention of such a matter. "the citizens," says my author, "lived in luxury and pleasure not becoming to a state of war. they saw on all sides the fields devastated, houses burnt, wealth plundered, cities given to the flames, friends and companions killed or reduced to slavery, yet was there no vice, no sin, that did not rule unpunished among them." therefore the saint preached the woe to come, and, turning to the governor, constantine patrizio, in his place in the cathedral, he appealed to him to restrain his people. "let the philosophy of the gentiles," he exclaimed, "be your shame. epaminondas, that illustrious _condottiere_, strictly restrained himself from intemperance, from every lust, every allurement of pleasure. so, also, scipio, the roman leader, was valorous through the same continence as epaminondas; and therefore they brought back signal victory, one over the spartans, the other over the carthaginians, and both erected immortal trophies." he promised them mercy with repentance, but ended threateningly: "so far as in me lies i have clearly foretold to you all that has been divinely revealed to me. if you believe my words, like the penitents of nineveh, you shall find mercy; if you despise my admonitions, bound and captive you shall be reduced to the worst slavery." he prophesied yet more in private. he went to the house of a noble citizen, crisione, who esteemed him as a father, and, lying in bed, he said to him: "do you see, crisione, the bed in which i now lie? in this same bed shall ibrahim sleep, hungry for human blood, and the walls of the rooms shall see many of the most distinguished persons of this city all together put to the edge of the sword." then he left the house and went to the square in the centre of the city, and, standing there, he lifted his garments above the knee. whereupon simple daniele, who always followed him about, marvelling asked, "what does this thing mean, father?" the old man had his answer ready, "now i see rivers of blood running, and these proud and magnificent buildings which you see exalted shall be destroyed even to the foundations by the saracens." and the monk fled from the doomed city, like a true prophet, and went overseas. the danger was near, but perhaps not more felt than it must always have been where the prayer for defence against the saracens had gone up for a hundred years in the cathedral. the governor, however, had taken pains to add to the strength of the city by strong fortifications upon mola. ahulabras came under the walls, but gave over the ever unsuccessful attempt to take the place, and went on to ruin reggio beyond the straits. when it was told to his father ibrahim that tabermina, as the saracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son, "he is degenerate, degenerate! he took his nature from his mother and not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword would not have spared the christians!" therefore he recalled him to the home government, and came himself and sat down before the city. the garrison was small and insufficient, but, says my author, following old chronicles, "youths, old men, and children, without distinction of age, sex, or condition, fearing outrage and all that slavery would expose them to, all spontaneously offered themselves to fight in this holy war even to death: with such courage did love of country and religious zeal inspire the citizens." ibrahim had other weapons than the sword. he first corrupted the captains of the greek fleet, who were afterward condemned for the treason at byzantium. then, all being ready, he promised some ethiopians of his army, who are described as of a ferocious nature and harsh aspect, that he would give them the city for booty, besides other gifts, if they would devote themselves to the bold undertaking. the catastrophe deserves to be told in monsignore's own words: "this people, accustomed to rapine, allured by the riches of the taorminians and the promises of the king, with the aid of the traitors entered unexpectedly into the city, and with bloody swords and mighty cries and clamour assailed the citizens. meanwhile king ibrahim, having entered with all his army by a secret gate under the fortress of mola, thence called the gate of the saracens, raged against the citizens with such unexpected and cruel slaughter that not only neither the weakness of sex, nor tender years, nor reverence for hoary age, but not even the abundance of blood that like torrents flowed down the ways, touched to pity that ferocious heart. the soldiers, masters of the beautiful and wealthy city, divided among them the riches and goods of the citizens according as to each one the lot fell; they levelled to the ground the magnificent buildings, public or private, sacred or profane, all that were proudest for amplitude, construction, and ornament; and that not even the ruins of ancient splendour should remain, all that had survived they gave to the flames." this city, which the saracens destroyed, is the one the taorminians cherish as the culmination of their past. in the greek, the roman, and the early christian ages it had flourished, as both its ruins and its history attest, and much must have yet survived from those times; while its station as the only christian stronghold in the island would naturally have attracted wealth hither for safety. in this first sack of the saracens, the ancient city must have perished, but the destruction could hardly have been so thorough as is represented, since some of the churches themselves, in their present state, show byzantine workmanship. there remains one bloody and characteristic episode to ibrahim's victory. the king, says the arab chronicler, was pious and naturally compassionate, but on this occasion he forgot his usual mildness. in the midst of fire and blood he ordered the soldiers to search the caverns of the hills, and they dragged forth many prisoners, among whom was the bishop procopio. the king spoke to him gently and nobly, "because you are wise and old, o bishop, i exhort you with soft words to obey my advice, and to have foresight for your own safety and that of your companions; otherwise you shall suffer what your fellow-citizens have suffered from me. if you will embrace my laws, and deny the christian religion, you shall have the second place after me, and shall be more dear to me than all the agarenes." the prelate only smiled. then, full of wrath, the king said: "do you smile while you are my prisoner? know you not in whose presence you are?" "i smile truly," came the answer, "because i see you are inspired by a demon who puts these words into your mouth." furious, the king called to his attendants, "quick, break open his breast, tear out his heart, that we may see and understand the secrets of his mind." while the command was being executed, procopio reproved the king and comforted his companions. "the tyrant, swollen with rage, and grinding his teeth," says the narrative, "barbarously offered him the torn-out heart that he might eat it." then he bade them strike off the bishop's head (who, we are told, was already half dead), and also the heads of his companions, and to burn the bodies all together. and as st. pancrazio of old had thrown the holy dragon into the sea, so now were his own ashes scattered to the winds of heaven; and ibrahim, having accomplished his work, departed. some of the citizens, however, had survived, and among them crisione, the host of st. elia. he went to bear the tidings to the saint; and being now assured of the gift of prophecy possessed by the holy man, asked him to foretell his future. he met the customary fate of the curious in such things. "i foresee," said the discomfortable saint, "that within a few days you will die." and to make an end of st. elia with crisione, let me record here the simple daniele's last act of piety to his master. it is little that in such company he fought with devils, or that after he had written with much labour a beautiful psalter, the old monk bade him fling it and worldly pride together over the cliff into a lake. such episodes belonged to the times; and, after all, by making a circuit of six miles he found the psalter miraculously unwet, and only his worldly pride remained at the lake's bottom. but it was a mind singularly inventive of penance that led the dying saint to charge poor daniele to bear the corpse on his back a long way over the mountains, merely because, he said, it would be a difficult thing to do. other survivors of the sack of taormina, more fortunate than crisione, watched their opportunity, and, at a moment when the garrison was weak, entered, seized the place, fortified it anew, and offered it to the greek emperor once more. he could not maintain war with the saracens, but by a treaty made with them he secured his faithful taorminians in the possession of the city. after forty years of peace under this treaty it was again besieged for several months, and fell on christmas night. seventeen hundred and fifty of its citizens were sent by the victors into slavery in africa. greek troops, however, soon retook the city in a campaign that opened brilliantly in sicily only to close in swift disaster; but for five years longer taormina sustained continual siege, and when it fell at last, with the usual carnage of its citizens and the now thrice-repeated fire and ruin of saracenic victory, we may well believe that, though it remained the seat of a governor, little of the city was left except its memory. its name even was changed to moezzia. the crescent ruled undisturbed for a hundred years, until the landing of count roger, the norman, the great hero of mediaeval sicily, who recovered the island to the christian faith. taormina, true to its tradition, was long in falling; but after eighteen years of desultory warfare count roger sat down before it with determination. he surrounded it with a circumvallation of twenty-two fortresses connected by ramparts and bridges, and cut off all access by land or sea. each day he inspected the lines; and the enemy, having noticed this habit, laid an ambush for him in some young myrtles where the path he followed had a very narrow passage over the precipices. they rushed out on him, and, as he was unarmed and alone, would have killed him, had not their cries attracted one evandro, a breton, who, coming, and seeing his chief's peril, threw himself between, and died in his place. count roger was not forgetful of this noble action. he recovered the body, held great funeral services, and gave gifts to the soldiers and the church. the story appealed so to the old chronicler malaterra, that he told it in both prose and verse. after seven months the city surrendered, and the iron cross was again set up on the rocky eminence by the gate. it is a sign of the ruin which had befallen that the city now lost its bishopric and was ecclesiastically annexed to another see. taormina, compared with what it had been, was now a place of the desert; but not the less for that did the tide of war rage round it for five hundred years to come. it was like a rock of the sea over which conflicting billows break eternally. i will not narrate the feudal story of internecine violence, nor how amidst it all every religious order set up monasteries upon the beautiful hillsides, of whose life little is now left but the piles of books in old bindings over which my friend the librarian keeps guard, mourning the neglect in which they are left. among both the nobles and the fathers were some examples of heroism, sacrifice, and learning, but their deeds and virtues may sleep unwaked by me. the kings and queens who took refuge here, and fled again, messenian foray and chiaramontane faction, shall go unrecorded. i must not, however, in the long roll of the famous figures of our beach forget that our english richard the lion-hearted was entertained here by tancred in crusading days; and of notable sieges let me name at least that which the city suffered for its loyalty to the brave and generous manfred when the messenians surprised and wasted it, and that which with less destruction the enemies of the second frederick inflicted on it, and that of the french under charles ii, who, contrary to his word, gave up the surrendered city to the soldiery for eight whole days--a terrible sack, of which monsignore has heard old men tell. what part the citizens took in the sicilian vespers, and how the parliament that vainly sought a king for all sicily was held here, and in later times the marches of the germans, spaniards, and english--these were too long a tale. with one more signal memory i close this world-history, as it began, with a noble name. it was from our beach yonder that garibaldi set out for italy in the campaign of aspromonte; hither he was brought back, wounded, to the friendly people, still faithful to that love of liberty which flowed in the old taorminian blood. i shut my books; but to my eyes the rock is scriptured now. what a leaf it is from the world-history of man upon the planet! every race has splashed it with blood; every faith has cried from it to heaven. it is only a hill-station in the realm of empire; but in the records of such a city, lying somewhat aside and out of common vision, the course of human fate may be more simply impressive than in the story of world-cities. athens, rome, constantinople, london, paris, are great centres of history; but in them the mind is confused by the multiplicity and awed by the majesty of events. here on this bare rock there is no thronging of illustrious names, and little of that glory that conceals imperial crime, the massacre of armies, and the people's woe. again i use the figure: it is like a rock of the sea, set here in the midst of the mediterranean world, washed by all the tides of history, beat on by every pitiless storm of the passion of man for blood. the torch of greece, the light of the cross, the streaming portent of the crescent, have shone from it, each in its time; all governments, from greek democracy to bourbon tyranny, have ruled it in turn; roman law and feudal custom had it in charge, each a long age: yet civilization in all its historic forms has never here done more, seemingly, than alleviate at moments the hard human lot. and what has been the end? go down into the streets; go out into the villages; go into the country-side. the men will hardly look up from their burdens, the women will seldom stop to ask alms, but you will see a degradation of the human form that speaks not of the want of individuals, of one generation, or of an age, but of the destitution of centuries stamped physically into the race. there is, as always, a prosperous class, men well to do, the more fortunate and better-born; but the common people lead toilsome lives, and among them suffering is widespread. three thousand years of human life, and this the result! yet i see many indications of a brave patriotism in the community, an effort to improve general conditions, to arouse, to stimulate, to encourage--the spirit of free and united italy awakening here, too, with faith in the new age of liberty and hope of its promised blessings. and for a sign there stands in the centre of the poor fishing-village yonder a statue of garibaldi. vi the rain-cloud is gone. the days are bright, warm, and clear, and every hour tempts me forth to wander about the hills. it is not spring, but the hesitancy that holds before the season changes; yet each day there are new flowers--not our delicate wood flowers, but larger and coarser of fibre, and it adds a charm to them that i do not know their names. the trees are budding, and here and there, like a wave breaking into foam on a windless sea, an almond has burst into blossom, white and solitary on the gray slopes, and over all the orchards there is the faint suggestion of pale pink, felt more than seen, so vague is it--but it is there. i go wandering by cliff or sea-shore, by rocky beds of running water, under dark-browed caverns, and on high crags; now on our cape, among the majestic rocks, i watch the swaying of the smooth deep-violet waters below, changing into indigo as they lap the rough clefts, or i loiter on the beach to see the fishers about their boats, weather-worn mariners, and youths in the fair strength of manly beauty, like athletes of the old world: and always i bring back something for memory, something unforeseen. i have ever found this uncertainty a rare pleasure of travel. it is blessed not to know what the gods will give. i remember once in other days i left the beach of amalfi to row away to the isles of the sirens, farther down the coast. it was a beautiful, blowing, wave-wild morning, and i strained my sight, as every headland of the high cliff-coast was rounded, to catch the first glimpse of the low isles; and there came by a country boat-load of the peasants, and in the bows, as it neared and passed, i saw a dark, black-haired boy, bare breast, and dreaming eyes, motionless save for the dipping prow--a figure out of old italian pictures, some young st. john, inexpressibly beautiful. i have forgotten how the isles of the sirens looked, but that boy's face i shall never forget. it is such moments that give the italy of the imagination its charm. here, too, i have similar experiences. a day or two ago, when the bright weather began, i was threading the rough edge of a broken path under the hill, and clinging to the rock with my hand. suddenly a figure rose just before me, where the land made out a little farther on a point of the crag, so strange that i was startled; but straightway i knew the goatherd, the curling locks, the olive face, the garments of goatskin and leather on his limbs. it came on me like a flash--_eccola_ the country of theocritus! i have never seen it set down among the advantages of travel that one learns to understand the poets better. to see courts and governments, manners and customs, works of architecture, statues and pictures and ruins--this, since modern travel began, is to make the grand tour; but though i have diligently sought such obvious and common aims, and had my reward, i think no gain so great as that i never thought of, the light which travel sheds upon the poets; unless, indeed, i should except that stronger hold on the reality of the ideal creations of the imagination which comes from familiar life with pictures, and statues, and kindred physical renderings of art. this latter advantage must necessarily be more narrowly availed of by men, since it implies a certain peculiar temperament; but poetry, in its less exalted forms, is open and common to all who are not immersed in the materialism of their own lives, and whatever helps to unlock the poetic treasures of other lands for our possession may be an important part of life. i think none can fully taste the sweetness, or behold the beauty, of english song even, until he has wandered in the lanes and fields of the mother-country; and in the case of foreign, and especially of the ancient, poets, so much of whose accepted and assumed world of fact has perished, the loss is very great. i had trodden many an italian hillside before i noticed how subtly dante's landscape had become realized in my mind as a part of nature. i own to believing that virgil's storms never blew on the sea until once, near salerno, as i rode back from paestum, there came a storm over the wide gulf that held my eyes enchanted--such masses of ragged, full clouds, such darkness in their broad bosoms broken with rapid flame, and a change beneath so swift, such anger on the sea, such an indescribable and awful gleaming hue, not purple, nor green, nor red, but a commingling of all these--a revelation of the wrath of colour! the waves were wild with the fallen tempest; quick and heavy the surf came thundering on the sands; the light went out as if it were extinguished, and the dark rain came down; and i said, "'tis one of virgil's storms." such a one you will find also in theocritus, where he hymns the children of leda, succourers of the ships that, "defying the stars that set and rise in heaven, have encountered the perilous breath of storms. the winds raise huge billows about their stern, yea, or from the prow, or even as each wind wills, and cast them into the hold of the ship, and shatter both bulwarks, while with the sail limits nil the gear confused and broken, and the wide sea rings, being lashed by the gusts and by showers of iron hail." i must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. yet here i find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. once before i had a sight of it, as all over italy it glimpses at times from the hills and the campagna. descending under the high peak of capri, i heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. then the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and i heard the world's morning notes. that was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. i read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. the idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as i meet with wherever i turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems. it is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. the run that comes down from mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon branches toward letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the mill down by giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen alcantara lying on the campagna in the meadows, and that further _fiume freddo_, the cold stream,--"chill water that for me deep-wooded etna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine,"--each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. but all alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real. on the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. no idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, i suspect, as does that of the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. go down to the shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. often as i look at them i recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on the sands. "two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall. beside them wore strewn the instruments of their toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. here was all their toil, here all their wealth. the threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. all things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea." this is what the eye beholds; and i dare not say that the idyl is touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. poverty such as this, so absolute, i see everywhere at every hour. it is a terrible sight. it is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes--despair made flesh. how long has it suffered here? and was it so when theocritus saw his fishers and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? he spreads before us the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old men. the shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now as then. with the rock and sea it, too, endures. a few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. not far from here, down the coast, the rocks that the cyclops threw after the fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he piped to galatea. some day i mean to take a boat and see them. but now i let the cyclops idyls go, and with them adonis of egypt, and ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of hiero, and the deeds of herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. fain would i recover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot "every stone upon the way spins singing," make what speed i can, i come not to the harvest-feast. bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, and night falls with hesperus; but fruitless on my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is bion's prayer: "hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam--dear hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!" dead now is that ritual. now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. sweet was his flute's first triumph over menaleas: "then was the boy glad, and leaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn leaps about his mother"; but sweeter was the unwon victory when he strove with damoetas: "then damoetas kissed daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave daphnis a pipe, and daphnis gave him a beautiful flute. damoetas fluted, and daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. neither won the victory, but both were invincible." and him, too, i miss who loved his friend, and wished that they twain might "become a song in the ears of all men unborn," even for their love's sake; and prayed, "would, o father cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and that when two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by acheron, the irremeable stream: the loving-kindness that was between thee and thy gracious friend is even now in all men's mouths, and chiefly on the lips of the young." hill and fountain and pine, the gray sea and mother etna, are here; but no children gather in the land, as once about the tomb of diocles at the coming in of the spring, contending for the prize of the kisses--"whoso most sweetly touches lip to lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his mother. happy is he who judges those kisses of the children." lost over the bright furrows of the sea is europa riding on the back of the divine bull as moschus beheld her--"with one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, and with the other caught up the purple fold of her garment, lest it might trail and be wet in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from the border-land of mythic story, that was then this world's horizon, yet more faintly the fading voice of hylas answers the deep-throated shout of herakles. faint now as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth and maiden and children; dimly i see them, vaguely i hear them; at last there remains only "the hoar sea's infinite spray." and will you say it was in truth all a dream? were the poor fisherman in their toil alone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom sicily gave a local habitation and a name? it was virgil's dream and spenser's; and some secret there was--something still in our breasts--that made it immortal, so that to name the sicilian muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softened with sweet thoughts. and here i shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that taormina bore. she, too, in her centuries has had her poet. perhaps none who will see these words ever gave a thought to the name and fame of cornelius severus. few of his works remain, and little is known of his life. he is said to have been the friend of pollio, and to have been present in the sicilian war between augustus and sextus pompey. he wrote the first book of an epic poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the second place among the latin epic poets. he wrote also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon cicero, which seneca quotes, saying of him, "no one out of so many talented men deplored the death of cicero better than cornelius severus." some dialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him. these fragments may not he easily obtained. but take down your virgil; and, if it be like this of mine which i brought from rome, you will find at the very end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length of a book of the "georgics," called "etna." this is the work of cornelius severus. an early death took from him the perfection of his genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wrote so well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy of virgil, whose name still shields this taorminian verse from oblivion. vii it is my last day at taormina. i have seen the sunrise from my old station by the greek temple, and watched the throng of cattle and men gathered on the distant beach of letojanni and darkening the broad bed of the dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and i wished i were among them, for it is their annual fair; and still i dwell on every feature of the landscape that familiarity has made more beautiful. the afternoon i have dedicated to a walk to mola. it is a pleasant, easy climb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the left, where it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the right the deep ravine, closed by monte venere in the west. all is very quiet; a silent, silent country! there are few birds or none, and indeed i have heard no bird-song since i have been here. opposite, on the other side of the wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems goats could hardly cling; but the unwieldy, awkward creatures move with sure feet, and seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare precipice. i cannot hear the torrent, now a narrow stream, deep below me, but i see the women of mola washing by the old fountain which is its source. there is no other sign of human life. the fresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all i have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. so i go up, ever up, and at last am by the gate of mola, and enter the stony-hearted town. a place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom seen. there are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. if you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence over all--that is mola. the ruins of the fortress are near the gate on the highest point of the crag. within is a barren spot--a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. look over the battlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks only birds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all sides, you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and cannot be surprised at its record of defence. perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man upon the hill, and it was the securest retreat. monsignore, indeed, believes that ham, the son of noah, who drove japhet out of sicily, was the first builder; but i do not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this was the original siculian stronghold before the coming of the greeks, and the building of the lower city of taormina. the ruins that exist are part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to the saracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood for nigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. it seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more than once, when taormina was sacked, its citadel and mola remained untaken and unconquerable on their extreme heights. i shall not tell its story; but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its fame now, and my last tale of the taorminian past. he was count matteo, a nobleman of the days when the messenians revolted against the chancellor of queen margaret. he was placed over this castle; and when a certain count riccardo was discovered in a conspiracy to murder the chancellor, and was taken captive, he was given into matteo's charge, and imprisoned here. the messenians came and surprised the lower city of taormina, but they could not gain mola nor persuade matteo to yield riccardo up to them. so they thought to overcome his fidelity cruelly. they took his wife and children, who were at messina, threw them into a dungeon, and condemned them to death. then they sent matteo's brother-in-law to treat with him. but when the count knew the reason of the visit he said: "it seems to me that you little value the zeal of an honest man who, loyal to his office, does not wish, neither knows how, to break his sworn faith. my wife and children would look on me with scornful eyes should i be renegade; for shame is not the reward that sweetens life, but burdens it. if the messenians stain themselves with innocent blood, i shall weep for the death of my wife and sons, but the heart of an honest citizen will have no remorse." then he was silent. but treachery could do what such threats failed to accomplish. one gavaretto was found, who unlocked the prison, and riccardo was already escaping when matteo, roused at a slight noise, came, sword in hand, and would have slain him; but the traitor behind, "to save his wages," struck matteo in the body, and the faithful count fell dead in his blood. i thought of this story, standing there, and nothing else in the castle's filled with bloom; then the infinite beauty, slowly fading, withdrew the scene, and sweetly it parted from my eyes. viii yet once more i step out upon the terrace into the night. i hear the long roar of the breakers; i see the flickering fishers' lights, and etna pale under the stars. the place is full of ghosts. in the darkness i seem to hear vaguely arising, half sense, half thought, the murmur of many tongues that have perished here, sicanian and siculian and the lost oscan, greek and latin and the hoarse jargon of barbaric slaves, byzantine and arabic confused with strange african dialects, norman and sicilian, french and spanish, mingling, blending, changing, the sharp battle-cry of a thousand assaults rising from the low ravines, the death-cry of twenty bloody massacres within these walls, ringing on the hard rock and falling to silence only to rise more full with fiercer pain--century after century of the battle-wrath and the battle-woe. my fancy shapes the air till i see over the darkly lifted, castle-rock the triple crossing swords of greek, carthaginian, and roman in the age-long duel, and as these fade, the springing brands of byzantine, arab, and norman, and yet again the heavy blades of france, spain, and sicily; and ever, like rain or snow, falls the bloody dew on this lone hill-wide. "oh, wherefore?" i whisper; and all is silent save the surge still lifting round the coast the far voices of the old ionian sea. i have wondered that the children of etna should dwell in its lovely paradise, as i thought how often, how terribly, the lava has poured forth upon it, the shower of ashes fallen, the black horror of volcanic eruption overwhelmed the land. yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here suffered at the hands of man. o etna, it is not thou that man should fear! he should fear his brother-man. ix the stars were paling over etna, white and ghostly, as i came out to depart. in the dark street i met a woman with a young boy clinging to her side. her black hair fell down over her shoulders, and her bosom was scantily clothed by the poor garment that fell to her ankles and her feet. she was still young, and from her dark, sad face her eyes met mine with that fixed look of the hopeless poor, now grown familiar; the child, half naked, gazed up at me as he held his mother's hand. what brought her there at that hour, alone with her child? she seemed the epitome of the human life i was leaving behind, come forth to bid farewell; and she passed on under the shadows of the dawn. the last star faded as i went down the hollow between the spurs. etna gleamed white and vast over the shoulder of the ravine, and, as i dipped down, was gone. a new defence of poetry there was an old cry, return to nature! let us rather return unto the soul. nature is great, and her science marvellous; but it is man who knows it. in what he knows it is partial and subsidiary. know thyself, was the first command of reason; and wisdom was an ancient thing when the sweet influences of the pleiades and the path of arcturus with his sons were young in human thought. these late conquests of the mind in the material infinities of the universe, its exploring of stellar space, its exhuming of secular time, its harnessing of invisible forces, this new mortal knowledge, its sudden burst, its brilliancy and amplitude of achievement, thought winnowing the world as with a fan; the vivid spectacle of vast and beneficent changes wrought by this means in human welfare, the sense of the increase of man's power springing from unsuspected and illimitable resources,--all this has made us forgetful of truth that is the oldest heirloom of the race. in the balances of thought the soul of man outweighs the mass that gravitation measures. man only is of prime interest to men; and man as a spirit, a creature but made in the likeness of something divine. the lapse of aeons touches us as little as the reach of space; even the building of our planet, and man's infancy, have the faint and distant reality of cradle records. science may reconstruct the inchoate body of animal man, the clay of our mould, and piece together the primitive skeleton of the physical being we now wear; but the mind steadily refuses to recognize a human past without some discipline in the arts, some exercise in rude virtue, and some proverbial lore handed down from sire to son. the tree of knowledge is of equal date with the tree of life; nor were even the tamer of horses, the worker in metals, or the sower, elder than those twin guardians of the soul,--the poet and the priest. conscience and imagination were the pioneers who made earth habitable for the human spirit; they are still its lawgivers and where they have lodged their treasures, there is wisdom. i desire to renew the long discussion of the nature and method of idealism by engaging in a new defence of poetry, or the imaginative art in any of its kinds, as the means by which this wisdom, which is the soul's knowledge of itself, is stored up for the race in its most manifest, enduring, and vital forms. it is, by literary tradition and association, a proud task. may i not take counsel of spenser and be bold at the first door? sidney and shelley pleaded this cause. because they spoke, must we be dumb? or shall not a noble example be put to its best use in trying what truth can now do on younger lips? the old hunt is up in the muses' bower; and i would fain speak for that learning which has to me been light. i use this preface not unwillingly in open loyalty to studies on which my youth was nourished, and the masters i then loved whom the natural thoughts of youth made eloquent; my hope is to continue their finer breath, as they before drank from old fountains; but chiefly i name them as a reminder that the main argument is age-long; it does not harden into accepted dogma; and it is thus ceaselessly tossed because it belongs in that sphere of our warring nature where conflict is perpetual. it goes on in the lives as well as on the lips of men. it is a question how to live as well as how to express life. each race uses its own tongue, each age its dialect; but, change the language as man may, he ever remains the questioner of his few great thoughts. the defenders of the soul inherit an old cause that links them together in a long descent; but the battle is always to a present age. continually something is becoming superfluous, inapplicable, or wanting in the work of the past. victory itself makes arms useless, and consigns them to dark closets. new times, new weapons, is the history of all warfare. the doubt of the validity of the ideal, never absent from any intellectual period, is active on all sides, and in more than one quarter passes into denial. literature and the other arts of expression suffer throughout the world. to that point is it come that those of the old stock who believe that the imagination exercises man's faculty at its highest pitch, and that the method of idealism is its law, are bid step down, while others more newly grounded in what belongs to literature possess the city; but seeing the shrines interdicted, the obliteration of ancient names, the heroes' statues thrown down, shall we learn what our predecessors never knew--to abdicate and abandon? i hear in the temples the footsteps of the departing gods-- di quibus imperium hoc steterat; but no; for our opponents are worse off than those of whom it was said that though one rose from the dead they would not believe,--plato, being dead, yet speaks, shakspere treads our boards, and (why should i hesitate?) tennyson yet breathes among us though already immortal. that which convinced the master minds of antiquity and many in later ages is still convincing, if it be attended to; the old tradition is yet unbroken; therefore, because i was bred in this faith, i will try to set forth anew in the phrases of our time the eternal ground of reason on which idealism rests. the specific question concerns literature and its method, but its import is not mainly literary. life is the matter of literature; and thence it comes that all leading inquiries to which literature gives rise probe for their premises to the roots of our being and expand in their issues to the unknown limits of human fate. it is an error to think of idealism as a thing remote, fantastic, and unsubstantial. it enters intimately into the lives of all men, however humble and unlearned, if they live at all except in their bodies. what is here proposed is neither speculative, technical, nor abstruse; it is practical in matter, universal in interest, and touches upon those things which men most should heed. i fear rather to incur the reproach of uttering truisms than paradoxes. but he does ill who is scornful of the trite. to be learned in commonplaces is no mean education. they make up the great body of the people's knowledge. they are the living words upon the lips of men from generation to generation; the real winged words; the matter of the unceasing reiteration of families, schools, pulpits, libraries; the tradition of mankind. proverb, text, homily,--happy the youth whose purse is stored with these broad pieces, current, in every country and for every good, like fairy gifts of which the occasion only when it arises shows the use. it is with truth as with beauty,--familiarity endears and makes it more precious. what is common is for that very reason in danger of neglect, and from it often flashes that divine surprise which most enkindles the soul. why must prometheus bring fire from heaven to savage man? did it not sleep in the flint at his feet? how often, at the master stroke of life, has some text of holy scripture, which lay in the mind from childhood almost like the debris of memory, illuminated the remorseful darkness of the mind, or interpreted the sweetness of god's sunshine in the happy heart! common as light is love, sang shelley; and equally common with beauty and truth and love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and gives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heart to understand. grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold, silver and iron, steam and electricity,--were not all, like the spark, within arm's reach of savage man? the slow material progress of mankind through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul in laying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strength that are nigh unto it. the service of man to man in the ways of the spirit is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of cold water to him who is athirst. can there be any surprise when i say that the method of idealism is that of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the logician, the chemist, the statesman? it is no more than to say that in creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought; and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of gravitation. experience is the matter of all knowledge. it is given to the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, of impressions outward and inward. it is stored in the memory, and were memory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this of particular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. all literature would then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments in their order. reason, however, intervenes. its process is well known. in every object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and in its relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and this likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,-- abstract ideas, formulas, laws. the mind arrives at these in the course of its normal operation. as soon as we think at all, we speak of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,--of uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification of qualities, objects, and various relations, not merely in the sensuous but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies. to this work it brings, also, the method of experiment. it then interferes arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm what was surmised. its end, whether through observation or experiment, is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as opposed to the units of phenomena. the body of these constitutes rational knowledge. nature then becomes known, not as a series of impressions on the retina of sense merely, but as a system seized by the eye of reason; for the senses show man the aspect worn by the world as it is at the moment, but reason opens to him the order obtaining in the world as it must be at every moment; and the instrument by which man rises from the phenomenal plane of experience to the necessary sphere of truth is the generalizing faculty whose operation has just been described. the office of the reason in the exercise of this faculty is to find organic form in that experience which memory preserves in the mass,--to penetrate, that is, to that mould of necessity in the world which phenomena, when they arise, must put on. the species once perceived, the mind no longer cares for the individual; the law once known, the mind no longer cares for the facts; for in these universals all particular instances, past, present, and to come, are contained in their significance. all sciences are advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it deals with, as these are more or less embracing. the matter of literature--that part of total experience which it deals with--is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast as distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science deals. the reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. such knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to mankind. it exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge; for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. the method of the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes its work elsewhere, its only method. here, too, its concern is with the universal; its end is to know life--the life with which literature deals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty. one difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth,--a difference in the mode of statement. science and also philosophy formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is, clothes truth in a tale. imagination is brought in, and by its aid the mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that it reembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to the eye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. so, to draw an example from science itself, when leverrier projected in imagination the planet uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. this creation of the concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of the mind, in distinction from the scientific intellect which merely knows. the term is intended to convey at once the double phase, under one aspect of which the reason controls imagination, and under the other aspect the imagination formulates the reason; it is meant to free the idea, on the one hand, from that suggestion of abstraction implied by the reason, and to disembarrass it, on the other, of any connection with the irrational fancy; for the world of art so conceived is necessarily both concrete, correspondent to the realities of experience, and truthful, subject to the laws of the universe; it cannot contain the impossible, it cannot amalgamate the actual with the unreal, it cannot in any way lie and retain its own nature. the use of this rational imagination is not confined to the world of art. it is only by its aid that we build up the horizons of our earthly life and fill them with objects and events beyond the reach of our senses. to it we are indebted for our knowledge of the greater part of others' lives, for our idea of the earth's surface and the doings of foreign nations, of all past history and its scene, and the events of primaeval nature which were even before man was. so far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of our private experience of it, we do so by the power of the imagination acting on the lines of reason. it fills space and time for us through all their compass. nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits of men. the scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecasts reform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizes in fact; the entire future lives to us--and it is the most important part of life--only by its incantation. the poet acts no otherwise in employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that he uses it for the ends of reason instead of for his private interest. in some parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physical parallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imagined state of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception of the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is a tissue of abstract thought. in art this governance of the imagination by the reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter a seeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on the universal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form. but in the light of this preliminary description of the mental processes involved, let us take a nearer view of their particular employment in literature. human life, as represented in literature, consists of two main branches, character and action. of these, character, which is the realm of personality, is generalized by means of type, which is ideal character; action, which is the realm of experience, by plot, which is ideal action. it is convenient to examine the nature of these separately. a type, the example of a class, contains the characteristic qualities which make an individual one of that class; it does not differ in this elementary form from the bare idea of the species. the traits of a tree, for instance, exist in every actual tree, however stunted or imperfect; and in the type which condenses into itself what is common in all specimens of the class, these traits only exist; they constitute the type. comic types, in literature, are often simple abstractions of some single human quality, and hence easily afford illustrations. the braggart, the miser, the hypocrite, contain that one trait which is common to the class; and in their portrayal this characteristic only is shown. in proportion as the traits are many in any character, the type becomes complex. in simple types attention is directed to some one vice, passion, or virtue, capable of absorbing a human life in to itself. this is the method of jonson, and, in tragedy, of marlowe. as human energy displays itself more variously in a life, in complex types, the mind contemplates human nature in a more catholic way, with a less exclusive identification of character with specific trait, a more free conception of personality as only partially exhibited; thus, in becoming complex, types gather breadth and depth, and share more in the mystery of humanity as something incompletely known to us at the best. such are the characters of shakspere. the manner in which types are arrived at and made recognizable in other arts opens the subject more fully and throws light upon their nature. the sculptor observes in a group of athletes that certain physical habits result in certain moulds of the body; and taking such characteristics as are common to all of one class, and neglecting such as are peculiar to individuals, he carves a statue. so permanent are the physical facts he relies upon that, centuries after, when the statue is dug up, men say without hesitation--here is the greek runner, there the wrestler. the habit of each in life produces a bodily form which if it exists implies that habit; the reality here results from the operation of physical laws and can be physically rendered; the type is constituted of permanent physical fact. there are habits of the soul which similarly impress an outward stamp upon the face and form so certainly that expression, attitude, and shape authentically declare the presence of the soul that so reveals itself. in the phidian zeus was all awe; in the praxitelean hermes all grace, sweetness, tenderness; in the pallas athene of her people who carved or minted her image in statue, bas-relief, or coin, was all serene and grave wisdom; or, in the glowing and chastened colours of the later artistic time, the virgin mother shines out, in fra angelico all adoration, in bellini all beatitude, in raphael all motherhood. the sculptor and the painter are restricted to the bodily signs of the soul's presence; but the poet passes into another and wider range of interpretation. he finds the soul stamped in its characteristic moods, words, actions. he then creates for the mind's eye achilles, aeneas, arthur; and in his verse are beheld their spirits rather than their bodies. these several sorts of types make an ascending series from the predominantly physical to the predominantly spiritual; but, from the present point of view, the arts which embody their creations in a material form should not be opposed to literature which employs the least interrelation of sensation, as if the former had a physical and the last a spiritual content. all types have one common element, they express personality; they have for the mind a spiritual meaning, what they contain of human character; they differ here only in fulness of representation. the most purely physical types imply spiritual qualities, choice, will, command,--all the life which was a condition precedent to the bodily perfection that was its flower; and, though the eye rests on the beautiful form, it may discern through it the human soul of the athlete as in life; and, moreover, the figure may be represented in some significant act, or mood even, but this last is rare. the more plainly spiritual types, physically rendered, are most often shown in some such mood or act expressive in itself of the soul whose habit lives in the form it has moulded. it is not that the plastic and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone and the canvas as well as humanize it bodily; equally with the poetic art they reveal character, but within narrower bounds. the limitation of these arts in embodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; and though it springs out of their use of material forms, it does so in a peculiar way. it is not the employment of a physical medium of communication that differentiates them, for a physical medium of some sort is the only means of exchange between mind and mind; neither is it the employment of a physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests on a physical basis--the world of imagination is exhaled from things that are. the physical basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is enacted on the stage; but it is substantially the same whether beheld in thought or ocularly. the fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and their kindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life only partially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. they set forth their works in the single element of space; they exclude the changes that take place in time. the types they show are arrested, each in its moment; or if a story is told by a series of representations, it is a succession of such moments of arrested life. the method is that of the camera; what is given is a fixed state. but literature renders life in movement; it revolves life through its moments as rapidly as on the retina of sense; its method is that of the kinetoscope. it holds under its command change, growth, the entire energy of life in action; it can chase mood with mood, link act to act. it alone can speak the word, which is the most powerful instrument of man. hence the types it shows by presenting moods, words, and acts with the least obstruction of matter and the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the most complete. they have broken the bonds of the flesh, of moment and place. they exhibit themselves in actions; they speak, and in dialogue and soliloquy set forth their states of mind lying before, or accompanying, or following their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. action by itself reveals character; speech illumines it, and casts upon the action also a forward and a backward light. the lapse of time, binding all together, adds the continuous life of the soul. this large compass, which is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider command and more flexible control which literature exercises over that physical basis which is the common foundation of all the arts. hence it abounds in complex types, just as other arts present simple types with more frequency. all types, however, in so far as they appeal to the mind and interpret the inward world, under which aspect alone they are now considered, have their physical nature, materially or imaginatively, even though it be solely visible beauty, in order to express personality. the type, in the usage of literature, must be further distinguished from the bare idea of the species as it has thus far been defined. it is more than this. it is not only an example; it is an example in a high state of development, if not perfect. the best possible tree, for instance, does not exist in nature, owing to a confused environment which does not permit its formation. in literature a type is made a high type either by intensity, if it be simple, or by richness of nature, if it be complex. miserliness, braggadocio, hypocrisy, in their extremes, are the characters of comedy; a rich nature, such as hamlet, showing variety of faculty and depth of experience, is the hero of more profound drama. this truth, the necessity of high development in the type, underlay the old canon that the characters of tragedy should be of lofty rank, great place, and consequence in the world's affairs, preferably even of historic fame. the canon erred in mistaking one means of securing credible intensity or richness for the many which are possible. the end in view is to represent human qualities at their acme. in other times as a matter of fact persons highly placed were most likely to exhibit such development; birth, station, and their opportunities for unrestrained and conspicuous action made them examples of the compass of human energy, passion, and fate. new ages brought other conditions. shakspere recognized the truth of the matter, and laid the emphasis where it belongs, upon the humanity of the king, not on the kingly office of the man. said henry v: "i think the king is but a man as i am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions; his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his appetites are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with like wing." such, too, was lear in the tempest. and from the other end of the scale hear shylock: "hath not a jew eyes? hath not a jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, appetites, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a christian is? if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" rank and race are accidents; the essential thing is that the type be highly human, let the means of giving it this intensity and richness be what they may. it is true that the type may seem defective in the point that it is at best but a fragment of humanity, an abstraction or a combination of abstracted qualities. there was never such an athlete as our greek sculptor's, never a pagan god nor virgin mother, nor a hero equal to homer's thought, so beautiful, brave, and courteous, so terrible to his foe, so loving to his friend. and yet is it not thus that life is known to us actually? does not this typical rendering of character fall in with the natural habit of life? what man, what friend, is known to us except by fragments of his spirit? only one life, our own, is known to us as a continuous existence. just as when we see an orange, we supply the further side and think of it as round, so with men we supply from ourselves the unseen side that makes the man completely and continuously human. moreover, it is a matter of common experience that men, we ourselves, may live only in one part, and the best, of our nature at one moment, and yet for the moment be absorbed in that activity both in consciousness and energy; for that moment we are only living so; now, if a character were shown to us only in the moments in which he was living so, at his best and in his characteristic state as the soldier, the priest, the lover, then the ideal abstraction of literature would not differ from the actuality of our experience. in this selfsame way we habitually build for ourselves ideal characters out of dead and living men, by dwelling on that part of their career which we most admire or love as showing their characteristic selves. napoleon is the conqueror, st. francis the priest, washington the great citizen, only by this method. they are not thereby de-humanized; neither do the ideal types of imagination fail of humanization because they are thus fragmentarily, but consistently, presented. the type must make this human appeal under all circumstances. its whole meaning and virtue lie in what it contains of our common humanity, in the clearness and brilliancy with which it interprets the man in us, in the force with which it identifies us with human nature. if it is separated from us by a too high royalty or a too base villany, it loses intelligibility, it forfeits sympathy, it becomes more and more an object of simple curiosity, and removes into the region of the unknown. even if the type passes into the supernatural, into fairyland or the angelic or demoniac world, it must not leave humanity behind. these spheres are in fact fragments of humanity itself, projections of its sense of wonder, its goodness, and its evil, in extreme abstraction though concretely felt. fairy, angel, and devil cease to be conceivable except as they are human in trait, however the conditions of their nature may be fancied; for we have no other materials to build with save those of our life on earth, though we may combine them in ways not justified by reason. in so far as these worlds are in the limits of rational imagination, they are derived from humanity, partial interpretations of some of its moods, portions of itself; and the beings who inhabit them are impaired for the purposes of art in the degree to which their abstract nature is felt as stripping them of complete humanity. for this reason in dealing with such simple types, being natures all of one strain, it has been found best in practice to import into them individually some quality widely common to men in addition to that limited quality they possess by their conception. some touch of weakness in an angel, some touch of pity in a devil, some unmerited misfortune in an ariel, bring them home to our bosoms; just as the frailty of the hero, however great he be, humanizes him at a stroke. thus these abstract fragments also are reunited with humanity, with the whole of life in ourselves. types, then, whether simple or complex, whether apparently physical or purely spiritual, whether given fragmentary or as wholes of personality, express human character in its essential traits. they may be narrow or broad generalizations; but if to know ourselves be our aim, those types, which show man his common and enduring nature, are the most valuable, and rank first in importance; in proportion as they are specialized, they are less widely interpretative; in proportion as they escape from time and place, race, culture, and religion, and present man eternal and universal in his primary actions, moods, and passions, they appeal to a greater number and with more permanence; they become immortal in becoming universal. to preserve this universality is the essence of the type, and the degree of universality it reaches is its measure of value to men. it is immaterial whether it be simple as ajax or complex as hamlet, whether it be the work of imagination solely as in hercules, or have a historical basis as in agamemnon; its exemplary rendering of man in general is its substance and constitutor its ideality. action, the second great branch of life, is generalized by plot. it lies, as has been said, in the region of experience. character, though it may be conceived as latent, can be presented only energetically as it finds outward expression. it cannot be shown in a vacuum. it embodies or reveals itself in an act; form and feature, as expressive of character, are the record of past acts. this act is the link that binds type to plot. by means of it character enters the external world, determining the course of events and being passively affected by them. plot takes account of this interplay and sets forth its laws. it is, therefore, more deeply engaged with the environment, as type is more concerned with the man in himself. it is, initially, a thing of the outward as type is a thing of the inward world. how, then, does literature, through plot, reduce the environment in its human relations to organic form? the course of events, taken as a whole, is in part a process of nature independent of man, in part the product of his will. it is a continuous stream of phenomena in great multiplicity, and proceeding in a temporal sequence. science deals with that portion of the whole which is independent of man, and may be called natural events, and by discerning causal relations in them arrives at the conception of law as a principle of unchanging and necessary order in nature. science seeks to reduce the multiplicity and heterogeneity of facts as they occur to these simple formulas of law. science does not begin in reality until facts end; facts, ten or ten thousand, are indifferent to her after the law which contains them is found, and are a burden to her until it is found. literature, in its turn, deals with human events; and, in the same way as science, by attending to causal relations, arrives at the conception of spiritual law as a similarly permanent principle in the order of the soul. this causal unity is the cardinal idea of plot which by definition is a series of events causally related and conceived as a unit, technically called the action. plot is thus analogous to an illustrative experiment in science; it is a concrete example of law,--it is law operating. the course of events again, so far as they stand in direct connection with human life, may be thought of as the expression of the individual's own will, or of that of his environment. the will of the environment may be divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the will of other men, and the will of god. in each case it is will embodied in events. if these ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totality whose course is the unfolding of one divine will operant throughout it and called fate or providence, then the individual will, through which, as through nature also, the divine will works, is only its servant. action so conceived, the march of events under some heavenly power working through the mass of human will which it overrules in conjunction with its own more comprehensive purposes, is epic action; in it characters are subordinate to the main progress of the action, they are only terms in the action; however free they may be apparently, considered by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to allow entire certainty of result, its mutations are included in the calculation of the divine will. the action of the aeneid is of this nature: a grand series of destined events worked out through human agency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and earth. on the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowly attended to within the limits of the individual's own activity, as the expression primarily and significantly of his personal will, then the successive acts are subordinate to the character; they are terms of the character which is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. action, so conceived, is dramatic action. if in the course of events there arises a conflict between the will of the individual and that of his environment, whether nature, man, or god, then the seed of tragedy, specifically, is present; this conflict is the essential idea of tragedy. in all these varieties of action, the scene is the external world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causal principle, obtaining in it. it is necessary, however, to refine upon this statement of the matter. the course of external events, in so far as it affects one person, whether as proceeding from or reacting upon him, reveals character, and has meaning as an interpretation of inward life. it is a series outward indeed, but parallel with the states of will, intellect, and emotion which make up the consciousness of the character; and it is interesting humanly only as a mirror of them. it is not the murderous blow, but the depraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not the muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working itself out, that hold our attention. plot here manifests the law of character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. all fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. the constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which shakspere felt this, from the earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. says richard ii:-- "'tis very true, my grief lies all within; and those external manners of lament are merely shadows to the unseen grief that swells in silence in the tortured soul; there lies the substance." so theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of athens, excusing all art: "the best in this kind are but shadows." so hamlet; so prospero. action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. the external fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our own bosoms--it is spiritually discerned. on the stage plainly this is the case. so far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our experience permits us so to comprehend them. we contemplate a world of emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till absorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor's genius we become ourselves the character. the greatest actor is he who makes the spectator play the part. so far is the drama from the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves. and what is true of the stage is true of life. it is only through our own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. we interpret the external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never seen any more than our own personality. thus our knowledge of them is not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within its limits. it is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto ourselves abides,--the human soul, though never seen face to face. to enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of personality and experience, and to set them forth as a spiritual order, is the main end of ideal art. though in plot the outward order is brought into the fullest prominence, and may seem to occupy the field, yet it is significantly only the shadow of that order within. in thus presenting plot as the means by which the history of a single soul is externalized, one important element has been excluded from consideration. the causal chain of events, which constitutes plot, has a double unity, answering to the double order of phenomena in action as a state of mind and a state of external fact. under one aspect, so much of the action as is included in any single life and is there a linked sequence of mental states, has its unity in the personality of that individual. under the other aspect, the entire action which sets forth the relations of all the characters involved, of their several courses of experience as elements in the working out of the joint result, has its unity in the constitution of the universe,--the impersonal order, that structure of being itself, which is independent of man's will, which is imposed upon him as a condition of existence, and which he must accept without appeal. this necessity, to give it the best name, to which man is exposed without and subjected within, is in its broadest conception the power that increases life, and all things are under its sway. its sphere is above man's will; he knows it as immutable law in himself as it is in nature; it is the highest object of his thoughts. its workings are submitted to his observation and experiment as a part of the world of knowledge; he sees its operation in individuals, social groups, and nations, and sets it forth in the action of the lyric, the drama, and the epic as the law of life. in its sphere is the higher unity of plot by virtue of which it integrates many lives in one main action. such, then, is the nature of plot as intermediary between man and his environment, but deeply engaged in the latter, and not to be freed from it even by a purely spiritualistic philosophy; for though we say that, as under one aspect plot shadows forth the unseen world of the soul's life, so under the other it shadows forth the invisible will of god, we do not escape from the outward world. sense is still the medium by which only man knows his brother man and god also as through a glass darkly,-- "the painted veil which those who live call life." it separates all spirits, the beautiful but dense element in which the pure soul is submerged. it is necessary only to summarize the characteristics of plot which are merely parallel to those of type already illustrated. plot may be simple or complex; it may be more or less involved in physical conditions in proportion as it lays stress on its machinery or its psychology; it must be important, as the type must be high, but important by virtue of its essential human meaning and not of its accidents; it is a fragment of destiny only, but in this falls in with the way life in others is known to us; if it passes into the superhuman world, it must retain human significance and be brought back to man's life by devices similar to those used in the type for the same purpose; it rises in value in proportion to the universality it contains, and gains depth and permanence as it is interpretative of common human fate at all times and among all men; it may be purely imaginary or founded on actual incidents; and its exemplary interpretation of man's life is its substance, and constitutes its ideality. in the discussion of type and plot, the concrete nature of the world of art, which was originally stated to be the characteristic work of the creative reason, or imagination acting in conformity with truth, has been assumed; but no reason has been given for it, because it seemed best to develop first with some fulness the nature of that inward order which is thus projected in the forms of art. it belongs to the frailty of man that he seizes with difficulty and holds with feebleness the pure ideas of the intellect, the more in proportion as they are removed from sense; and he seeks to support himself against this weakness by framing sensible representations of the abstract in which the mind can rest. thus in all lands and among savage tribes, as well as in the most civilized nations, symbols have been used immemorially. the flag of a nation has all its meaning because it is taken as a physical token of national honour, almost of national life itself. the moslem crescent, the christian cross, have only a similar significance, a bringing near to the eye of what exists in reality only for the mind and heart. a symbol, however, is an arbitrary fiction, and stands to the idea as a metaphor does to the thing itself. in literature the parable of the mustard seed to which the kingdom of heaven was likened, exemplifies symbolical or metaphorical method; but the tale of the court of arthur's knights, ideal method; between them, and sharing something of both, lies allegorical method. idolatry is the religion of symbolism, for the image is not the god; christianity is the religion of idealism, for christ is god incarnate. idealism presents the reality itself, the universal truth made manifest in the concrete type, and there present and embodied in its characteristics as they are, not merely arbitrarily by a fiction of thought, symbolically or allegorically. the way in which type concretes truth is sufficiently plain; but it may be useful, with respect to plot, to draw out more in detail the analogy which has been said to exist between it and an illustrative scientific experiment. if scientific law is declared experimentally, the course of nature is modified by intent; certain conditions are secured, certain others eliminated; a selected train of phenomena is then set in motion to the end that the law may be illustrated, and nothing else. in a perfect experiment the law is in full operation. in plot there is a like selection of persons, situations, and incidents so arranged as to disclose the working of that order which obtains in man's life. the law may be simple and shown by means of few persons and incidents in a brief way, as in ancient drama, or complex and exhibited with many characters in an abundance of action over a wide scene as in shakspere; in either case equally there is a selection from the whole mass of man's life of what shall illustrate the causal union in its order and show it in action. the process in the epic or prose narrative is the same. the common method of all is to present the universal law in a particular instance made for the purpose. in thus clothing itself in concrete form, truth suffers no transformation; it remains what it was, general truth, the very essence of type and plot being, as has been said, to preserve this universality in the particular instance. there is a sense in which this general truth is more real, as plato thought, than particulars; a sense in which the phenomenal world is less real than the system of nature, for phenomena come and go, but the law remains; a sense in which the order in man's breast is more real than he is, in whom it is manifest, for the form of ideas, the mould of law, are permanent, but their expression in us transitory. it is this higher realism, as it was anciently called, that the mind strives for in idealism,--this organic form of life, the object of all rational knowledge. types, under their concrete disguise, are thus only a part of the general notions of the mind found in every branch of knowledge and necessary to thought; plots, similarly, are only a part of the general laws of the ordered world; literature in using them, and specializing them in concrete form by which alone they differ in appearance from like notions and laws elsewhere, merely avails itself of that condensing faculty of the mind which most economizes mental effort and loads conceptions with knowledge. in the type it is not personal, but human character that interests the mind; in plot, it is not personal, but human fate. while it is true that the object of ideal method is to reach universals, and reembody them in particular instances, this reasoning action is often obscurely felt by the imagination in its creative process. the very fact that its operation is through the concrete complicates the process. the mind of genius working out its will does not usually start with a logical attempt consciously; it does not arrive at truth in the abstract and then reduce it to concrete illustration in any systemic way; it does not select the law and then shape the plot. the poet is rather directly interested in certain characters and events that appeal to him; his sympathies are aroused, and he proceeds to show forth, to interpret, to create; and in proportion as the characters he sets in motion and the circumstances in which they are placed have moulding force, they will develop traits and express themselves in influences that he did not foresee. this is a matter of familiar knowledge to authors, who frequently discover in the trend of the imaginary tale a will of its own, which has its unforeseen way. the drama or story, once set in motion, tends to tell itself, just as life tends to develop in the world. the vitality of the clay it works in, is one of the curious experiences of genius, and occasions that mood of mystery in relation to their creatures frequently observed in great writers. in fact, this mode of working in the concrete, which is characteristic of the creative imagination, gives to its activity an inductive and experimental character, not to be confounded with the demonstrative act of the intellect which states truth after knowing it, and not in the moment of its discovery. in literature this moment of discovery is what makes that flash which is sometimes called intuition, and is one of the great charms of genius. the concrete nature of ideal art, to touch conveniently here upon a related though minor topic, is also the reason that it expresses more than its creator is aware of. in imaging life he includes more reality than he attends to; but if his representation has been made with truth, others may perceive phases of reality that he neglected. it is the mark of genius, as has hitherto appeared, to grasp life, not fragmentarily, but in the whole. so, in a scientific experiment, intended to illustrate one particular form of energy, a spectator versed in another science may detect some truth belonging in his own field. this richer significance of great works is especially found where the union of the general and the particular is strong; where the fusion is complete, as in hamlet. in a sense he is more real than living men, and we can analyze his nature, have doubts about his motives, judge differently of his character, and value his temperament more or less as one might with a friend. the more imaginative a character is, in the sense that his personality and experience are given in the whole so that one feels the bottom of reality there, the more significance it has. thus in the world of art discoveries beyond the intention of the writer may be made as in the actual world; so much of reality does it contain. will it be said that, in making primary the universal contents and spiritual significance of type and plot, i have made literature didactic, as if the word should stop my mouth? if it is meant by this that i maintain that literature conveys truth, it may readily be admitted, since only thus can it interest the mind which has its whole life in the pursuit and its whole joy in the possession of truth. but if it be meant that abstract or moral instruction has been made the business of literature, the charge may be met with a disclaimer, as should be evident, first, from the emphasis placed on its concrete dealing with persons and actions. on the contrary, literature fails in art precisely in proportion as it becomes expressly such a teacher. secondly, the life which literature organizes, the whole of human nature in its relation to the world, is many-sided; and imaginative genius, the creative reason, grasps it in its totality. the moral aspect is but one among many that life wears. if ethics are implicit in the mass of life, so also are beauty and passion, pathos, humour, and terror; and in literature any one of these may be the prominent phase at the moment, for literature gives out not only practical moral wisdom, but all the reality of life. literature is didactic in the reproachful sense of the word only in proportion as type and plot are distinctly separated from the truth they embody, and ceases to be so in proportion as these are blended and unified. the fable is one of the most ancient forms of such didactic literature; in it a story is told to enforce a lesson, and animals are made the characters, in consequence of which it has the touch of humour inseparable from the spectacle of beasts playing at being men; but the very fact that the moral is of men and the tale is of beasts involves a separation of the truth from its concrete embodiment, and besides the moral is stated by itself. in the oriental apologue an advance is made. the parables of our lord, in particular, are admirable examples of its method. the characters are few, the situations common, the action simple, and the moral truth or lesson enforced is so completely clothed in the tale that it needs no explanation; at the same time, the mind is aware of the teacher. in the higher forms of literature, however, the fusion of ethics with life may be complete. here the poet works so subtly that the mind is not aware of the illumination of this light which comes without the violence of the preacher, until after the fact; and, indeed, the effect is wrought more through the sympathies than the reason. in such a case literature, though it conveys moral with other kinds of truth, is not open to the charge of didacticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit and abstract. the educative power of literature, however, is not diminished because in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, which by its very definiteness is inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginative a character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral truth; it may teach, as has been said, what the poet never dreamed his work contained. if, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject-matter of literature is life in the forms of personality and experience, and the particular facts with respect to these are generalized by means of type and plot in concrete form, and so are set forth as phases of an ordered world for the intelligence, to the end that man may know himself in the same way as he knows nature in its living system--if this be so, what standing have those who would restrict literature to the actual in life? who would replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, and the ordered drama of the stage by the medley of life? they deny art, which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for as soon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins, the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question of values, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score of actuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. the trivial, the accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and there will be no stopping short of the end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no other than the method of all reason, wherefore idealism is to it what abstraction is to logic and induction to natural science,--the breath of its rational being. those who hold to realism in its extreme form, as a representation of the actual only, behave as if one should say to the philosopher--leave this formulation of general notions and be content with sensible objects; or to the scientist--experiment no more, but observe the course of nature as it may chance to arise, and describe it in its succession. they bid us be all eye, no mind; all sense, no thought; all chance, all confusion, no order, no organization, no fabric of the reason. but there are no such realists; though pure realism has its place, as will hereafter be shown, it is usually found mixed with ideal method; and as commonly employed the word designates the preference merely for types and plots of much detail, of narrow application, of little meaning, in opposition to the highly generalized and significant types and plots usually associated with the term idealism. in what way such realism has its place will also appear at a later stage. here it is necessary to say no more than that in proportion as realism uses the ideal method only at the lowest, it narrows its appeal, weakens its power, and takes from literature her highest distinction by virtue of which she grasps the whole of character and fate in her creation and informs man of the secrets of his human heart, the course of his mortal destiny, and the end of all his spiritual effort and aspiration. i am aware that i have not proceeded so far without starting objections. to meet that which is most grave, what shall i say when it is alleged that there is no order such as i have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. the mind is perplexed and disturbed until it finds this order; and in the progressive integration of its experience into an ordered world lies its work. art gives pleasure to the intellect, because in its structure whatever is superfluous and extrinsic has been eliminated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic work as a unity of relations bound each to each which it fully comprehends. such works, we say, have form, which is just this interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the order of nature itself illusory. creative art would thus still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would delight to dream his dream. but it is not necessary to take this lower line of argument. it does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world. the soul of man has a common being in all. there could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to the identity of the will in all, nor any ground of expression even, of communication between man and man, on the hypothesis of any radical difference in the experience and faculties to which all expression appeals for its intelligibility; neither could there be any system of life in social groups, or plan for education, unless such a common basis is accepted. the postulate of a common human nature is analogous to that of the unity of matter in science; it finds its complete expression in the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, for if race be fundamentally distinguished from race as was once thought, it is only as element is distinguished from element in the old chemistry. so, too, the postulate of an order obtaining in the soul, universal and necessary, independent of man's volition, analogous in all respects to the order of nature, is parallel with that of the constancy of physical law. a rational life expects this order. the first knowledge of it comes to us, as that of natural law, by experience; in the social world--the relations of men to one another--and in the more important region of our own nature we learn the issue of certain courses of action as well as in the external world; in our own lives and in our dealings with others we come to a knowledge of, and a conformity to, the conditions under which we live, the laws operant in our being, as well as those of the physical world. literature assumes this order; in aeschylus, cervantes, or shakspere, it is this that gives their work interest. apart from natural science, the whole authority of the past in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon the permanence of this order, and its capacity to be known by man; that virtue makes men noble and vice renders them base, is a statement without meaning unless this order is continuous through ages; all principles of action, all schemes of culture, would be uncertain except on this foundation. so near is this order to us that it was known long before science came to any maturity. we have added, in truth, little to our knowledge of humanity since the greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came before science, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is near and vital in life as science is not. we can do, it seems, without kepler's laws, but not without the decalogue. the race acquires first what is most needful for life; and man's heart was always with him, and his fate near. a second reason, it may be noted, for the later development of science is that our senses, as used by science, are more mental now, and the object itself is observable only by the intervention of the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments into which, though physical, the mind enters. our methods, too, as well as our instruments, are things of the mind. it behooves us to remember in an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, that more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever larger place in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more and more what it is--a savage conception. but recognizing the great place of mind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly system, i am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art and morals. i find in this penetration of the order of the world within us our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of sharing in the general order of nature, so, i believe, our souls have being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world. what, then, is this order? we do not merely contemplate it: we are immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul's life outvalues the body in our experience. it is necessary to expand our conception of it. hitherto it has been presented only as an order of truth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one function of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. we know this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in conscience. we know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity. what i maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may be learned in any of them--as an order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. it is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,--it has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,--is equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on every side. a lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without a moral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure joy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. the course of action that increases life may be selected because it is reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that are joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, and all else shall be added unto you. the binding force in this order is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and knowledge, and its method is the same in all. is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its principles, in those relations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highest importance of anything of human concern? in harmony with these laws, and only thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous, wise, and beautiful. in ideal literature this knowledge is found, expressed, and handed down age after age--the knowledge of necessary and permanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together, exhaust the capacities of life. man's moral sense is strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act; his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strong in the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several field of experience. and conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. insanity, in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. to take an example from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge, the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by stage; this is god's justice, visiting sin with death. similarly, and to most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society, because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good, including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. this is why the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. but whether in god's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over his fortunes. this was the truth that lay in the platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. in the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to the whole of life. these several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but are in the closest alliance. they act conjointly and with one result in the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of one personal power. it cannot be that contradiction should arise among them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in reality, is impossible. in the narrow view the lust of the eye and the pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. to represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents the harmony of our nature. satan, as conceived by milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to milton's imagination. "the infernal serpent" is the first name the poet gives him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in paradise he is surprised at the ear of eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs up in his own form there, as the "grisly king," he mourns most his beauty lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. to me, at least, so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. in all great creations of art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and joy should he preserved. it is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often breaks down. but if the order of the material universe seems now a more settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was reversed; god was known and nature miraculous. it must be remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature, the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. it is the touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts. the expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its direct appeal to the mind. it is not enough to show that the creative reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man's faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet to come. to enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. idealism does not confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. it has a second and greater office, which is to charm the soul. so characteristic of it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springs the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself. idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the greek sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic folds. truth made virtue is her work of power, and she imposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight-- "virtue in her shape how lovely," which since it first abashed the devil in paradise makes wrong-doers aware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might, such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believed with their master, plato, that should truth show her countenance unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her. the images of plato--those images in which alone he could adequately body forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude of our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness; and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in the soul. under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the passionate lover. as truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by the special act and favour of god. as beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. in these various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. it is the persuasion with which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has fastened upon him the love of later ages. he was the first to discern in truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature. so, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told in the scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the heart of man. then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with true desire. prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. at the height of hebrew genius in the personality of christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the divine reality on earth and not, as plato saw it, in a world removed, that has drawn all eyes to the judean hill. the years lived under the syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has since shone in its purity on men's gaze. it is this loveliness which needs only to be seen that wins mankind. the emotions are enlisted; and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. more men are saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. for this is achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were little to see the story of pelops' line if the emotions were not awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own play, but to form the soul. the emotional glow of the creative imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold of youth. what, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? it is the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the arch of life. emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. in the strictest sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. like plot, it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as spenser thought,--the mood, the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. it is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal movement. and as plot has its characteristic unity in the impersonal order of god's will, shown in time's event, so beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the visible creation of space. it is true that all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external, independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. it is this outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality, and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. in landscape, which is in the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted in the mood of the psalmist as declaring its creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of narcissus into the brook. the pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form and is included in it. the eye, however, governs so large a part of the sensuous field, the idea of beauty as a unity of space-relations giving pleasure is so simple, and the experience is so usual, that the word has been carried over to the life of the more limited senses in which analogous phenomena arise, differing only in the fact that they exist in another sense. thus in the dominion of the ear especially, we speak commonly of the beauty of music; but the life of the minor senses, touch, taste, and smell, is composed of too simple elements to allow of such combination as would constitute specific form in ordinary apprehension, though in the blind and deaf the possibility of high and intelligible complexity in these senses is proved. similarly, the term is carried over to the invisible and inaudible world of the soul within itself, and we speak of the beauty of sidney's act, of romeo's nature, and, in the abstract, of the beauty of holiness, and, in a still more remote sphere, of the beauty of a demonstration or a hypothesis; by this usage we do not so much describe the thing as convey the charm of the thing. this charm is more intimate and piercing to those of sensuous nature who rejoice in visible loveliness or in heard melodies; but to the spiritually minded it may be as close and penetrating in the presence of what is to them dearer than life and light, and is beheld only by the inner eye. it is this charm, whether flowing from the outward semblance or shining from the unseen light, that wins the heart, stirs emotion, wakes the desire to be one with this order manifest in truth and beauty, in the spirit and the body of things, to go out toward it in love, to identify one's being with it as the order of life, mortal and immortal; last the will quickens, and its effort to make this order prevail in us and possess us is virtue. the act through all its phases is, as has been said, one act of the soul, which first perceives, then loves, and finally wills. emotion is the intermediary between the divine order and the human will; it responds to the beauty of the one and directs the choice of the other, and is felt in either function as love controlling life in the new births of the spirit. the emotion, to return to the world of art, which is felt in the presence of imaginary things is actual in us; but the attempt is made to fix upon it a special character differentiating it from the emotion felt in the presence of reality. one principle of difference is sought in the point that in literature, or in sculpture and painting, emotion entails no action; it has no outlet, and is without practical consequences; the will is paralyzed by the fatuity of trying to influence an unreal series of events, and in the case of the object of beauty in statue or painting by the impossibility of possession. the world of art is thus thought of as one of pure contemplation, a place of escape from the difficulties, the pangs, and the incompleteness that beset all action. it is true that the imagined world creates special conditions for emotion, and that the will does not act in respect to that world; but does this imply any radical difference in the emotion, or does it draw after it the consequence that the will does not act at all? checked emotion, emotion dying in its own world, is common in life; and so, too, is contemplation as a mode of approach to beauty, as in landscape, or even in human figures where there is no thought of any other possession than the presence of beauty before the eye and soul; escape, too, into a sphere of impersonality, in the love of nature or the spectacle of life, is a common refuge. art does not give us new faculties, generate unknown habits, or in any way change our nature; it presents to us a new world only, toward which our mental behaviour is the same as in the rest of life. why, then, should emotion, the most powerful element in life, be regarded as a fruitless thing in that ideal art which has thus far appeared as a life in purer energy and higher intensity of being than life itself? the distinction between emotion depicted and that felt in response must be kept in mind to avoid confusion, for both sorts are present at the same time. in literature emotion may be set forth as a phase of the character or as a term in the plot; it may be a single moment of high feeling as in a lyric or a prolonged experience as in a drama; it may be shown in the pure type of some one passion as in romeo, or in the various moods of a rich nature as in hamlet; but, whether it be predominant or subordinate in any work, it is there treated in the same way and for the same purpose as other materials of life. what happens when literature gives us, for instance, examples of moral experience? it informs the mind of the normal course of certain lines of action, of the inevitable issues of life; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these; it is educative, and though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. so, when literature presents examples of emotional experience, it informs us of the nature of emotion, its causes, occasions, and results, its value in character, its influence on action, the modes of its expression; it breeds habits of right thinking in respect to these, and is educative; and, just as in the preceding case, though we do not act at once upon this knowledge, when the occasion arises we are prepared to act. concurrently with emotions thus objectively presented there arises in us a similar series of emotions in the beholding; by sympathy we ourselves feel what is before us, the emotions there are also in us in proportion as we identify ourselves with the character; or, in proportion as our own individuality asserts itself by revolt, a contrary series arises of hatred, indignation, or contempt, of pity for the character or of terror in the feeling that what has happened to one may happen to us in our humanity. we are taught in a more intimate and vital way than through ideas alone; the lesson has entered into our bosoms; we have lived the life. literature is thus far more powerfully educative emotionally than intellectually; and if the poet has worked with wisdom, he has bred in us habits of right feeling in respect to life, he has familiarized our hearts with love and anger, with compassion and fear, with courage, with resolve, has exercised us in them upon their proper occasions and in their noble expression, has opened to us the world of emotion as it ought to be in showing us that world as it is in men with all its possibilities of baseness, ugliness, and destruction. this is the service which literature performs in this field. imagination shows us a scheme of emotion attending the scheme of events and presents it in its general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. we go out from the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. in all literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or emotion, is a preparation for life; but this intimate experience of emotion in connection with an imagined world is a more vital preparation, and enters more directly, easily, and effectually into men's bosoms. two particular phases of this educative power should be specifically mentioned. the objective presentation of emotion in literature, as has been often observed, corrects the perspective of our own lives, as does also the action which it envelops; and by showing to us emotion in intense energy, which by this intensity corresponds to high type and important plot, and in a compass far greater than is normal in ordinary life, the portrayal leads us better to bear and more justly to estimate the petty trials, the vexations, the insignificant experiences of our career; we see our lives in a truer relation to life in general, and avoid an overcharged feeling in regard to our private fortune. and, secondly, the subjective emotion in ourselves is educative in the point that by this outlet we go out of ourselves in sympathy, lose our egoism, and become one with man in general. this is an escape; but not such as has been previously spoken of, for it is not a retreat. there is no escape for us, except into the lives of others. in nature it is still our own face we see; and before the ideal creations of art we are still aware, for all our contemplation, of the ineffable yearning of the thwarted soul, of the tender melancholy, the sadness in all beauty, which is the measure of our separation therefrom, and is fundamental in the poetic temperament. this is that pain, which plato speaks of--the pain of the growing of the wings of the spirit as they unfold. but in passing into the lives of other men, in sharing their joys, in taking on ourselves the burden of humanity, we escape from our self-prison, we leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to ourselves in order to live in lives not ours. in literature, sympathy and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick. it begins to appear, i trust, that ideal art is not only one with our nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in all things. moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need generalization, it is the same in all. it is rather a means of universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primitive feeling which they call forth. poetry, therefore, especially deals, as wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the elementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the master-spirit of all our seeing. emotion is more fundamental in us than knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules, as it influences in all. it is natural, therefore, to find that its operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned. another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions become a pleasure. aristotle's doctrine in respect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously interpreted. he regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life. it is not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life. but here we come upon darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly touched. tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending. comedy, which similarly deals with discords, is endurable only while these remain painless. both imply a defect in order, and neither would have any place in a perfect world, which would be without pity, fear, or humour, all of which proceed from incongruities in the scheme. tragedy and comedy belong alike to low civilizations, to wicked, brutal, or ridiculous types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance, and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are equally near to tears. but before leaving this subject it is interesting to observe how in the aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty, the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in all tragic art. this, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself, and especially its genesis out of life. the method by which it is built up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. but the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life; it is more than this. the mind takes the particulars of the world of sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or to the eye of sense. the pleasure which imitation gives has been often and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. it is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the difference between its created concrete and the original out of which that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind. it is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation accomplished by the mind for the senses. if the world of art were only a reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering power. in the world thus created there will remain the imperfections which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and choice. it will be said at once that all these concrete representations necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate, inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and inductive. so, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their processes, are at a disadvantage. the figures of the geometer, the quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. art, as an embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality. hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages. the course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter. at first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. the peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. nor is this attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the important fates of life, the primary emotions in their normal course, that are in the foreground of thought, but the individual is more and more, the sensational in plot, the sentimental in feeling. this tendency to detail, which is the hallmark of realism, constitutes decline. it arises partly from the exhaustion of general ideas, from the search for novelty of subject and sensation, from the special phenomena of a decaying society; but, however manifold may be the causes, the fact of decline consists in the lessened scope of the matter and the increased importance of the form, both resulting in luxuriant detail. ideas as they lose generality gain in intensity, but in the history of art this has not proved a compensation. in greece the three stages are clearly marked both in matter and manner, in aeschylus, sophocles, and euripides; in england less clearly in marlowe, shakspere, and webster. how monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, ford. in greek sculpture, passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed voluptuousness, in italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this century with us, the same stages are manifest. age parallels age. tennyson in artistic technique is virgilian, we are aware of the style; but both virgil and tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality, and the elemental in man. browning in substance is euripidean, being individualistic, psychologic, problematic, with special pleading; classicism had departed from him, and left not even the style behind. the great opposition lies in the subject of interest. is it to know ourselves in others? then art which is widely interpretative of the common nature of man results. is it to know others as different from ourselves? then art which is specially interpretative of abnormal individuals in extraordinary environments results. this is the opposition between realism and idealism, while both remain in the limits of art, as these terms are commonly used. it belongs to realism to tend to the concrete of narrow application, but with fulness of special trait or detail. it belongs to idealism to tend to the concrete of broad application, but without peculiarity. the trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a nation's effort. race-ideas, or generalizations of a compact and homogeneous people summing up their serious interpretations of life, their moral choices, their aspiration and hope in the lines of effort that seem to them highest, are the necessary matter of idealism; when these are expressed they are the greek spirit, the roman genius, great types of humanity on the impersonal, the national scale. as these historic generalizations dissolve in national decay, art breaks up in individual portrayal of less embracing types; the glorification of the greek man in achilles yields place to the corruptions of the homunculus; and in general the literature of nationality gives way to the unmeaning and transitory literature of a society interested in its vices, superstitions, and sensations. in each age some genius stands at the centre of its expression, a shining nucleus amid its planetary stars; such was dante, such virgil, such shakspere. few indeed are the races that present the spectacle of a double-sun in their history, as the hebrews in psalm and gospel, the greeks in homer and in plato. and yet, all this enormous range of life and death, this flowering in centuries of the human spirit in its successive creations, reposes finally on the more or less general nature of the concretes used in its art, on their broad or narrow truth, on their human or individualistic significance. the difference between idealism and realism is not more than a question which to choose. at the further end and last remove, when all art has been resolved into a sensation, an effect, lies impressionism, which, by its nature, is a single phase at a single moment as seen by a single being; but even then, if the mind be normal, if the phase be veritable, if the moment be that of universal beauty which faust bade be eternal, the artistic work remains ideal; but on the other hand, it is usually the eccentric mind, the abnormal phase, the beauty of morbid sensation that are rendered; and impressionism becomes, as a term, the vanishing-point of realism into the moment of sense. the world of art, to reach its last limitation, through all this wide range is in each creation passed through the mind of the artist and presented necessarily under all the conditions of his personality. his nature is a term in the process, and the question of imperfection or of error, known as the personal equation, arises. individual differences of perceptive power in comprehending what is seen, and of narrative skill, or in the plastic and pictorial arts of manual dexterity, import this personal element into all artistic works, the more in proportion to the originality of the maker and the fulness of his self-expression. in rendering from the actual such error is unavoidable, and is practically admitted by all who would rather see for themselves than take the account of a witness, and prefer the original to any copy of it, though they thereby only substitute their own error for that of the artist. this personal error, however, is easily corrected by the consensus of human nature. the differences in personality go far deeper than this common liability of humanity to mere mistakes in sight and in representation. the isolating force that creates a solitude round every man lies in his private experience, and results from his original faculties and the special conditions of his environment, his acquired habits of attending to some things rather than others open to him, the choices he has made in the past by which his view of the world and his interest in it have been determined. memory, the mother of the muses, is supreme here; a man's memory, which is the treasury of his chosen delights in life, characterizes him, and differentiates his work from that of others, because he must draw on that store for his materials. thus a man's character, or, what is more profound, his temperament, acting in conjunction with the memory it has built up for itself, is a controlling force in artistic work, and modifies it in the sense that it presents the universal truth only as it exists in his personality, in his apprehension of it and its meaning. genius is this power of personality, and exists in proportion as the man differs from the average in ways that find significant expression. this difference may proceed along two lines. it may be aberration from normal human nature, due to circumstances or to inherent defect or to a thousand causes, but existing always in the form of an inward perversion approaching disease of our nature; such types of genius are pathological and may be neglected. it may, on the other hand, be development of normal human nature in high power, and it then exists in the form of inward energy, showing itself in great sensitiveness to outward things, in mental power of comprehension, in creative force of recombination and expression. of genius of this last sort the leaders of the human spirit are made. the basis of it is still, human faculty dealing with the universe--the same faculty, the same universe, that are common to mankind; but with an extraordinary power, such that it can reveal to men at large what they of themselves might never have arrived at, can advance knowledge and show forth goals of human hope, can in a word guide the race. the isolation of such a nature is necessarily profound, and intense loneliness has ever been a characteristic of genius. the solvent of all personality, however, lies at last in this fact of a common world and a common faculty for all, resulting in an experience intelligible to all, even if unshared by them. the humanity of genius constitutes its sanity, and is the ground of its usefulness; though it lives in isolation, it does so only as an advanced outpost may; it expects the advent of the race behind and below it, and shows there its signal and sounds there its call. its escape from personality lies in its identifying itself with the common order in which all souls shall finally be merged and be at one. the limitations of genius are consequently not so much limitations as the abrogation of limits in the ordinary sense; its originality of insight, interpretation, and expression broadens the human horizons and enriches the fields within them; it tells us what we may not have known or felt or guessed, but what we shall at last understand. thus, as the theory of art is most fixed in the doctrine of order, so here it is most flexible in the doctrine of personality, through which that order is most variously set forth and illustrated. imitation, so far from becoming a defective or false method because of personality, is really made catholic by it, and gains the variety and breadth that characterizes the artistic world as a whole. the element of self which thus enters into every artistic work has different degrees of importance. in objective art, it is clear that it enters valuably in proportion as the universe is seized by a mind of right reason, of profound penetration, of truthful imagination; and if the work be presented enveloped in a subjective mood, while it remains objective in contents, as in virgil the mood pervades the poem so deeply as to be a main part of it, then the mood must be one of those felt or capable of being felt universally,--the profound moods of the meditative spirit in grand works, the common moods of simple joy and sorrow in less serious works. in proportion as society develops, whether in historic states singly or in the progress of mankind, the direct expression of self for its own sake becomes more usual; literature becomes more personal or purely subjective. if the poet's private story be one of action, it is plain that it has interest only as if it were objectively rendered, from its being illustrative of life in general; so, too, if the felt emotion be given, this will have value from its being treated as typical; and, in so far as the intimate nature of the poet is variously given as a whole in his entire works, it has real importance, has its justification in art, only in so far as he himself is a high normal type of humanity. the truth of the matter is, in fact, only a detail of the general proposition that in art history has no value of its own as such; for the poet is a part of life that is, and his nature and career, like that of any character or event in history, have no artistic value beyond their universal significance. in such self-portraiture there may be sometimes the depicting of a depraved nature, such as villon; but such a type takes its place with other criminal types of the imagination, and belongs with them in another sphere. this element of self finds its intense expression in lyrical love-poetry, one of the most enduring forms of literature because of its elementariness and universality; but it is also found in other parts of the emotional field. in seeking concrete material for lyrical use the poet may take some autobiographical incident, but commonly the world of inanimate nature yields the most plastic mould. it is a marvellous victory of the spirit over matter when it takes the stars of heaven and the flowers of earth and makes them utter forth its speech, less as it seems in words of human language than in the pictured hieroglyph and symphonic movement of natural things; for in such poetry it is not the vision of nature, however beautiful, that holds attention; it is the colour, form, and music of things externalizing, visualizing the inward mood, emotion, or passion of the singer. nature is emptied of her contents to become the pure inhabitancy of one human soul. the poet's method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that beauty and absorbing it. he identifies himself with the objects before him through his joy in them, and entering there makes nature translucent with his own spirit. shelley's ode to the west wind is the eminent example of such magical power. the three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all this limitless and majestic imagery with him, by gradual and spontaneous approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object of his invocation,-- "be thou me, impetuous one!" and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is only a spiritual meaning. so burns in some songs, and keats in some odes, following the same method, make nature their own syllables, as of some cosmic language. this is the highest reach of the artist's power of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which he is born to that divine union to which he is destined. the evolution of this one moment of passion is lyric form, whose unity lies in personality exclusively, however it may seem to involve the external world which is its imagery,--its body lifted from the dust, woven of light and air, but alive only while the spirit abides there. and here, too, as elsewhere, to whatever height the poet may rise, it must be one to which man can follow, to which, indeed, the poet lifts men. nor is it only nature which thus suffers spiritualization through the stress of imagination interpreting life in definite and sensible forms of beauty, but the imagery of action also may be similarly taken possession of, though this is rare in merely lyrical expression. the ideal world, then, to present in full summary these views, is thus built up, through personality in all its richness, by a perfected imitation of life itself, and is set forth in universal unities of relation, causal or formal, to the intellect in its inward, to the sense of beauty in its outward, aspects; and thereby delighting the desire of the mind for lucid and lovely order, it generates joy, and thence is born the will to conform one's self to this order. if, then, this order be conceived as known in its principles and in operation in living souls, as existing in its completeness on the simplest scale in an entire series of illustrative instances but without multiplicity,--if it be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,--that would be to know it as it exists to the mind of god; that would be to contemplate the world of ideas as plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. that is the beatific vision. if it be conceived in its mortal movement as a developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of god," as poe called the universe. art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot, however fragmentary, upon earth. it is a world of order clothing itself in beauty, with a charm to the soul, such is our nature,--operative upon the will to live. it is preeminently a vision of beauty. it is true that this beauty which thus wins and moves us seems something added by the mind in its great creations rather than anything actual in life; for it is, in fact, heightened and refined from the best that man has seen in himself, and it partakes more of hope than of memory. here is that woven robe of illusion which is so hard a matter to those who live in horizons of the eye and hand. yet as idealism was found on its mental side harmonious with reason in all knowledge, and on its emotional side harmonious with the heart in its outgoings, so this perfecting temperament that belongs to it and most characterizes it, falls in with the natural faith of mankind. idealism in this sense, too, existed in life before it passed into literature. the youth idealizes the maiden he loves, his hero, and the ends of his life; and in age the old man idealizes his youth. who does not remember some awakening moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? sweet was it then to learn of some jason of the golden fleece, some lancelot of the tourney, some dying sydney of the stricken field. there was a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on? in such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens and supples itself, and puts on youthful beauty; for here is its palaestra. who would blot these from his memory? who choke these fountain-heads, remembering how often along life's pathway he has thirsted for them? such moments, too, have something singular in their nature, and almost immortal, that carries them echoing far on into life where they strike upon us in manhood at chosen moments when least expected; some of them are the real time in which we live. it was said of old that great men were creative in their souls, and left their works to be their race; these ideal heroes have immortal souls for their children, age after age. shall we in our youth, then, in generous emulation idealize the great of old times, and honour them as our fair example of what we most would be? shall we, in our hearts, idealize those we love,--so natural is it to believe in the perfection of those we love,--and even if the time for forgiveness comes, and we show them the mercy that our own frailty teaches us to exercise, shall we still idealize them, since love continues only in the persuasion of perfection yet to come, and is the tenderer because it comes with struggle? whether in our acts or our emotions shall we give idealism this range, and deny it to literature which discloses the habits of our daily practice in more perfection and with greater beauty? there we find the purest types to raise and sustain us; to direct our choice, and reenforce us with that emotion, that passion, which most supports the will in its effort. there history itself is taken up, transformed, and made immortal, the whole past of human emotion and action contained and shown forth with convincing power. nor is it only with the natural habit of mankind that idealism falls in, but with divine command. were we not bid be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect? and what is that image of the christ, what is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the creative reason,--not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great tradition,--the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind? is it nevertheless true that there is falsehood in all this? that men were never such as the heart believes them, nor ideal characters able to breathe mortal air? by indulging our emotions, do we deceive ourselves, and end at last in cynicism or despair? why, then, should we not boldly affirm that the falsehood is rather in us, in the defects by which we fail of perfection, in our ignorant error and voluntary wrong? that in the ideal, free as it is from the accidental and the transitory, inclusive as it is of the common truth, lies, as plato thought, the only reality, the truth which outlasts us all? but this may seem a subtle evasion rather than a frank answer. let us rather say that idealism is one of the necessary modes of man's faith, brings in the future, and assumes the reality of that which shall be actual; that the reality it owns is that of the rose in the bud, the oak in the acorn, the planet in its fiery mist. i believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world. we forecast the future in other parts of life; why should we not forecast ourselves? would he not be thought foolish who should refuse to embark in great enterprises of trade, because he does not already hold the wealth to be gained? the ideal is our infinite riches, more than any individual or moment can hold. to refuse it is as if a man should neglect his estate because he can take but a handful of it in his grasp. it is the law of our being to grow, and it is a necessity that we should have examples and patterns in advance of us, by which we can find our way. there is no falsehood in such anticipation; there is only a faith in truth instead of a possession of it. will you limit us to one moment of time and place? will you say to the patriot that his country is a geographical term? and when he replies that rather is it the life of her sons, will you point him to human nature as it seems at the period, to corruption, folly, ignorance, strife, and crime, and tell him that is our actual america? will he not rather say that his america is a great past, a future whose beneficence no man can sum? is there any falsehood in this ideal country that men have ever held precious? did pericles lie in his great oration, and virgil in his noble poem, and dante in his fervid italian lines? and as there are ideals of country, so also of men, of the soldier, the priest, the king, the lover, the citizen, and beside each of us does there not go one who mourns over our fall and pities us, gladdens in our virtue, and shall not leave us till we die; an ideal self, who is our judgment? and if it be yet answered that this in truth is so, and might be borne but for the errors of the idealizing temperament, shall we not reply that the quack does not discredit the art of medicine, nor the demagogue the art of politics, and no more does the fool in all his motley the art of literature. must i, however, come back to my answer, and meet those who aver that however stimulating idealism is to the soul, yet it must be remembered that in the world at large there is nothing corresponding to ideal order, to poetic ethics, and that to act these forth as the supremacy of what ought to be is to misrepresent life, to raise expectations in youth never to be realized, to pervert practical standards, and in brief to make a false start that can be fruitful only in error, in subsequent suffering of mind, and with material disadvantage? i must be frank: i own that i can perceive in nature no moral order, that in her world there is no knowledge of us or of our ideals, and that in general her order often breaks upon man's life with mere ruin, irrational and pitiful; and i acknowledge, also, the prominence of evil in the social, and its invasion in the individual, life of man. but, again, were we so situated that there should be no external divine order apparent to our minds, were justice an accident and mercy the illusion of wasted prayer, there would still remain in us that order whose workings are known within our own bosom, that law which compels us to be just and merciful in order to lead the life that we recognize to be best, and the whole imperative of our ideal, which, if we fail to ourselves, condemns us, irrespective of what future attends us in the world. ideal order as the mind knows it, the mind must strive to realize, or stand dishonoured in its own forum. within us, at least, it exists in hope and somewhat in reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be nobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. but there is no such difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art presents it. what, then, is the difference between art and nature? art is nature regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be; an ordered and complete world. but this is the vision of art as the ultimate of good. idealism has also another world, of which glimpses have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the background. in the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization of evil, a universal statement of it, as in mephistopheles, or in more partial ways in iago, macbeth, richard iii. in the emotional sphere also there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the element in which these characters have their being. even in the sphere of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as his portion? so, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend life, but are developed out of it. the difference between these two poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of the other an order of death. between these two is the special province of the human will. what literature, what all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. hence tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the intermediate world of conflict. i speak of the spiritual world of man's will. we may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice. we may think of god as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is death. we do not know. but as shown to us in imagination, idealism, which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us, the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. not that prosperity follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study. so far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining and intimate foes. here is no false world, but just that world which is our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men. ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good and evil, is just this: a world of order emerging from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things that are, in selected and typical examples. it follows from this that what remains in the world of observation in personality or experience, whether good or evil, whether particular or general, not yet coordinated in rational knowledge as a whole, all for which no solution is found, all that cannot be or has not been made intelligible, must be the subject-matter of realism in the exact use of that term. this must be recorded by literature, or admitted into it, as matter-of-fact which is to the mind still a problem. earthly mystery therefore is the special sphere of realism. the borderland of the unknown or the irreducible is its realm. this old residuum, this new material, is not yet capable of art. hence, too, realism in this sense characterizes ages of expansion of knowledge such as ours. the new information which is the fruit of our wide travel, of our research into the past, has enlarged the problem of man's life by showing us both primitive and historical humanity in its changeful phases of progress working out the beast; and this new interest has been reenforced by the attention paid, under influences of democracy and philanthropy, to the lower and baser forms of life in the masses under civilization, which has been a new revelation of persistent savagery in our midst. here realism illustrates its service as a gatherer of knowledge which may hereafter be reduced to orderliness by idealistic processes, for idealism is the organizer of all knowledge. but apart from this incoming of facts, or of laws not yet harmonized in the whole body of law, for which we may have fair hope that a synthesis will be found, there remains forever that residuum of which i spoke, which has resisted the intelligence of man, age after age, from the first throb of feeling, the first ray of thought; that involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, that impotent pain,--the human debris of the social process,--which is a challenge to the power of god, and a cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. in this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as controlling the fortune of their victims, is manifest; and what answer has ever been found to the interrogation they make? it is not merely that particular facts are here irreconcilable; but laws themselves are discernible, types even not of narrow application, which have not been brought into any relation with what i have named the divine order. millions of men in thousands of years are included in this holocaust of past time,--eras of savagery, assyrian civilizations, christian butcheries, the czar yet supreme, the turk yet alive. and how is it at the other pole of mystery, where life rises into a heavenly vision of eternities of love to come? there is no place for realism here, where observation ceases and our only human outlook is by inference from principles and laws of the ideal world as known to us; yet what problems are we aware of? must,--to take the special problem of art,--must the sensuous scheme of life persist, since of it warp and woof are woven all our possibilities of communication, all our capabilities of knowledge? it is our language and our memory alike. must god be still thought of in the image of man, since only in terms of our humanity can we conceive even divine things, whether in forms of mortal pleasure as the greeks framed their deities, or in shapes of spiritual bliss as christians fashion saint, angel, and archangel? these are rather philosophical problems. but in art, as at the realistic end of the scale, we admit the portraiture, as a part of life, of the bestial, the cruel, the unforgiven, and feel it debasing, so must we at the idealistic end admit the representation of the celestial after human models, and feel it, even in milton and in dante, minimizing. the mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it is a fear. we do not know. but within the narrow range of the intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the narrow path from jerusalem and athens to the western world, we do know that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. shut within these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from god,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. it is faith, springing from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the will to live. can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit, exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge and saw the universe as we believe god sees it, he would behold it as an artistic whole even now? would it be that beatific vision, revolving like god's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see within our capacities as god sees, and hence have such faith? is art after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail powers? has idealism such optimistic reach as that? or must we see the evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of god exercised in omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. i recall newman's picture: "to consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words, 'having no hope and without god in the world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution." in the face of such a world, even when partially made intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which would have it that the universe is in god's eyes a perfect world? i can find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of christ's kingdom upon earth. art rather becomes in our mind a function of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. so much of truth there is in ruskin's statement that art made perfect denies progress and is its ultimate. but perfection in life, as ideal art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant in its fulfilment. its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the world. it thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods of their attainment under mortal conditions. the difficulty of men in respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the things of actuality. they think of it as an imagined, instead of as the real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which ought to be. in history the climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; its crests in greece, italy, and england are crests of the never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual uplifting to god of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth. there remains but one last resort; for it will yet be urged that the impossibility of any scientific knowledge of the spiritual order is proved by the transience of the ideals of the past; one is displaced by another, there is no permanence in them. it is true that the concrete world, which must be employed by art, is one of sense, and necessarily imports into the form of art its own mortality; it is, even in art, a thing that passes away. it is also true that the world of knowledge, which is the subject-matter of art, is in process of being known, and necessarily imports into the contents of art its errors, its hypotheses, its imperfections of every kind; it is a thing that grows more and more, and in growing sheds its outworn shells, its past body. let us consider the form and the contents separately. the element of mortality in the form is included in the transience of imagery. the poet uses the world as he knows it, and reflects in successive ages of literature the changing phases of civilization. the shepherd, the tiller of the soil, the warrior, the trader yield to him their language of the earth, the battle, and the sea; from the common altar he learns the speech of the gods; the elemental aspects of nature, the pursuits of men, and what is believed of the supernatural are the great storehouses of imagery. the fact that it is at first a living act or habit that the poet deals with, gives to his work that original vivacity, that direct sense of actuality, of contemporaneousness, which characterizes early literatures, as in homer or the song of roland: even the marvellous has in them the reality of being believed. this imagery, however, grows remote with the course of time; it becomes capable of holding an inward meaning without resistance from too high a feeling of actuality; it becomes spiritualized. the process is the same already illustrated in lyric form as an expression of personality; but here man universal enters into the image and possesses it impersonally on the broad human scale. the pastoral life, for example, then yields the forms of art which hold either the simple innocence of happy earthly love, as in daphnis and chloe, or the natural grief of elegy made beautiful, as in bion's dirge, or the shepherding of christ in his church on earth, as in many an english poet; the imagery has unclothed itself of actuality and shows a purely spiritual body. this growing inwardness of art is a main feature of literary history. it is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. in the beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle within the breast. achilles, aeneas, lancelot, the red cross knight are the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort. nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous, condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its tender care for all creatures, as in the scriptures; and at last the words of our lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of god, out of whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet i say unto you that even solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. shall he not much more clothe you, o ye of little faith?" such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it, and in becoming remote it grows flexible. it is only by virtue of this that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance. the imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal meaning. thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have their place in art. the actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant, just as history is in the idealization of human events. its transience, then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language. it follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language; and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot. the transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. there is a passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss need not detain attention. what is really in issue is the passing away of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. the contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. a parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy, geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. or, to take a kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the history of our system from nascent life to complete death as earths, so these ideals exhibit man's stages from savagery to such culture as has been attained. they have more than a descriptive and historical significance; they retain practical vitality because the unchangeable element in the universe and in man's nature is in the main their subject-matter. it is not merely that the child repeats in his education, in some measure at least, the history of the race, and hence must still learn the value of bravery and humility in their order; nor that in the mass of men many remain ethically and emotionally in the characteristic stages of past culture; but these various ideals of what is admirable have themselves identical elements, and in those points in which they differ respond to native varieties of human capacity and temperament. the living principles of hebrew, greek, roman, and christian thought and feeling are at work in the world, still formative; it is only by such vitality that their results in art truly survive. there has been an expansion of the field, and some rearrangement within it; but the evolution of human ideals has been, in our civilization, the growth of one spirit out of its dead selves carrying on into each reincarnation the true life that was in the form it leaves, and which is immortal. the substance in each ideal, its embodiment of what is cardinal in all humanity, remains integral. the alloy of mortality in a work of art lies in so much of it as was limited in truth to time, place, country, race, religion, its specific and contemporary part; so great is this in detail that a strong power of historical imagination, the power to rebuild past conditions, is a main necessity of culture, like the study of a dead language; an interpretative faculty, the power to translate into terms of our knowledge what was stated in terms of different beliefs, must go with this; and also a corrective power, if the work is to be truly useful and enter into our lives with effect. such an alloy there is in nearly all great works even; much in homer, something in virgil, a considerable part of dante, and an increasing portion in milton have this mixture of death in them; but if by keeping to the primary, the permanent, the universal, they have escaped the natural body of their age, the substance of the work is still living; they have achieved such immortality as art allows. they have done so, not so much by the personal power of their authors as by their representative character. these ideal works of the highest range, which embody in themselves whole generations of effort and rise as the successive incarnations of human imagination, are products of race and state, of world experience and social personality; they differ, race from race, civilization from civilization, hebrew or greek, pagan or christian, just as on the individual scale persons differ; and they are solved, as personality in its individual form is solved, in the element of the common reason, the common nature in the world and man, which they contain,--in man, "equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless"; in the unity of the truth of his spirit they are freed from mortality, they are mutually intelligible and interchangeable, they survive,-- racial and secular states and documents of a spiritual evolution yet going on in all its stages in the human mass, still barbarous, still pagan, still christian, but an evolution which at its highest point wastes nothing of the past, holds all its truth, its beauty, its vital energy, in a forward reach. the nature of the changes which time brings may best be illustrated from the epic, and thus the opposition of the transient and permanent elements in art be, perhaps, more clearly shown. epic action has been defined as the working out of the divine will in society; hence it requires a crisis of humanity as its subject, it involves the conflict of a higher with a lower civilization, and it is conducted by means of a double plot, one in heaven, the other on earth. these are the characteristic epic traits. in dealing with ideas of such importance, the poets in successive eras of civilization naturally found much adaptation to new conditions necessary, and met with ever fresh difficulties; the result is a many-sided epic development. the idea of the divine will, the theory of its operation, and the conception of society itself were all subject to change. epics at first are historical; but, sharing with the tendency of all art toward inwardness of meaning, they become purely spiritual. the one thing that remains common to all is the notion of a struggle between a higher and a lower, overruled by providence. they have two subjects of interest, one the cause, the other the hero through whom the cause works; and between these two interests the epic hovers, seldom if ever identifying them and yet preserving their dual reality. the iliad has all the traits that have been mentioned, but society is still loose enough in its bonds to give the characters free play; it is, in the main, a hero-epic. the aeneid, on the contrary, exhibits the enormous development of the social idea; its subject is roman dominion, which is the will of zeus, localized in the struggle with carthage and with turnus, but felt in the poem pervasively as the general destiny of rome in its victory over the world; and this interest is so overpowering as to make aeneas the slave of jove and almost to extinguish the other characters; it is a state-epic. so long as the divine will was conceived as finding its operation through deities similar to man, the double plot presented little difficulty; but in the coming of christian thought, even with its hierarchies of angels and legions of devils, the interpretation became arduous. in the jerusalem delivered the social conflict between crusader and infidel is clear, the historical crisis in the wars of palestine is rightly chosen, but the machinery of the heavenly plot is weakened by the presence of magic, and is by itself ineffectual in inspiring a true belief. so in the lusiads, while the conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization in the east, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility. in the paradise lost arises the spiritual epic, but still historically conceived; the crisis chosen, which is the fall of man in adam, is the most important conceivable by man; the powers engaged are the superior beings of heaven and hell in direct antagonism; but here, too, the machinery of the heavenly plot is handled with much strain, and, however strongly supported by the scriptures, has little convincing power. the truth is that the divine will was coming to be conceived as implicit in society, being providence there, and operating in secret but normal ways in the guidance of events, not by special and interfering acts; and also as equally implicit in the individual soul, the influence of the spirit, and working in the ways of spiritual law. one change, too, of vast importance was announced by the words "the kingdom of heaven is within you." this transferred the very scene of conflict, the theatre of spiritual warfare, from an external to an internal world, and the social significance of such individual battle lay in its being typical of all men's lives. the faerie queene, the most spiritual poem in all ways in english, is an epic in essence, though its action is developed by a revolution of the phases of the soul in succession to the eye, and not by the progress of one main course of events. the conflict of the higher and the lower under divine guidance in the implicit sense is there shown; the significance is for mankind, though not for a society in its worldly fortunes; but there is little attempt to externalize the heavenly power in specific action in superhuman forms, though in mortal ways the good knights, and especially arthur, shadow it forth. the celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way; though the knight's achievement is also an achievement of god's will, the interest lies in the divine power conceived as man's moral victory. in the idyls of the king there are several traits of the epic. there is the central idea of the conflict between the higher and lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the round table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate state. here, however, the externalization of the divine will in the holy grail, and, as in the christian epic generally, its confusion on the marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the sensuous sphere of merlin, are felt to be inadequate. the war of "soul with sense" was the subject-matter, as was spenser's; the method of revolution of its phases was also spenser's; but the two poems differ in the point that spenser's knight wins, but tennyson's king loses, so far as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in milton adam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as a divine issue of the action though outside the poem, so arthur is saved to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the new order coming on, for it is not so felt. the touch of pessimism invades the poem in many details, but here at its heart; for arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. he is the hero of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom of christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from beyond the barriers of the world to come. but in showing the different conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the divine will, its relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man's universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the ends of god have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the union of divine grace with heroic will,--the interpretation and glorification, of history and of man's single conflict in himself ago after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal order over its foes in the entire race-life of man. out of these changes of time, in response to the varying moods of men in respect to the world they inhabit, arise those phases of art which are described as classical and romantic, words of much confusion. it has been attempted to distinguish the latter as having an element of remoteness, of surprise, of curiosity; but to me, at least, classical art has the same remoteness, the same surprise, and answers the same curiosity as romantic art. if i were to endeavour to oppose them i should say that classical art is clear, it is perfectly grasped in form, it satisfies the intellect, it awakes an emotion absorbed by itself, it definitely guides the will; romantic art is touched with mystery, it has richness and intricacy of form not fully comprehended, it suggests more than it satisfies, it stirs an unconfined and wandering emotion, it invigorates an adventurous will; classicism is whole in itself and lives in the central region, the white light, of that star of ideality which is the light of our knowledge; romanticism borders on something else,--the rosy corona round about our star, carrying on its dawning power into those unknown infinities which embosom the spark of life. the two have always existed in conjunction, the romantic element in ancient literature being large. but owing to the disclosure of the world to us in later times, to the deeper sense of its mysteries which are our bounding horizons round about, and especially to the impulse given to emotion by the opening of the doors of immortality by christianity to thought, revery, and dream, to hope and effort, the romantic element has been more marked in modern art, has in fact characterized it, being fed moreover by the ever increasing inwardness of human life, the greater value and opportunity of personality in a free and high civilization, and by the uncertainty, confusion, and complexity of such masses of human experience as our observation now controls. the romantic temper is inevitable in men whose lives are themselves thought of as, in form, but fragments of the life to come, which shall find their completion an eternal task. it is the natural ally of faith which it alone can render with an infinite outlook; and it is the complement of that mystery which is required to supplement it, and which is an abiding presence in the habit of the sensitive and serious mind. yet in classical art the definite may still be rendered, the known, the conquered. idealism has its finished world therein; in romanticism it has rather its prophetic work. such, then, as best i can state it in brief and rapid strokes, is the world of art, its methods, its appeals, its significance to mankind. idealism, so presented, is in a sense a glorification of the commonplace. its realm lies in the common lot of men; its distinction is to embrace truth for all, and truth in its universal forms of experience and personality, the primary, elementary, equally shared fates, passions, beliefs of the race. shakspere, our great example, as coleridge wisely said, "kept in the highway of life." that is the royal road of genius, the path of immortality, the way ever trodden by the great who lead. i have ventured to speak at times of religious truth. what is the secret of christ's undying power? is it not that he stated universal truth in concrete forms of common experience so that it comes home to all men's bosoms? genius is supreme in proportion as it does that, and becomes the interpreter of every man who is born into the world, makes him know his brotherhood with all, and the incorporation of his fate in the scheme of law, and ideal achievement under it, which is the common ground of humanity. ideal literature is the treasury of such genius in the past; here, as i said in the beginning, the wisdom of the soul is stored; and art, in all its forms, is immortal only in so far as it has done its share in this same labour of illumination, persuasion, and command, forecasting the spirit to be, companioning the spirit that is, sustaining us all in the effort to make ideal order actual in ourselves. what, then, since i said that it is a question how to live as well as how to express life,--what, then, is the ideal life? it is to make one's life a poem, as milton dreamed of the true poet; for as art works through matter and takes on concrete and sensible shape with its mortal conditions, so the soul dips in life, is in material action, and, suffering a similar fate, sinks into limitations and externals of this world and this flesh, through which it must live. in such a life, mortal in all ways, to bring down to earth the vision that floats in the soul's eyes, the ideal order as it is revealed to the poet's gaze, incorporating it in deed and being, and to make it prevail, so far as our lives have power, in the world of our life, is the task set for us. to disengage reason from the confusion of things, and behold the eternal forms of the mind; to unveil beauty in the transitory sights of our eyes, and behold the eternal forms of sense; so to act that the will within us shall take on this form of reason and our manifest life wear this form of beauty; and, more closely, to live in the primary affections, the noble passions, the sweet emotions,-- "founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure, relations dear, and all the charities of father, son, and brother,--" and also in the general sorrows of mankind, thereby, in joy and grief, entering sympathetically into the hearts of common men; to keep in the highway of life, not turning aside to the eccentric, the sensational, the abnormal, the brutal, the base, but seeing them, if they must come within our vision, in their place only by the edges of true life; and, if, being men, we are caught in the tragic coil, to seek the restoration of broken order, learning also in such bitterness better to understand the dark conflict forever waging in the general heart, the terror of the heavy clouds hanging on the slopes of our battle, the pathos that looks down even from blue skies that have kept watch o'er man's mortality,--so, even through failure, to draw nearer to our race; this, as i conceive it, is to lead the ideal life. it is a message blended of many voices of the poets whom shelley called, whatever might be their calamity on earth, the most fortunate of men; it rises from all lands, all ages, all religions; it is the battle-cry of that one great idea whose slow and hesitating growth is the unfolding of our long civilization, seeking to realize in democracy the earthly, and in christianity the heavenly, hope of man,--the idea of the community of the soul, the sameness of it in all men. to lead this life is to be one with man through love, one with the universe through knowledge, one with god through the will; that is its goal, toward that we strive, in that we believe. and thou, o youth, for whom these lines are written, fear not; idealize your friend, for it is better to love and be deceived than not to love at all; idealize your masters, and take shelley and sidney to your bosom, so shall they serve you more nobly and you love them more sweetly than if the touch and sight of their mortality had been yours indeed; idealize your country, remembering that brutus in the dagger-stroke and cato in his death-darkness knew not the greater rome, the proclaimer of the unity of our race, the codifier of justice, the establisher of our church, and died not knowing,--but do you believe in the purpose of god, so shall you best serve the times to be; and in your own life, fear not to act as your ideal shall command, in the constant presence of that other self who goes with you, as i have said, so shall you blend with him at the end. fear not either to believe that the soul is as eternal as the order that obtains in it, wherefore you shall forever pursue that divine beauty which has here so touched and inflamed you,--for this is the faith of man, your race, and those who were fairest in its records. and have recourse always to the fountains of this life in literature, which are the wells of truth. how to live is the one matter; the wisest man in his ripe age is yet to seek in it; but thou, begin now and seek wisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in its light, rejoicing in it; so in this world shall you live in the foregleam of the world to come. democracy democracy is a prophecy, and looks to the future; it is for this reason that it has its great career. its faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, whose realization will be the labour of a long age. the life of historic nations has been a pursuit toward a goal under the impulse of ideas often obscurely comprehended,--world-ideas as we call them,--which they have embodied in accomplished facts and in the institutions and beliefs of mankind, lasting through ages; and as each nation has slowly grown aware of the idea which animated it, it has become self-conscious and conscious of greatness. that men are born equal is still a doctrine openly derided; that they are born free is not accepted without much nullifying limitation; that they are born in brotherhood is less readily denied. these three, the revolutionary words, liberty, equality, fraternity, are the substance of democracy, if the matter be well considered, and all else is but consequence. it might seem singular that man should ever have found out this creed, as that physical life could invent the brain, since the struggle for existence in primitive and early times was so adverse to it, and rested on a selfish and aggrandizing principle, in states as well as between races. in most parts of the world the first true governments were tyrannies, patriarchal or despotic; and where liberty was indigenous, it was confined to the race-blood. aristotle speaks of slavery without repugnance save in greeks, and serfdom was incorporated in the northern tribes as soon as they began to be socially organized. some have alleged that religious equality was an oriental idea, and borrowed from the relation of subjects to an asiatic despot, which paved the way for it; some attribute civil equality to the roman law; some find the germ of both in stoical morals. but so great an idea as the equality of man reaches down into the past by a thousand roots. the state of nature of the savage in the woods, which our fathers once thought a pattern, bore some outward resemblance to a freeman's life; but such a condition is rather one of private independence than of the grounded social right that democracy contemplates. how the ideas involved came into historical existence is a minor matter. democracy has its great career, for the first time, in our national being, and exhibits here most purely its formative powers, and unfolds destiny on the grand scale. nothing is more incumbent on us than to study it, to turn it this way and that, to handle it as often and in as many phases as possible with lively curiosity, and not to betray ourselves by an easy assumption that so elementary a thing is comprehended because it seems simple. fundamental ideas are precisely those with which we should be most familiar. democracy is not merely a political experiment; and its governmental theory, though so characteristic of it as not to be dissociated from it, is a result of underlying principles. there is always an ideality of the human spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is the main thing. the state, as a social aggregate with a joint life which constitutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of human conviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom and energy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal, whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government is no more than the mode of administration under which it achieves its results both in national life and in the lives of its citizens. all society is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations of power and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in so far, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies and strengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with the general life of men,--that universal and typical life which they have in common and which moulds them with similar characteristics. it is by this fusion of the individual with the mass, this identification of himself with mankind in a joint activity, this reenforcement of himself by what is himself in others, that a man becomes a social being. the process is the same, whether in clubs, societies of all kinds, sects, political parties, or the all-embracing body of the state. it is by making himself one with human nature in america, its faith, its methods, and the controlling purposes in our life among nations, and not by birth merely, that a man becomes an american. the life of society, however, includes various affairs, and man deals with them by different means; thus property is a mode of dealing with things. democracy is a mode of dealing with souls. men commonly speak as if the soul were something they expect to possess in another world; men are souls, and this is a fundamental conception of democracy. this spiritual element is the substance of democracy, in the large sense; and the special governmental theory which it has developed and organized, and in which its ideas are partially included, is, like other such systems, a mode of administration under which it seeks to realize its ideal of what life ought to be, with most speed and certainty, and on the largest scale. what characterizes that ideal is that it takes the soul into account in a way hitherto unknown; not that other governments have not had regard to the soul, but, in democracy, it is spirituality that gives the law and rules the issue. hence, a great preparation was needed before democracy could come into effective control of society. christianity mainly afforded this, in respect to the ideas of equality and fraternity, which were clarified and illustrated in the life of the church for ages, before they entered practically into politics and the general secular arrangements of state organization; the nations of progress, of which freedom is a condition, developed more definitely the idea of liberty, and made it familiar to the thoughts of men. democracy belongs to a comparatively late age of the world, and to advanced nations, because such ideas could come into action only after the crude material necessities of human progress--illustrated in the warfare of nations, in military organizations for the extension of a common rule and culture among mankind, and in despotic impositions of order, justice, and the general ideas of civilization--had relaxed, and a free course, by comparison at least, was opened for the higher nature of man in both private and public action. a conception of the soul and its destiny, not previously applicable in society, underlies democracy; this is why it is the most spiritual government known to man, and therefore the highest reach of man's evolution; it is, in fact, the spiritual element in society expressing itself now in politics with an unsuspected and incalculable force. democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free, equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle term that is cardinal, and the root of all. yet it is the doctrine of the equality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, and provocative more of laughter than of argument. what, then, is this equality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men among themselves? it is our common human nature, that identity of the soul in all men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of christ's death for all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equal value in the eyes of god, its creator, and had the same title to the rites of the christian church, and the same blessedness of an infinite immortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the very fountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that which levelled king and peasant, barbarian and roman, in the communion of our lord. yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birth itself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men's souls seem a play of fancy. there are men of almost divine intelligence, men of almost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and they are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity, circumstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality and wholesomeness, in the body which is her work. such differences do exist, and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which accumulates inequalities in the struggle for life, "with ravin shrieks against our creed." but we have not now to learn for the first time that nature, though not the enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soul has erected in man's own realm, peculiar to humanity. what has nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom or of fraternity? man's life to her is all one, tyrant or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her imperative physical conditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to; society itself is not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that belongs to man above the brute. her word, consequently, need not disturb us; she is not our oracle. it rather belongs to us to win further victory over her, if it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as we are now coming to control her material, powers and their operation. this equality which democracy affirms--the identity of the soul, the sameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment--draws after it as a consequence the soul's right to opportunity for self-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall be its own fulness of life. in the inscrutable mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both by inherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals, classes, and races; but the determination of democracy is that, so far as may be, it will secure equality of opportunity to every soul born within its dominion, in the expectation that much in human conditions which has hitherto fed and heightened inequality, in both heredity and circumstance, may be lessened if not eradicated; and life after birth is subject to great control. this is the meaning of the first axiom of democracy, that all have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and its early cries--"an open career," and "the tools to him who can use them." in this effort society seems almost as recalcitrant as nature; for in human history the accumulation of the selfish advantage of inequality has told with as much effect as ever it did in the original struggle of reptile and beast; and in our present complex and extended civilization a slight gain over the mass entails a telling mortgage of the future to him who makes it and to his heirs, while efficiency is of such high value in such a society that it must needs be favoured to the utmost; on the other hand a complex civilization encourages a vast variety of talent, and finds a special place for that individuation of capacity which goes along with social evolution. the end, too, which democracy seeks is not a sameness of specific results, but rather an equivalence; and its duty is satisfied if the child of its rule finds such development as was possible to him, has a free course, and cannot charge his deficiency to social interference and the restriction of established law. the great hold that the doctrine of equality has upon the masses is not merely because it furnishes the justification of the whole scheme, which is a logic they may be dimly conscious of, but that it establishes their title to such good in human life as they can obtain, on the broadest scale and in the fullest measure. what other claim, so rational and noble in itself, can they put forth in the face of what they find established in the world they are born into? the results of past civilization are still monopolized by small minorities of mankind, who receive by inheritance, under natural and civil law, the greater individual share of material comfort, of large intelligence, of fortunate careers. it does not matter that the things which belong to life as such, the greater blessings essential to human existence, cannot be monopolized; all that man can take and appropriate they find preoccupied so far as human discovery and energy have been able to reach, understand, and utilize it; and what proposition can they assert as against this sequestering of social results and material and intellectual opportunity, except to say, "we, too, are men," and with the word to claim a share in such parts of social good as are not irretrievably pledged to men better born, better educated, better supplied with the means of subsistence and the accumulated hoard of the past, which has come into their hands by an award of fortune? it is not a fanciful idea. it is founded in the unity of human nature, which is as certain as any philosophic truth, and has been proclaimed by every master-spirit of our race time out of mind. it is supported by the universal faith, in which we are bred, that we are children of a common father, and saved by one redeemer and destined to one immortality, and cannot be balked of the fulness of life which was our gift under divine providence. i emphasize the religious basis, because i believe it is the rock of the foundation in respect to this principle, which cannot be successfully impeached by any one who accepts christian truth; while in the lower sphere, on worldly grounds alone, it is plain that the immense advantage of the doctrine of equality to the masses of men, justifies the advancement of it as an assumption which they call on the issue in time to approve. it is in this portion of the field that democracy relies most upon its prophetic power. within the limits of nature and mortal life the hope of any equal development of the soul seems folly; yet, so far as my judgment extends, in men of the same race and community it appears to me that the sameness in essentials is so great as to leave the differences inessential, so far as power to take hold of life and possess it in thought, will, or feeling is in question. i do not see, if i may continue to speak personally, that in the great affairs of life, in duty, love, self-control, the willingness to serve, the sense of joy, the power to endure, there is any great difference among those of the same community; and this is reasonable, for the permanent relations of life, in families, in social ties, in public service, and in all that the belief in heaven and the attachments to home bring into men's lives, are the same; and though, in the choicer parts of fortunate lives, aesthetic and intellectual goods may be more important than among the common people, these are less penetrating and go not to the core, which remains life as all know it--a thing of affection, of resolve, of service, of use to those to whom it may be of human use. is it not reasonable, then, on the ground of what makes up the substance of life within our observation, to accept this principle of equality, fortified as it is by any conception of heaven's justice to its creatures? and to assume, if the word must be used, the principle primary in democracy, that all men are equally endowed with destiny? and thus to allow its prophetic claim, till disproved, that equal opportunity, linked with the service of the higher to the lower, will justify its hope? at all events, in this lies the possibility of greater achievement than would otherwise be attained within our national limits; and what is found to be true of us may be extended to less developed communities and races in their degree. the doctrine of the equality of mankind by virtue of their birth as men, with its consequent right to equality of opportunity for self-development as a part of social justice, establishes a common basis of conviction, in respect to man, and a definite end as one main object of the state; and these elements are primary in the democratic scheme. liberty is the next step, and is the means by which that end is secured. it is so cardinal in democracy as to seem hardly secondary to equality in importance. every state, every social organization whatever, implies a principle of authority commanding obedience; it may be of the absolute type of military and ecclesiastical use, or limited, as in constitutional monarchies; but some obedience and some authority are necessary in order that the will of the state may be realized. the problem of democracy is to find that principle of authority which is most consistent with the liberty it would establish, and which acts with the greatest furtherance and the least interference in the accomplishment of the chief end in view. it composes authority, therefore, of personal liberty itself, and derives it from the consent of the governed, and not merely from their consent but from their active decree. the social will is impersonal, generic, the will of man, not of men; particular wills enter into it, and make it, so constituted, themselves in a larger and external form. the citizen has parted with no portion of his freedom of will; the will of the state is still his own will, projected in unison with other wills, all jointly making up one sum,--the authority of the nation. this is social self-government,--not the anarchy of individuals each having his own way for himself, but government through a delegated self, if one may use the phrase, organically combined with others in the single power of control belonging to a state. this fusion is accomplished in the secondary stage, for the continuous action of the state, by representation, technically; but, in its primary stage and original validity, by universal suffrage; for the characteristic trait of democracy is that in constituting this authority, which is social as opposed to personal freedom,--personal freedom existing in its social form,--it includes every unit of will, and gives to each equivalence. democracy thus establishes the will of society in its most universal form, lying between the opposite extremes of particularism in despotism and anarchy; it owns the most catholic organ of authority, and enters into it with the entire original force of the community. this universal will of democracy is distinguished from the more limited forms of states partially embodying democratic principles by the fact that nothing enters into it except man as such. the rival powers which seek to encroach upon this scheme, and are foreign elements in a pure democracy, are education, property, and ancestry, which last has its claim as the custodian of education and property and the advantages flowing from their long possession; the trained mind, the accumulated capital, and the fixed historic tradition of the nation in its most intense and efficient personal form are summed up in these, and would appropriate to themselves in the structure of government a representation not based on individual manhood but on other grounds. if it be still allowed that all men should have a share in a self-government, it is yet maintained that a share should be granted, in addition, to educated men and owners of property, and to descendants of such men who have founded permanent families with an inherited capacity, a tradition, and a material stake. yet these three things, education, property, and ancestry, are in the front rank of those inequalities in human conditions which democracy would minimize. they embody past custom and present results which are a deposit of the past; they plead that they found men wards and were their guardians, and that under their own domination progress was made, and all that now is came into being; but they must show farther some reason in present conditions under democracy now why such potent inequalities and breeders of inequality should be clothed with governing power. universal suffrage is the centre of the discussion, and the argument against it is twofold. it is said that, though much in the theory of democracy may be granted and its methods partially adopted, men at large lack the wisdom to govern themselves for good in society, and also that they control by their votes much more than is rightfully their own. the operation of the social will is in large concerns of men requiring knowledge and skill, and it has no limits. in state affairs education should have authority reserved to it, and certain established interests, especially the rights of property, should be exempted from popular control; and the effectual means of securing these ends is to magnify the representatives of education and property to such a degree that they will retain deciding power. but is this so? or if there be some truth in the premises, may it not be contained in the democratic scheme and reconciled with it? and, to begin with, is education, in the special sense, so important in the fundamental decisions which the suffrage makes? i speak, of course, of literary education. it may well be the case that the judgment of men at large is sufficiently informed and sound to be safe, and is the safest, for the reason that the good of society is for all in common, and being, from the political point of view, in the main, a material good, comes home to their business and bosoms in the most direct and universal way, in their comfort or deprivation, in prosperity and hard times, in war and famine, and those wide-extended results of national policies which are the evidence and the facts. politics is very largely, and one might almost say normally, a conflict of material interests; ideas dissociated from action are not its sphere; the way in which policies are found immediately to affect human life is their political significance. on the broad scale, who is a better judge of their own material condition and the modifications of it from time to time, of what they receive and what they need from political agencies, than the individual men who gain or suffer by what is done, on so great a scale that, combined, these men make the masses? experience is their touchstone, and it is an experience universally diffused. education, too, is a word that will bear interpretation. it is not synonymous with intelligence, for intelligence is native in men, and, though increased by education, not conditioned upon it. intelligence, in the limited sphere in which the unlearned man applies it, in the things he knows, may be more powerful, more penetrating, comprehensive, and quick, in him, than in the technically educated man; for he is educated by things, and especially in those matters which touch his own interests, widely shared. the school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes. if politics, then, be in the main a conflict of material interests broadly affecting masses of men, the people, both individually and as a body, may well be more competent to deal with the matter in hand intelligently than those who, though highly educated, are usually somewhat removed from the pressure of things, and feel results and also conditions, even widely prevalent, at a less early stage and with less hardship, and at best in very mild forms. besides, to put it grossly, it is often not brains that are required to diagnose a political situation so much as stomachs. the sphere of ideas, of reason and argument, in politics, is really limited; in the main, politics is, as has been said, the selfish struggle of material interests in a vast and diversified state. common experience furnishes a basis of political fact, well known to the people in their state of life, and also a test of any general policy once put into operation. the capacity of the people to judge the event in the long run must be allowed. but does broad human experience, however close and pressing, contain that forecast of the future, that right choice of the means of betterment, or even knowledge of the remedy itself, which belong in the proper sphere of enlightened intelligence? i am not well assured that it is not so. the masses have been long in existence, and what affects them is seldom novel; they are of the breed that through "old experience do attain to something like prophetic strain." the sense of the people, learning from their fathers and their mothers, sums up a vast amount of wisdom in common life, and more surely than in others the half-conscious tendencies of the times; for in them these are vital rather than reflective, and go on by the force of universal conditions, hopes, and energies. in them, too, intelligence works in precisely the same way as in other men, and in politics precisely as in other parts of life. they listen to those they trust who, by neighbourhood, by sympathetic knowledge of their own state, or actual share in it, by superior powers of mind and a larger fund of information, are qualified to be their leaders in forming opinion and their instruments in the policy they adopt. these leaders may be called demagogues. they may be thought to employ only resources of trickery upon dupes for selfish ends; but such a view, generally, is a shallow one, and not justified by facts. it is right in the masses to make men like themselves and nigh to them, especially those born and bred in their own condition of life, their leaders, in preference to men, however educated, benevolent, and upright, who are not embodiments of the social conditions, needs, and aspirations of the people in their cruder life, if it in fact substantially be so, and to allow these men, so chosen, to find a leader among themselves. such a man is a true chief of a party, who is not an individual holding great interests in trust and managing them with benevolent despotism by virtue of his own superior brain; he is the incarnation, as a party chief, of other brains and wills, a representative exceeding by far in wisdom and power himself, a man in whom the units of society, millions of them, have their governmental life. no doubt he has great qualities of sympathy, comprehension, understanding, tact, efficient power, in order to become a chief; but he leads by following, he relies on his sense of public support, he rises by virtue of the common will, the common sense, which store themselves in him. such the leaders of the people have always been. if this process--and it is to be observed that as the scale of power rises the more limited elements of social influence enter into the result with more determining force--be apparently crude in its early stages, and imperfect at the best, is it different from the process of social expansion in other parts of life? wherever masses of men are entering upon a rising and larger life, do not the same phenomena occur? in religion, for example, was there not a similar popular crudity, as it is termed by some, a vulgarity as others name it, in the methodist movement, in the presbyterian movement, in the protestant movement, world-wide? was english puritanism free from the same sort of characteristics, the things that are unrefined as belong to democratic politics in another sphere? the method, the phenomena, are those that belong to life universal, if life be free and efficient in moving masses of men upward into more noble ranges. men of the people lead, because the people are the stake. on the other hand, educated leaders, however well-intentioned, may be handicapped if they are not rooted deeply in the popular soil. literary education, it must never be forgotten, is not specially a preparation for political good judgment. it is predominantly concerned, in its high branches, with matters not of immediate political consequence--with books generally, science, history, language, technical processes and trades, professional outfits, and the manifold activity of life not primarily practical, or if practical not necessarily political. men of education, scholars especially, even in the field of political system, are not by the mere fact of their scholarship highly or peculiarly fitted to take part in the active leadership of politics, unless they have other qualifications not necessarily springing from their pursuits in learning; they are naturally more engaged with ideas in a free state, theoretical ideas, than with ideas which are in reality as much a part of life as of thought; and the method of dealing with these vitalized and, as it were, adulterated ideas has a specialty of its own. it must be acknowledged, too, that in the past, the educated class as a whole has commonly been found to entertain a narrow view; it has been on the side of the past, not of the future; previous to the revolutionary era the class was not--though it is now coming to be--a germinating element in reform, except in isolated cases of high genius which foresees the times to come and develops principles by which they come; it has been, even during our era, normally in alliance with property and ancestry, to which it is commonly an appurtenance, and like them is deeply engaged in the established order, under which it is comfortable, enjoying the places there made for its functions, and is conservative of the past, doubtful of the changing order, a hindrance, a brake, often a note of despair. i do not forget the great exceptions; but revolutions have come from below, from the masses and their native leaders, however they may occasionally find some preparation in thinkers, and some welcome in aristocrats. the power of intellectual education as an element in life is always overvalued; and, within its sphere, which is less than is represented, it is subject to error, prejudice, and arrogance of its own; and, being without any necessary connection with love or conscience, it has often been a reactionary, disturbing, or selfish force in politics and events, even when well acquainted with the field of politics, as ever were any of the forms of demagogy in the popular life. intelligence, in the form of high education, can make no authoritative claim, as such, either by its nature, its history, or, as a rule, its successful examples in character. the suffrage, except as by natural modes it embodies the people's practical and general intelligence, in direct decisions and in the representatives of themselves whom it elects to serve the state, need not look to high education as it has been in the privileged past, for light and leading in matters of fundamental concern; education remains useful, as expert knowledge is always useful in matters presently to be acted on; but in so far as it is separable from the business of the state, and stands by itself in a class not servants of the state and mainly critical and traditionary, it is deserving of no special political trust because of any superiority of judgment it may allege. in fact, education has entered with beneficent effect into political life with the more power, in proportion as it has become a common and not a special endowment, and the enfranchisement of education, if i may use the term, is rather a democratic than an aristocratic trait. education, high education even, is more respected and counts for more in a democracy than under the older systems. but in a democracy it remains true, that so far as education deserves weight, it will secure it by its own resources, and enter into political results, as property does, with a power of its own. there, least of all, does it need privilege. education is one inequality which democracy seems already dissolving. what suffrage records, in opposition it may be to educated opinion, as such, is the mental state of the people, and their choices of the men they trust with the accomplishment of what is to be done. if the suffrage is exposed to defect in wisdom by reason of its dulness and ignorance, which i by no means admit, the remedy lies not in a guardianship of the people by the educated class, but in popular education itself, in lower forms, and the diffusion of that general information which, in conjunction with sound morals, is all that is required for the comprehension of the great questions decided by suffrage, and the choice of fit leaders who shall carry the decisions into effect. the vast increase of this kind of intelligence, bred of such schools and such means for the spread of political information as have grown up here, has been a measureless gain to man in many other than political ways. no force has been so great, except the discussion of religious dogma and practice under the reformation in northern nations, in establishing a mental habit throughout the community. the suffrage also has this invaluable advantage, that it brings about a substitution of the principle of persuasion for that of force, as the normal mode of dealing with important differences of view in state affairs; it is, in this respect, the corollary of free speech and the preservative of that great element of liberty, and progress under liberty, which is not otherwise well safe-guarded. it is also a continuous thing, and deals with necessities and disagreements as they arise and by gradual means, and thus, by preventing too great an accumulation of discontent, it avoids revolution, containing in itself the right of revolution in a peaceable form under law. it is, moreover, a school into which the citizen is slowly received; and it is capable of receiving great masses of men and accustoming them to political thought, free and efficient action in political affairs, and a civic life in the state, breeding in them responsibility for their own condition and that of the state. it is the voice of the people always speaking; nor is it to be forgotten, especially by those who fear it, that the questions which come before the suffrage for settlement are, in view of the whole complex and historic body of the state, comparatively few; for society and its institutions, as the fathers handed them down, are accepted at birth and by custom and with real veneration, as our birthright,--the birthright of a race, a nation, and a hearth. the suffrage does not undertake to rebuild from the foundations; the people are slow to remove old landmarks; but it does mean to modify and strengthen this inheritance of past ages for the better accomplishment of the ends for which society exists, and the better distribution among men of the goods which it secures. fraternity, the third constituent of democracy, enforces the idea of equality through its doctrine of brotherhood, and enlarges the idea of liberty, which thus becomes more than an instrument for obtaining private ends, is inspired with a social spirit and has bounds set to its exercise. fraternity leads us, in general, to share our good, and to provide others with the means of sharing in it. this good is inexhaustible and makes up welfare in the state, the common weal. it is in the sphere of fraternity, in particular, that humanitarian ideas, and those expressions of the social conscience which we call moral issues, generally arise, and enter more or less completely into political life. in defining politics as, in the main, a selfish struggle of material interests, this was reserved, that, from time to time, questions of a higher order do arise, such as that of slavery in our history, which have in them a finer element; and, though it be true that government has in charge a race which is yet so near to the soil that it is never far from want, and therefore government must concern itself directly and continuously with arrangements for our material welfare, yet the higher life has so far developed that matters which concern it more intimately are within the sphere of political action, and among these we reckon all those causes which appeal immediately to great principles, to liberty, justice, and manhood, as things apart from material gain or loss, and in our consciousness truly spiritual; and such a cause, preeminently, was the war for the union, heavy as it was with the fate of mankind under democracy. in such crises, which seldom arise, material good is subordinated for the time being, and life and property, our great permanent interests, are held cheap in the balance with that which is their great charter of value, as we conceive our country. yet even here material interests are not far distant. such issues are commonly found to be involved with material interests in conflict, or are alloyed with them in the working out; and these interests are a constituent, though, it may be, not the controlling matter. it is commonly felt, indeed, that some warrant of material necessity is required in any great political act, for politics, as has been said, is an affair of life, not of free ideas; and without such a plain authorization reform is regarded as an invasion of personal liberty of thought, expression, or action, which is the breeding-place of progressive life and therefore carefully guarded from intrusion. in proportion as the material interests are less clearly affected injuriously, a cause is removed into the region of moral suasion, and loses political vigour. religious issues constitute the extreme of political action without regard to material interests, wars of conversion being their ultimate, and they are more potent with less developed races. for this reason the humanitarian and moral sphere of fraternity lies generally outside of politics, in social institutions and habits, which political action may sometimes favour as in public charities, but which usually rely on other resources for their support. on occasions of crisis, however, a great idea may marshal the whole community in its cause; and, more and more, the cause so championed under democracy is the spiritual right of man. but fraternity finds, perhaps, its great seal of sovereignty in that principle of persuasion which has been spoken of already, and in that substitution of it for force, in the conduct of human affairs, which democracy has made, as truly as it has replaced tyranny with the authority of a delegated and representative liberty. persuasion, in its moral form, outside of politics,--which is so largely resorted to in a community that does not naturally regard the imposition of virtue, even, with favour, but believes virtue should be voluntary in the man and decreed by him out of his own soul,--need not be enlarged upon here; but in its intellectual form, as a persuasion of the mind and will necessarily precedent to political action, it may be glanced at, since law thus becomes the embodied persuasion of the community, and is itself no longer force in the objectionable sense; even minorities, to which it is adversely applied, and on which it thus operates like tyranny, recognize the different character it bears to arbitrary power as that has historically been. but outside of this refinement of thought in the analysis, the fact that the normal attitude of any cause in a democracy is that men must be persuaded of its justice and expediency, before it can impose itself as the will of the state on its citizens, marks a regard for men as a brotherhood of equals and freemen, of the highest consequence in state affairs, and with a broad overflow of moral habit upon the rest of life. that portion of the community which is not reached by persuasion, and remains in opposition, must obey the law, and submit, such is the nature of society; but minorities have acknowledged rights, which are best preserved, perhaps, by the knowledge that they may be useful to all in turn. those rights are more respected under democracy than in any other form of government. the important question here, however, is not the conduct of the state toward an opposition in general, which is at one time composed of one element and at another time of a different element, and is a shifting, changeable, and temporary thing; but of its attitude toward the more permanent and inveterate minority existing in class interests, which are exposed to popular attack. the capital instance is property, especially in the form of wealth; and here belongs that objection to the suffrage, which was lightly passed over, to the effect that, since the social will has no limits, to constitute it by suffrage is to give the people control of what is not their own. property, reenforced by the right of inheritance, is the great source of inequality in the state and the continuer of it, and gives rise perpetually to political and social questions, attended with violent passions; but it is an institution common to civilization, it is very old, and it is bound up intimately with the motive energies of individual life, the means of supplying society on a vast scale with production, distribution, and communication, and the process of taking possession of the earth for man's use. its social service is incalculable. at times, however, when accumulated so as to congest society, property has been confiscated in enormous amounts, as in england under henry viii, in france at the revolution, and in italy in recent times. the principle of paramount right over it in society has been established in men's minds, and is modified only by the social conviction that this right is one to be exercised with the highest degree of care and on the plainest dictates of a just necessity. taxation, nevertheless, though a power to destroy and confiscate in its extreme exercise, normally takes nothing from property that is not due. it is not a levy of contributions, but the collection of a just debt; for property and its owners are the great gainers by society, under whose bond alone wealth finds security, enjoyment, and increase, carrying with them untold private advantages. property is deeply indebted to society in a thousand ways; and, besides, much of its material cannot be said to be earned, but was given either from the great stores of nature, or by the hand of the law, conferring privilege, or from the overflowing increments of social progress. if it is naturally selfish, acquisitive, and conservative, if it has to be subjected to control, if its duties have to be thrust upon it oftentimes, it has such powers of resistance that there need be little fear lest it should suffer injustice. like education, it has great reserves of influence, and is assured of enormous weight in the life of the community. other vested interests stand in a similar relation to the state. these minorities, which are important and lasting elements in society, receive consideration, and bounds are set to liberty of dealing adversely with them in practice, under that principle of fraternity which seeks the good of one in all and the good of all in one. fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficiently indicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund public education as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great element of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into all parts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme and the organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in a mutual understanding and regard. it has established, too, protection in the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the state for their own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its salutary justice. it has, again, in another great field, established toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,--a respect that awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,--which as a constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized. the object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end and summary, to secure justice among mankind. justice is the most sacred word of men; but it is a thing hard to find. law, which is its social instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in the mass. it is not, like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms; its knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. it is in the main a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it may be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of difficulties. this is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches. its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on the broad scale. those matters which make individual justice impossible,--especially the element of personal responsibility in wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such considerations,--law ignores in the main question, however it may admit them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, as circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. this large part of responsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters little into the law's survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack of this rude world." death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for the protection of society, not for reformation, though the philanthropic element in the state may use the period of imprisonment with a view to reformation; nor in the history of the punishment of crime, of the vengeance as such taken on men in addition to the social protection sought, has society on the whole been less brutal in its repulse of its enemies than they were in their attack, or shown any eminent justice toward its victims in the sphere of their own lives. it is a terrible and debasing record, up to this century at least, and uniformly corrupted those who were its own instruments. it was the application of force in its most material forms, and dehumanized those upon whom it was exercised, placing them outside the pale of manhood as a preliminary to its work. the lesson that the criminal remains a man, was one taught to the law, not learned from it. on the civil side, likewise, similar reservations must be made, both as regards its formulation and operation. the law as an instrument of justice is a rough way of dealing with the problems of the individual in society, but it is effective for social ends; and, in its total body and practical results, it is a priceless monument of human righteousness, sagacity, and mercy, and though it lags behind opinion, as it must, and postpones to a new age the moral and prudential convictions of the present, it is in its treasury that these at last are stored. if such be the case within the law, what indifference to justice does the course of events exhibit in the world at large which comes under the law's inquisition so imperfectly! how continuous and inevitable, how terrible and pitiful is this aspect of life, is shown in successive ages by the unending story of ideal tragedy, in poem, drama, and tale, in which the noble nature through some frailty, that was but a part, and by the impulse of some moment of brief time, comes to its wreck; and, in connection with this disaster to the best, lies the action of the villain everywhere overflowing in suffering and injury upon his victims and all that is theirs. what is here represented as the general lot of mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and fortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always present. the sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught of vengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. the murdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. what shall one say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great curse that lies in heredity and the circumstances of early life under depraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? these brutalities, like the primeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard the name of justice. the main seat of individual justice and its operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their own conduct and modifying so far as possible the mass of injustice continually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they can give by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realm of moral opinion. but, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the law over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, there remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of the french lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar great measures of class legislation, if you will. i confess i am one of those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the structure of society itself. the process of freeing man from the fetters of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men's passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid to the door of society itself? charity, great as it is, can but alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure poverty and its attendant ills; nor can mercy, however humanely and wisely exerted, do more than mollify the misfortune that abides in the criminal. social justice asks neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutions and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry, and the hope of happiness. social justice, so defined, under temporal conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. what matters it? it is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman's dream. such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. they have been working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation has grown great in their charge. what, in brief, are the results, so clear, so grand, so vast, that they stand out like mountain ranges, the configuration of a national life? the diffusion of material comfort among masses of men, on a scale and to an amount abolishing peasantry forever; the dissemination of education, which is the means of life to the mind as comfort is to the body, in no more narrow bounds, but through the state universal, abolishing ignorance; the development of human capacity in intelligence, energy, and character, under the stimulus of the open career, with a result in enlarging and concentrating the available talent of the state to a compass and with an efficiency and diversity by which alone was possible the material subjugation of the continent which it has made tributary to man's life; the planting of self-respect in millions of men, and of respect for others grounded in self-respect, constituting a national characteristic now first to be found, and to be found in the bosom of every child of our soil, and, with this, of a respect for womanhood, making the common ways safe and honourable for her, unknown before; the moulding of a conservative force, so sure, so deep, so instinctive, that it has its seat in the very vitals of the state and there maintains as its blood and bone the principles which the fathers handed down in institutions containing our happiness, security, and destiny, yet maintains them as a living present, not as a dead past; the incorporation into our body politic of millions of half-alien people, without disturbance, and with an assimilating power that proves the universal value of democracy as a mode of dealing with the race, as it now is; an enthronement of reason as the sole arbiter in a free forum where every man may plead, and have the judgment of all men upon the cause; a rooted repugnance to use force; an aversion to war; a public and private generosity that knows no bounds of sect, race, or climate; a devotion to public duty that excuses no man and least of all the best, and has constantly raised the standard of character; a commiseration for all unfortunate peoples and warm sympathy with them in their struggles; a love of country as inexhaustible in sacrifice as it is unparalleled in ardour; and a will to serve the world for the rise of man into such manhood as we have achieved, such prosperity as earth has yielded us, and such justice as, by the grace of heaven, is established within our borders. is it not a great work? and all these blessings, unconfined as the element, belong to all our people. in the course of these results, the imperfection of human nature and its institutions has been present; but a just comparison of our history with that of other nations, ages, and systems, and of our present with our past, shows that such imperfection in society has been a diminishing element with us, and that a steady progress has been made in methods, measures, and men. no great issue, in a whole century, has been brought to a wrong conclusion. our public life has been starred with illustrious names, famous for honesty, sagacity, and humanity, and, above all, for justice. our presidents in particular have been such men as democracy should breed, and some of them such men as humanity has seldom bred. we are a proud nation, and justly; and, looking to the future, beholding these things multiplied million-fold in the lives of the children of the land to be, we may well humbly own god's bounty which has earliest fallen upon us, the first fruits of democracy in the new ages of a humaner world. it will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. in it the individual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh perfect way. in it there is the slow embodiment of a future nobly conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that is, from age to age, in man's power. it includes the universal wisdom, the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and here manhood climbs. it knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the form christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. through democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system of government or conception of man's nature and destiny, the best of men may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. democracy, as elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however obstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the ways of life. on the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest cabin of the west, to lead an american life is to join heart and soul in this cause. the ride mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. it is the child's element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks intellectually for things definite and clear. education in general through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early years at least is sensual. so it was with me: the mind's eye saw all that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world washed in colour. yet the habitual sense of mystery in man's life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage's knowledge or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the world as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or the unlighted spirit, i well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and deeply distrusted. i was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least, not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. but on my first italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of a wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when i came on deck in this water-world, we had sighted santa maria, the southernmost of the azores, and gradually we drew near to it. i shall never forget the strangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showers of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were the whitest objects i have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and i could not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me. but when, some days afterward, at the harbor of gibraltar i looked upon the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of africa, again i felt through me that unknown thrill. it was the mystery of the land. it was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the natural world. under the wild heights of sangue di christo i had dreamed that on the further side i should find the "far west" that had fled before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. since that morning in the straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain barriers of africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of a land men yet might tread as common ground. "a poet's mood"--i know what once i should have said. but mystery i then accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of our life. in many ways i had drawn near to this belief before, and i have since many times confirmed it. one occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those i have made bold to mention,--one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which i was formed and to which i shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air. i had returned to the west; and while there, wandering in various places, i went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. there a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there i had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. he flung his arms about me, with a look of the south in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like italy made real for one instant of golden time. but if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of monte beni, i soon found it was into the frontier of our western border. a herd of texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and i went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. it was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "they're wild, mind!" the next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the bad lands, to give me a new experience of the vast american land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,--brothers and friends. yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing august wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was thinly settling,--the new america growing up before my eyes! and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. and if now i recur to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they were then to us, i trust they will lose no privacy; for, as i write, i see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast. we mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "poor robin," he said, "what of him?" "poor robin sleeps in the muses' graveyard," i laughed, "in the soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. one must live the life before he tells the tale." "i loved his 'awakening,'" he replied, "and i have often thought of it by myself. and will nothing come of him now?" "who can tell?" i said, looking hard off over the prairie. "the muses must care for their own. that 'awakening,'" i went on, after a moment of wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the looking-glass," and learning only that such was its name, "was when after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human service come back on him like a flood. it was the growing consciousness of how little of life is our own. youth takes life for granted; the hand that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with life's first breath, are natural to him as christmas gifts, and bring no obligation. our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give. this was dawning on my hero then. i recall how he ran the new passion. that outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of april breathing with universal mildness through the softened air--why, you can remember the very day," i said. "it was one--" "yes, i can remember more than that," he interrupted; "i know the words, or some of them; what you just said was the old voice--tang and colour--poor robin's voice;" and he began, and i listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now were his. "by heaven, i never believed it. 'clotho spins, lachesis weaves, and atropos cuts,' i said, 'and the poor illusion vanishes; the loud laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and the wise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the idlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart of mary mother and of mary magdalen are one dust.' duly in those years the sun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils; the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. spring with its blossomed fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame of autumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude. men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and so far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doors sustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for my soul. women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among my fellows gave me their souls in keeping. how true is that which my friend said to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die,--'i tell you, you cannot escape the mercy of god;' and tears coursed down the imbruted face, and once more the human soul, that the ministers of god could not reach, shone in its tabernacle. now the butterfly has flown in at the tavern-window, and rebuked me. i go out, and on the broad earth the warm sun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern globe as when first man looked upon it; the seasons keep their word; the birds know their pathways through the air; the animals feed and multiply; the succession of day and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their order in the blue depths of infinite space; sirius has not swerved from his course, nor aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere; nature puts forth her strength in all the vast compass of her domain, and is manifest in life that continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. wiser were the ascetics whom i used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the body, but i have been an ascetic of the soul." * * * * * "_eccola!_" i said, "was it like that? but a heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a victorian page we have read together testifies. the style tames with the spirit; and wild blood is not the worst of faults in poets or boys. but i will change old coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so very different. there is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem to misbehave both at once." in fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while one or the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels and prepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steady pace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less adventurous way than i had anticipated. and so i read a page or two from the small blank-book in which i used to write, saying only, by way of preface, that the april morning my friend so well remembered marked the time when i began that direct appeal to life of which these notes were the first-fruits. the waters of the looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the earth itself, which was felt at a later time. then i saw only the outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or great strands of indian corn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; the loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were the elements i remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse of the blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over the gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown road and soil. so, with pauses for common sights and things, and some word of comment and fuller statement and personal touches that do not matter now, i read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part. "the gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby's lips; the air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses awaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child's smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not less entirely a gift. as well say a self-born as a self-made man. nature does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike are above his will--our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth, too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law of grace that went forth with the creative word. slow as men are to realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows, too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and the large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,--its mighty sheltering of mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering agencies, its driving energies. what a breaking out there is then in him of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,--filial love, patriotic duty, man's passion for humanity! it is then that he becomes a man. strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should not, in pure thankfulness, find out the giver of all good! "as soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a direct relation with the creator, did he but realize it,--not in mere thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the universe in being, 'which wields the world with never wearied love, sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,'-- felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. the extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic mood, as here in shelley's words, without any logical irreverence: for pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent, recurring in every age and race, as natural to wordsworth as to shelley, because of the fundamental character of these facts and the inevitability of the knowledge of them. the most arrogant thought of man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious life in all its forms. a mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in us, are the mere lendings of mortality like lear's rags, may come to think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to st. paul as to plato. this intimate and infinite sense of obligation finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed themselves in a special manner servants of god, and in great poets who found some consecration in their calling. they, more than other men, know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike. but in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest in the greatest. "this spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. he who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent in the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain? yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born with this thankfulness,--the feeling of helplessness. though the secret and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,-- 'closer is he than breathing and nearer than hands and feet,'-- though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in the beneficent order of god? and especially in the more strenuous trials of later ages for christian perfection in a world not christian, and under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance, protection. dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all he may become, the means of help--self-help even--and the law of it must be from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized with a thankful heart. where else shall he look except to that experience of exaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for the future, a reasonable belief in providence, and a humble readiness to accept the partial ills of life? in life's valleys, then, as on its summits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that once confided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and particularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of things he believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power with himself. in depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all life exhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing. thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with god, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aid as in the offering of thanks. the gratitude of the soul may be likened to that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praise with uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening prayer of the christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace of god to shield him through the night. these two, in all times, among all races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart. "there is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the religious life. surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with christ's commands; and he knows that the promises of christ, so far as they relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he can escape neither the ideal that christ was, nor the wisdom of christ in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. he perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption; its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish it. he is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a humanitarian. but he is more than this in such a life. if he be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters; for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the purest souls. it is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. it may well be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering caused in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. thus none--those least who are most hearts of conscience--escapes this emotion, known in the language of religion as conviction of sin. it is the earliest moral crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,--such is the nature and such the circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so runs his life to the end save for some great change. if then some restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the memory and words of christ, or from the example of those lives that were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of struggle,--in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as the man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue with christ's rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its original statement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, is what has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of the spirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it from what the servants of christ call the life of christ in them. he has become more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is now himself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he has entered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthly seal of christian faith. "yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole. a narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both in one's own conscience and in his love for others. sin is but a part of life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of advance, which i believe to be the greater part, both in individual lives of noble intention, and in the christian nations. sin loses half its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already incarnate in the spirit of great nations. "however this may be, i find on examination of man's common experience these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation between him and god: this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the christian life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences. they are simple elements: a faith in god's being which has not cared further to define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify even a resurrection; a love that has not concentrated itself through limitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love--these three. are they not sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? to theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the elementary. in setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more highly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handle the essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with much in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandons nine-tenths of his vocabulary. in the same way, learning as a child, seeking in the life of the soul with god what is normal, vital, and universal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he does not avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life, breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the seer's insight. "the spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. why should this be surprising? surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately given through others. faith that is vital is not the fruit of things told of, but of things experienced. it follows that religion may be essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to the soul. it cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable, or on books of a far-off and now alien age. these things are the tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. to the mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in other men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they cannot scrutinize. it would be a religion of authority, not of personal and intimate conviction. just as creation may be felt, not as some far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present reality. do not the heavens still declare the glory of god as when they spoke to the psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle was lit on a christian altar? if the revelation of glory and mercy be an everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in the life itself, then only is that direct relation of man with god, this vital certainty in living truth,--living in us,--this personal religion, possible. "what has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and god? the theory of the office of the holy spirit in the church expresses man's need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in his loneliness, seeking god face to face? what is its iconoclasm of image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the councils and the fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue of which it demands a freeman's right of audience, a son's right of presence with his father, and believes that such is god's way with his own? this immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours. the theories of the past respecting god's government, no longer possible in a humaner and christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence. a man may approach divine truth without them. simple and bare as the spiritual life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being the fundamental revelation of god bound up in the very nature of man which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places and ages, as the inward light. we may safely leave dogma and historical criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they naturally arise under the influence of life. "this view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the spiritual life in man as we possess. man's nature is one; and, just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul's life with god. our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives. to them belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers. yet it is because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have heard,--what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power. such were st. augustine, st. francis of assisi, st. thomas à kempis, and many a humbler name whose life's story has come into our hands; such were the apostles, and, preeminently, christ. it is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves their influence in other lives. they help us by opening and directing the spiritual powers we have in common; and beyond our own experience we believe in their counsels as leading to what we in our turn may somewhat attain to in the life they followed. it is not what they believed of god, but what god accomplished in them, that holds our attention; and we interpret it only by what ourselves have known of his dealing with us. it is life, and the revelation of god there contained, that in others or ourselves is the root of the matter--god in us. this is the corner stone." * * * * * the sun was high in the heavens when we ceased talking of these matters and saw in a lowland before us a farmhouse, where we stopped. it was a humble dwelling--almost the humblest--partly built of sod, with a barn near by, and nothing to distinguish it except the sign, "post office," which showed it was the centre of this neighborhood, if "the blank miles round about" could be so called. we were made welcome, and, the ponies being fed and cared for, we sat down with the farmer and his wife and the small brood of young children, sharing their noonday meal. it was a rude table and a lowly roof; but, when i arose, i was glad to have been at such a board, taking a stranger's portion, but not like a stranger. it was to be near the common lot, and the sense of it was as primitive as the smell of the upturned earth in spring; it had the wholesomeness of life in it. going out, i lay down on the ground and talked with the little boy, some ten years old, to whom our coming was evidently an event of importance; and i remember asking him if he ever saw a city. he had been once, he said, to--the hamlet, as i thought it, which we had just left--with his father in the farm-wagon. that was his idea of the magnificence of cities. i could not but look at him curiously. here was the creature, just like other boys, who knew less of the look of man's world than any one i had ever encountered. to him this overstretching silent sky, this vacant rolling reach of earth, and home, were all of life. what a waif of existence!--but the ponies being ready, we said our good-byes and drove on along fainter tracks, still northward. we talked for a while in that spacious atmosphere--the cheerful talk, half personal, half literary, lightly humorous, too, which we always had together; but tiring of it at last, and the boy still staying in my mind as a kind of accidental symbol of that isolated being whom my notes had described, and knowing that i had told but half my story and that my friend would like the rest, i turned the talk again on the serious things, saying--and there was nothing surprising in such a change with us--"after all, you know, we can't live to ourselves alone or by ourselves. how to enter life and be one with other men, how to be the child of society, and a peer there, belongs to our duty; and to escape from the solitude of private life is the most important thing for men of lonely thought and feeling, such as meditation breeds. there is more of it, if you will listen again;" and he, with the sparkle in his eyes, and the youthful happiness in the new things of life for us, new as if they had not been lived a thousand years before,--listened like a child to a story, grave as the matter was, which i read again from the memoranda i had made, after that april morning, year by year. * * * * * "respect for age is the natural religion of childhood; it becomes in men a sentiment of the soul. an obscure melancholy, the pathos of human fate, mingles with this instinctive feeling. the fascination of the sea, the sublimity of mountains, are indebted to it, as well as the beautiful and solemn stars, which, like them, the mind does not distinguish from eternal things, and has ever invested with sacred awe. it is the sense of our mortality that thus exalts nature. yet before her antiquity merely, veneration is seldom full and perfect; her periods are too impalpable, and, in contemplating their vastness, amazement dissipates our faculties. rather some sign of human occupancy, turning the desert into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the substance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writing beyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock a monument. the mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes england ancestral soil. nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life, handed down from generation to generation. on the western prairies i have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the land. "the sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below thought. we behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment, imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of mankind; stonehenge, indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost relics of their human charge long vanished away. startling it is, when the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in some solitary place the face of stone. i learned this lesson on the low marshes of ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown eyes of an alien and oriental faith. 'stranger, why lingerest thou in this broken tomb,' i seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of time; and still, when my thoughts seek the mother-church of christendom, they go, not to st. john lateran by the roman wall, but are pilgrims to the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone byzantine ruin that even the sea has long abandoned. "the mother-church?--is then this personal religious life only a state of orphanage? because true life necessarily begins in the independent self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past, the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in common which by association so enlarges and fortifies the individual good? why should one not behave with respect to religion as he does in other parts of life? it is our habit elsewhere in all quarters to recognize beyond ourselves an ampler knowledge, a maturer judgment, a more efficient will enacting our own choice. to obey by force is a childish or a slavish act, but intelligently and willingly to accept authority within just limits is the reasonable and practical act of a free man in society; the recognition of this by a youth marks his attainment of intellectual majority. authority, in all its modes, is the bond of the commonwealth; until the youth comprehends it he is a ward; thereafter he is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. for us, born to the largest measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. the right of private judgment, which is, i believe, the vital principle of the intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism before we would remove all questions to the court of our own jurisdiction. the mind is not a _tabula rasa_ at birth, we learn, but, so soon as may be, we will remedy that, and erase all records copied there. the treasure doors of our fathers' inheritance are thrown open to us; but we will weigh each gold piece with balance and scale. all that libraries contain, all that institutions embody, all the practice of life which, in its innocence, mankind has adopted as things of use and wont, shall be certified by our scrutiny. so in youth we say, and what results? what do the best become? incapables, detached from the sap of life, forced to escape to the intellectual limbo of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. we no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. in view of the vast variety of phases in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. pilate's question, 'what is truth?' ends all. "this is the extreme penalty of the heroic sceptical resolve in strong and constant minds; commonly those who would measure man's large scope by the gauge of their own ability and experience fall into such idiosyncrasy as is the fruitful mother of sects, abortive social schemes, and all the various brood of dwarfed life; but, for most men, the pressure of life itself, which compels them, like descartes, doubting the world, to live as if it were real, corrects their original method of independence. they find that to use authority is the better part of wisdom, much as to employ men belongs to practical statecraft; and they learn the reasonable share of the principle of authority in life. they accept, for example, the testimony of others in matters of fact, and their mental results in those subjects with which such men are conversant, on the ground of a just faith in average human capacity in its own sphere; and, in particular, they accept provisional opinions, especially such as are alleged to be verifiable in action, and they put them to the test. this is our habit in all parts of secular life--in scholarship and in practical affairs. 'if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of god,' is only a special instance of this law of temporary acceptance and experiment in all life. it is a reasonable command. the confusion of human opinion largely arises from the fact that the greater part of it is unverifiable, owing to the deficient culture or opportunity of those who hold it; and the persistency with which such opinion is argued, clung to, and cherished, is the cause of many of the permanent differences that array men in opposition. the event would dispense with the argument; but in common life, which knows far more of the world than it has in its own laboratory, much lies beyond the reach of such real solution. it is the distinction of vital religious truth that it is not so withdrawn from true proof, but is near at hand in the daily life open to all. "such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, or commerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human life in these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yield also in religion. the lives of the saints and all those who in history have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions, speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the religious life. it is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore the alphabet of letters, the arabic numerals, or the constitution; for, as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well established results of life already lived. though the religious life be personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and in it we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other parts of life. we begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, of many methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth; and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with the respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, their convictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness as enforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as he would have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship. "the question of authority in the religious life, however, is more specific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the general respect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and our dependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses, direction, and the confirmation of our experience. it is organized religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty, organized justice do, in man's communal life. there is a joint and general consent in the masses of men with similar experience united into the church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar to that of such masses united into a government with respect to secular things. the history of the church with its embodied dogmas--the past of christendom--contains that consent; and the church founds its claim to veneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered from all ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces of individuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no free constitution and no legal code can claim. to substitute the simple faith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoary and commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arrogance and folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught within the free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary, for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the church definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in a diffused state like philosophy, but as an institution like the throne or the parliament. "but may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personal life may seem, yet if it be true, the church must include this in its own mighty sum; and that what the church adds to define, expand, and elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things, not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? and in defence of a private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized social life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past of christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritual insight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society, and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? is its historic life, with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not a process of christianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birth of the world? in reading the fathers we come on states of mind and forms of emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in the history of the church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work and aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. such are no longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belonging to that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that is forever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in imperfection, we come, in the fathers and in the church, upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to be accounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in the whole of man's historic life. in view of these obvious facts, and also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are here spoken of in their total mass as the church, and of their emphasis upon such particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in a young and conscientious heart? it may seem to be partial scepticism, especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of this embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind's information and the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence. but if much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. let us own, then, and reverence the great tradition of the church; but he has feebly grasped the idea of christ leavening the world, and has read little in the records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in the church it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from living truth. "if, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the case with the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the church proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in puritan thought to god only,--then does it not usurp the function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove god to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for the vital faith? if the voice of the church is to find only its own echo in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its authority is external wholly and has nothing in common with that authority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselves embodied in an outward principle. if personality has any place in the soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits that reserve to the soul its privacy with god, to truth an un-borrowed radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the normal course of life. otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience cannot be the beginning of christian conviction, the true available test of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of god's presence within us, and, as i have called it, the vitality of the whole matter. "within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the value of the personal soul in all men,--what to us is the office of the church? in theology it defines a philosophy which, though an interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value, differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most mysterious known to thought. in its specific rites it dignifies the great moments of life--birth, marriage, and death--with its solemn sanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in which religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially it enables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with the impressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make that act, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole in manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its least groups by sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the life of entire christendom by its general feasts of christmas and easter, and, though within narrower limits, by its seasons of fasting and prayer. in its administration it facilitates its daily work among men. the church is thus a mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical action in its executive. its doctrines, however conflicting in various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound, conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods, which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and whose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their own speculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thought age after age. its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of human nature. its joys and consolations are the most precious inheritance of the heart of man. its saints open our pathways, and go before, following in the ways of the spirit. its doors concentrate within their shelter the general faith, and give it there a home. its table is spread for all men. i do not speak of the church invisible, but mean to embrace with this catholicity of statement all organizations, howsoever divided, which own christ as their head. temple, cathedral, and chapel have each their daily use to those who gather there with christian hearts; each is a living fountain to its own fold. the village spire, wherever it rises on american or english ground, bespeaks an association of families who find in this bond an inward companionship and outward expression of it in a public habit continuing from the fathers down, sanctified by the memories of generations gone, and tender with the hope of the generation to come; and this is of measureless good within such families for young and old alike. it bespeaks also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, friendly, and searching, and growing more and more unconfined; it bespeaks a rock of public morality deep-set in the foundations of the state. "it is true that in uniting with such a church, under the specific conditions natural to both temperament and residence, a man yields something of private right, and sacrifices in a greater or less degree his personality; but this is the common condition of all social cooperation, whether in party action or any union to a common end. the compromise, involved in any platform of principles, tolerates essential differences in important matters, but matters not then important in view of what is to be gained in the main. the advantages of an organized religious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable to go to the very verge in order to avail of them, both for a man's self and for his efficiency in society, just as it is to unite with a general party in the state, and serve it in local primaries, for the ends of citizenship; such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment are not to be lightly neglected. happy is he who, christened at the font, naturally accepts the duties devolved upon him, and stands in his parents' place; and fortunate i count the youth who, without stress and trouble, undertakes in his turn his father's part. but some there are, born of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is finer than tempered steel, and of the conscience of the mothers which is more sensitive than the bare nerve,--the very flower of the puritan tradition, and my heart goes out to them. and if there be a youth in our days who feels hesitancy in such an early surrender into the bosom of a church, however broadly inclusive of firm consciences, strong heads, and free hearts; if primitive puritanism is bred in his bone and blood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural to the american heart; if the spirit is so living in him that he dispenses with the form, which to those of less strenuous strain is rather a support; if truth is so precious to him that he will not subscribe to more or less than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative and uncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejected doctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowly uprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this most private part of life as to make it here something between god and him only; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out his fellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them, or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common in american youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the responsibility before god and man which he incurs, to think himself worthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties,--if in any way, being of noble nature, he keeps by himself,--let him not think he thereby withdraws from the life of christendom, nor that in the church itself he may not still take some portion of its great good. so far as its authority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religious life itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual, historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary at most, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however much he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains a christian." * * * * * there was no doubt about it; we were lost. the faint tracks in the soil had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the ponies. they did not mind; they were born to it. what solitude there was in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! what wildness was there! only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind,--and no life but ours shut in among the group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! the earth seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously i found myself thinking of childe roland's tower,-- "those two hills on the right couched,"-- and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me. that halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end. the sun was too low for further adventuring. we struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to mankind. an hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to which we drove,--a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in. we drove to the door, and called; it was long before any answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. alone on that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and hardly answered to our question of the road. she was the type of the abandonment of human life. i did not speak to her; but i see her now, as i saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be, by human life, like that. there was no one else in the house; and she shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. i have often thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some image of other solitudes--and men and women in them--as expansive, as alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows dehumanized, and dies. we drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,--a splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. at the first farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly, under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. it was then i took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with wrist and eye, while he listened. so we drove down, and knew the moon was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light, lay the long valley like a larger river. we still felt the upland, however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places, there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth--not earth as it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but earth, the soil, the element, the globe. this was in both our minds, and i had thought of it before he spoke after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since morning. "i can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to us." i say the things he said, for i cannot otherwise give his way, and that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all those years, in many a distant place, i had thought for him almost as much as for myself. "you knighted us," he said, "and we fight your cause,"--not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the lowly knights made one in him who by god's grace can speak the word. "i have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. i expected it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of nature's being a guide. poor robin, i remember, began with that." "there is a sonnet of arnold's you know," i answered, "that tells another tale. but i did not learn it from him. and, besides, what else he has to say is not cheerful. nothing is wise," i interjected, "that is not cheerful." but without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful tones,--and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,--i told him, as we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of physics. "i convinced myself," i said, "that the soul is not a term in the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for immortality, whether immortality come or not. and i have sometimes thought," i continued, "that on the spiritual side an explanation of the inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an opportunity to know god and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at least within christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one pagan civilization. material success, fame, wealth, and power--birth even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate--are insignificant, if the soul's life is thus secured. i do not mean that such a thought clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid forms. this, however, is a wandering thought. the great reversal of the law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. scientific ethics, which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. such a code is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of the secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature was constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. and if the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the least in the hope of bettering the lot of man. hence, as we are willing that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some hellenization of a roman, some romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the winds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and more populous life. such has been the history of our civilization, and still is, and must be till the whole earth's surface be conquered for mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social. this is not nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is man's laurel upon our grave. so, everywhere except in the physical sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature's will. this superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler ether, a diviner air.'" so i spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. we turned a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear, riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for miles to our eyes. at the instant, while the ponies came back upon their haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, "the looking-glass!" there it was, about a mile away before and below us, as plain as a pikestaff,--a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent, motionless,--for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass, set there in the half-darkened waste. it was evidently what gave the name to the creek, and i have since noticed the same name elsewhere in the western country, and i suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. for an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was an eerie thing--the earth-light of the moon on that side,--i saw it all the time. "the difference you spoke of," i began, with my eyes upon that spectral pool, "is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like illusion, but not itself illusion. i am not aware of any break; it is the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. life, in the soul especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation, whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that change is self-determined," i continued, making almost an effort to think, so weird was that scene before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of itself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is not a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned in almost a darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into the struggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power. in our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, we instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemed almost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in her material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the orbing of stars and the building of continents. he has used his powers of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might it happen that through his control of elemental forces and his acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying prescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for the better accomplishment of her apparent ends,--that, though unimaginable now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic motions,--chaotic in intelligence, i mean, and to the moral reason. unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward nature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscape painters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without human intention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort of elemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an object of knowledge,--a curious form of the beauty of truth." we spoke of some illustrations of this, the scene before us lending atmosphere and suggestion to the talk, and enforcing it like nature's comment. "but," i continued, "what i had in mind to say was concerning our dead selves. the old phrase, _life is a continual dying_, is true, and, once gone life is death; and sometimes so much of it has been gathered to the past, such definite portions of it are laid away, that we can look, if we will, in the lake of memory on the faces of the dead selves which once we were." instinctively we looked on the mystic glamour in the low valley, as on that lake of the dead souls i spoke of. i went on after the natural pause,--i could not help it,--"'i was a different man, then,' we say, with a touch of sadness, perhaps, but often with better thoughts, and always with a feeling of mystery. how old is the youth before he is aware of the fading away of vitality out of early beliefs? and then he feels the quick passing of the enthusiasms of opening life, as one cause after another, one hero, one poet, disclosing the great interests of life, in turn engages his heart. as time goes on, and life comes out in its true perspective, one thing with another, and he discovers the incompleteness of single elements of ardour in the whole of life, and also the defects of wisdom, art, and action in those books and men that had won his full confidence and what he called perfect allegiance, there comes often a moment of pause, as if this growth had in it some thing irrational and derogatory. the thinkers whose words of light and leading were the precious truth itself, the poets he idolized, the elders he trusted, fall away, and others stand in their places, who better appeal to his older mind, his finer impulses, his sounder judgment; and what true validity can these last have in the end? after a decade he can almost see his youth as something dead, his early manhood as something that will die. the poet, especially, who gives expression to himself, and puts his life at its period into a book, feels, as each work drops from his hand, that it is a portion of a self that is dead, though it was life in the making; and so with the embodiments of life in action, the man looks back on past greatness, past romance; for all life, working itself out--desire into achievement--dies to the man. vital life lies always before. it is a strange thought that only by the death of what we now are, can we enter into our own hopes and victories; that it is by the slaying of the self which now is that the higher self takes life; that it is through such self-destruction that we live. the intermediate state seems a waste, and the knowledge that it is intermediate seems to impair its value; but this is the way ordained by which we must live, and such is life's magic that in each stage, from childhood to age, it is lived with trustfulness in itself. it is needful only, however much we outlive, to live more and better, and through all to remain true to the high causes, the faithful loves, the sacred impulses, that have given our imperfect life of the past whatever of nobility it may have; so shall death forever open into life. but," i ended, lifting my moist eyes toward the sweep of the dark slopes, "the wind blows, and leaves the mystic to inquire whence and whither, the wild shrub blossoms and only the poet is troubled to excuse its beauty, and happy is he who can live without too much thought of life." the sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the low indistinguishable country. we drove in silence down the valley along that shelf of road under the land. the broken bluffs on the left rose into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. then fell on me and grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of slower and more awful might. the solid waste began to loom and lift, almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet through space. deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing tread of the hoofs. the lair of some mysterious presence was about us,--unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the time of temples or of gods. it seemed a corporal thing. if i stretched out my hand i should touch it like the ground. it came out from all the black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the chill air,--it was an envelopment--it would be an engulfment--horse and man we were sinking in it. then it was--most in all my days--that i felt dense mystery overwhelming me. "o infinite earth," i thought, "our unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"--"what is it?" he said, feeling my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the hand seeking him. was it a premonition? "nothing," i answered, and did not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we drove into the silent town. we put the ponies up, praising them with hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "the truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'we live each others' lives.'" that was his thanks. o brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that far prairie in his niche of earth! how often i see him as in our first days,--the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as i recall the manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways. who of us knows what he is to another? he could not know how much his life entered into mine, and still enters. but he is dead; and i have set down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find in them the dark leading of a hand. american institutions and their influence. by alexis de tocqueville. with notes, by hon. john c. spencer. entered according to act of congress, in the year , by a.s. barnes & co., in the clerk's office of the district court of the united states for the southern district of new york. advertisement. the american publishers of m. de tocqueville's "democracy in america," have been frequently solicited to furnish the work in a form adapted to seminaries of learning, and at a price which would secure its more general circulation, and enable trustees of school district libraries, and other libraries, to place it among their collections. desirous to attain these objects, they have consulted several gentlemen, in whose judgment they confided, and particularly the editor of the american editions, to ascertain whether the work was capable of abridgment or condensation, so as to bring the expense of its publication within the necessary limits. they are advised that the nature of the work renders it impossible to condense it by omitting any remarks or illustrations of the author upon any subject discussed by him, even if common justice to him did not forbid any such attempt; and that the only mode of reducing its bulk, is to exclude wholly such subjects as are deemed not to be essential. it will be recollected that the first volume was originally published separately, and was complete in itself. it treated of the influence of democracy upon the political institutions of the united states, and exhibited views of the nature of our government, and of their complicated machinery, so new, so striking, and so just, as to excite the admiration and even the wonder of our countrymen. it was universally admitted to be the best, if not the first systematic and philosophic view of the great principles of our constitutions which has been presented to the world. as a treatise upon the spirit of our governments, it was full and finished, and was deemed worthy of being introduced as a text-book in some of our seminaries of learning. the publication of the first volume alone would therefore seem to be sufficient to accomplish in the main the objects of the publishers above stated. and upon a careful re-examination of the second volume, this impression is confirmed. it is entirely independent of the first volume, and is in no way essential to a full understanding of the principles and views contained in that volume. it discusses the effects of the democratic principle upon the tastes, feelings, habits, and manners of the americans; and although deeply interesting and valuable, yet the observations of the author on these subjects are better calculated for foreign countries than for our own citizens. as he wrote for europe they were necessary to his plan. they follow naturally and properly the profound views which had already been presented, and which they carry out and illustrate. but they furnish no new developments of those views, nor any facts that would be new to us. the publishers were therefore advised that the printing of the first volume complete and entire, was the only mode of attaining the object they had in view. they have accordingly determined to adopt that course, intending, if the public sentiment should require it, hereafter to print the second volume in the same style, so that both may be had at the same moderate price. a few notes, in addition to those contained in the former editions, have been made by the american editor, which upon a reperusal of the volume seemed useful if not necessary: and some statistical results of the census of have been added, in connection with similar results given by the author from returns previous to that year. preface to the american edition. the following work of m. de tocqueville has attracted great attention throughout europe, where it is universally regarded as a sound, philosophical, impartial, and remarkably clear and distinct view of our political institutions, and of our manners, opinions, and habits, as influencing or influenced by those institutions. writers, reviewers, and statesmen of all parties, have united in the highest commendations of its ability and integrity. the people, described by a work of such a character, should not be the only one in christendom unacquainted with its contents. at least, so thought many of our most distinguished men, who have urged the publishers of this edition to reprint the work, and present it to the american public. they have done so in the hope of promoting among their countrymen a more thorough knowledge of their frames of government, and a more just appreciation of the great principles on which they are founded. but it seemed to them that a reprint in america of the views of an author so well entitled to regard and confidence, without any correction of the few errors or mistakes that might be found, would be in effect to give authenticity to the whole work, and that foreign readers, especially, would consider silence, under such circumstances, as strong evidence of the accuracy of its statements. the preface to the english edition, too, was not adapted to this country, having been written, as it would seem, in reference to the political questions which agitate great britain. the publishers, therefore, applied to the writer of this, to furnish them with a short preface, and such notes upon the text as might appear necessary to correct any erroneous impressions. having had the honor of a personal acquaintance with m. de tocqueville while he was in this country; having discussed with him many of the topics treated of in this book; having entered deeply into the feelings and sentiments which guided and impelled him in his task, and having formed a high admiration of his character and of this production, the writer felt under some obligation to aid in procuring for one whom he ventures to call his friend, a hearing from those who were the subjects of his observations. these circumstances furnish to his own mind an apology for undertaking what no one seemed willing to attempt, notwithstanding his want of practice in literary composition, and notwithstanding the impediments of professional avocations, constantly recurring, and interrupting that strict and continued examination of the work, which became necessary, as well to detect any errors of the author, as any misunderstanding or misrepresentation of his meaning by his translator. if the same circumstances will atone in the least for the imperfections of what the editor has contributed to this edition, and will serve to mitigate the severity of judgment upon those contributions, it is all he can hope or ask. the notes are confined, with very few exceptions, to the correction of what appeared to be misapprehensions of the author in regard to some matters of fact, or some principles of law, and to explaining his meaning where the translator had misconceived it. for the latter purpose the original was consulted; and it affords great pleasure to bear witness to the general fidelity with which mr. reeve has transferred the author's ideas from french into english. he has not been a literal translator, and this has been the cause of the very few errors which have been discovered: but he has been more and better: he has caught the spirit of m. de tocqueville, has understood the sentiment he meant to express, and has clothed it in the language which m. de tocqueville would have himself used, had he possessed equal facility in writing the english language. being confined to the objects before mentioned, the reader will not find any comments on the theoretical views of our author. he has discussed many subjects on which very different opinions are entertained in the united states; but with an ability, a candor, and an evident devotion to the cause of truth, which will commend his views to those who most radically dissent from them. indeed, readers of the most discordant opinions will find that he frequently agrees with both sides, and as frequently differs from them. as an instance, his remarks on slavery will not be found to coincide throughout with the opinions either of abolitionists or of slaveholders: but they will be found to present a masterly view of a most perplexing and interesting subject, which seems to cover the whole ground, and to lead to the melancholy conclusion of the utter impotency of human effort to eradicate this acknowledged evil. but on this, and on the various topics of the deepest interest which are discussed in this work, it was thought that the american readers would be fully competent to form their own opinions, and to detect any errors of the author, if such there are, without any attempt of the present editor to enlighten them. at all events, it is to be hoped that the citizens of the united states will patiently read, and candidly consider, the views of this accomplished foreigner, however hostile they may be to their own preconceived opinions or prejudices. he says: "there are certain truths which americans can only learn from strangers, or from experience." let us, then, at least listen to one who admires us and our institutions, and whose complaints, when he makes any, are, that we have not perfected our own glorious plans, and that there are some things yet to be amended. we shall thus furnish a practical proof, that public opinion in this country is not so intolerant as the author may be understood to represent it. however mistaken he may be, his manly appeal to our understandings and to our consciences, should at least be heard. "if ever," he says, "these lines are read in america, i am well assured of two things: in the first place, that all who peruse them will raise their voice to condemn me; and, in the second place, that very many of them will acquit me at the bottom of their consciences." he is writing on that very sore subject, the tyranny of public opinion in the united states. fully to comprehend the scope of the present work, the author's motive and object in preparing it should be distinctly kept in view. he has written, not for america, but for france. "it was not, then, merely to satisfy a legitimate curiosity," he says, "that i have examined america: my wish has been to find instruction, by which we might ourselves profit."--"i sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to hope or fear from its progress." he thinks that the principle of democracy has sprung into new life throughout europe, and particularly in france, and that it is advancing: with a firm and steady march to the control of all civilized governments. in his own country, he had seen a recent attempt to repress its energies within due bounds, and to prevent the consequences of its excesses. and it seems to be a main object with him, to ascertain whether these bounds can be relied upon; whether the dikes and embankments of human contrivance can keep within any appointed channel this mighty and majestic stream. giving the fullest confidence to his declaration, that his book "is written to favor no particular views and with no design of serving or attacking any party," it is yet evident that his mind has been very open to receive impressions unfavorable to the admission into france of the unbounded and unlimited democracy which reigns in these united states. a knowledge of this inclination of his mind will necessarily induce some caution in his readers, while perusing those parts of the work which treat of the effects of our democracy upon the stability of our government and its administration. while the views of the author, respecting the application of the democratic principle, in the extent that it exists with us, to the institutions of france, or to any of the european nations, are of the utmost importance to the people and statesmen of those countries, they are scarcely less entitled to the attention of americans. he has exhibited, with admirable skill, the causes and circumstances which prepared our forefathers, gradually, for the enjoyment of free institutions, and which enable them to sustain, without abusing, the utmost liberty that was ever enjoyed by any people. in tracing these causes, in examining how far they continue to influence our conduct, manners, and opinions, and in searching for the means of preventing their decay or destruction, the intelligent american reader will find no better guide than m. de tocqueville. fresh from the scenes of the "three days" revolution in france, the author came among us to observe, carefully and critically, the operation of the new principle on which the happiness of his country, and, as he seems to believe, the destinies of the civilized world, depend. filled with the love of liberty, but remembering the atrocities which, in its name, had been committed under former dynasties at home, he sought to discover the means by which it was regulated in america, and reconciled with social order. by his laborious investigations, and minute observations of the history of the settlement of the country, and of its progress through the colonial state to independence, he found the object of his inquiry in the manners, habits, and opinions, of a people who had been gradually prepared, by a long course of peculiar circumstances, and by their local position, for self-government; and he has explained, with a pencil of light, the mystery that has baffled europeans and perplexed americans. he exhibits us, in our present condition, a new, and to europeans, a strange people. his views of our political institutions are more general, comprehensive, and philosophic than have been presented by any writer, domestic or foreign. he has traced them from their source, democracy--the power of the people--and has steadily pursued this foundation-principle in all its forms and modifications: in the frame of our governments, in their administration by the different executives, in our legislation, in the arrangement of our judiciary, in our manners, in religion, in the freedom and licentiousness of the press, in the influence of public opinion, and in various subtle recesses, where its existence was scarcely suspected. in all these, he analyzes and dissects the tendencies of democracy; heartily applauds where he can, and faithfully and independently gives warning of dangers that he foresees. no one can read the result of his observations without better and clearer perceptions of the structure of out governments, of the great pillars on which they rest, and of the dangers to which they are exposed: nor without a more profound and more intelligent admiration of the harmony and beauty of their formation, and of the safeguards provided for preserving and transmitting them to a distant posterity. the more that general and indefinite notions of our own liberty, greatness, happiness, &c., are made to give place to precise and accurate knowledge of the true merits of our institutions, the peculiar objects they are calculated to attain or promote, and the means provided for that purpose, the better will every citizen be enabled to discharge his great political duty of guarding those means against the approach of corruption, and of sustaining them against the violence of party commotions. no foreigner has ever exhibited such a deep, clear, and correct insight of the machinery of our complicated systems of federal and state governments. the most intelligent europeans are confounded with our _imperium in imperio_; and their constant wonder is, that these systems are not continually jostling each other. m. de tocqueville has clearly perceived, and traced correctly and distinctly, the orbits in which they move, and has described, or rather defined, our federal government, with an accurate precision, unsurpassed even by an american pen. there is no citizen of this country who will not derive instruction from our author's account of our national government, or, at least, who will not find his own ideas systematised, and rendered more fixed and precise, by the perusal of that account. among other subjects discussed by the author, that of the _political influence_ of the institution of trial by jury, is one of the most curious and interesting. he has certainly presented it in a light entirely new, and as important as it is new. it may be that he has exaggerated its influence as "a gratuitous public school;" but if he has, the error will be readily forgiven. his views of religion, as connected with patriotism, in other words, with the democratic principle, which he steadily keeps in view, are conceived in the noblest spirit of philanthropy, and cannot fail to confirm the principles already so thoroughly and universally entertained by the american people. and no one can read his observations on the union of "church and state," without a feeling of deep gratitude to the founders of our government, for saving us from such a prolific source of evil. these allusions to topics that have interested the writer, are not intended as an enumeration of the various subjects which will arrest the attention of the american reader. they have been mentioned rather with a view of exciting an appetite for the whole feast, than as exhibiting the choice dainties which cover the board. it remains only to observe, that in this edition the constitutions of the united states and of the state of new york, which had been published at large in the original and in the english edition, have been omitted, as they are documents to which every american reader has access. the map which the author annexed to his work, and which has been hitherto omitted, is now for the first time inserted in the american edition, to which has been added the census of . table of contents. preface by the american editor introduction chapter i. exterior form of north america chapter ii. origin of the anglo-americans, and its importance in relation to their future condition reasons of certain anomalies which the laws and customs of the anglo-americans present chapter iii. social condition of the anglo-americans the striking characteristic of the social condition of the anglo-americans is its essential democracy political consequences of the social condition of the anglo-americans chapter iv. the principle of the sovereignty of the people in america chapter v. necessity of examining the condition of the states before that of the union at large the american system of townships and municipal bodies limits of the townships authorities of the township in new england existence of the township public spirit of the townships of new england the counties of new england administration in new england general remarks on the administration of the united states of the state legislative power of the state the executive power of the state political effects of the system of local administration in the united states chapter vi. judicial power in the united states, and its influence on political society other powers granted to the american judges chapter vii. political jurisdiction in the united states chapter viii. the federal constitution history of the federal constitution summary of the federal constitution prerogative of the federal government federal powers legislative powers a farther difference between the senate and the house of representatives the executive power differences between the position of the president of the united states and that of a constitutional king of france. accidental causes which may increase the influence of the executive government why the president of the united states does not require the majority of the two houses in order to carry on the government election of the president mode of election crisis of the election re-election of the president federal courts means of determining the jurisdiction of the federal courts different cases of jurisdiction procedure of the federal courts high rank of the supreme courts among the great powers of the state in what respects the federal constitution is superior to that of the states characteristics which distinguish the federal constitution of the united states of america from all other federal constitutions advantages of the federal system in general, and its special utility in america why the federal system is not adapted to all peoples, and how the anglo-americans were enabled to adopt it chapter ix. why the people may strictly be said to govern in the united states chapter x. parties in the united states remains of the aristocratic party in the united states chapter xi. liberty of the press in the united states chapter xii. political associations in the united states chapter xiii. government of the democracy in america universal suffrage choice of the people, and instinctive preferences of the american democracy causes which may partly correct the tendencies of the democracy influence which the american democracy has exercised on the laws relating to elections public officers under the control of the democracy in america arbitrary power of magistrates under the rule of the american democracy instability of the administration in the united states charges levied by the state under the rule of the american democracy tendencies of the american democracy as regards the salaries of public officers difficulties of distinguishing the causes which contribute to the economy of the american government whether the expenditure of the united states can be compared to that of france corruption and vices of the rulers in a democracy, and consequent effects upon public morality efforts of which a democracy is capable self-control of the american democracy conduct of foreign affairs, by the american democracy chapter xiv. what the real advantages are which american society derives from the government of the democracy general tendency of the laws under the rule of the american democracy, and habits of those who apply them public spirit in the united states notion of rights in the united states respect for the law in the united states activity which pervades all the branches of the body politic in the united states; influence which it exercises upon society chapter xv. unlimited power of the majority in the united states, and its consequences how the unlimited power of the majority increases in america, the instability of legislation inherent in democracy tyranny of the majority effects of the unlimited power of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of the american public officers power exercised by the majority in america upon public opinion effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the americans the greatest dangers of the american republics proceed from the unlimited power of the majority chapter xvi. causes which mitigate the tyranny of the majority in the united states absence of central administration the profession of the law in the united states serves to counterpoise the democracy trial by jury in the united states considered as a political institution chapter xvii. principal causes which tend to maintain the democratic republic in the united states accidental or providential causes which contribute to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states influence of the laws upon the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states influence of manners upon the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states religion considered as a political institution, which powerfully contributes to the maintenance of the democratic republic among the americans indirect influence of religious opinions upon political society in the united states principal causes which render religion powerful in america how the instruction, the habits, and the practical experience of the americans, promote the success of their democratic institutions the laws contribute more to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states than the physical circumstances of the country, and the manners more than the laws whether laws and manners are sufficient to maintain democratic institutions in other countries beside america importance of what precedes with respect to the state of europe chapter xviii. the present and probable future condition of the three races which inhabit the territory of the united states the present and probable future condition of the indian tribes which inhabit the territory possessed by the union situation of the black population in the united states, and dangers with which its presence threatens the whites what are the chances in favor of the duration of the american union, and what dangers threaten it of the republican institutions of the united states, and what their chances of duration are reflections on the causes of the commercial prosperity of the united states conclusion appendix introduction. among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the united states, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. i readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society, by giving a certain direction to public opinion, and a certain tenor to the laws; by imparting new maxims to the governing powers, and peculiar habits to the governed. i speedily perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less empire over civil society than over the government; it creates opinions, engenders sentiments, the ordinary practices of life, and modifies whatever it does not produce. the more i advanced in the study of american society, the more i perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. i then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, where i imagined that i discerned something analogous to the spectacle which the new world presented to me. i observed that the equality of conditions is daily advancing towards those extreme limits which it seems to have reached in the united states; and that the democracy which governs the american communities, appears to be rapidly rising into power in europe. i hence conceived the idea of the book which is now before the reader. it is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on among us; but there are two opinions as to its nature and consequences. to some it appears to be a novel accident, which as such may still be checked; to others it seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history. let us recollect the situation of france seven hundred years ago, when the territory was divided among a small number of families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the inhabitants; the right of governing descended with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which man could act on man; and landed property was the sole source of power. soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded, and began to exert itself; the clergy opened its ranks to all classes, to the poor and the rich, the villain and the lord; equality penetrated into the government through the church, and the being who, as a serf, must have vegetated in perpetual bondage, took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and not unfrequently above the heads of kings. the different relations of men became more complicated and more numerous, as society gradually became more stable and more civilized. thence the want of civil laws was felt; and the order of legal functionaries soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of the feudal barons in their ermine and their mail. while the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce. the influence of money began to be perceptible in state affairs. the transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised. gradually the spread of mental acquirements, and the increasing taste for literature and art, opened chances of success to talent; science became the means of government, intelligence led to social power, and the man of letters took a part in the affairs of the state. the value attached to the privileges of birth, decreased in the exact proportion in which new paths were struck out to advancement. in the eleventh century nobility was beyond all price; in the thirteenth it might be purchased; it was conferred for the first time in ; and equality was thus introduced into the government by the aristocracy itself. in the course of these seven hundred years, it sometimes happened that, in order to resist the authority of the crown, or to diminish the power of their rivals, the nobles granted a certain share of political rights to the people. or, more frequently the king permitted the lower orders to enjoy a degree of power, with the intention of repressing the aristocracy. in france the kings have always been the most active and the most constant of levellers. when they were strong and ambitious, they spared no pains to raise the people to the level of the nobles; when they were temperate or weak, they allowed the people to rise above themselves. some assisted the democracy by their talents, others by their vices. louis xi. and louis xiv. reduced every rank beneath the throne to the same subjection; louis xv. descended, himself and all his court, into the dust. as soon as land was held on any other than a feudal tenure, and personal property began in its turn to confer influence and power, every improvement which was introduced in commerce or manufacture, was a fresh element of the equality of conditions. henceforward every new discovery, every new want which it engendered, and every new desire which craved satisfaction, was a step toward the universal level. the taste for luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, the most superficial, as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, co-operated to enrich the poor and to impoverish the rich. from the time when the exercise of the intellect became the source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea, as a germe of power placed within the reach of the people. poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilisation and knowledge; and literature became an arsenal, where the poorest and weakest could always find weapons to their hand. in perusing the pages of our history, we shall scarcely meet with a single great event, in the lapse of seven hundred years, which has not turned to the advantage of equality. the crusades and the wars of the english decimated the nobles, and divided their possessions; the erection of communes introduced an element of democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of firearms equalized the villain and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post was organized so as to bring the same information to the door of the poor man's cottage and to the gate of the palace; and protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. the discovery of america offered a thousand new paths to fortune, and placed riches and power within the reach of the adventurous and the obscure. if we examine what has happened in france at intervals of fifty years, beginning with the eleventh century, we shall invariably perceive that a twofold revolution has taken place in the state of society. the noble has gone down on the social ladder, and the _roturier_ has gone up; the one descends as the other rises. every half-century brings them nearer to each other, and they will very shortly meet. nor is this phenomenon at all peculiar to france. whithersoever we turn our eyes, we shall discover the same continual revolution throughout the whole of christendom. the various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy; all men have aided it by their exertions; those who have intentionally labored in its cause, and those who have served it unwittingly--those who have fought for it, and those who have declared themselves its opponents--have all been driven along in the same track, have all labored to one end, some ignorantly, and some unwillingly; all have been blind instruments in the hands of god. the gradual development of the equality of conditions is, therefore, a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress. would it, then, be wise to imagine that a social impulse which dates from so far back, can be checked by the efforts of a generation? is it credible that the democracy which has annihilated the feudal system, and vanquished kings, will respect the citizen and the capitalist? will it stop now that it has grown so strong and its adversaries so weak? none can say which way we are going, for all terms of comparison are wanting: the equality of conditions is more complete in the christian, countries of the present day, than it has been at any time, or in any part of the world; so that the extent of what already exists prevents us from foreseeing what may be yet to come. the whole book which is here offered to the public, has been written under the impression of a kind of religious dread, produced in the author's mind by the contemplation of so irresistible a revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of such amazing obstacles, and which is still proceeding in the midst of the ruins it has made. it is not necessary that god himself should speak in order to disclose to us the unquestionable signs of his will; we can discern them in the habitual course of nature, and in the invariable tendency of events; i know, without a special revelation, that the planets move in the orbits traced by the creator's fingers. if the men of our time were led by attentive observation and by sincere reflection, to acknowledge that the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and future of their history, this solitary truth would confer the sacred character of a divine decree upon the change. to attempt to check democracy would be in that case to resist the will of god; and the nations would then be constrained to make the best of the social lot awarded to them by providence. the christian nations of our age seem to me to present a most alarming spectacle; the impulse which is bearing them along is so strong that it cannot be stopped, but it is not yet so rapid that it cannot be guided: their fate is in their hands; yet a little while and it may be so no longer. the first duty which is at this time imposed upon those who direct our affairs is to educate the democracy; to warm its faith, if that be possible; to purify its morals; to direct its energies; to substitute a knowledge of business for its inexperience, and an acquaintance with its true interests for its blind propensities; to adapt its government to time and place, and to modify it in compliance with the occurrences and the actors of the age. a new science of politics is indispensable to a new world. this, however, is what we think of least; launched in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins which may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current sweeps us along, and drives us backward toward the gulf. in no country in europe has the great social revolution which i have been describing, made such rapid progress as in france; but it has always been borne on by chance. the heads of the state have never had any forethought for its exigences, and its victories have been obtained without their consent or without their knowledge. the most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most moral classes of the nation have never attempted to connect themselves with it in order to guide it. the people have consequently been abandoned to its wild propensities, and it has grown up like those outcasts who receive their education in the public streets, and who are unacquainted with aught but the vices and wretchedness of society. the existence of a democracy was seemingly unknown, when, on a sudden, it took possession of the supreme power. everything was then submitted to its caprices; it was worshipped as the idol of strength; until, when it was enfeebled by its own excesses, the legislator conceived the rash project of annihilating its power, instead of instructing it and correcting its vices; no attempt was made to fit it to govern, but all were bent on excluding it from the government. the consequence of this has been that the democratic revolution has been effected only in the material parts of society, without that concomitant change in laws, ideas, customs, and manners, which was necessary to render such a revolution beneficial. we have gotten a democracy, but without the conditions which lessen its vices, and render its natural advantages more prominent; and although we already perceive the evils it brings, we are ignorant of the benefits it may confer. while the power of the crown, supported by the aristocracy, peaceably governed the nations of europe, society possessed, in the midst of its wretchedness, several different advantages which can now scarcely be appreciated or conceived. the power of a part of his subjects was an insurmountable barrier to the tyranny of the prince; and the monarch who felt the almost divine character which he enjoyed in the eyes of the multitude, derived a motive for the just use of his power from the respect which he inspired. high as they were placed above the people, the nobles could not but take that calm and benevolent interest in its fate which the shepherd feels toward his flock; and without acknowledging the poor as their equals, they watched over the destiny of those whose welfare providence had intrusted to their care. the people, never having conceived the idea of a social condition different from its own, and entertaining no expectation of ever ranking with its chiefs, received benefits from them without discussing their rights. it grew attached to them when they were clement and just, but it submitted without resistance or servility to their exactions, as to the inevitable visitations of the arm of god. custom, and the manners of the time, had moreover created a species of law in the midst of violence, and established certain limits to oppression. as the noble never suspected that any one would attempt to deprive him of the privileges which he believed to be legitimate, and as the serf looked upon his own inferiority as a consequence of the immutable order of nature, it is easy to imagine that a mutual exchange of good-will took place between two classes so differently gifted by fate. inequality and wretchedness were then to be found in society; but the souls of neither rank of men were degraded. men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience; but by the exercise of power which they believe to be illegal, and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive. on one side were wealth, strength, and leisure, accompanied by the refinement of luxury, the elegance of taste, the pleasures of wit, and the religion of art. on the other were labor, and a rude ignorance; but in the midst of this coarse and ignorant multitude, it was not uncommon to meet with energetic passions, generous sentiments, profound religious convictions, and independent virtues. the body of a state thus organized, might boast of its stability, its power, and above all, of its glory. but the scene is now changed, and gradually the two ranks mingle; the divisions which once severed mankind, are lowered; property is divided, power is held in common, the light of intelligence spreads, and the capacities of all classes are equally cultivated; the state becomes democratic, and the empire of democracy is slowly and peaceably introduced into the institutions and manners of the nation. i can conceive a society in which all men would profess an equal attachment and respect for the laws of which they are the common authors; in which the authority of the state would be respected as necessary, though not as divine; and the loyalty of the subject to the chief magistrate would not be a passion, but a quiet and rational persuasion. every individual being in the possession of rights which he is sure to retain, a kind of manly reliance and reciprocal courtesy would arise between all classes, alike removed from pride and meanness. the people, well acquainted with its true interests, would allow, that in order to profit by the advantages of society, it is necessary to satisfy its demands. in this state of things, the voluntary association of the citizens might supply the individual exertions of the nobles, and the community would be alike protected from anarchy and from oppression. i admit that in a democratic state thus constituted, society will not be stationary; but the impulses of the social body may be regulated and directed forward; if there be less splendor than in the halls of an aristocracy, the contrast of misery will be less frequent also; the pleasures of enjoyment may be less excessive, but those of comfort will be more general; the sciences may be less perfectly cultivated, but ignorance will be less common; the impetuosity of the feelings will be repressed, and the habits of the nation softened; there will be more vices and fewer crimes. in the absence of enthusiasm and of an ardent faith, great sacrifices may be obtained from the members of a commonwealth by an appeal to their understandings and their experience: each individual will feel the same necessity for uniting with his fellow-citizens to protect his own weakness; and as he knows that if they are to assist he must co-operate, he will readily perceive that his personal interest is identified with the interest of the community. the nation, taken as a whole, will be less brilliant, less glorious, and perhaps less strong; but the majority of the citizens will enjoy a greater degree of prosperity, and the people will remain quiet, not because it despairs of melioration, but because it is conscious of the advantages of its condition. if all the consequences of this state of things were not good or useful, society would at least have appropriated all such as were useful and good; and having once and for ever renounced the social advantages of aristocracy, mankind would enter into possession of all the benefits which democracy can afford. but here it may be asked what we have adopted in the place of those institutions, those ideas, and those customs of our forefathers which we have abandoned. the spell of royalty is broken, but it has not been succeeded by the majesty of the laws; the people have learned to despise all authority. but fear now extorts a larger tribute of obedience than that which was formerly paid by reverence and by love. i perceive that we have destroyed those independent beings which were able to cope with tyranny single-handed; but it is the government that has inherited the privileges of which families, corporations, and individuals, have been deprived; the weakness of the whole community has, therefore, succeeded to that influence of a small body of citizens, which, if it was sometimes oppressive, was often conservative. the division of property has lessened the distance which separated the rich from the poor; but it would seem that the nearer they draw to each other, the greater is their mutual hatred, and the more vehement the envy and the dread with which they resist each other's claims to power; the notion of right is alike insensible to both classes, and force affords to both the only argument for the present, and the only guarantee for the future. the poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which controls it, and his egotism is no less blind than his devotedness was formerly. if society is tranquil, it is not because it relies upon its strength and its well-being, but because it knows its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life; everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure; the desires, the regret, the sorrows, and the joys of the time, produce nothing that is visible or permanent, like the passions of old men which terminate in impotence. we have, then, abandoned whatever advantages the old state of things afforded, without receiving any compensation from our present condition; having destroyed an aristocracy, we seem inclined to survey its ruins with complacency, and to fix our abode in the midst of them. the phenomena which the intellectual world presents, are not less deplorable. the democracy of france, checked in its course or abandoned to its lawless passions, has overthrown whatever crossed its path, and has shaken all that it has not destroyed. its control over society has not been gradually introduced, or peaceably established, but it has constantly advanced in the midst of disorder, and the agitation of a conflict. in the heat of the struggle each partisan is hurried beyond the limits of his opinions by the opinions and the excesses of his opponents, until he loses sight of the end of his exertions, and holds a language which disguises his real sentiments or secret instincts. hence arises the strange confusion which we are beholding. i cannot recall to my mind a passage in history more worthy of sorrow and of pity than the scenes which are happening under our eyes; it is as if the natural bond which unites the opinions of man to his tastes, and his actions to his principles, was now broken; the sympathy which has always been acknowledged between the feelings and the ideas of mankind, appears to be dissolved, and all the laws of moral analogy to be abolished. zealous christians may be found among us, whose minds are nurtured in the love and knowledge of a future life, and who readily espouse the cause of human liberty, as the source of all moral greatness. christianity, which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of god, will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eye of the law. but, by a singular concourse of events, religion is entangled in those institutions which democracy assails, and it is not unfrequently brought to reject the equality it loves, and to curse that cause of liberty as a foe, which it might hallow by its alliance. by the side of these religious men i discern others whose looks are turned to the earth more than to heaven; they are the partisans of liberty, not only as the source of the noblest virtues, but more especially as the root of all solid advantages; and they sincerely desire to extend its sway, and to impart its blessings to mankind. it is natural that they should hasten to invoke the assistance of religion, for they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith; but they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and they inquire no farther; some of them attack it openly, and the remainder are afraid to defend it. in former ages slavery has been advocated by the venal and slavish-minded, while the independent and the warm-hearted were struggling without hope to save the liberties of mankind. but men of high and generous characters are now to be met with, whose opinions are at variance with their inclinations, and who praise that servility which they have themselves never known. others, on the contrary, speak in the name of liberty as if they were able to feel its sanctity and its majesty, and loudly claim for humanity those rights which they have always disowned. there are virtuous and peaceful individuals whose pure morality, quiet habits, affluence, and talents, fit them to be the leaders of the surrounding population; their love of their country is sincere, and they are prepared to make the greatest sacrifices to its welfare, but they confound the abuses of civilisation with its benefits, and the idea of evil is inseparable in their minds from that of novelty. not far from this class is another party, whose object is to materialise mankind, to hit upon what is expedient without heeding what is just; to acquire knowledge without faith, and prosperity apart from virtue; assuming the title of the champions of modern civilisation, and placing themselves in a station which they usurp with insolence, and from which they are driven by their own unworthiness. where are we then? the religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, while men without patriotism and without principles, are the apostles of civilisation and of intelligence. has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world, like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? i cannot, however, believe that the creator made man to leave him in an endless struggle with the intellectual miseries which surround us: god destines a calmer and a more certain future to the communities of europe; i am unacquainted with his designs, but i shall not cease to believe in them because i cannot fathom them, and i had rather mistrust my own capacity than his justice. there is a country in the world where the great revolution which i am speaking of seems nearly to have reached its natural limits; it has been effected with ease and simplicity, say rather that this country has attained the consequences of the democratic revolution which we are undergoing, without having experienced the revolution itself. the emigrants who fixed themselves on the shores of america in the beginning of the seventeenth century, severed the democratic principle from all the principles which repressed it in the old communities of europe, and transplanted it unalloyed to the new world. it has there been allowed to spread in perfect freedom, and to put forth its consequences in the laws by influencing the manners of the country. it appears to me beyond a doubt, that sooner or later we shall arrive, like the americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions. but i do not conclude from this, that we shall ever be necessarily led to draw the same political consequences which the americans have derived from a similar social organization. i am far from supposing that they have chosen the only form of government which a democracy may adopt; but the identity of the efficient cause of laws and manners in the two countries is sufficient to account for the immense interest we have in becoming acquainted with its effects in each of them. it is not, then, merely to satisfy a legitimate curiosity that i have examined america; my wish has been to find instruction by which we may ourselves profit. whoever should imagine that i have intended to write a panegyric would be strangely mistaken, and on reading this book, he will perceive that such was not my design: nor has it been my object to advocate any form of government in particular, for i am of opinion that absolute excellence is rarely to be found in any legislation; i have not even affected to discuss whether the social revolution, which i believe to be irresistible, is advantageous or prejudicial to mankind; i have acknowledged this revolution as a fact already accomplished or on the eve of its accomplishment; and i have selected the nation, from among those which have undergone it, in which its development has been the most peaceful and the most complete, in order to discern its natural consequences, and, if it be possible, to distinguish the means by which it may be rendered profitable. i confess that in america i saw more than america; i sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress. in the first part of this work i have attempted to show the tendency given to the laws by the democracy of america, which is abandoned almost without restraint to its instinctive propensities; and to exhibit the course it prescribes to the government, and the influence it exercises on affairs. i have sought to discover the evils and the advantages which it produces. i have examined the precautions used by the americans to direct it, as well as those which they have not adopted, and i have undertaken to point out the causes which enable it to govern society. it was my intention to depict, in a second part, the influence which the equality of conditions and the rule of democracy exercise on the civil society, the habits, the ideas, and the manners of the americans; i begin, however, to feel less ardor for the accomplishment of this project, since the excellent work of my friend and travelling companion m. de beaumont has been given to the world.[ ] i do not know whether i have succeeded in making known what i saw in america, but i am certain that such has been my sincere desire, and that i have never, knowingly, moulded facts to ideas, instead of ideas to facts. whenever a point could be established by the aid of written documents, i have had recourse to the original text, and to the most authentic and approved works.[ ] i have cited my authorities in the notes, and any one may refer to them. whenever an opinion, a political custom, or a remark on the manners of the country was concerned, i endeavored to consult the most enlightened men i met with. if the point in question was important or doubtful, i was not satisfied with one testimony, but i formed my opinion on the evidence of several witnesses. here the reader must necessarily believe me upon my word. i could frequently have quoted names which are either known to him, or which deserve to be so, in proof of what i advance; but i have carefully abstained from this practice. a stranger frequently hears important truths at the fireside of his host, which the latter would perhaps conceal even from the ear of friendship; he consoles himself with his guest, for the silence to which he is restricted, and the shortness of the traveller's stay takes away all fear of his indiscretion. i carefully noted every conversation of this nature as soon as it occurred, but these notes will never leave my writing-case; i had rather injure the success of my statements than add my name to the list of those strangers who repay the generous hospitality they have received by subsequent chagrin and annoyance. i am aware that, notwithstanding my care, nothing will be easier than to criticise this book, if any one ever chooses to criticise it. those readers who may examine it closely will discover the fundamental idea which connects the several parts together. but the diversity of the subjects i have had to treat is exceedingly great, and it will not be difficult to oppose an isolated fact to the body of facts which i quote, or an isolated idea to the body of ideas i put forth. i hope to be read in the spirit which has guided my labors, and that my book may be judged by the general impression it leaves, as i have formed my own judgment not on any single reason, but upon the mass of evidence. it must not be forgotten that the author who wishes to be understood is obliged to push all his ideas to their utmost theoretical consequences, and often to the verge of what is false or impracticable; for if it be necessary sometimes to quit the rules of logic in active life, such is not the case in discourse, and a man finds that almost as many difficulties spring from inconsistency of language, as usually arise from consistency of conduct. i conclude by pointing out myself what many readers will consider the principal defect of the work. this book is written to favor no particular views, and in composing it i have entertained no design of serving or attacking any party: i have undertaken not to see differently, but to look farther than parties, and while they are busied for the morrow, i have turned my thoughts to the future. * * * * * notes: [ ] this work is entitled, marie, ou l'esclavage aux etats-unis. [ ] legislative and administrative documents have been furnished me with a degree of politeness which i shall always remember with gratitude. among the american functionaries who thus favored my inquiries i am proud to name mr. edward livingston, then secretary of state and late american minister at paris. during my stay at the session of congress, mr. livingston was kind enough to furnish me with the greater part of the documents i possess relative to the federal government. mr. livingston is one of those rare individuals whom one loves, respects, and admires, from their writings, and to whom one is happy to incur the debt of gratitude on further acquaintance. american institutions. chapter i. exterior form of north america. north america divided into two vast regions, one inclining toward the pole, the other toward the equator.--valley of the mississippi.--traces of the revolutions of the globe.--shore of the atlantic ocean, where the english colonies were founded.--difference in the appearance of north and of south america at the time of their discovery.--forests of north america.--prairies.--wandering tribes of natives.--their outward appearance, manners, and language.--traces of an unknown people. north america presents in its external form certain general features, which it is easy to discriminate at the first glance. a sort of methodical order seems to have regulated the separation of land and water, mountains and valleys. a simple but grand arrangement is discoverable amid the confusion of objects and the prodigious variety of scenes. this continent is divided, almost equally, into two vast regions, one of which is bounded, on the north by the arctic pole, and by the two great oceans on the east and west. it stretches toward the south, forming a triangle, whose irregular sides meet at length below the great lakes of canada. the second region begins where the other terminates, and includes all the remainder of the continent. the one slopes gently toward the pole, the other toward the equator. the territory comprehended in the first regions descends toward the north with so imperceptible a slope that it may almost be said to form a level plain. within the bounds of this immense tract of country there are neither high mountains nor deep valleys. streams meander through it irregularly; great rivers mix their currents, separate and meet again, disperse and form vast marshes, losing all trace of their channels in the labyrinth of waters they have themselves created; and thus, at length, after innumerable windings, fall into the polar seas. the great lakes which bound this first region are not walled in, like most of those in the old world, between hills and rocks. their banks are flat, and rise but a few feet above the level of their waters; each of them thus forming a vast bowl filled to the brim. the slightest change in the structure of the globe would cause their waters to rush either toward the pole or to the tropical sea. the second region is more varied on its surface, and better suited for the habitation of man. two long chains of mountains divide it from one extreme to the other; the allegany ridge takes the form of the shores of the atlantic ocean; the other is parallel with the pacific. the space which lies between these two chains of mountains contains , , square miles.[ ] its surface is therefore about six times as great as that of france. this vast territory, however, forms a single valley, one side of which descends gradually from the rounded summits of the alleganies, while the other rises in an uninterrupted course toward the tops of the rocky mountains. at the bottom of the valley flows an immense river, into which the various streams issuing from the mountains fall from all parts. in memory of their native land, the french formerly called this the river st. louis. the indians, in their pompous language, have named it the father of waters, or the mississippi. the mississippi takes its source above the limit of the two great regions of which i have spoken, not far from the highest point of the table-land where they unite. near the same spot rises another river,[ ] which empties itself into the polar seas. the course of the mississippi is at first devious: it winds several times toward the north, whence it rose; and, at length, after having been delayed in lakes and marshes, it flows slowly onward to the south. sometimes quietly gliding along the argillaceous bed which nature has assigned to it, sometimes swollen by storms, the mississippi waters , miles in its course.[ ] at the distance of , miles from its mouth this river attains an average depth of fifteen feet; and it is navigated by vessels of tons burden for a course of nearly miles. fifty-seven large navigable rivers contribute to swell the waters of the mississippi; among others the missouri, which traverses a space of , miles; the arkansas of , miles; the red river , miles; four whose course is from to miles in length, viz., the illinois, the st. peter's, the st. francis, and the moingona; besides a countless number of rivulets which unite from all parts their tributary streams. the valley which is watered by the mississippi seems formed to be the bed of this mighty river, which like a god of antiquity dispenses both good and evil in its course. on the shores of the stream nature displays an inexhaustible fertility; in proportion as you recede from its banks, the powers of vegetation languish, the soil becomes poor, and the plants that survive have a sickly growth. nowhere have the great convulsions of the globe left more evident traces than in the valley of the mississippi: the whole aspect of the country shows the powerful effects of water, both by its fertility and by its barrenness. the waters of the primeval ocean accumulated enormous beds of vegetable mould in the valley, which they levelled as they retired. upon the right shore of the river are seen immense plains, as smooth as if the husbandman had passed over them with his roller. as you approach the mountains, the soil becomes more and more unequal and sterile; the ground is, as it were, pierced in a thousand places by primitive rocks, which appear like the bones of a skeleton whose flesh is partly consumed. the surface of the earth is covered with a granitic sand, and huge irregular masses of stone, among which a few plants force their growth, and give the appearance of a green field covered with the ruins of a vast edifice. these stones and this sand discover, on examination, a perfect analogy with those which compose the arid and broken summits of the rocky mountains. the flood of waters which washed the soil to the bottom of the valley, afterward carried away portions of the rocks themselves; and these, dashed and bruised against the neighboring cliffs, were left scattered like wrecks at their feet.[ ] the valley of the mississippi is, upon the whole, the most magnificent dwelling-place prepared by god for man's abode; and yet it may be said that at present it is but a mighty desert. on the eastern side of the alleganies, between the base of these mountains and the atlantic ocean, lies a long ridge of rocks and sand, which the sea appears to have left behind as it retired. the mean breadth of this territory does not exceed one hundred miles; but it is about nine hundred miles in length. this part of the american continent has a soil which offers every obstacle to the husbandman, and its vegetation is scanty and unvaried. upon this inhospitable coast the first united efforts of human industry were made. this tongue of arid land was the cradle of those english colonies which were destined one day to become the united states of america. the centre of power still remains there; while in the backward states the true elements of the great people, to whom the future control of the continent belongs, are secretly springing up. when the europeans first landed on the shores of the antilles, and afterwards on the coast of south america, they thought themselves transported into those fabulous regions of which poets had sung. the sea sparkled with phosphoric light, and the extraordinary transparency of its waters discovered to the view of the navigator all that had hitherto been hidden in the deep abyss.[ ] here and there appeared little islands perfumed with odoriferous plants, and resembling baskets of flowers, floating on the tranquil surface of the ocean. every object which met the sight, in this enchanting region, seemed prepared to satisfy the wants, or contribute to the pleasures of man. almost all the trees were loaded with nourishing fruits, and those which were useless as food, delighted the eye by the brilliancy and variety of their colors. in groves of fragrant lemon-trees, wild figs, flowering myrtles, acacias, and oleanders, which were hung with festoons of various climbing-plants, covered with flowers, a multitude of birds unknown in europe displayed their bright plumage, glittering with purple and azure, and mingled their warbling in the harmony of a world teeming with life and motion.[ ] underneath this brilliant exterior death was concealed. the air of these climates had so enervating an influence that man, completely absorbed by the present enjoyment, was rendered regardless of the future. north america appeared under a very different aspect; there, everything was grave, serious, and solemn; it seemed created to be the domain of intelligence, as the south was that of sensual delight. a turbulent and foggy ocean washed its shores. it was girded round by a belt of granite rocks, or by wide plains of sand. the foliage of its woods was dark and gloomy; for they were composed of firs, larches, evergreen oaks, wild olive-trees, and laurels. beyond this outer belt lay the thick shades of the central forests, where the largest trees which are produced in the two hemispheres grow side by side. the plane, the catalpa, the sugar-maple, and the virginian poplar, mingled their branches with those of the oak, the beech, and the lime. in these, as in the forests of the old world, destruction was perpetually going on. the ruins of vegetation were heaped upon each other; but there was no laboring hand to remove them, and their decay was not rapid enough to make room for the continual work of reproduction. climbing-plants, grasses and other herbs, forced their way through the moss of dying trees; they crept along their bending trunks, found nourishment in their dusty cavities, and a passage beneath the lifeless bark. thus decay gave its assistance to life, and their respective productions were mingled together. the depths of these forests were gloomy and obscure, and a thousand rivulets, undirected in their course by human industry, preserved in them a constant moisture. it was rare to meet with flowers, wild fruits, or birds, beneath their shades. the fall of a tree overthrown by age, the rushing torrent of a cataract, the lowing of the buffalo, and the howling of the wind, were the only sounds which broke the silence of nature. to the east of the great river the woods almost disappeared; in their stead were seen prairies of immense extent. whether nature in her infinite variety had denied the germes of trees to these fertile plains, or whether they had once been covered with forests, subsequently destroyed by the hand of man, is a question which neither tradition nor scientific research has been able to resolve. these immense deserts were not, however, devoid of human inhabitants. some wandering tribes had been for ages scattered among the forest shades or the green pastures of the prairie. from the mouth of the st. lawrence to the delta of the mississippi, and from the atlantic to the pacific ocean, these savages possessed certain points of resemblance which bore witness of their common origin: but at the same time they differed from all other known races of men:[ ] they were neither white like the europeans, nor yellow like most of the asiatics, nor black like the negroes. their skin was reddish brown, their hair long and shining, their lips thin, and their cheek-bones very prominent. the languages spoken by the north american tribes were various as far as regarded their words, but they were subject to the same grammatical rules. those rules differed in several points from such as had been observed to govern the origin of language. the idiom of the americans seemed to be the product of new combinations, and bespoke an effort of the understanding, of which the indians of our days would be incapable.[ ] the social state of these tribes differed also in many respects from all that was seen in the old world. they seemed to have multiplied freely in the midst of their deserts, without coming in contact with other races more civilized than their own. accordingly, they exhibited none of those indistinct, incoherent notions of right and wrong, none of that deep corruption of manners that is usually joined with ignorance and rudeness among nations which, after advancing to civilisation, have relapsed into a state of barbarism. the indian was indebted to no one but himself; his virtues, his vices, and his prejudices, were his own work; he had grown up in the wild independence of his nature. if, in polished countries, the lowest of the people are rude and uncivil, it is not merely because they are poor and ignorant, but that, being so, they are in daily contact with rich and enlightened men. the sight of their own hard lot and of their weakness, which are daily contrasted with the happiness and power of some of their fellow creatures, excites in their hearts at the same time the sentiments of anger and of fear: the consciousness of their inferiority and of their dependence irritates while it humiliates them. this state of mind displays itself in their manners and language; they are at once insolent and servile. the truth of this is easily proved by observation; the people are more rude in aristocratic countries than elsewhere; in opulent cities than in rural districts. in those places where the rich and powerful are assembled together, the weak and the indigent feel themselves oppressed by their inferior condition. unable to perceive a single chance of regaining their equality, they give up to despair, and allow themselves to fall below the dignity of human nature. this unfortunate effect of the disparity of conditions is not observable in savage life; the indians, although they are ignorant and poor, are equal and free. at the period when europeans first came among them, the natives of north america were ignorant of the value of riches, and indifferent to the enjoyments which civilized man procures to himself by their means. nevertheless there was nothing coarse in their demeanor; they practised an habitual reserve, and a kind of aristocratic politeness. mild and hospitable when at peace, though merciless in war beyond any known degree of human ferocity, the indian would expose himself to die of hunger in order to succor the stranger who asked admittance by night at the door of his hut--yet he could tear in pieces with his hands the still quivering limbs of his prisoner. the famous republics of antiquity never gave examples of more unshaken courage, more haughty spirits, or more intractable love of independence, than were hidden in former times among the wild forests of the new world.[ ] the europeans produced no great impression when they landed upon the shores of north america: their presence engendered neither envy nor fear. what influence could they possess over such men as we have described? the indian could live without wants, suffer without complaint, and pour out his death-song at the stake.[ ] like all the other members of the great human family, these savages believed in the existence of a better world, and adored, under different names, god, the creator of the universe. their notions on the great intellectual truths were, in general, simple and philosophical.[ ] although we have here traced the character of a primitive people, yet it cannot be doubted that another people, more civilized and more advanced in all respects, had preceded it in the same regions. an obscure tradition, which prevailed among the indians to the north of the atlantic, informs us that these very tribes formerly dwelt on the west side of the mississippi. along the banks of the ohio, and throughout the central valley, there are frequently found, at this day, _tumuli_ raised by the hands of men. on exploring these heaps of earth to their centre, it is usual to meet with human bones, strange instruments, arms and utensils of all kinds, made of a metal, or destined for purposes, unknown to the present race. the indians of our time are unable to give any information relative to the history of this unknown people. neither did those who lived three hundred years ago, when america was first discovered, leave any accounts from which even an hypothesis could be formed. tradition--that perishable, yet ever-renewed monument of the pristine world--throws no light upon the subject. it is an undoubted fact, however, that in this part of the globe thousands of our fellow-beings had lived. when they came hither, what was their origin, their destiny, their history, and how they perished, no one can tell. how strange does it appear that nations have existed, and afterward so completely disappeared from the earth, that the remembrance of their very name is effaced: their languages are lost; their glory is vanished like a sound without an echo; but perhaps there is not one which has not left behind it a tomb in memory of its passage. the most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man. although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said, at the time of its discovery by europeans, to have formed one great desert. the indians occupied, without possessing it. it is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of north america lived by the produce of the chase. their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more, perhaps, their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. the ruin of these nations began from the day when europeans landed on their shores: it has proceeded ever since, and we are now seeing the completion of it. they seemed to have been placed by providence amid the riches of the new world to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them. those coasts, so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the mississippi; the whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation, yet unborn. in that land the great experiment was to be made by civilized man, of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past. * * * * * notes: [ ] darby's "view of the united states." [ ] mackenzie's river. [ ] warden's "description of the united states." [ ] see appendix a. [ ] malte brun tells us (vol. v., p. ) that the water of the caribbean sea is so transparent, that corals and fish are discernible at a depth of sixty fathoms. the ship seemed to float in the air, the navigator became giddy as his eye penetrated through the crystal flood, and beheld submarine gardens, or beds of shells, or gilded fishes gliding among tufts and thickets of seaweed. [ ] see appendix b. [ ] with the progress of discovery, some resemblance has been found to exist between the physical conformation, the language, and the habits of the indians of north america, and those of the tongous, mantchous, moguls, tartars, and other wandering tribes of asia. the land occupied by these tribes is not very distant from behring's strait; which allows of the supposition, that at a remote period they gave inhabitants to the desert continent of america. but this is a point which has not yet been clearly elucidated by science. see malte brun, vol. v.; the works of humboldt; fischer, "conjecture sur l'origine des américains;" adair, "history of the american indians." [ ] see appendix c. [ ] we learn from president jefferson's "notes upon virginia," p. , that among the iroquois, when attacked by a superior force, aged men refused to fly, or to survive the destruction of their country; and they braved death like the ancient romans when their capital was sacked by the gauls. further on, p. , he tells us, that there is no example of an indian, who, having fallen into the hands of his enemies, begged for his life; on the contrary, the captive sought to obtain death at the hands of his conquerors by the use of insult and provocation. [ ] see "histoire de la louisiane," by lepage dupratz; charlevoix, "histoire de la nouvelle france;" "lettres du rev. g. hecwelder;" "transactions of the american philosophical society," v. i.; jefferson's "notes on virginia," pp. - . what is said by jefferson is of especial weight, on account of the personal merit of the writer, and of the matter-of-fact age in which he lived. [ ] see appendix d. chapter ii. origin of the anglo-americans and its importance, in relation to their future condition. utility of knowing the origin of nations in order to understand their social condition and their laws.--america the only country in which the starting-point of a great people has been clearly observable.--in what respects all who emigrated to british america were similar.--in what they differed.--remark applicable to all the europeans who established themselves on the shores of the new world.--colonization of virginia.--colonization of new england.--original character of the first inhabitants of new england.--their arrival.--their first laws.--their social contract.--penal code borrowed from the hebrew legislation.--religious fervor.--republican spirit.--intimate union of the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty. after the birth of a human being, his early years are obscurely spent in the toils or pleasures of childhood. as he grows up, the world receives him, when his manhood begins, and he enters into contact with his fellows. he is then studied for the first time, and it is imagined that the germe of the vices and the virtues of his maturer years is then formed. this, if i am not mistaken, is a great error. we must begin higher up; we must watch the infant in his mother's arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; the first occurrences which he beholds; we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions, which will rule his life. the entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child. the growth of nations presents something analogous to this; they all bear some marks of their origin; and the circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their rise, affect the whole term of their being. if we were able to go back to the elements of states, and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, i doubt not that we should discover the primary cause of the prejudices, the habits, the ruling passions, and in short of all that constitutes what is called the national character: we should then find the explanation of certain customs which now seem at variance with prevailing manners, of such laws as conflict with established principles, and of such incoherent opinions as are here and there to be met with in society, like those fragments of broken chains which we sometimes see hanging from the vault of an edifice, and supporting nothing. this might explain the destinies of certain nations which seem borne along by an unknown force to ends of which they themselves are ignorant. but hitherto facts have been wanting to researches of this kind: the spirit of inquiry has only come upon communities in their latter days; and when they at length turned their attention to contemplate their origin, time had already obscured it, or ignorance and pride adorned it with truth-concealing fables. america is the only country in which it has been possible to study the natural and tranquil growth of society, and where the influence exercised on the future condition of states by their origin is clearly distinguishable. at the period when the people of europe landed in the new world, their national characteristics were already completely formed; each of them had a physiognomy of its own; and as they had already attained that stage of civilisation at which men are led to study themselves, they have transmitted to us a faithful picture of their opinions, their manners, and their laws. the men of the sixteenth century are almost as well known to us as our contemporaries. america consequently exhibits in the broad light of day the phenomena which the ignorance or rudeness of earlier ages conceals from our researches. near enough to the time when the states of america were founded to be accurately acquainted with their elements, and sufficiently removed from that period to judge of some of their results. the men of our own day seem destined to see farther than their predecessors into the series of human events. providence has given us a torch which our forefathers did not possess, and has allowed us to discern fundamental causes in the history of the world which the obscurity of the past concealed from them. if we carefully examine the social and political state of america, after having studied its history, we shall remain perfectly convinced that not an opinion, not a custom, not a law, i may even say not an event, is upon record which the origin of that people will not explain. the readers of this book will find the germe of all that is to follow in the present chapter, and the key to almost the whole work. the emigrants who came at different periods to occupy the territory now covered by the american union, differed from each other in many respects; their aim was not the same, and they governed themselves on different principles. these men had, however, certain features in common, and they were all placed in an analogous situation. the tie of language is perhaps the strongest and most durable that can unite mankind. all the emigrants spoke the same tongue; they were all offsets from the same people. born in a country which had been agitated for centuries by the struggles of faction, and in which all parties had been obliged in their turn to place themselves under the protection of the laws, their political education had been perfected in this rude school, and they were more conversant with the notions of right, and the principles of true freedom, than the greater part of their european contemporaries. at the period of the first emigrations, the parish system, that fruitful germe of free institutions, was deeply rooted in the habits of the english; and with it the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people had been introduced even into the bosom of the monarchy of the house of tudor. the religious quarrels which have agitated the christian world were then rife. england had plunged into the new order of things with headlong vehemence. the character of its inhabitants, which had always been sedate and reflecting, became argumentative and austere. general information had been increased by intellectual debate, and the mind had received a deeper cultivation. while religion was the topic of discussion, the morals of the people were reformed. all these national features are more or less discoverable in the physiognomy of those adventurers who came to seek a new home on the opposite shores of the atlantic. another remark, to which we shall hereafter have occasion to recur, is applicable not only to the english, but to the french, the spaniards, and all the europeans who successively established themselves in the new world. all these european colonies contained the elements, if not the development of a complete democracy. two causes led to this result. it may safely be advanced, that on leaving the mother-country the emigrants had in general no notion of superiority over one another. the happy and the powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. it happened, however, on several occasions that persons of rank were driven to america by political and religious quarrels. laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of america was entirely opposed to a territorial aristocracy. to bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a master and a farmer at the same time. the land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. a nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness; but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor. all the british colonies had then a great degree of similarity at the epoch of their settlement. all of them, from their first beginning, seemed destined to behold the growth, not of the aristocratic liberty of their mother-country, but of that freedom of the middle and lower orders of which the history of the world has as yet furnished no complete example. in this general uniformity several striking differences were however discernible, which it is necessary to point out. two branches may be distinguished in the anglo-american family, which have hitherto grown up without entirely commingling; the one in the south, the other in the north. virginia received the first english colony; the emigrants took possession of it in . the idea that mines of gold and silver are the sources of national wealth, was at that time singularly prevalent in europe; a fatal delusion, which has done more to impoverish the nations which adopted it, and has cost more lives in america, than the united influence of war and bad laws. the men sent to virginia[ ] were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character, whose turbulent and restless spirits endangered the infant colony,[ ] and rendered its progress uncertain. the artisans and agriculturists arrived afterward; and although they were a more moral and orderly race of men, they were in nowise above the level of the inferior classes in england.[ ] no lofty conceptions, no intellectual system directed the foundation of these new settlements. the colony was scarcely established when slavery was introduced,[ ] and this was the main circumstance which has exercised so prodigious an influence on the character, the laws, and all the future prospects of the south. slavery, as we shall afterward show, dishonors labor; it introduces idleness into society, and, with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. it enervates the powers of the mind, and benumbs the activity of man. the influence of slavery, united to the english character, explains the mariners and the social condition of the southern states. in the north, the same english foundation was modified by the most opposite shades of character; and here i may be allowed to enter into some details. the two or three main ideas which constitute the basis of the social theory of the united states, were first combined in the northern british colonies, more generally denominated the states of new england.[ ] the principles of new england spread at first to the neighboring states; they then passed successively to the more distant ones; and at length they embued the whole confederation. they now extend their influence beyond its limits over the whole american world. the civilisation of new england has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after it has diffused its warmth around, tinges the distant horizon with its glow. the foundation of new england was a novel spectacle, and all the circumstances attending it were singular and original. the large majority of colonies have been first inhabited either by men without education and without resources, driven by their poverty and their misconduct from the land which gave them birth, or by speculators and adventurers greedy of gain. some settlements cannot even boast so honorable an origin: st. domingo was founded by buccaneers; and, at the present day, the criminal courts of england supply the population of australia. the settlers who established themselves on the shores of new england all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. their union on the soil of america at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor. these men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any european nation of our own time. all, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in europe for their talents and their acquirements. the other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of new england brought with them the best elements of order and morality, they landed in the desert accompanied by their wives and children. but what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. they had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country, the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain. nor did they cross the atlantic to improve their situation, or to increase their wealth; the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile, their object was the triumph of an idea. the emigrants, or, as they deservedly styled themselves, the pilgrims, belonged to that english sect, the austerity of whose principles had acquired for them the name of puritans. puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories. it was this tendency which had aroused its most dangerous adversaries. persecuted by the government of the mother-country, and disgusted by the habits of a society opposed to the rigor of their own principles, the puritans went forth to seek some rude and unfrequented part of the world, where they could live according to their own opinions, and worship god in freedom. a few quotations will throw more light upon the spirit of these pious adventurers than all we can say of them. nathaniel morton,[ ] the historian of the first years of the settlement, thus opens his subject:-- "gentle reader: i have for some length of time looked upon it as a duty incumbent, especially on the immediate successors of those that have had so large experience of those many memorable and signal demonstrations of god's goodness, viz., the first beginning of this plantation in new england, to commit to writing his gracious dispensations on that behalf; having so many inducements thereunto, not only otherwise, but so plentifully in the sacred scriptures: that so, what we have seen, and what our fathers have told us (psalm lxxviii., , ), we may not hide from our children, showing to the generations to come the praises of the lord; that especially the seed of abraham his servant, and the children of jacob his chosen (psalm cv., , ), may remember his marvellous works in the beginning and progress of the planting of new england, his wonders and the judgments of his mouth; how that god brought a vine into this wilderness; that he cast out the heathen and planted it; that he made room for it, and caused it to take deep root; and it filled the land (psalm lxxx., , ). and not onely so, but also that he hath guided his people by his strength to his holy habitation, and planted them in the mountain of his inheritance in respect of precious gospel enjoyments: and that as especially god may have the glory of all unto whom it is most due; so also some rays of glory may reach the names of those blessed saints, that were the main instruments and the beginning of this happy enterprise." it is impossible to read this opening paragraph without an involuntary feeling of religious awe; it breathes the very savor of gospel antiquity. the sincerity of the author heightens his power of language. the band, which to his eyes was a mere party of adventurers, gone forth to seek their fortune beyond the seas, appears to the reader as the germe of a great nation wafted by providence to a predestined shore. the author thus continues his narrative of the departure of the first pilgrims:-- "so they left that goodly and pleasant city of leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years; but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country, where god hath prepared for them a city (heb. xi., ), and therein quieted their spirits. when they came to delfs-haven they found the ship and all things ready; and such of their friends as could come with them, followed after them, and sundry came from amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. one night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and christian discourse, and other real expressions of true christian love. the next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound among them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the dutch strangers that stood on the key as spectators could not refrain from tears. but the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away that were thus loath to depart, their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with most fervent prayers unto the lord and his blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many tears, they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them." the emigrants were about in number, including the women and the children. their object was to plant a colony on the shores of the hudson; but after having been driven about for some time in the atlantic ocean, they were forced to land on that arid coast of new england which is now the site of the town of plymouth. the rock is still shown on which the pilgrims disembarked.[ ] "but before we pass on," continues our historian, "let the reader with me make a pause, and seriously consider this poor people's present condition, the more to be raised up to admiration of god's goodness toward them in their preservation: for being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectation, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns to repair unto to seek for succor; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts. besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts, and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country full of woods and thickets represented a wild and savage hue; if they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world." it must not be imagined that the piety of the puritans was of a merely speculative kind, or that it took no cognizance of the course of worldly affairs. puritanism, as i have already remarked, was scarcely less a political than a religious doctrine. no sooner had the emigrants landed on the barren coast, described by nathaniel morton, than their first care was to constitute a society, by passing the following act:[ ]-- "in the name of god, amen! we, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord king james, &c., &c., having undertaken for the glory of god and advancement of the christian faith, and the honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of virginia: do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of god and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid: and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience," &c.[ ] this happened in , and from that time forward the emigration went on. the religious and political passions which ravished the british empire during the whole reign of charles i., drove fresh crowds of sectarians every year to the shores of america. in england the stronghold of puritanism was in the middle classes, and it was from the middle classes that the majority of the emigrants came. the population of new england increased rapidly; and while the hierarchy of rank despotically classed the inhabitants of the mother-country, the colony continued to present the novel spectacle of a community homogeneous in all its parts. a democracy, more perfect than any which antiquity had dreamed of, started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society. the english government was not dissatisfied with an emigration which removed the elements of fresh discord and of future revolutions. on the contrary, everything was done to encourage it, and little attention was paid to the destiny of those who sought a shelter from the rigor of their country's laws on the soil of america. it seemed as if new england was a region given up to the dreams of fancy, and the unrestrained experiments of innovators. the english colonies (and this is one of the main causes of their prosperity) have always enjoyed more internal freedom and more political independence than the colonies of other nations; but this principle of liberty was nowhere more extensively applied than in the states of new england. it was generally allowed at that period that the territories of the new world belonged to that european nation which had been the first to discover them. nearly the whole coast of north america thus became a british possession toward the end of the sixteenth century. the means used by the english government to people these new domains were of several kinds: the king sometimes appointed a governor of his own choice, who ruled a portion of the new world in the name and under the immediate orders of the crown;[ ] this is the colonial system adopted by the other countries of europe. sometimes grants of certain tracts were made by the crown to an individual or to a company,[ ] in which case all the civil and political power fell into the hands of one or more persons, who, under the inspection and control of the crown, sold the lands and governed the inhabitants. lastly, a third system consisted in allowing a certain number of emigrants to constitute a political society under the protection of the mother-country, and to govern themselves in whatever was not contrary to her laws. this mode of colonization, so remarkably favorable to liberty, was adopted only in new england.[ ] in ,[ ] a charter of this kind was granted by charles i. to the emigrants who went to form the colony of massachusetts. but, in general, charters were not given to the colonies of new england till they had acquired a certain existence. plymouth, providence, new haven, the state of connecticut, and that of rhode island,[ ] were founded without the co-operation, and almost without the knowledge of the mother-country. the new settlers did not derive their incorporation from the head of the empire, although they did not deny its supremacy; they constituted a society of their own accord, and it was not till thirty or forty years afterward, under charles ii., that their existence was legally recognised by a royal charter. this frequently renders it difficult to detect the link which connected the emigrants with the land of their forefathers, in studying the earliest historical and legislative records of new england. they perpetually exercised the rights of sovereignty; they named their magistrates, concluded peace or declared war, made police regulations, and enacted laws, as if their allegiance was due only to god.[ ] nothing can be more curious, and at the same time more instructive than the legislation of that period; it is there that the solution of the great social problem which the united states now present to the world is to be found. among these documents we shall notice as especially characteristic, the code of laws promulgated by the little state of connecticut in .[ ] the legislators of connecticut[ ] begin with the penal laws, and, strange to say, they borrow their provisions from the text of holy writ. "whoever shall worship any other god than the lord," says the preamble of the code, "shall surely be put to death." this is followed by ten or twelve enactments of the same kind, copied verbatim from the books of exodus, leviticus, and deuteronomy. blasphemy, sorcery, adultery,[ ] and rape were punished with death; an outrage offered by a son to his parents, was to be expiated by the same penalty. the legislation of a rude and half-civilized people was thus transferred to an enlightened and moral community. the consequence was, that the punishment of death was never more frequently prescribed by the statute, and never more rarely enforced toward the guilty. the chief care of the legislators, in this body of penal laws, was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which they did not subject to magisterial censure. the reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. the judge was empowered to inflict a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage,[ ] on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of new haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not infrequent. we find a sentence bearing date the first of may, , inflicting a fine and a reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed.[ ] the code of abounds in preventive measures. it punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity.[ ] innkeepers are forbidden to furnish more than a certain quantity of liquor to each customer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious,[ ] is checked by a fine or a flogging. in other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself upheld in europe, renders attendance on divine service compulsory,[ ] and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment,[ ] and even with death, the christians who chose to worship god according to a ritual differing from his own.[ ] sometimes indeed, the zeal of his enactments induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco.[ ] it must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and more puritanical than the laws. in a solemn association was formed in boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair.[ ] these errors are no doubt discreditable to the human reason; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which is incapable of laying firm hold upon what is true and just, and is often reduced to the alternative of two excesses. in strict connection with this penal legislation, which bears such striking marks of a narrow sectarian spirit, and of those religious passions which had been warmed by persecution, and were still fermenting among the people, a body of political laws is to be found, which, though written two hundred years ago, is still ahead of the liberties of our age. the general principles which are the groundwork of modern constitutions--principles which were imperfectly known in europe, and not completely triumphant even in great britain, in the seventeenth century--were all recognised and determined by the laws of new england: the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of authorities, personal liberty, and trial by jury, were all positively established without discussion. from these fruitful principles, consequences have been derived and applications have been made such as no nation in europe has yet ventured to attempt. in connecticut the electoral body consisted, from its origin, of the whole number of citizens; and this is readily to be understood,[ ] when we recollect that this people enjoyed an almost perfect equality of fortune, and a still greater uniformity of capacity.[ ] in connecticut, at this period, all the executive functionaries were elected, including the governor of the state.[ ] the citizens above the age of sixteen were obliged to bear arms; they formed a national militia, which appointed its own officers, and was to hold itself at all times in readiness to march for the defence of the country.[ ] in the laws of connecticut, as well as in those of new england, we find the germe and gradual development of that township independence, which is the life and mainspring of american liberty at the present day. the political existence of the majority of the nations of europe commenced in the superior ranks of society, and was gradually and always imperfectly communicated to the different members of the social body. in america, on the other hand, it may be said that the township was organized before the county, the county before the state, the state before the union. in new england, townships were completely and definitively constituted as early as . the independence of the township was the nucleus around which the local interests, passions, rights, and duties, collected and clung. it gave scope to the activity of a real political life, most thoroughly democratic and republican. the colonies still recognised the supremacy of the mother-country; monarchy was still the law of the state; but the republic was already established in every township. the towns named their own magistrates of every kind, rated themselves, and levied their own taxes.[ ] in the townships of new england the law of representation was not adopted, but the affairs of the community were discussed, as at athens, in the market-place, by a general assembly of the citizens. in studying the laws which were promulgated at this first era of the american republics, it is impossible not to be struck by the remarkable acquaintance with the science of government, and the advanced theory of legislation, which they display. the ideas there formed of the duties of society toward its members, are evidently much loftier and more comprehensive than those of the european legislators at that time: obligations were there imposed which were elsewhere slighted. in the states of new england, from the first, the condition of the poor was provided for;[ ] strict measures were taken for the maintenance of roads, and surveyors were appointed to attend to them;[ ] registers were established in every parish, in which the results of public deliberations, and the births, deaths, and marriages of the citizens were entered;[ ] clerks were directed to keep these registers;[ ] officers were charged with the administration of vacant inheritances, and with the arbitration of litigated landmarks; and many others were created whose chief functions were the maintenance of public order in the community.[ ] the law enters into a thousand useful provisions for a number of social wants which are at present very inadequately felt in france. but it is by the attention it pays to public education that the original character of american civilisation is at once placed in the clearest light. "it being," says the law, "one chief project of satan to keep men from the knowledge of the scripture by persuading from the use of tongues, to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the lord assisting our endeavors."[ ] here follow clauses establishing schools in every township, and obliging the inhabitants, under pain of heavy fines, to support them. schools of a superior kind were founded in the same manner in the more populous districts. the municipal authorities were bound to enforce the sending of children to school by their parents; they were empowered to inflict fines upon all who refused compliance; and in cases of continued resistance, society assumed the place of the parent, took possession of the child, and deprived the father of those natural rights which he used to so bad a purpose. the reader will undoubtedly have remarked the preamble of these enactments: in america, religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads men to civil freedom. if, after having cast a rapid glance over the state of american society in , we turn to the condition of europe, and more especially to that of the continent, at the same period, we cannot fail to be struck with astonishment. on the continent of europe, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy had everywhere triumphed over the ruins of the oligarchical and feudal liberties of the middle ages. never were the notions of right more completely confounded than in the midst of the splendor and literature of europe; never was there less political activity among the people; never were the principles of true freedom less widely circulated, and at that very time, those principles, which were scorned or unknown by the nations of europe, were proclaimed in the deserts of the new world, and were accepted as the future creed of a great people. the boldest theories of the human reason were put into practice by a community so humble, that not a statesman condescended to attend to it; and a legislation without precedent was produced off-hand by the imagination of the citizens. in the bosom of this obscure democracy, which had as yet brought forth neither generals, nor philosophers, nor authors, a man might stand up in the face of a free people, and pronounce amid general acclamations the following fine definition of liberty:[ ]-- "nor would i have you to mistake in the point of your own liberty. there is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty '_sumus omnes deteriores_;' it is the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of god are bent against it. but there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good: for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives, and whatsoever crosses it is not authority, but a distemper thereof. this liberty is maintained in a way of subjection to authority; and the authority set over you will, in all administrations for your good, be quietly submitted unto by all but such as have a disposition to shake off the yoke and lose their true liberty, by their murmuring at the honor and power of authority." the remarks i have made will suffice to display the character of anglo-american civilisation in its true light. it is the result (and this should be constantly present to the mind) of two distinct elements, which in other places have been in frequent hostility, but which in america have admirably incorporated and combined with one another. i allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. the settlers of new england were at the same time ardent sectarians and daring innovators. narrow as the limits of some of their religious opinions were, they were entirely free from political prejudices. hence arose two tendencies, distinct but not opposite, which are constantly discernible in the manners as well as in the laws of the country. it might be imagined that men who sacrificed their friends, their family, and their native land, to a religious conviction, were absorbed in the pursuit of the intellectual advantages which they purchased at so dear a rate. the energy, however, with which they strove for the acquirements of wealth, moral enjoyment, and the comforts as well as the liberties of the world, was scarcely inferior to that with which they devoted themselves to heaven. political principles, and all human laws and institutions were moulded and altered at their pleasure; the barriers of the society in which they were born were broken down before them; the old principles which had governed the world for ages were no more; a path without a turn, and a field without a horizon, were opened to the exploring and ardent curiosity of man; but at the limits of the political world he checks his researches, he discreetly lays aside the use of his most formidable faculties, he no longer consents to doubt or to innovate, but carefully abstaining from raising the curtain of the sanctuary, he yields with submissive respect to truths which he will not discuss. thus in the moral world, everything is classed, adapted, decided, and foreseen; in the political world everything is agitated, uncertain, and disputed: in the one is a passive, though a voluntary obedience; in the other an independence, scornful of experience and jealous of authority. these two tendencies, apparently so discrepant, are far from conflicting; they advance together, and mutually support each other. religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the faculties of man, and that the political world is a field prepared by the creator for the efforts of the intelligence. contented with the freedom and the power which it enjoys in its own sphere, and with the place which it occupies, the empire of religion is never more surely established than when it reigns in the hearts of men unsupported by aught besides its native strength. religion is no less the companion of liberty in all its battles and its triumphs; the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims. the safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law as well as the surest pledge of freedom.[ ] * * * * * reasons of certain anomalies which the laws and customs of the anglo-americans present. remains of aristocratic institutions in the midst of a complete democracy.--why?--distinction carefully to be drawn between what is of puritanical and what is of english origin. the reader is cautioned not to draw too general or too absolute an inference from what has been said. the social condition, the religion, and the manners of the first emigrants undoubtedly exercised an immense influence on the destiny of their new country. nevertheless it was not in their power to found a state of things originating solely in themselves; no man can entirely shake off the influence of the past, and the settlers, unintentionally or involuntarily, mingled habits derived from their education and from the traditions of their country, with those habits and notions which were exclusively their own. to form a judgment on the anglo-americans of the present day, it is therefore necessary carefully to distinguish what is of puritanical from what is of english origin. laws and customs are frequently to be met with in the united states which contrast strongly with all that surrounds them. these laws seem to be drawn up in a spirit contrary to the prevailing tenor of the american legislation; and these customs are no less opposed to the general tone of society. if the english colonies had been founded in an age of darkness, or if their origin was already lost in the lapse of years, the problem would be insoluble. i shall quote a single example to illustrate what i advance. the civil and criminal procedure of the americans has only two means of action--committal or bail. the first measure taken by the magistrate is to exact security from the defendant, or, in case of refusal, to incarcerate him: the ground of the accusation, and the importance of the charges against him are then discussed. it is evident that a legislation of this kind is hostile to the poor man, and favorable only to the rich. the poor man has not always a security to produce, even in a civil cause: and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. the wealthy individual, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil causes; nay, more, he may readily elude the punishment which awaits him for a delinquency, by breaking his bail. so that all the penalties of the law are, for him, reducible to fines.[ ] nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. yet in america it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest social advantages to themselves. the explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in england; the laws of which i speak are english,[ ] and the americans have retained them, however repugnant they may be to the tenor of their legislation, and the mass of their ideas. next to its habits, the thing which a nation is least apt to change is its civil legislation. civil laws are only familiarly known to legal men, whose direct interest it is to maintain them as they are, whether good or bad, simply because they themselves are conversant with them. the body of the nation is scarcely acquainted with them: it merely perceives their action in particular cases; but it has some difficulty in seizing their tendency, and obeys them without reflection. i have quoted one instance where it would have been easy to adduce a great number of others. the surface of american society is, if i may use the expression, covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep.[ ] * * * * * notes: [ ] the charter granted by the crown of england, in , stipulated, among other conditions, that the adventurers should pay to the crown a fifth of the produce of all gold and silver mines. see marshall's "life of washington," vol i., pp. - . [ ] a large portion of the adventurers, says stith (history of virginia), were unprincipled young men of family, whom their parents were glad to ship off, discharged servants, fraudulent bankrupts, or debauchees: and others of the same class, people more apt to pillage and destroy than to assist the settlement, were the seditious chiefs who easily led this band into every kind of extravagance and excess. see for the history of virginia the following works:-- "history of virginia, from the first settlements in the year ," by smith. "history of virginia," by william stith. "history of virginia, from the earliest period," by beverley. [ ] it was not till some time later that a certain number of rich english capitalists came to fix themselves in the colony. [ ] slavery was introduced about the year , by a dutch vessel, which landed twenty negroes on the banks of the river james. see chalmer. [ ] the states of new england are those situated to the east of the hudson; they are now six in number: . connecticut; . rhode island; . massachusetts; . vermont; . new hampshire; . maine. [ ] "new england's memorial," p. . boston, . see also "hutchinson's history," vol. ii., p. [ ] this rock is become an object of veneration in the united states. i have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the union. does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic; and what is become of the gateways of a thousand palaces? [ ] "new england memorial," p. . [ ] the emigrants who founded the state of rhode island in , those who landed at new haven in , the first settlers in connecticut in , and the founders of providence in , began in like manner by drawing up a social contract, which was submitted to the approval of all the interested parties. see "pitkin's history," pp , . [ ] this was the case in the state of new york. [ ] maryland, the carolinas, pennsylvania, and new jersey, were in this situation. see pitkin's history, vol. i., pp. - . [ ] see the work entitled, "_historical collection of state papers and other authentic documents intended as materials for a history of the united states of america_" by ebenezer hazard, philadelphia, , for a great number of documents relating to the commencement of the colonies, which are valuable from their contents and their authenticity; among them are the various charters granted by the king of england, and the first acts of the local governments. see also the analysis of all these charters given by mr. story, judge of the supreme court of the united states, in the introduction to his commentary on the constitution of the united states. it results from these documents that the principles of representative government and the external forms of political liberty were introduced into all the colonies at their origin. these principles were more fully acted upon in the north than in the south, but they existed everywhere. [ ] see pitkin's history, p. . see the history of the colony of massachusetts bay, by hutchinson, vol. i., p. . [ ] see pitkin's history, pp. , . [ ] the inhabitants of massachusetts had deviated from the forms which are preserved in the criminal and civil procedure of england: in the decrees of justice were not yet headed by the royal style. see hutchinson, vol. i., p. . [ ] code of , p. . hartford, . [ ] see also in hutchinson's history, vol. i., pp. , , the analysis of the penal code adopted in , by the colony of massachusetts: this code is drawn up on the same principles as that of connecticut. [ ] adultery was also punished with death by the law of massachusetts; and hutchinson, vol. i., p. , says that several persons actually suffered for this crime. he quotes a curious anecdote on this subject, which occurred in the year . a married woman had had criminal intercourse with a young man; her husband died, and she married the lover. several years had elapsed, when the public began to suspect the previous intercourse of this couple; they were thrown into prison, put upon trial, and very narrowly escaped capital punishment. [ ] code of , p. . it seems sometimes to have happened that the judge superadded these punishments to each other, as is seen in a sentence pronounced in (new haven antiquities, p. ), by which margaret bedford, convicted of loose conduct, was condemned to be whipped, and afterward to marry nicolas jemmings her accomplice. [ ] new haven antiquities, p. . see also hutchinson's history for several causes equally extraordinary. [ ] code of , pp. , . [ ] ibid, p. . [ ] ibid, p. . [ ] this was not peculiar to connecticut. see for instance the law which, on the th of september, , banished the ana-baptists from the state of massachusetts. (historical collection of state papers, vol. i., p. .) see also the law against the quakers, passed on the th of october, . "whereas," says the preamble, "an accursed race of heretics called quakers has sprung up," &c. the clauses of the statute inflict a heavy fine on all captains of ships who should import quakers into the country. the quakers who may be found there shall be whipped and imprisoned with hard labor. those members of the sect who should defend their opinions shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and finally driven out of the province. (historical collection of state papers, vol. i., p. .) [ ] by the penal law of massachusetts, any catholic priest who should set foot in the colony after having been once driven out of it, was liable to capital punishment. [ ] code of , p. . [ ] new england's memorial, p. . see appendix e. [ ] constitution of , p. . [ ] in the general assembly of rhode island unanimously declared that the government of the state was a democracy, and that the power was vested in the body of free citizens, who alone had the right to make the laws and to watch their execution. code of , p. . [ ] pitkin's history, p. . [ ] constitution of , p. . [ ] code of , p . [ ] code of , p. . [ ] code of , p. . [ ] ibid, p. . [ ] see hutchinson's history, vol. i. p. . [ ] ibid, p. . [ ] code of , p. . [ ] mather's magnalia christi americana, vol. ii., p. . this speech was made by winthrop; he was accused of having committed arbitrary actions during his magistracy, but after having made the speech of which the above is a fragment, he was acquitted by acclamation, and from that time forward he was always re-elected governor of the state. see marshall, vol. i., p. . [ ] see appendix f. [ ] crimes no doubt exist for which bail is inadmissible, but they are few in number. [ ] see blackstone; and delolme, book i., chap. x. [ ] the author is not quite accurate in this statement. a person accused of crime is, in the first instance, arrested by virtue of a warrant issued by the magistrate, upon a complaint granted upon proof of a crime having been committed by the person charged. he is then brought before the magistrate, the complainant examined in his presence, other evidence adduced, and he is heard in explanation or defence. if the magistrate is satisfied that a crime has been committed, and that the accused is guilty, the latter is, then, and then only, required to give security for his appearance at the proper court to take his trial, if an indictment shall be found against him by a grand jury of twenty-three of his fellow-citizens. in the event of his inability or refusal to give the security he is incarcerated, so as to secure his appearance at a trial. in france, after the preliminary examination, the accused, unless absolutely discharged, is in all cases incarcerated, to secure his presence at the trial. it is the relaxation of this practice in england and the united states, in order to attain the ends of justice at the least possible inconvenience to the accused, by accepting what is deemed an adequate pledge for his appearance, which our author considers hostile to the poor man and favorable to the rich. and yet it is very obvious, that such is not its design or tendency. good character, and probable innocence, ordinarily obtain for the accused man the required security. and if they do not, how can complaint be justly made that others are not treated with unnecessary severity, and punished in anticipation, because some are prevented by circumstances from availing themselves of a benign provision so favorable to humanity, and to that innocence which our law presumes, until guilt is proved? to secure the persons of suspected criminals, that they may abide the sentence of the law, is indispensable to all jurisprudence. and instead of reproof or aristocratic tendency, our system deserves credit for having ameliorated, as far as possible, the condition of persons accused. that this amelioration cannot be made in all instances, flows from the necessity of the case. it would be a mistake to suppose, as the author seems to have done, that the forfeiture of the security given, exonerates the accused from punishment. he may be again arrested and detained in prison, as security would not ordinarily be received from a person who had given such evidence of his guilt as would be derived from his attempt to escape. and the difficulty of escape is rendered so great by our constitutional provisions for the delivery, by the different states, of fugitives from justice, and by our treaties with england and france for the same purpose, that the instances of successful evasion are few and rare. chapter iii. social condition of the anglo-americans. a social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these two causes united; but wherever it exists, it may justly be considered as the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas, which regulate the conduct of nations: whatever it does not produce, it modifies. it is, therefore, necessary, if we would become acquainted with the legislation and the manners of a nation, to begin by the study of its social condition. * * * * * the striking characteristic of the social condition of the anglo-americans is its essential democracy. the first emigrants of new england.--their equality.--aristocratic laws introduced in the south.--period of the revolution.--change in the law of descent.--effects produced by this change.--democracy carried to its utmost limits in the new states of the west.--equality of education. many important observations suggest themselves upon the social condition of the anglo-americans; but there is one which takes precedence of all the rest. the social condition of the americans is eminently democratic; this was its character at the foundation of the colonies, and is still more strongly marked at the present day. i have stated in the preceding chapter that great equality existed among the emigrants who settled on the shores of new england. the germe of aristocracy was never planted in that part of the union. the only influence which obtained there was that of intellect; the people were used to reverence certain names as the emblems of knowledge and virtue. some of their fellow-citizens acquired a power over the rest which might truly have been called aristocratic, if it had been capable of invariable transmission from father to son. this was the state of things to the east of the hudson: to the southwest of that river, and in the direction of the floridas, the case was different. in most of the states situated to the southwest of the hudson some great english proprietors had settled, who had imported with them aristocratic principles and the english law of descent. i have explained the reasons why it was impossible ever to establish a powerful aristocracy in america; these reasons existed with less force to the southwest of the hudson. in the south, one man, aided by slaves, could cultivate a great extent of country: it was therefore common to see rich landed proprietors. but their influence was not altogether aristocratic as that term is understood in europe, since they possessed no privileges; and the cultivation of their estates being carried on by slaves, they had no tenants depending on them, and consequently no patronage. still, the great proprietors south of the hudson constituted a superior class, having ideas and tastes of its own, and forming the centre of political action. this kind of aristocracy sympathized with the body of the people, whose passions and interests it easily embraced; but it was too weak and too short-lived to excite either love or hatred for itself. this was the class which headed the insurrection in the south, and furnished the best leaders of the american revolution. at the period of which we are now speaking, society was shaken to its centre: the people, in whose name the struggle had taken place, conceived the desire of exercising the authority which it had acquired; its democratic tendencies were awakened; and having thrown off the yoke of the mother-country, it aspired to independence of every kind. the influence of individuals gradually ceased to be felt, and custom and law united together to produce the same result. but the law of descent was the last step to equality. i am surprised that ancient and modern jurists have not attributed to this law a greater influence on human affairs.[ ] it is true that these laws belong to civil affairs: but they ought nevertheless to be placed at the head of all political institutions; for, while political laws are only the symbol of a nation's condition, they exercise an incredible influence upon its social state. they have, moreover, a sure and uniform manner of operating upon society, affecting, as it were, generations yet unknown. through their means man acquires a kind of preternatural power over the future lot of his fellow-creatures. when the legislator has once regulated the law of inheritance, he may rest from his labor. the machine once put in motion will go on for ages, and advance, as if self-guided, toward a given point. when framed in a particular manner, this law unites, draws together, and vests property and power in a few hands: its tendency is clearly aristocratic. on opposite principles its action is still more rapid; it divides, distributes, and disperses both property and power. alarmed by the rapidity of its progress, those who despair of arresting its motion endeavor to obstruct by difficulties and impediments; they vainly seek to counteract its effect by contrary efforts: but it gradually reduces or destroys every obstacle, until by its incessant activity the bulwarks of the influence of wealth are ground down to the fine and shifting sand which is the basis of democracy. when the law of inheritance permits, still more when it decrees, the equal division of a father's property among all his children, its effects are of two kinds: it is important to distinguish them from each other, although they tend to the same end. in virtue of the law of partible inheritance, the death of every proprietor brings about a kind of revolution in property: not only do his possessions change hands, but their very nature is altered; since they are parcelled into shares, which become smaller and smaller at each division. this is the direct, and, as it were, the physical effect of the law. it follows, then, that in countries where equality of inheritance is established by law, property, and especially landed property, must have a tendency to perpetual diminution. the effects, however, of such legislation would only be perceptible after a lapse of time, if the law was abandoned to its own working; for supposing a family to consist of two children (and in a country peopled as france is, the average number is not above three), these children, sharing among them the fortune of both parents, would not be poorer than their father or mother. but the law of equal division exercises its influence not merely upon the property itself, but it affects the minds of the heirs, and brings their passions into play. these indirect consequences tend powerfully to the destruction of large fortunes, and especially of large domains. among the nations whose law of descent is founded upon the right of primogeniture, landed estates often pass from generation to generation without undergoing division. the consequence of which is, that family feeling is to a certain degree incorporated with the estate. the family represents the estate, the estate the family; whose name, together with its origin, its glory, its power, and its virtues, is thus perpetuated in an imperishable memorial of the past, and a sure pledge of the future. when the equal partition of property is established by law, the intimate connection is destroyed between family feeling and the preservation of the paternal estate; the property ceases to represent the family; for, as it must inevitably be divided after one or two generations, it has evidently a constant tendency to diminish, and must in the end be completely dispersed. the sons of the great landed proprietor, if they are few in number, or if fortune befriend them, may indeed entertain the hope of being as wealthy as their father, but not that of possessing the same property as he did; their riches must necessarily be composed of elements different from his. now, from the moment when you divest the land-owner of that interest in the preservation of his estate which he derives from association, from tradition, and from family pride, you may be certain that sooner or later he will dispose of it; for there is a strong pecuniary interest in favor of selling, as floating capital produces higher interest than real property, and is more readily available to gratify the passions of the moment. great landed estates which have once been divided, never come together again; for the small proprietor draws from his land a better revenue in proportion, than the large owner does from his; and of course he sells it at a higher rate.[ ] the calculations of gain, therefore, which decided the rich man to sell his domain, will still more powerfully influence him against buying small estates to unite them into a large one. what is called family pride is often founded upon an illusion of self-love. a man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself, as it were, in his great-grandchildren. where the _esprit de famille_ ceases to act, individual selfishness comes into play. when the idea of family becomes vague, indeterminate, and uncertain, a man thinks of his present convenience; he provides for the establishment of the succeeding generation, and no more. either a man gives up the idea of perpetuating his family, or at any rate he seeks to accomplish it by other means than that of a landed estate. thus not only does the law of partible inheritance render it difficult for families to preserve their ancestral domains entire, but it deprives them of the inclination to attempt it, and compels them in some measure to co-operate with the law in their own extinction. the law of equal distribution proceeds by two methods: by acting upon things, it acts upon persons; by influencing persons, it affects things. by these means the law succeeds in striking at the root of landed property, and dispersing rapidly both families and fortunes.[ ] most certainly is it not for us, frenchmen of the nineteenth century, who daily behold the political and social changes which the law of partition is bringing to pass, to question its influence. it is perpetually conspicuous in our country, overthrowing the walls of our dwellings and removing the landmarks of our fields. but although it has produced great effects in france, much still remains for it to do. our recollections, opinions, and habits, present powerful obstacles to its progress. in the united states it has nearly completed its work of destruction, and there we can best study its results. the english laws concerning the transmission of property were abolished in almost all the states at the time of the revolution. the law of entail was so modified as not to interrupt the free circulation of property.[ ] the first having passed away, estates began to be parcelled out; and the change became more and more rapid with the progress of time. at this moment, after a lapse of little more than sixty years, the aspect of society is totally altered; the families of the great landed proprietors are almost all commingled with the general mass. in the state of new york, which formerly contained many of these, there are but two who still keep their heads above the stream; and they must shortly disappear. the sons of these opulent citizens have become merchants, lawyers, or physicians. most of them have lapsed into obscurity. the last trace of hereditary ranks and distinctions is destroyed--the law of partition has reduced all to one level. i do not mean that there is any deficiency of wealthy individuals in the united states; i know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property. but wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it. this picture, which may perhaps be thought overcharged, still gives a very imperfect idea of what is taking place in the new states of the west and southwest. at the end of the last century a few bold adventurers began to penetrate into the valleys of the mississippi, and the mass of the population very soon began to move in that direction: communities unheard of till then were seen to emerge from their wilds: states, whose names were not in existence a few years before, claimed their place in the american union; and in the western settlements we may behold democracy arrived at its utmost extreme. in these states, founded off hand, and as it were by chance, the inhabitants are but of yesterday. scarcely known to one another, the nearest neighbors are ignorant of each other's history. in this part of the american continent, therefore, the population has not experienced the influence of great names and great wealth, nor even that of the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue. none are there to wield that respectable power which men willingly grant to the remembrance of a life spent in doing good before their eyes. the new states of the west are already inhabited; but society has no existence among them. it is not only the fortunes of men which are equal in america; even their acquirements partake in some degree of the same uniformity. i do not believe there is a country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few uninstructed, and at the same time so few learned individuals. primary instruction is within the reach of everybody; superior instruction is scarcely to be obtained by any. this is not surprising; it is in fact the necessary consequence of what we have advanced above. almost all the americans are in easy circumstances, and can therefore obtain the elements of human knowledge. in america there are comparatively few who are rich enough to live without a profession. every profession requires an apprenticeship, which limits the time of instruction to the early years of life. at fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education ends at the age when ours begins. whatever is done afterward, is with a view to some special and lucrative object; a science is taken up as a matter of business, and the only branch of it which is attended to is such as admits of an immediate practical application. [this paragraph does not fairly render the meaning of the author. the original french is as follows:-- "en amérique il y a peu de riches; presque tous les américains ont donc besoin d'exercer une profession. or, toute profession exige an apprentissage. les américains ne peuvent donc donner a la culture générale de l'intelligence que les premières années de la vie: à quinze ans ils entrent dans une carrière: ainsi leur education finit le plus souvent à l'époque où la nôtre commence." what is meant by the remark; that "at fifteen they enter upon a career, and thus their education is very often finished at the epoch when ours commences," is not clearly perceived. our professional men enter upon their course of preparation for their respective professions, wholly between eighteen and twenty-one years of age. apprentices to trades are bound out, ordinarily, at fourteen, but what general education they receive is after that period. previously, they have acquired the mere elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. but it is supposed there is nothing peculiar to america, in the age at which apprenticeship commences. in england, they commence at the same age, and it is believed that the same thing occurs throughout europe. it is feared that the author has not here expressed himself with his usual clearness and precision.--_american editor_.] in america most of the rich men were formerly poor; most of those who now enjoy leisure were absorbed in business during their youth; the consequence of which is, that when they might have had a taste for study they had no time for it, and when the time is at their disposal they have no longer the inclination. there is no class, then, in america in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure, and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. accordingly there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects. a middling standard is fixed in america for human knowledge. all approach as near to it as they can; some as they rise, others as they descend. of course, an immense multitude of persons are to be found who entertain the same number of ideas on religion, history, science, political economy, legislation, and government. the gifts of intellect proceed directly from god, and man cannot prevent their unequal distribution. but in consequence of the state of things which we have here represented, it happens, that although the capacities of men are widely different, as the creator has doubtless intended they should be, they are submitted to the same method of treatment. in america the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence in the course of affairs. the democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant but all-powerful. there is no family or corporate authority, and it is rare to find even the influence of individual character enjoy any durability. america, then, exhibits in her social state a most extraordinary phenomenon. men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or, in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance. * * * * * political consequences of the social condition of the anglo-americans. the political consequences of such a social condition as this are easily deducible. it is impossible to believe that equality will not eventually find its way into the political world as it does everywhere else. to conceive of men remaining for ever unequal upon one single point, yet equal on all others, is impossible; they must come in the end to be equal upon all. now i know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world: every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one. for nations which have arrived at the same stage of social existence as the anglo-americans, it is therefore very difficult to discover a medium between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man: and it would be vain to deny that the social condition which i have been describing is equally liable to each of these consequences. there is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality, which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. this passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. not that those nations whose social condition is democratic naturally despise liberty; on the contrary, they have an instinctive love of it. but liberty is not the chief and constant object of their desires; equality is their idol: they make rapid and sudden efforts to obtain liberty, and if they miss their aim, resign themselves to their disappointment; but nothing can satisfy them except equality, and rather than lose it they resolve to perish. on the other hand, in a state where the citizens are nearly on an equality, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggression of power. no one among them being strong enough to engage singly in the struggle with advantage, nothing but a general combination can protect their liberty: and such a union is not always to be found. from the same social position, then, nations may derive one or the other of two great political results; these results are extremely different from each other, but they may both proceed from the same cause. the anglo-americans are the first who, having been exposed to this formidable alternative, have been happy enough to escape the dominion of absolute power. they have been allowed by their circumstances, their origin, their intelligence, and especially by their moral feeling, to establish and maintain the sovereignty of the people. * * * * * notes: [ ] i understand by the law of descent all those laws whose principal object it is to regulate the distribution of property after the death of its owner. the law of entail is of this number: it certainly prevents the owner from disposing of his possessions before his death; but this is solely with a view of preserving them entire for the heir. the principal object, therefore, of the law of entail is to regulate the descent of property after the death of its owner: its other provisions are merely means to this end. [ ] i do not mean to say that the small proprietor cultivates his land better, but he cultivates it with more ardor and care; so that he makes up by his labor for his want of skill. [ ] land being the most stable kind of property, we find, from time to time, rich individuals who are disposed to make great sacrifices in order to obtain it, and who willingly forfeit a considerable part of their income to make sure of the rest. but these are accidental cases. the preference for landed property is no longer found habitually in any class but among the poor. the small land-owner, who has less information, less imagination, and fewer passions, than the great one, is generally occupied with the desire of increasing his estate; and it often happens that by inheritance, by marriage, or by the chances of trade, he is gradually furnished with the means. thus, to balance the tendency which leads men to divide their estates, there exists another, which incites them to add to them. this tendency, which is sufficient to prevent estates from being divided _ad infinitum_, is not strong enough to create great territorial possessions, certainly not to keep them up in the same family. [ ] see appendix g. chapter iv. the principle of the sovereignty of the people in america. it predominates over the whole of society in america.--application made of this principle by the americans even before their revolution.--development given to it by that revolution.--gradual and irresistible extension of the elective qualification. whenever the political laws of the united states are to be discussed, it is with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people that we must begin. the principle of the sovereignty of the people, which is to be found, more or less, at the bottom of almost all human institutions, generally remains concealed from view. it is obeyed without being recognised, or if for a moment it be brought to light, it is hastily cast back into the gloom of the sanctuary. "the will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age. to the eyes of some it has been represented by the venal suffrages of a few of the satellites of power; to others, by the votes of a timid minority; and some have even discovered it in the silence of a people, on the supposition that the fact of submission established the right of command. in america, the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not either barren or concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognised by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences. if there be a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be foreseen, that country is assuredly america. i have already observed that, from their origin, the sovereignty of the people was the fundamental principle of the greater number of the british colonies in america. it was far, however, from then exercising as much influence on the government of society as it now does. two obstacles, the one external, the other internal, checked its invasive progress. it could not ostensibly disclose itself in the laws of the colonies, which were still constrained to obey the mother country; it was therefore obliged to spread secretly, and to gain ground in the provincial assemblies, and especially in the townships. american society was not yet prepared to adopt it with all its consequences. the intelligence of new england, and the wealth of the country to the south of the hudson (as i have shown in the preceding chapter), long exercised a sort of aristocratic influence, which tended to limit the exercise of social authority within the hands of a few. the public functionaries were not universally elected, and the citizens were not all of them electors. the electoral franchise was everywhere placed within certain limits, and made dependant on a certain qualification, which was exceedingly low in the north, and more considerable in the south. the american revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the townships, took possession of the state; every class was enlisted in its cause; battles were fought, and victories obtained for it; until it became the law of laws. a scarcely less rapid change was effected in the interior of society, where the law of descent completed the abolition of local influences. at the very time when this consequence of the laws and of the revolution became apparent to every eye, victory was irrevocably pronounced in favor of the democratic cause. all power was, in fact, in its hands, and resistance was no longer possible. the higher orders submitted without a murmur and without a struggle to an evil which was thenceforth inevitable. the ordinary fate of falling powers awaited them; each of their several members followed his own interest; and as it was impossible to wring the power from the hands of a people which they did not detest sufficiently to brave, their only aim was to secure its good-will at any price. the most democratic laws were consequently voted by the very men whose interests they impaired; and thus, although the higher classes did not excite the passions of the people against their order, they accelerated the triumph of the new state of things; so that, by a singular change, the democratic impulse was found to be most irresistible in the very states where the aristocracy had the firmest hold. the state of maryland, which had been founded by men of rank, was the first to proclaim universal suffrage,[ ] and to introduce the most democratic forms into the conduct of its government. when a nation modifies the elective qualification, it may easily be foreseen that sooner or later that qualification will be entirely abolished. there is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the farther electoral rights are extended, the more is felt the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength. the ambition of those who are below the appointed rate is irritated in exact proportion to the great number of those who are above it. the exception at last becomes the rule, concession follows concession, and no stop can be made short of universal suffrage. at the present day the principle of the sovereignty of the people has acquired, in the united states, all the practical development which the imagination can conceive. it is unencumbered by those fictions which have been thrown over it in other countries, and it appears in every possible form according to the exigency of the occasion. sometimes the laws are made by the people in a body, as at athens; and sometimes its representatives, chosen by universal suffrage, transact business in its name, and almost under its immediate control. in some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. in others the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. but nothing of the kind is to be seen in the united states; there society governs itself for itself. all power centres in its bosom; and scarcely an individual is to be met with who would venture to conceive, or, still more, to express, the idea of seeking it elsewhere. the nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive government; it may almost be said to govern itself, so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they emanate.[ ] * * * * * notes: [ ] see the amendments made to the constitution of maryland in and . [ ] see appendix h. chapter v. necessity of examining the condition of the states before that of the union at large. it is proposed to examine in the following chapter, what is the form of government established in america on the principle of the sovereignty of the people; what are its resources, its hindrances, its advantages, and its dangers. the first difficulty which presents itself arises from the complex nature of the constitution of the united states, which consists of two distinct social structures, connected, and, as it were, encased, one within the other; two governments, completely separate, and almost independent, the one fulfilling the ordinary duties, and responding to the daily and indefinite calls of a community, the other circumscribed within certain limits, and only exercising an exceptional authority over the general interests of the country. in short, there are twenty-four small sovereign nations, whose agglomeration constitutes the body of the union. to examine the union before we have studied the states, would be to adopt a method filled with obstacles. the federal government of the united states was the last which was adopted; and it is in fact nothing more than a modification or a summary of these republican principles which were current in the whole community before it existed, and independently of its existence. moreover, the federal government is, as i have just observed, the exception; the government of the states is the rule. the author who should attempt to exhibit the picture as a whole, before he had explained its details, would necessarily fall into obscurity and repetition. the great political principles which govern american society at this day, undoubtedly took their origin and their growth in the state. it is therefore necessary to become acquainted with the state in order to possess a clew to the remainder. the states which at present compose the american union, all present the same features as far as regards the external aspect of their institutions. their political or administrative existence is centred in three foci of action, which may not inaptly be compared to the different nervous centres which convey motion to the human body. the township is in the lowest order, then the county, and lastly the state; and i propose to devote the following chapter to the examination of these three divisions. * * * * * the american system of townships and municipal bodies.[ ] why the author begins the examination of the political institutions with the township.--its existence in all nations.--difficulty of establishing and preserving independence.--its importance.--why the author has selected the township system of new england as the main object of his inquiry. it is not undesignedly that i begin this subject with the township. the village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural, that wherever a number of men are collected, it seems to constitute itself. the town, or tithing, as the smallest division of a community, must necessarily exist in all nations, whatever their laws and customs may be: if man makes monarchies, and establishes republics, the first association of mankind seems constituted by the hand of god. but although the existence of the township is coeval with that of man, its liberties are not the less rarely respected and easily destroyed. a nation is always able to establish great political assemblies, because it habitually contains a certain number of individuals fitted by their talents, if not by their habits, for the direction of affairs. the township is, on the contrary, composed of coarser materials, which are less easily fashioned by the legislator. the difficulties which attend the consolidation of its independence rather augment than diminish with the increasing enlightenment of the people. a highly-civilized community spurns the attempts of a local independence, is disgusted at its numerous blunders, and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is completed. again, no immunities are so ill-protected from the encroachments of the supreme power as those of municipal bodies in general: they are unable to struggle, single-handed, against a strong or an enterprising government, and they cannot defend their cause with success unless it be identified with the customs of the nation and supported by public opinion. thus, until the independence of townships is amalgamated with the manners of a people, it is easily destroyed; and it is only after a long existence in the laws that it can be thus amalgamated. municipal freedom eludes the exertions of man; it is rarely created; but it is, as it were, secretly and spontaneously engendered in the midst of a semi-barbarous state of society. the constant action of the laws and the national habits, peculiar circumstances, and above all, time, may consolidate it; but there is certainly no nation on the continent of europe which has experienced its advantages. nevertheless, local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations. municipal institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. a nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty. the transient passions, and the interests of an hour, or the chance of circumstances, may have created the external forms of independence; but the despotic tendency which has been repelled will, sooner or later, inevitably reappear on the surface. in order to explain to the reader the general principles on which the political organisations of the counties and townships of the united states rest, i have thought it expedient to choose one of the states of new england as an example, to examine the mechanism of its constitution, and then to cast a general glance over the country. the township and the county are not organized in the same manner in every part of the union; it is, however, easy to perceive that the same principles have guided the formation of both of them throughout the union. i am inclined to believe that these principles have been carried farther in new england than elsewhere, and consequently that they offer greater facilities to the observations of a stranger. the institutions of new england form a complete and regular whole; they have received the sanction of time, they have the support of the laws, and the still stronger support of the manners of the community, over which they exercise the most prodigious influence; they consequently deserve our attention on every account. * * * * * limits of the township. the township of new england is a division which stands between the commune and the canton of france, and which corresponds in general to the english tithing, or town. its average population is from two to three thousand;[ ] so that, on the one hand, the interests of the inhabitants are not likely to conflict, and, on the other, men capable of conducting its affairs are always to be found among its citizens. * * * * * authorities of the township in new england. the people the source of all power here as elsewhere.--manages its own affairs. no corporation.--the greater part of the authority vested in the hands of the selectmen.--how the selectmen act.--town-meeting.--enumeration of the public officers of the township obligatory and remunerated functions. in the township, as well as everywhere else, the people is the only source of power; but in no stage of government does the body of citizens exercise a more immediate influence. in america, the people is a master whose exigences demand obedience to the utmost limits of possibility. in new england the majority acts by representatives in the conduct of the public business of the state; but if such an arrangement be necessary in general affairs, in the township, where the legislative and administrative action of the government is in more immediate contact with the subject, the system of representation is not adopted. there is no corporation; but the body of electors, after having designated its magistrates, directs them in anything that exceeds the simple and ordinary executive business of the state.[ ] this state of things is so contrary to our ideas, and so different from our customs, that it is necessary for me to adduce some examples to explain it thoroughly. the public duties in the township are extremely numerous and minutely divided, as we shall see farther on; but the large proportion of administrative power is vested in the hands of a small number of individuals called "the selectmen."[ ] the general laws of the state impose a certain number of obligations on the selectmen, which may they fulfil without the authorization of the body they govern, but which they can only neglect on their own responsibility. the law of the state obliges them, for instance, to draw up the list of electors in the townships; and if they omit this part of their functions, they are guilty of a misdemeanor. in all the affairs, however, which are determined by the town-meeting, the selectmen are the organs of the popular mandate, as in france the maire executes the decree of the municipal council. they usually act upon their own responsibility, and merely put in practice principles which have been previously recognised by the majority. but if any change is to be introduced in the existing state of things, or if they wish to undertake any new enterprise, they are obliged to refer to the source of their power. if, for instance, a school is to be established, the selectmen convoke the whole body of electors on a certain day at an appointed place; they explain the urgency of the case; they give their opinion on the means of satisfying it, on the probable expense, and the site which seems to be most favorable. the meeting is consulted on these several points; it adopts the principle, marks out the site, votes the rate, and confides the execution of its resolution to the selectmen. the selectmen alone have the right of calling a town-meeting; but they may be requested to do so: if the citizens are desirous of submitting a new project to the assent of the township, they may demand a general convocation of the inhabitants; the selectmen are obliged to comply, but they have only the right of presiding at the meeting.[ ] the selectmen are elected every year in the month of april or of may. the town-meeting chooses at the same time a number of municipal magistrates, who are intrusted with important administrative functions. the assessors rate the township; the collectors receive the rate. a constable is appointed to keep the peace, to watch the streets, and to forward the execution of the laws; the town-clerk records all the town votes, orders, grants, births, deaths, and marriages; the treasurer keeps the funds; the overseer of the poor performs the difficult task of superintending the action of the poor laws; committee-men are appointed to attend to the schools and to public instruction; and the road-surveyors, who take care of the greater and lesser thoroughfares of the township, complete the list of the principal functionaries. they are, however, still farther subdivided; and among the municipal officers are to be found parish commissioners, who audit the expenses of public worship; different classes of inspectors, some of whom are to direct the citizens in case of fire; tithing-men, listers, haywards, chimney-viewers, fence-viewers to maintain the bounds of property, timber-measurers, and sealers of weights and measures.[ ] there are nineteen principal offices in a township. every inhabitant is constrained, on pain of being fined, to undertake these different functions; which, however, are almost all paid, in order that the poor citizens may be able to give up their time without loss. in general the american system is not to grant a fixed salary to its functionaries. every service has its price, and they are remunerated in proportion to what they have done. * * * * * existence of the township. every one the best judge of his own interest.--corollary of the principle of the sovereignty of the people.--application of these doctrines in the townships of america.--the township of new england is sovereign in that which concerns itself alone; subject to the state in all other matters.--bond of township and the state.--in france the government lends its agents to the _commune_.--in america the reverse occurs. i have already observed, that the principle of the sovereignty of the people governs the whole political system of the anglo-americans. every page of this book will afford new instances of the same doctrine. in the nations by which the sovereignty of the people is recognised, every individual possesses an equal share of power, and participates alike in the government of the state. every individual is therefore supposed to be as well informed, as virtuous, and as strong, as any of his fellow-citizens. he obeys the government, not because he is inferior to the authorities which conduct it, or that he is less capable than his neighbor of governing himself, but because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow-men, and because he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force. if he be a subject in all that concerns the mutual relations of citizens, he is free and responsible to god alone for all that concerns himself. hence arises the maxim that every one is the best and the sole judge of his own private interest, and that society has no right to control a man's actions, unless they are prejudicial to the common weal, or unless the common weal demands his co-operation. this doctrine is universally admitted in the united states. i shall hereafter examine the general influence which it exercises on the ordinary actions of life: i am now speaking of the nature of municipal bodies. the township, taken as a whole, and in relation to the government of the country, may be looked upon as an individual to whom the theory i have just alluded to is applied. municipal independence is therefore a natural consequence of the principle of the sovereignty of the people in the united states, all the american republics recognise it more or less; but circumstances have peculiarly favored its growth in new england. in this part of the union the impulsion of political activity was given in the townships; and it may almost be said that each of them originally formed an independent nation. when the kings of england asserted their supremacy, they were contented to assume the central power of the state. the townships of new england remained as they were before; and although they are now subject to the state, they were at first scarcely dependent upon it. it is important to remember that they have not been invested with privileges, but that they seem, on the contrary, to have surrendered a portion of their independence to the state. the townships are only subordinate to the state in those interests which i shall term _social_, as they are common to all the citizens. they are independent in all that concerns themselves; and among the inhabitants of new england i believe that not a man is to be found who would acknowledge that the state has any right to interfere in their local interests. the towns of new england buy and sell, prosecute or are indicted, augment or diminish their rates, without the slightest opposition on the part of the administrative authority of the state. they are bound, however, to comply with the demands of the community. if the state is in need of money, a town can neither give nor withhold the supplies. if the state projects a road, the township cannot refuse to let it cross its territory; if a police regulation is made by the state, it must be enforced by the town. a uniform system of instruction is organised all over the country, and every town is bound to establish the schools which the law ordains. in speaking of the administration of the united states, i shall have occasion to point out the means by which the townships are compelled to obey in these different cases: i here merely show the existence of the obligation. strict as this obligation is, the government of the state imposes it in principle only, and in its performance the township resumes all its independent rights. thus, taxes are voted by the state, but they are assessed and collected by the township; the existence of a school is obligatory, but the township builds, pays, and superintends it. in france the state collector receives the local imposts; in america the town collector receives the taxes of the state. thus the french government lends its agents to the commune; in america, the township is the agent of the government. this fact alone shows the extent of the differences which exist between the two nations. * * * * * public spirit of the townships of new england. how the township of new england wins the affections of its inhabitants.--difficulty of creating local public spirit in europe.--the rights and duties of the american township favorable to it.--characteristics of home in the united states.--manifestations of public spirit in new england.--its happy effects. in america, not only do municipal bodies exist, but they are kept alive and supported by public spirit. the township of new england possesses two advantages which infallibly secure the attentive interest of mankind, namely, independence and authority. its sphere is indeed small and limited, but within that sphere its action is unrestrained; and its independence would give to it a real importance, even if its extent and population did not ensure it. it is to be remembered that the affections of men are generally turned only where there is strength. patriotism is not durable in a conquered nation. the new englander is attached to his township, not only because he was born in it, but because it constitutes a strong and free social body of which he is a member, and whose government claims and deserves the exercise of his sagacity. in europe, the absence of local public spirit is a frequent subject of regret to those who are in power; every one agrees that there is no surer guarantee of order and tranquillity, and yet nothing is more difficult to create. if the municipal bodies were made powerful and independent, the authorities of the nation might be disunited, and the peace of the country endangered. yet, without power and independence, a town may contain good subjects, but it can have no active citizens. another important fact is, that the township of new england is so constituted as to excite the warmest of human affections, without arousing the ambitious passions of the heart of man. the officers of the county are not elected, and their authority is very limited. even the state is only a second-rate community, whose tranquil and obscure administration offers no inducement sufficient to draw men away from the circle of their interests into the turmoil of public affairs. the federal government confers power and honor on the men who conduct it; but these individuals can never be very numerous. the high station of the presidency can only be reached at an advanced period of life; and the other federal functionaries are generally men who have been favored by fortune, or distinguished in some other career. such cannot be the permanent aim of the ambitious. but the township serves as a centre for the desire of public esteem, the want of exciting interests, and the taste for authority and popularity, in the midst of the ordinary relations of life: and the passions which commonly embroil society, change their character when they find a vent so near the domestic hearth and the family circle. in the american states power has been disseminated with admirable skill, for the purpose of interesting the greatest possible number of persons in the common weal. independently of the electors who are from time to time called into action, the body politic is divided into innumerable functionaries and officers, who all, in their several spheres, represent the same powerful corporation in whose name they act. the local administration thus affords an unfailing source of profit and interest to a vast number of individuals. the american system, which divides the local authority among so many citizens, does not scruple to multiply the functions of the town officers. for in the united states, it is believed, and with truth, that patriotism is a kind of devotion, which is strengthened by ritual observance. in this manner the activity of the township is continually perceptible; it is daily manifested in the fulfilment of a duty, or the exercise of a right; and a constant though gentle motion is thus kept up in society which animates without disturbing it. the american attaches himself to his home, as the mountaineer clings to his hills, because the characteristic features of his country are there more distinctly marked than elsewhere. the existence of the townships of new england is in general a happy one. their government is suited to their tastes, and chosen by themselves. in the midst of the profound peace and general comfort which reign in america, the commotions of municipal discord are infrequent. the conduct of local business is easy. the political education of the people has long been complete; say rather that it was complete when the people first set foot upon the soil. in new england no tradition exists of a distinction of ranks; no portion of the community is tempted to oppress the remainder; and the abuses which may injure isolated individuals are forgotten in the general contentment which prevails. if the government is defective (and it would no doubt be easy to point out its deficiencies), the fact that it really emanates from those it governs, and that it acts, either ill or well, casts the protecting spell of a parental pride over its faults. no term of comparison disturbs the satisfaction of the citizen: england formerly governed the mass of the colonies, but the people was always sovereign in the township, where its rule is not only an ancient, but a primitive state. the native of new england is attached to his township because it is independent and free; his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions; he takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the union of the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights. * * * * * the counties of new england. the division of the counties in america has considerable analogy with that of the arrondissements of france. the limits of the counties are arbitrarily laid down, and the various districts which they contain have no necessary connexion, no common traditional or natural sympathy; their object is simply to facilitate the administration of public affairs. the extent of the township was too small to contain a system of judicial institutions; each county has, however, a court of justice,[ ] a sheriff to execute its decrees, and a prison for criminals. there are certain wants which are felt alike by all the townships of a county; it is therefore natural that they should be satisfied by a central authority. in the state of massachusetts this authority is vested in the hands of several magistrates who are appointed by the governor of the state, with the advice[ ] of his council.[ ] the officers of the county have only a limited and occasional authority, which is applicable to certain predetermined cases. the state and the townships possess all the power requisite to conduct public business. the budget of the county is only drawn up by its officers, and is voted by the legislature.[ ] there is no assembly which directly or indirectly represents the county; it has, therefore, properly speaking, no political existence. a twofold tendency may be discerned in the american constitutions, which impels the legislator to centralize the legislative, and to disperse the executive power. the township of new england has in itself an indestructible element of independence; but this distinct existence could only be fictitiously introduced into the county, where its utility had not been felt. all the townships united have but one representation, which is the state, the centre of the national authority: beyond the action of the township and that of the nation, nothing can be said to exist but the influence of individual exertion. * * * * * administration in new england. administration not perceived in america.--why?--the europeans believe that liberty is promoted by depriving the social authority of some of its rights; the americans, by dividing its exercise.--almost all the administration confined to the township, and divided among the town officers.--no trace of an administrative hierarchy to be perceived either in the township, or above it.--the reason of this.--how it happens that the administration of the state is uniform.--who is empowered to enforce the obedience of the township and the county to the law.--the introduction of judicial power into the administration.--consequence of the extension of the elective principle to all functionaries.--the justice of the peace in new england.--by whom appointed.--county officer.--ensures the administration of the townships.--court of sessions.--its action.--right of inspection and indictment disseminated like the other administrative functions.--informers encouraged by the division of fines. nothing is more striking to a european traveller in the united states than the absence of what we term government, or the administration. written laws exist in america, and one sees that they are daily executed; but although everything is in motion, the hand which gives the impulse to the social machine can nowhere be discovered. nevertheless, as all people are obliged to have recourse to certain grammatical forms, which are the foundation of human language, in order to express their thoughts; so all communities are obliged to secure their existence by submitting to a certain portion of authority, without which they fall a prey to anarchy. this authority may be distributed in several ways, but it must always exist somewhere. there are two methods of diminishing the force of authority in a nation. the first is to weaken the supreme power in its very principle, by forbidding or preventing society from acting in its own defence under certain circumstances. to weaken authority in this manner is what is generally termed in europe to lay the foundations of freedom. the second manner of diminishing the influence of authority does not consist in stripping society of any of its rights, nor in paralysing its efforts, but in distributing the exercise of its privileges among various hands, and in multiplying functionaries, to each of whom the degree of power necessary for him to perform his duty is intrusted. there may be nations whom this distribution of social powers might lead to anarchy; but in itself it is not anarchical. the action of authority is indeed thus rendered less irresistible, and less perilous, but it is not totally suppressed. the revolution of the united states was the result of a mature and deliberate taste for freedom, not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence. it contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy; but its course was marked, on the contrary, by an attachment to whatever was lawful and orderly. it was never assumed in the united states that the citizen of a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases: on the contrary, social obligations were there imposed upon him more various than anywhere else; no idea was ever entertained of attacking the principles, or of contesting the rights of society; but the exercise of its authority was divided, to the end that the office might be powerful and the officer insignificant, and that the community should be at once regulated and free. in no country in the world does the law hold so absolute a language as in america; and in no country is the right of applying it vested in so many hands. the administrative power in the united states presents nothing either central or hierarchical in its constitution, which accounts for its passing unperceived. the power exists, but its representative is not to be discerned. we have already seen that the independent townships of new england protect their own private interests; and the municipal magistrates are the persons to whom the execution of the laws of the state is most frequently intrusted.[ ] beside the general laws, the state sometimes passes general police regulations; but more commonly the townships and town officers, conjointly with the justices of the peace, regulate the minor details of social life, according to the necessities of the different localities, and promulgate such enactments as concern the health of the community, and the peace as well as morality of the citizens.[ ] lastly, these municipal magistrates provide of their own accord and without any delegated powers, for those unforeseen emergencies which frequently occur in society.[ ] it results, from what we have said, that in the state of massachusetts the administrative authority is almost entirely restricted to the township,[ ] but that it is distributed among a great number of individuals. in the french commune there is properly but one official functionary, namely, the maire; and in new england we have seen that there are nineteen. these nineteen functionaries do not in general depend upon one another. the law carefully prescribes a circle of action to each of these magistrates; and within that circle they have an entire right to perform their functions independently of any other authority. above the township scarcely any trace of a series of official dignities is to be found. it sometimes happens that the county officers alter a decision of the townships, or town magistrates,[ ] but in general the authorities of the county have no right to interfere with the authorities of the township,[ ] except in such matters as concern the county. the magistrates of the township, as well as those of the county, are bound to communicate their acts to the central government in a very small number of predetermined cases.[ ] but the central government is not represented by an individual whose business it is to publish police regulations and ordinances enforcing the execution of the laws; to keep up a regular communication with the officers of the township and the county; to inspect their conduct, to direct their actions, or reprimand their faults. there is no point which serves as a centre to the radii of the administration. what, then, is the uniform plan on which the government is conducted, and how is the compliance of the counties and their magistrates, or the townships and their officers, enforced? in the states of new england the legislative authority embraces more subjects than it does in france; the legislator penetrates to the very core of the administration; the law descends to the most minute details; the same enactment prescribes the principle and the method of its application, and thus imposes a multitude of strict and rigorously defined obligations on the secondary functionaries of the state. the consequence of this is, that if all the secondary functionaries of the administration conform to the law, society in all its branches proceeds with the greatest uniformity; the difficulty remains of compelling the secondary functionaries of the administration to conform to the law. it may be affirmed that, in general, society has only two methods of enforcing the execution of the laws at its disposal; a discretionary power may be intrusted to a superior functionary of directing all the others, and of cashiering them in case of disobedience; or the courts of justice may be authorized to inflict judicial penalties on the offender: but these two methods are not always available. the right of directing a civil officer pre-supposes that of cashiering him if he does not obey orders, and of rewarding him by promotion if he fulfils his duties with propriety. but an elected magistrate can neither be cashiered nor promoted. all elective functions are inalienable until their term is expired. in fact, the elected magistrate has nothing either to expect or to fear from his constituents; and when all public offices are filled by ballot, there can be no series of official dignities, because the double right of commanding and of enforcing obedience can never be vested in the same individual, and because the power of issuing an order can never be joined to that of inflicting a punishment or bestowing a reward. the communities therefore in which the secondary functionaries of the government are elected, are perforce obliged to make great use of judicial penalties as a means of administration. this is not evident at first sight; for those in power are apt to look upon the institution of elective functionaries as one concession, and the subjection of the elective magistrate to the judges of the land as another. they are equally averse to both these innovations; and as they are more pressingly solicited to grant the former than the latter, they accede to the election of the magistrate, and leave him independent of the judicial power. nevertheless, the second of these measures is the only thing that can possibly counter-balance the first; and it will be found that an elective authority which is not subject to judicial power will, sooner or later, either elude all control or be destroyed. the courts of justice are the only possible medium between the central power and the administrative bodies; they alone can compel the elected functionary to obey, without violating the rights of the elector. the extension of judicial power in the political world ought therefore to be in the exact ratio of the extension of elective offices; if these two institutions do not go hand in hand, the state must fall into anarchy or into subjection. it has always been remarked that habits of legal business do not render men apt to the exercise of administrative authority. the americans have borrowed from the english, their fathers, the idea of an institution which is unknown upon the continent of europe: i allude to that of justices of the peace. the justice of the peace is a sort of _mezzo termine_ between the magistrate and the man of the world, between the civil officer and the judge. a justice of the peace is a well-informed citizen, though he is not necessarily versed in the knowledge of the laws. his office simply obliges him to execute the police regulations of society; a task in which good sense and integrity are of more avail than legal science. the justice introduces into the administration a certain taste for established forms and publicity, which renders him a most unserviceable instrument of despotism; and, on the other hand, he is not blinded by those superstitions which render legal officers unfit members of a government. the americans have adopted the system of english justices of the peace, but they have deprived it of that aristocratic character which is discernible in the mother-country. the governor of massachusetts[ ] appoints a certain number of justices of the peace in every county, whose functions last seven years.[ ] he farther designates three individuals from among the whole body of justices, who form in each county what is called the court of sessions. the justices take a personal share in public business; they are sometimes intrusted with administrative functions in conjunction with elected officers;[ ] they sometimes constitute a tribunal, before which the magistrates summarily prosecute a refractory citizen or the citizens inform against the abuses of the magistrate. but it is in the court of sessions that they exercise their most important functions. this court meets twice a year in the county town; in massachusetts it is empowered to enforce the obedience of the greater number[ ] of public officers.[ ] it must be observed that in the state of massachusetts the court of sessions is at the same time an administrative body, properly so called, and a political tribunal. it has been asserted that the county is a purely administrative division. the court of sessions presides over that small number of affairs which, as they concern several townships, or all the townships of the county in common, cannot be intrusted to any of them in particular.[ ] in all that concerns county business, the duties of the court of sessions are therefore purely administrative; and if in its investigations it occasionally borrows the forms of judicial procedure, it is only with a view to its own information,[ ] or as a guarantee to the community over which it presides. but when the administration of the township is brought before it, it almost always acts as a judicial body, and in some few cases as an administrative assembly. the first difficulty is to procure the obedience of an authority so entirely independent of the general laws of the state as the township is. we have stated that assessors are annually named by the town meetings, to levy the taxes. if a township attempts to evade the payment of the taxes by neglecting to name its assessors, the court of sessions condemns it to a heavy penalty.[ ] the fine is levied on each of the inhabitants; and the sheriff of the county, who is an officer of justice, executes the mandate. thus it is that in the united states the authority of the government is mysteriously concealed under the forms of a judicial sentence; and the influence is at the same time fortified by that irresistible power with which men have invested the formalities of law. these proceedings are easy to follow, and to understand. the demands made upon a township are in general plain and accurately defined; they consist in a simple fact without any complication, or in a principle without its application in detail.[ ] but the difficulty increases when it is not the obedience of the township, but that of the town officers, which is to be enforced. all the reprehensible actions of which a public functionary may be guilty are reducible to the following heads: he may execute the law without energy or zeal; he may neglect to execute the law; he may do what the law enjoins him not to do. the last two violations of duty can alone come under the cognizance of a tribunal; a positive and appreciable fact is the indispensable foundation of an action at law. thus, if the selectmen omit to fulfil the legal formalities usual to town elections, they may be condemned to pay a fine;[ ] but when the public officer performs his duty without ability, and when he obeys the letter of the law without zeal or energy, he is at least beyond the reach of judicial interference. the court of sessions, even when it is invested with its administrative powers, is in this case unable to compel him to a more satisfactory obedience. the fear of removal is the only check to these quasi offences; and as the court of sessions does not originate the town authorities, it cannot remove functionaries whom it does not appoint. moreover, a perpetual investigation would be necessary to convict the subordinate officer of negligence or lukewarmness; and the court of sessions sits but twice a year, and then only judges such offences as are brought before its notice. the only security for that active and enlightened obedience, which a court of justice cannot impose upon public officers, lies in the possibility of their arbitrary removal. in france this security is sought for in powers exercised by the heads of the administration; in america it is sought for in the principle of election. thus, to recapitulate in a few words what i have been showing:-- if a public officer in new england commits a crime in the exercise of his functions, the ordinary courts of justice are always called upon to pass sentence upon him. if he commits a fault in his official capacity, a purely administrative tribunal is empowered to punish him; and, if the affair is important or urgent, the judge supplies the omission of the functionary.[ ] lastly, if the same individual is guilty of one of those intangible offences, of which human justice has no cognizance, he annually appears before a tribunal from which there is no appeal, which can at once reduce him to insignificance, and deprive him of his charge. this system undoubtedly possesses great advantages, but its execution is attended with a practical difficulty which it is important to point out. i have already observed, that the administrative tribunal, which is called the court of sessions, has no right of inspection over the town officers. it can only interfere when the conduct of a magistrate is specially brought under its notice; and this is the delicate part of the system. the americans of new england are unacquainted with the office of public prosecutor in the court of sessions,[ ] and it may readily be perceived that it could not have been established without difficulty. if an accusing magistrate had merely been appointed in the chief town of each county, and if he had been unassisted by agents in the townships, he would not have been better acquainted with what was going on in the county than the members of the court of sessions. but to appoint agents in each township, would have been to centre in his person the most formidable of powers, that of a judicial administration. moreover, laws are the children of habit, and nothing of the kind exists in the legislation of england. the americans have therefore divided the officers of inspection and of prosecution as well as all the other functions of the administration. grand-jurors are bound by the law to apprize the court to which they belong of all the misdemeanors which may have been committed in their county.[ ] there are certain great offences which are officially prosecuted by the state;[ ] but more frequently the task of punishing delinquents devolves upon the fiscal officer, whose province it is to receive the fine; thus the treasurer of the township is charged with the prosecution of such administrative offences as fall under his notice. but a more especial appeal is made by american legislation to the private interest of the citizen,[ ] and this great principle is constantly to be met with in studying the laws of the united states. american legislators are more apt to give men credit for intelligence than for honesty; and they rely not a little on personal cupidity for the execution of the laws. when an individual is really and sensibly injured by an administrative abuse, it is natural that his personal interest should induce him to prosecute. but if a legal formality be required which, however advantageous to the community, is of small importance to individuals, plaintiffs may be less easily found; and thus, by a tacit agreement, the laws might fall into disuse. reduced by their system to this extremity, the americans are obliged to encourage informers by bestowing on them a portion of the penalty in certain cases;[ ] and to ensure the execution of the laws by the dangerous expedient of degrading the morals of the people. the only administrative authority above the county magistrates is, properly speaking, that of the government. * * * * * general remarks on the administration of the united states. difference of the states of the union in their systems of administration.--activity and perfection of the local authorities decreases towards the south.--power of the magistrates increases; that of the elector diminishes.--administration passes from the township to the county.--states of new york, ohio, pennsylvania.--principles of administration applicable to the whole union.--election of public officers, and inalienability of their functions.--absence of gradation of ranks.--introduction of judicial resources into the administration. i have already promised that after having examined the constitution of the township and the county of new england in detail, i should take a general view of the remainder of the union. townships and a local activity exist in every state; but in no part of the confederation is a township to be met with precisely similar to those in new england. the more we descend toward the south, the less active does the business of the township or parish become; the number of magistrates, of functions, and of rights, decreases; the population exercises a less immediate influence on affairs; town-meetings are less frequent, and the subjects of debates less numerous. the power of the elected magistrate is augmented, and that of the elector diminished, while the public spirit of the local communities is less awakened and less influential.[ ] these differences may be perceived to a certain extent in the state of new york; they are very sensible in pennsylvania; but they become less striking as we advance to the northwest. the majority of the emigrants who settle in the northwestern states are natives of new england, and they carry the habits of their mother-country with them into that which they adopt. a township in ohio is by no means dissimilar from a township in massachusetts. we have seen that in massachusetts the principal part of the public administration lies in the township. it forms the common centre of the interests and affections of the citizens. but this ceases to be the case as we descend to states in which knowledge is less generally diffused, and where the township consequently offers fewer guarantees of a wise and active administration. as we leave new england, therefore, we find that the importance of the town is gradually transferred to the county, which becomes the centre of administration, and the intermediate power between the government and the citizen. in massachusetts the business of the town is conducted by the court of sessions, which is composed of a _quorum_ named by the governor and his council; but the county has no representative assembly, and its expenditure is voted by the national[ ] legislature. in the great state of new york, on the contrary, and in those of ohio and pennsylvania, the inhabitants of each county choose a certain number of representatives, who constitute the assembly of the county.[ ] the county assembly has the right of taxing the inhabitants to a certain extent; and in this respect it enjoys the privileges of a real legislative body: at the same time it exercises an executive power in the county, frequently directs the administration of the townships, and restricts their authority within much narrower bounds than in massachusetts. such are the principal differences which the systems of county and town administration present in the federal states. were it my intention to examine the provisions of american law minutely, i should have to point out still farther differences in the executive details of the several communities. but what i have already said may suffice to show the general principles on which the administration of the united states rests. these principles are differently applied; their consequences are more or less numerous in various localities; but they are always substantially the same. the laws differ, and their outward features change, but their character does not vary. if the township and the county are not everywhere constituted in the same manner, it is at least true that in the united states the county and the township are always based upon the same principle, namely, that every one is the best judge of what concerns himself alone, and the person most able to supply his private wants. the township and the county are therefore bound to take care of their special interests: the state governs, but it does not interfere with their administration. exceptions to this rule may be met with, but not a contrary principle. the first consequence of this doctrine has been to cause all the magistrates to be chosen either by, or at least from among the citizens. as the officers are everywhere elected or appointed for a certain period, it has been impossible to establish the rules of a dependent series of authorities; there are almost as many independent functionaries as there are functions, and the executive power is disseminated in a multitude of hands. hence arose the indispensable necessity of introducing the control of the courts of justice over the administration, and the system of pecuniary penalties, by which the secondary bodies and their representatives are constrained to obey the laws. the system obtains from one end of the union to the other. the power of punishing the misconduct of public officers, or of performing the part of the executive, in urgent cases, has not, however, been bestowed on the same judges in all the states. the anglo-americans derived the institution of justices of the peace from a common source; but although it exists in all the states, it is not always turned to the same use. the justices of the peace everywhere participate in the administration of the townships and the counties,[ ] either as public officers or as the judges of public misdemeanors, but in most of the states the more important classes of public offences come under the cognisance of the ordinary tribunals. the election of public officers, or the inalienability of their functions, the absence of a gradation of powers, and the introduction of a judicial control over the secondary branches of the administration, are the universal characteristics of the american system from maine to the floridas. in some states (and that of new york has advanced most in this direction) traces of a centralised administration begin to be discernible. in the state of new york the officers of the central government exercise, in certain cases, a sort of inspection of control over the secondary bodies.[ ] at other times they constitute a court of appeal for the decision of affairs.[ ] in the state of new york judicial penalties are less used than in other parts as a means of administration; and the right of prosecuting the offences of public officers is vested in fewer hands.[ ] the same tendency is faintly observable in some other states;[ ] but in general the prominent feature of the administration in the united states is its excessive local independence. * * * * * of the state. i have described the townships and the administration: it now remains for me to speak of the state and government. this is ground i may pass over rapidly, without fear of being misunderstood; for all i have to say is to be found in written forms of the various constitutions, which are easily to be procured.[ ] these constitutions rest upon a simple and rational theory; their forms have been adopted by all constitutional nations, and are become familiar to us. in this place, therefore, it is only necessary for me to give a short analysis; i shall endeavor afterward to pass judgment upon what i now describe. * * * * * legislative power of the state. division of the legislative body into two houses.--senate.--house of representatives.--different functions of these two bodies. the legislative power of the state is vested in two assemblies, the first of which generally bears the name of the senate. the senate is commonly a legislative body; but it sometimes becomes an executive and judicial one. it takes a part in the government in several ways, according to the constitution of the different states;[ ] but it is in the nomination of public functionaries that it most commonly assumes an executive power. it partakes of judicial power in the trial of certain political offences, and sometimes also in the decision of certain civil cases.[ ] the number of its members is always small. the other branch of the legislature, which is usually called the house of representatives, has no share whatever in the administration, and only takes a part in the judicial power inasmuch as it impeaches public functionaries before the senate. the members of the two houses are nearly everywhere subject to the same conditions of election. they are chosen in the same manner, and by the same citizens. the only difference which exists between them is, that the term for which the senate is chosen, is in general longer than that of the house of representatives. the latter seldom remain in office longer than a year; the former usually sit two or three years. by granting to the senators the privilege of being chosen for several years, and being renewed seriatim, the law takes care to preserve in the legislative body a nucleus of men already accustomed to public business, and capable of exercising a salutary influence upon the junior members. the americans, plainly, did not desire, by this separation of the legislative body into two branches, to make one house hereditary and the other elective; one aristocratic and the other democratic. it was not their object to create in the one a bulwark to power, while the other represented the interests and passions of the people. the only advantages which result from the present constitution of the united states, are, the division of the legislative power, and the consequent check upon political assemblies; with the creation of a tribunal of appeal for the revision of the laws. time and experience, however, have convinced the americans that if these are its only advantages, the division of the legislative power is still a principle of the greatest necessity. pennsylvania was the only one of the united states which at first attempted to establish a single house of assembly; and franklin himself was so far carried away by the necessary consequences of the principle of the sovereignty of the people, as to have concurred in the measure; but the pennsylvanians were soon obliged to change the law, and to create two houses. thus the principle of the division of the legislative power was finally established, and its necessity may henceforward be regarded as a demonstrated truth. this theory, which was nearly unknown to the republics of antiquity--which was introduced into the world almost by accident, like so many other great truths--and misunderstood by several modern nations, is at length become an axiom in the political science of the present age. * * * * * the executive power of the state. office of governor in an american state.--the place he occupies in relation to the legislature.--his rights and his duties.--his dependence on the people. the executive power of the state may with truth be said to be _represented_ by the governor, although he enjoys but a portion of its rights. the supreme magistrate, under the title of governor, is the official moderator and counsellor of the legislature. he is armed with a suspensive veto, which allows him to stop, or at least to retard, its movements at pleasure. he lays the wants of the country before the legislative body, and points out the means which he thinks may be usefully employed in providing for them; he is the natural executor of its decrees in all the undertakings which interest the nation at large.[ ] in the absence of the legislature, the governor is bound to take all necessary steps to guard the state against violent shocks and unforeseen dangers. the whole military power of the state is at the disposal of the governor. he is commander of the militia and head of the armed force. when the authority, which is by general consent awarded to the laws, is disregarded, the governor puts himself at the head of the armed force of the state, to quell resistance and to restore order. lastly, the governor takes no share in the administration of townships and counties, except it be indirectly in the nomination of justices of the peace, which nomination he has not the power to revoke.[ ] the governor is an elected magistrate, and is generally chosen for one or two years only; so that he always continues to be strictly dependent on the majority who returned him. * * * * * political effects of the system of local administration in the united states. necessary distinction between the general centralisation of government and the centralisation of the local administration.--local administration not centralized in the united states; great general centralisation of the government.--some bad consequences resulting to the united states from the local administration.--administrative advantages attending the order of things.--the power which conducts the government is less regular, less enlightened, less learned, but much greater than in europe.--political advantages of this order of things.--in the united states the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view.--support given to the government by the community.--provincial institutions more necessary in proportion as the social condition becomes more democratic.--reason of this. centralisation is become a word of general and daily use, without any precise meaning being attached to it. nevertheless, there exist two distinct kinds of centralisation, which it is necessary to discriminate with accuracy. certain interests are common to all parts of a nation, such as the enactment of its general laws, and the maintenance of its foreign relations. other interests are peculiar to certain parts of the nation; such, for instance, as the business of different townships. when the power which directs the general interests is centred in one place, or in the same persons, it constitutes a central government. the power of directing partial or local interests, when brought together, in like manner constitutes what may be termed a central administration. upon some points these two kinds of centralisation coalesce; but by classifying the objects which fall more particularly within the province of each of them, they may easily be distinguished. it is evident that a central government acquires immense power when united to administrative centralisation. thus combined, it accustoms men to set their own will habitually and completely aside; to submit, not only for once or upon one point, but in every respect, and at all times. not only, therefore, does the union of power subdue them by force, but it affects them in the ordinary habits of life, and influences each individual, first separately, and then collectively. these two kinds of centralisation mutually assist and attract each other: but they must not be supposed to be inseparable. it is impossible to imagine a more completely central government than that which existed in france under louis xiv.; when the same individual was the author and the interpreter of the laws, and being the representative of france at home and abroad, he was justified in asserting that the state was identified with his person. nevertheless, the administration was much less centralized under louis xiv., than it is at the present day. in england the centralisation of the government is carried to great perfection; the state has the compact vigor of a man, and by the sole act of its will it puts immense engines in motion, and wields or collects the efforts of its authority. indeed, i cannot conceive that a nation can enjoy a secure or prosperous existence without a powerful centralisation of government. but i am of opinion that a central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit. if such an administration succeeds in condensing at a given moment on a given point all the disposable resources of a people, it impairs at least the renewal of those resources. it may ensure a victory in the hour of strife, but it gradually relaxes the sinews of strength. it may contribute admirably to the transient greatness of a man, but it cannot ensure the durable prosperity of a people. if we pay proper attention, we shall find that whenever it is said that a state cannot act because it has no central point, it is the centralisation of the government in which it is deficient. it is frequently asserted, and we are prepared to assent to the proposition, that the german empire was never able to bring all its powers into action. but the reason was, that the state has never been able to enforce obedience to its general laws, because the several members of that great body always claimed the right, or found the means, of refusing their co-operation to the representatives of the common authority, even in the affairs which concerned the mass of the people; in other words, because there was no centralisation of government. the same remark is applicable to the middle ages; the cause of all the confusion of feudal society was that the control, not only of local but of general interests, was divided among a thousand hands, and broken up in a thousand different ways; the absence of a central government prevented the nations of europe from advancing with energy in any straightforward course. we have shown that in the united states no central administration, and no dependent series of public functionaries, exist. local authority has been carried to lengths which no european nation could endure without great inconvenience, and which have even produced some disadvantageous consequences in america. but in the united states the centralisation of the government is complete; and it would be easy to prove that the national power is more compact than it has ever been in the old monarchies of europe. not only is there but one legislative body in each state; not only does there exist but one source of political authority; but numerous district assemblies and county courts have in general been avoided, lest they should be tempted to exceed their administrative duties and interfere with the government. in america the legislature of each state is supreme; nothing can impede its authority; neither privileges, nor local immunities, nor personal influence, nor even the empire of reason, since it represents that majority which claims to be the sole organ of reason. its own determination is, therefore, the only limit to its action. in juxtaposition to it, and under its immediate control, is the representative of the executive power, whose duty it is to constrain the refractory to submit by superior force. the only symptom of weakness lies in certain details of the action of the government. the american republics have no standing armies to intimidate a discontented minority; but as no minority has as yet been reduced to declare open war, the necessity of an army has not been felt. the state usually employs the officers of the township or the county, to deal with the citizens. thus, for instance, in new england the assessor fixes the rate of taxes; the collector receives them; the town treasurer transmits the amount to the public treasury; and the disputes which may arise are brought before the ordinary courts of justice. this method of collecting taxes is slow as well as inconvenient, and it would prove a perpetual hindrance to a government whose pecuniary demands were large. in general it is desirable that in what ever materially affects its existence, the government should be served by officers of its own, appointed by itself, removable at pleasure, and accustomed to rapid methods of proceeding. but it will always be easy for the central government, organized as it is in america, to introduce new and more efficacious modes of action proportioned to its wants. the absence of a central government will not, then, as has often been asserted, prove the destruction of the republics of the new world; far from supposing that the american governments are not sufficiently centralized, i shall prove hereafter that they are too much so. the legislative bodies daily encroach upon the authority of the government, and their tendency, like that of the french convention, is to appropriate it entirely to themselves. under these circumstances the social power is constantly changing hands, because it is subordinate to the power of the people, which is too apt to forget the maxims of wisdom and of foresight in the consciousness of its strength: hence arises its danger; and thus its vigor, and not its impotence, will probably be the cause of its ultimate destruction. the system of local administration produces several different effects in america. the americans seem to me to have outstepped the limits of sound policy, in isolating the administration of the government; for order, even in second-rate affairs, is a matter of national importance.[ ] as the state has no administrative functionaries of its own, stationed on different parts of its territory, to whom it can give a common impulse, the consequence is that it rarely attempts to issue any general police regulations. the want of these regulations is severely felt, and is frequently observed by europeans. the appearance of disorder which prevails on the surface, leads them at first to imagine that society is in a state of anarchy; nor do they perceive their mistake till they have gone deeper into the subject. certain undertakings are of importance to the whole state; but they cannot be put in execution, because there is no national administration to direct them. abandoned to the exertions of the towns or counties, under the care of elected or temporary agents, they lead to no result, or at least to no durable benefit. the partisans of centralisation in europe maintain that the government directs the affairs of each locality better than the citizens could do it for themselves: this may be true when the central power is enlightened, and when the local districts are ignorant; when it is as alert as they are slow; when it is accustomed to act, and they to obey. indeed, it is evident that this double tendency must augment with the increase of centralisation, and that the readiness of the one, and the incapacity of the others, must become more and more prominent. but i deny that such is the case when the people is as enlightened, as awake to its interests, and as accustomed to reflect on them, as the americans are. i am persuaded, on the contrary, that in this case the collective strength of the citizens will always conduce more efficaciously to the public welfare than the authority of the government. it is difficult to point out with certainty the means of arousing a sleeping population, and of giving it passions and knowledge which it does not possess; it is, i am well aware, an arduous task to persuade men to busy themselves about their own affairs; and it would frequently be easier to interest them in the punctilios of court etiquette than in the repairs of their common dwelling. but whenever a central administration affects to supersede the persons most interested, i am inclined to suppose that it is either misled, or desirous to mislead. however enlightened and however skilful a central power may be, it cannot of itself embrace all the details of the existence of a great nation. such vigilance exceeds the powers of man. and when it attempts to create and set in motion so many complicated springs, it must submit to a very imperfect result, or consume itself in bootless efforts. centralisation succeeds more easily, indeed, in subjecting the external actions of men to a certain uniformity, which at last commands our regard, independently of the objects to which it is applied, like those devotees who worship the statue and forget the deity it represents. centralisation imparts without difficulty an admirable regularity to the routine of business; rules the details of the social police with sagacity; represses the smallest disorder and the most petty misdemeanors; maintains society in a _status quo_, alike secure from improvement and decline; and perpetuates a drowsy precision in the conduct of affairs, which is hailed by the heads of the administration as a sign of perfect order and public tranquillity;[ ] in short, it excels more in prevention than in action. its force deserts it when society is to be disturbed or accelerated in its course; and if once the co-operation of private citizens is necessary to the furtherance of its measures, the secret of its impotence is disclosed. even while it invokes their assistance, it is on the condition that they shall act exactly as much as the government chooses, and exactly in the manner it appoints. they are to take charge of the details, without aspiring to guide the system; they are to work in a dark and subordinate sphere, and only to judge the acts in which they have themselves co-operated, by their results. these, however, are not conditions on which the alliance of the human will is to be obtained; its carriage must be free, and its actions responsible, or (such is the constitution of man) the citizen had rather remain a passive spectator than a dependent actor in schemes with which he is unacquainted. it is undeniable, that the want of those uniform regulations which control the conduct of every inhabitant of france is not unfrequently felt in the united states. gross instances of social indifference and neglect are to be met with; and from time to time disgraceful blemishes are seen, in complete contrast with the surrounding civilisation. useful undertakings, which cannot succeed without perpetual attention and rigorous exactitude, are very frequently abandoned in the end; for in america, as well as in other countries, the people is subject to sudden impulses and momentary exertions. the european who is accustomed to find a functionary always at hand to interfere with all he undertakes, has some difficulty in accustoming himself to the complex mechanism of the administration of the townships. in general it may be affirmed that the lesser details of the police, which render life easy and comfortable, are neglected in america; but that the essential guarantees of man in society are as strong there as elsewhere. in america the power which conducts the government is far less regular, less enlightened, and less learned, but a hundredfold more authoritative, than in europe. in no country in the world do the citizens make such exertions for the common weal; and i am acquainted with no people which has established schools as numerous and as efficacious, places of public worship better suited to the wants of the inhabitants, or roads kept in better repair. uniformity or permanence of design, the minute arrangement of details,[ ] and the perfection of an ingenious administration, must not be sought for in the united states; but it will be easy to find, on the other hand, the symptoms of a power, which, if it is somewhat barbarous, is at least robust; and of an existence, which is checkered with accidents indeed, but cheered at the same time by animation and effort. granting for an instant that the villages and counties of the united states would be more usefully governed by a remote authority, which they had never seen, than by functionaries taken from the midst of them--admitting, for the sake of argument, that the country would be more secure, and the resources of society better employed, if the whole administration centred in a single arm, still the _political_ advantages which the americans derive from their system would induce me to prefer it to the contrary plan. it profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority protects the tranquillity of my pleasures, and constantly averts all danger from my path, without my care or my concern, if the same authority is the absolute mistress of my liberty and of my life, and if it so monopolises all the energy of existence, that when it languishes everything languishes around it, that when it sleeps everything must sleep, that when it dies the state itself must perish. in certain countries of europe the natives consider themselves as a kind of settlers, indifferent to the fate of the spot upon which they live. the greatest changes are effected without their concurrence and (unless chance may have apprised them of the event) without their knowledge; nay more, the citizen is unconcerned as to the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or the parsonage; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself, and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. he has only a life-interest in these possessions, and he entertains no notions of ownership or of improvement. this want of interest in his own affairs goes so far, that if his own safety or that of his children is endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms, and wait till the nation comes to his assistance. this same individual, who has so completely sacrificed his own free will, has no natural propensity to obedience; he cowers, it is true, before the pettiest officer; but he braves the law with the spirit of a conquered foe as soon as its superior force is removed: his oscillations between servitude and license are perpetual. when a nation has arrived at this state, it must either change its customs and its laws, or perish: the source of public virtue is dry; and though it may contain subjects, the race of citizens is extinct. such communities are a natural prey to foreign conquest; and if they do not disappear from the scene of life, it is because they are surrounded by other nations similar or inferior to themselves; it is because the instinctive feeling of their country's claims still exists in their hearts; and because an involuntary pride in the name it bears, or the vague reminiscence of its by-gone fame, suffices to give them the impulse of self-preservation. nor can the prodigious exertions made by certain people in the defence of a country, in which they may almost be said to have lived as aliens, be adduced in favor of such a system; for it will be found that in these cases their main incitement was religion. the permanence, the glory, and the prosperity of the nation, were become parts of their faith; and in defending the country they inhabited, they defended that holy city of which they were all citizens. the turkish tribes have never taken an active share in the conduct of the affairs of society, but they accomplished stupendous enterprises as long as the victories of the sultans were the triumphs of the mohammedan faith. in the present age they are in rapid decay, because their religion is departing, and despotism only remains. montesquieu, who attributed to absolute power an authority peculiar to itself, did it, as i conceive, undeserved honor; for despotism, taken by itself, can produce no durable results. on close inspection we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of absolute governments. whatever exertions may be made, no true power can be founded among men which does not depend upon the free union of their inclinations; and patriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of a body politic to one end. laws cannot succeed in rekindling the ardor of an extinguished faith; but men may be interested in the fate of their country by the laws. by this influence, the vague impulse of patriotism, which never abandons the human heart, may be directed and revived: and if it be connected with the thoughts, the passions and daily habits of life, it may be consolidated into a durable and rational sentiment. let it not be said that the time for the experiment is already past; for the old age of nations is not like the old age of men, and every fresh generation is a new people ready for the care of the legislator. it is not the _administrative_, but the _political_ effects of the local system that i most admire in america. in the united states the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view; they are an object of solicitude to the people of the whole union, and every citizen is as warmly attached to them as if they were his own. he takes pride in the glory of his nation; he boasts of his success, to which he conceives himself to have contributed; and he rejoices in the general prosperity by which he profits. the feeling he entertains toward the state is analogous to that which unites him to his family, and it is by a kind of egotism that he interests himself in the welfare of his country. the european generally submits to a public officer because he represents a superior force; but to an american he represents a right. in america it may be said that no one renders obedience to man, but to justice and to law. if the opinion which the citizen entertains of himself is exaggerated, it is at least salutary; he unhesitatingly confides in his own powers, which appear to him to be all-sufficient. when a private individual meditates an undertaking, however directly connected it may be with the welfare of society, he never thinks of soliciting the co-operation of the government: but he publishes his plan, offers to execute it himself, courts the assistance of other individuals, and struggles manfully against all obstacles. undoubtedly he is less successful than the state might have been in his position; but in the end, the sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the government could effect. as the administrative authority is within the reach of the citizens, whom it in some degree represents, it excites neither their jealousy nor their hatred: as its resources are limited, every one feels that he must not rely solely on its assistance. thus when the administration thinks fit to interfere, it is not abandoned to itself as in europe; the duties of the private citizens are not supposed to have lapsed because the state assists in their fulfilment; but every one is ready, on the contrary, to guide and to support it. this action of individual exertions, joined to that of the public authorities, frequently performs what the most energetic central administration would be unable to execute. it would be easy to adduce several facts in proof of what i advance, but i had rather give only one, with which i am more thoroughly acquainted.[ ] in america, the means which the authorities have at their disposal for the discovery of crimes and the arrest of criminals are few. a state police does not exist, and passports are unknown. the criminal police of the united states cannot be compared with that of france; the magistrates and public prosecutors are not numerous, and the examinations of prisoners are rapid and oral. nevertheless in no country does crime more rarely elude punishment. the reason is that every one conceives himself to be interested in furnishing evidence of the act committed, and in stopping the delinquent. during my stay in the united states, i saw the spontaneous formation of committees for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime in a certain county. in europe a criminal is an unhappy being, who is struggling for his life against the ministers of justice, while the population is merely a spectator of the conflict: in america he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him. i believe that provincial institutions are useful to all nations, but nowhere do they appear to me to be more indispensable than among a democratic people. in an aristocracy, order can always be maintained in the midst of liberty; and as the rulers have a great deal to lose, order is to them a first-rate consideration. in like manner an aristocracy protects the people from the excesses of despotism, because it always possesses an organized power ready to resist a despot. but a democracy without provincial institutions has no security against these evils. how can a populace, unaccustomed to freedom in small concerns, learn to use it temperately in great affairs? what resistance can be offered to tyranny in a country where every private individual is impotent, and where the citizens are united by no common tie? those who dread the license of the mob, and those who fear the rule of absolute power, ought alike to desire the progressive growth of provincial liberties. on the other hand, i am convinced that democratic nations are most exposed to fall beneath the yoke of a central administration, for several reasons, among which is the following:-- the constant tendency of these nations is to concentrate all the strength of the government in the hands of the only power which directly represents the people: because, beyond the people nothing is to be perceived but a mass of equal individuals confounded together. but when the same power is already in possession of all the attributes of the government, it can scarcely refrain from penetrating into the details of the administration; and an opportunity of doing so is sure to present itself in the end, as was the case in france. in the french revolution there were two impulses in opposite directions, which must never be confounded; the one was favorable to liberty, the other to despotism. under the ancient monarchy the king was the sole author of the laws; and below the power of the sovereign, certain vestiges of provincial institutions half-destroyed, were still distinguishable. these provincial institutions were incoherent, ill-compacted, and frequently absurd; in the hands of the aristocracy they had sometimes been converted into instruments of oppression. the revolution declared itself the enemy of royalty and of provincial institutions at the same time; it confounded all that had preceded it--despotic power and the checks to its abuses--in an indiscriminate hatred; and its tendency was at once to republicanism and to centralisation. this double character of the french revolution is a fact which has been adroitly handled by the friends of absolute power. can they be accused of laboring in the cause of despotism, when they are defending of the revolution?[ ] in this manner popularity may be conciliated with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed admirer of freedom. i have visited the two nations in which the system of provincial liberty has been most perfectly established, and i have listened to the opinions of different parties in those countries. in america i met with men who secretly aspired to destroy the democratic institutions of the union; in england, i found others who attacked aristocracy openly; but i know of no one who does not regard provincial independence as a great benefit. in both countries i have heard a thousand different causes assigned for the evils of the state; but the local system was never mentioned among them. i have heard citizens attribute the power and prosperity of their country to a multitude of reasons: but they _all_ placed the advantages of local institutions in the foremost rank. am i to suppose that when men who are naturally so divided on religious opinions, and on political theories, agree on one point (and that, one of which they have daily experience), they are all in error? the only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who pass a censure upon it. * * * * * notes: [ ] it is by this periphrasis that i attempt to render the french expressions "_commune_" and "_système communal_." i am not aware that any english word precisely corresponds to the general term of the original. in france every association of human dwellings forms a _commune_, and every commune is governed by a _maire_ and a _conseil municipal_. in other words, the _mancipium_ or municipal privilege, which belongs in england to chartered corporations alone, is alike extended to every commune into which the cantons and departments of france were divided at the revolution. thence the different application of the expression, which is general in one country and restricted in the other. in america, the counties of the northern states are divided into townships, those of the southern into parishes; besides which, municipal bodies, bearing the name of corporations, exist in the cities. i shall apply these several expressions to render the term _commune_. the term "parish," now commonly used in england, belongs exclusively to the ecclesiastical division; it denotes the limits over which a _parson's_ (_personae ecclesiae_ or perhaps _parochianus_) rights extend.--_translator's note_. [ ] in , there were townships in the state of massachusetts and , inhabitants; which gives an average of about , inhabitants to each township. [ ] the same rules are not applicable to the great towns, which generally have a mayor, and a corporation divided into two bodies; this, however, is an exception which requires a sanction of a law. see the act of d february, , for appointing the authorities of the city of boston. it frequently happens that small towns as well as cities are subject to a peculiar administration. in , townships in the state of new york were governed in this manner.--_williams's register_. [ ] three selectmen are appointed in the small townships, and nine in the large ones. see "the town officer," p. . see also the principal laws of the state of massachusetts relative to the selectmen:-- act of the th february, , vol. i, p. ; th february, , vol. i., p. , th march, , vol. ii., p. ; th june, , vol. i., p. ; th march, , vol. ii., p. ; th february, , vol. i., p. ; d june, , vol. i., p. . [ ] see laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. act of the th march, . [ ] all these magistrates actually exist; their different functions are all detailed in a book called, "the town officer," by isaac goodwin, worcester, ; and in the collection of the general laws of massachusetts, vols., boston, . [ ] see the act of th february, . laws of massachusetts, vol i., p. . [ ] see the act of th february, . laws of massachusetts, vol ii., p. . [ ] the council of the governor is an elective body. [ ] see the act of d november, . laws of massachusetts, vol i., p. . [ ] see "the town officer," especially at the words selectmen, assessors, collectors, schools, surveyors of highways. i take one example in a thousand: the state prohibits travelling on a sunday; the _tything-men_, who are town-officers, are especially charged to keep watch and to execute the law. see the laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . the selectmen draw up the lists of electors for the election of the governor, and transmit the result of the ballot to the secretary of the state. see act of th february, ; _ib_., vol. i., p. . [ ] thus, for instance, the selectmen authorise the construction of drains, point out the proper sites for slaughter-houses and other trades which are a nuisance to the neighborhood. see the act of th june, ; laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . [ ] the selectmen take measures for the security of the public in case of contagious disease, conjointly with the justices of the peace. see the act of d june, ; vol. i., p. . [ ] i say _almost_, for there are various circumstances in the annals of a township which are regulated by the justice of the peace in his individual capacity, or by the justices of the peace, assembled in the chief town of the county; thus licenses are granted by the justices. see the act of th feb., ; vol. i., p. . [ ] thus licenses are only granted to such persons as can produce a certificate of good conduct from the selectmen. if the selectmen refuse to give the certificate, the party may appeal to the justices assembled in the court of sessions; and they may grant the license. see the act of th march, ; vol. ii., p. . the townships have the right to make by-laws, and to enforce them by fines which are fixed by law; but these by-laws must be approved by the court of sessions. see the act of d march, ; vol. i., p. . [ ] in massachusetts the county-magistrates are frequently called upon to investigate the acts of the town-magistrates; but it will be shown farther on that this investigation is a consequence, not of their administrative, but of their judicial power. [ ] the town committees of schools are obliged to make an annual report to the secretary of the state on the condition of the school. see the act of th march, ; vol. iii., p. . [ ] we shall hereafter learn what a governor is; i shall content myself with remarking in this place, that he represents the executive power of the whole state. [ ] see the constitution of massachusetts, chap ii., § ; chap iii., § . [ ] thus, for example, a stranger arrives in a township from a country where a contagious disease prevails, and he falls ill. two justices of the peace can, with the assent of the selectmen, order the sheriff of the county to remove and take care of him. act of d june, ; vol. i., p. . in general the justices interfere in all the important acts of the administration, and give them a semi-judicial character. [ ] i say the greater number because certain administrative misdemeanors are brought before the ordinary tribunals. if, for instance, a township refuses to make the necessary expenditure for its schools, or to name a school-committee, it is liable to a heavy fine. but this penalty is pronounced by the supreme judicial court or the court of common pleas. see the act of th march, ; laws of massachusetts, vol. iii., p. . or when a township neglects to provide the necessary war-stores. act of st february, ; id. vol. ii., p. . [ ] in their individual capacity, the justices of the peace take a part in the business of the counties and townships. the more important acts of the municipal government are rarely decided upon without the co-operation of one of their body. [ ] these affairs may be brought under the following heads: . the erection of prisons and courts of justice. . the county budget, which is afterward voted by the state. . the assessment of the taxes so voted. . grants of certain patents. . the laying down and repairs of the county roads. [ ] thus, when a road is under consideration, almost all difficulties are disposed of by the aid of the jury. [ ] see the act of the th february, ; laws of massachusetts, vol. ., p. . [ ] there is an indirect method of enforcing the obedience of a township. suppose that the funds which the law demands for the maintenance of the roads have not been voted; the town-surveyor is then authorized, _ex-officio_, to levy the supplies. as he is personally responsible to private individuals for the state of the roads, and indictable before the court of sessions, he is sure to employ the extraordinary right which the law gives him against the township. thus by threatening the officer, the court of sessions exacts compliance from the town. see the act of th march, ; laws of massachusetts, vol. ., p. . [ ] laws of massachusetts, vol. ., p. . [ ] if, for instance, a township persists in refusing to name its assessors, the court of sessions nominates them; and the magistrates thus appointed are invested with the same authority as elected officers see the act quoted above, th february, . [ ] i say the court of sessions, because in common courts there is a magistrate who exercises some of the functions of a public prosecutor. [ ] the grand-jurors are, for instance, bound to inform the court of the bad state of the roads. laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . [ ] if, for instance, the treasurer of the county holds back his account. laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . [ ] thus, if a private individual breaks down or is wounded in consequence of the badness of a road, he can sue the township or the county for damages at the sessions. laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . [ ] in cases of invasion or insurrection, if the town officers neglect to furnish the necessary stores and ammunition for the militia, the township may be condemned to a fine of from two to five hundred dollars. it may readily be imagined that in such a case it might happen that no one cared to prosecute: hence the law adds that all the citizens may indict offences of this kind, and that half the fine shall belong to the plaintiff. see the act of th march, ; vol. ii., p. . the same clause is frequently to be met with in the laws of massachusetts. not only are private individuals thus incited to prosecute public officers, but the public officers are encouraged in the same manner to bring the disobedience of private individuals to justice. if a citizen refuses to perform the work which has been assigned to him upon a road, the road-surveyor may prosecute him, and he receives half the penalty for himself. see the laws above quoted, vol. i., p. . [ ] for details, see revised statutes of the state of new york, part i, chap, xi., vol. i., pp. - , entitled, "of the powers, duties, and privileges of towns." see in the digest of the laws of pennsylvania, the words, assessors, collector, constables, overseer of the poor, supervisors of highways: and in the acts of a general nature of the state of ohio, the act of th february, , relating to townships, p. ; beside the peculiar dispositions relating to divers town officers, such as township's clerks, trustees, overseers of the poor, fence-viewers, appraisers of property, township's treasurer, constables, supervisors of highways. [ ] the author means the state legislature. the congress has no control over the expenditure of the counties or of the states. [ ] see the revised statutes of the state of new york, part i., chap. xi., vol. i., p. . _idem_, chap, xii., p. : also in the acts of the state of ohio, an act relating to county commissioners, th february, , p. . see the digest of the laws of pennsylvania, at the words, county-rates and levies, p. . in the state of new york, each township elects a representative, who has a share in the administration of the county as well as in that of the township. [ ] in some of the southern states the county-courts are charged with all the details of the administration. see the statutes of the state of tennessee, _arts._ judiciary, taxes, &c. [ ] for instance, the direction of public instruction centres in the hands of the government. the legislature names the members of the university, who are denominated regents; the governor and lieutenant-governor of the state are necessarily of the number. revised statutes, vol. i., p. . the regents of the university annually visit the colleges and academies, and make their report to the legislature. their superintendence is not inefficient, for several reasons: the colleges in order to become corporations stand in need of a charter, which is only granted on the recommendation of the regents: every year funds are distributed by the state for the encouragement of learning, and the regents are the distributors of this money. see chap. xv., "public instruction," revised statutes, vol i., p. . the school commissioners are obliged to send an annual report to the superintendent of the state. _idem_, p. . a similar report is annually made to the same person on the number and condition of the poor. _idem_, p. . [ ] if any one conceives himself to be wronged by the school commissioners (who are town-officers), he can appeal to the superintendent of the primary schools, whose decision is final. revised statutes, vol. i., p. . provisions similar to those above cited are to be met with from time to time in the laws of the state of new york: but in general these attempts at centralisation are weak and unproductive. the great authorities of the state have the right of watching and controlling the subordinate agents, without that of rewarding or punishing them. the same individual is never empowered to give an order and to punish disobedience; he has therefore the right of commanding, without the means of exacting compliance. in the superintendent of schools complained in his annual report addressed to the legislature, that several school commissioners had neglected, notwithstanding his application, to furnish him with the accounts which were due. he added, that if this omission continued, he should be obliged to prosecute them, as the law directs, before the proper tribunals. [ ] thus the district-attorney is directed to recover all fines, unless such a right has been specially awarded to another magistrate. revised statutes, vol. i., p. . [ ] several traces of centralisation may be discovered in massachusetts, for instance, the committees of the town-schools are directed to make an annual report to the secretary of state. see laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . [ ] see the constitution of new york. [ ] in massachusetts the senate is not invested with any administrative functions. [ ] as in the state of new york. [ ] practically speaking, it is not always the governor who executes the plans of the legislature; it often happens that the latter, in voting a measure, names special agents to superintend the execution of it. [ ] in some of the states the justices of the peace are not nominated by the governor. [ ] the authority which represents the state ought not, i think, to waive the right of inspecting the local administration, even when it does not interfere more actively. suppose, for instance, that an agent of the government was stationed at some appointed spot, in the county, to prosecute the misdemeanors of the town and county officers, would not a more uniform order be the result, without in any way compromising the independence of the township? nothing of the kind, however, exists in america; there is nothing above the county courts, which have, as it were, only an accidental cognizance of the offences they are meant to repress. [this note seems to have been written without reference to the provision existing, it is believed in every state of the union, by which a local officer is appointed in each county, to conduct all public prosecutions at the expense of the state. and in each county, a grand-jury is assembled three or four times at least in every year, to which all who are aggrieved have free access, and where every complaint, particularly those against public officers, which has the least color of truth, is sure to be heard and investigated. such an agent as the author suggests would soon come to be considered a public informer, the most odious of all characters in the united states; and he would lose all efficiency and strength. with the provision above mentioned, there is little danger that a citizen, oppressed by a public officer, would find any difficulty in becoming his own informer, and inducing a rigid inquiry into the alleged misconduct.--_american editor_.] [ ] china appears to me to present the most perfect instance of that species of well-being which a completely central administration may furnish to the nations among which it exists. travellers assure us that the chinese have peace without happiness, industry without improvement, stability without strength, and public order without public morality. the condition of society is always tolerable, never excellent. i am convinced that, when china is opened to european observation, it will be found to contain the most perfect model of a central administration which exists in the universe. [ ] a writer of talent, who, in the comparison which he has drawn between the finances of france and those of the united states, has proved that ingenuity cannot always supply the place of a knowledge of facts, very justly reproaches the americans for the sort of confusion which exists in the accounts of the expenditure in the townships; and after giving the model of a departmental budget in france, he adds: "we are indebted to centralisation, that admirable invention of a great man, for the uniform order and method which prevail alike in all the municipal budgets, from the largest town to the humblest commune." whatever may be my admiration of this result, when i see the communes of france, with their excellent system of accounts, plunged in the grossest ignorance of their true interests, and abandoned to so incorrigible an apathy that they seem to vegetate rather than to live; when, on the other hand, i observe the activity, the information, and the spirit of enterprise which keeps society in perpetual labor, in those american townships whose budgets are drawn up with small method and with still less uniformity, i am struck by the spectacle; for to my mind the end of a good government is to ensure the welfare of a people, and not to establish order and regularity in the midst of its misery and its distress. i am therefore led to suppose that the prosperity of the american townships and the apparent confusion of their accounts, the distress of the french communes and the perfection of their budget, may be attributable to the same cause. at any rate i am suspicious of a benefit which is united to so many evils, and i am not averse to an evil which is compensated by so many benefits. [ ] see appendix i. [ ] see appendix k. chapter vi. judicial power in the united states, and its influence on political society. the anglo-americans have retained the characteristics of judicial power which are common to all nations.--they have, however, made it a powerful political organ.--how.--in what the judicial system of the anglo-americans differs from that of all other nations.--why the american judges have the right of declaring the laws to be unconstitutional.--how they use this right.--precautions taken by the legislator to prevent its abuse. i have thought it essential to devote a separate chapter to the judicial authorities of the united states, lest their great political importance should be lessened in the reader's eyes by a merely incidental mention of them. confederations have existed in other countries beside america; and republics have not been established on the shores of the new world alone: the representative system of government has been adopted in several states of europe; but i am not aware that any nation of the globe has hitherto organized a judicial power on the principle adopted by the americans. the judicial organization of the united states is the institution which the stranger has the greatest difficulty in understanding. he hears the authority of a judge invoked in the political occurrences of every day, and he naturally concludes that in the united states the judges are important political functionaries: nevertheless, when he examines the nature of the tribunals, they offer nothing which is contrary to the usual habits and privileges of those bodies; and the magistrates seem to him to interfere in public affairs by chance, but by a chance which recurs every day. when the parliament of paris remonstrated, or refused to enregister an edict, or when it summoned a functionary accused of malversation to its bar, its political influence as a judicial body was clearly visible; but nothing of the kind is to be seen in the united states. the americans have retained all the ordinary characteristics of judicial authority, and have carefully restricted its action to the ordinary circle of its functions. the first characteristic of judicial power in all nations is the duty of arbitration. but rights must be contested in order to warrant the interference of a tribunal; and an action must be brought to obtain the decision of a judge. as long, therefore, as a law is uncontested, the judicial authority is not called upon to discuss it, and it may exist without being perceived. when a judge in a given case attacks a law relating to that case, he extends the circle of his customary duties, without, however, stepping beyond it; since he is in some measure obliged to decide upon the law, in order to decide the case. but if he pronounces upon a law without resting upon a case, he clearly steps beyond his sphere, and invades that of the legislative authority. the second characteristic of judicial power is, that it pronounces on special cases, and not upon general principles. if a judge, in deciding a particular point, destroys a general principle, by passing a judgment which tends to reject all the inferences from that principle, and consequently to annul it, he remains within the ordinary limits of his functions. but if he directly attacks a general principle without having a particular case in view, he leaves the circle in which all nations have agreed to confine his authority; he assumes a more important, and perhaps a more useful influence than that of the magistrate, but he ceases to represent the judicial power. the third characteristic of the judicial power is its inability to act unless it is appealed to, or until it has taken cognizance of an affair. this characteristic is less general than the other two; but notwithstanding the exceptions, i think it may be regarded as essential. the judicial power is by its nature devoid of action; it must be put in motion in order to produce a result. when it is called upon to repress a crime, it punishes the criminal; when a wrong is to be redressed, it is ready to redress it; when an act requires interpretation, it is prepared to interpret it; but it does not pursue criminals, hunt out wrongs, or examine into evidence of its own accord. a judicial functionary who should open proceedings, and usurp the censorship of the laws, would in some measure do violence to the passive nature of his authority. the americans have retained these three distinguishing characteristics of the judicial power; an american judge can only pronounce a decision when litigation has arisen, he is only conversant with special cases, and he cannot act until the cause has been duly brought before the court. his position is therefore perfectly similar to that of the magistrate of other nations; and he is nevertheless invested with immense political power. if the sphere of his authority and his means of action are the same as those of other judges, it may be asked whence he derives a power which they do not possess. the cause of this difference lies in the simple fact that the americans have acknowledged the right of the judges to found their decisions on the constitution, rather than on the laws. in other words, they have left them at liberty not to apply such laws as may appear to them to be unconstitutional. i am aware that a similar right has been claimed--but claimed in vain--by courts of justice in other countries; but in america it is recognized by all the authorities; and not a party, nor so much as an individual, is found to contest it. this fact can only be explained by the principles of the american constitution. in france the constitution is (or at least is supposed to be) immutable; and the received theory is that no power has the right of changing any part of it. in england, the parliament has an acknowledged right to modify the constitution: as, therefore, the constitution may undergo perpetual changes, it does not in reality exist; the parliament is at once a legislative and a constituent assembly. the political theories of america are more simple and more rational. an american constitution is not supposed to be immutable as in france; nor is it susceptible of modification by the ordinary powers of society as in england. it constitutes a detached whole, which, as it represents the determination of the whole people, is no less binding on the legislator than on the private citizen, but which may be altered by the will of the people in predetermined cases, according to established rules. in america the constitution may, therefore, vary, but as long as it exists it is the origin of all authority, and the sole vehicle of the predominating force.[ ] it is easy to perceive in what manner these differences must act upon the position and the rights of the judicial bodies in the three countries i have cited. if in france the tribunals were authorized to disobey the laws on the ground of their being opposed to the constitution, the supreme power would in fact be placed in their hands, since they alone would have the right of interpreting a constitution, the clauses of which can be modified by no authority. they would, therefore, take the place of the nation, and exercise as absolute a sway over society as the inherent weakness of judicial power would allow them to do. undoubtedly, as the french judges are incompetent to declare a law to be unconstitutional, the power of changing the constitution is indirectly given to the legislative body, since no legal barrier would oppose the alterations which it might prescribe. but it is better to grant the power of changing the constitution of the people to men who represent (however imperfectly) the will of the people, than to men who represent no one but themselves. it would be still more unreasonable to invest the english judges with the right of resisting the decisions of the legislative body, since the parliament which makes the laws also makes the constitution; and consequently a law emanating from the three powers of the state can in no case be unconstitutional. but neither of these remarks is applicable to america.[ ] in the united states the constitution governs the legislator as much as the private citizen: as it is the first of laws, it cannot be modified by a law; and it is therefore just that the tribunals should obey the constitution in preference to any law. this condition is essential to the power of the judicature; for to select that legal obligation by which he is most strictly bound, is the natural right of every magistrate. in france the constitution is also the first of laws, and the judges have the same right to take it as the ground of their decisions; but were they to exercise this right, they must perforce encroach on rights more sacred than their own, namely, on those of society, in whose name they are acting. in this case the state motive clearly prevails over the motives of an individual. in america, where the nation can always reduce its magistrates to obedience by changing its constitution, no danger of this kind is to be feared. upon this point therefore the political and the logical reason agree, and the people as well as the judges preserve their privileges. whenever a law which the judge holds to be unconstitutional is argued in a tribunal of the united states, he may refuse to admit it as a rule; this power is the only one which is peculiar to the american magistrate, but it gives rise to immense political influence. few laws can escape the searching analysis; for there are few which are not prejudicial to some private interest or other, and none which may not be brought before a court of justice by the choice of parties, or by the necessity of the case. but from the time that a judge has refused to apply any given law in a case, that law loses a portion of its moral sanction. the persons to whose interest it is prejudicial, learn that means exist of evading its authority; and similar suits are multiplied, until it becomes powerless. one of two alternatives must then be resorted to: the people must alter the constitution, or the legislature must repeal the law. the political power which the americans have intrusted to their courts of justice is therefore immense; but the evils of this power are considerably diminished, by the obligation which has been imposed of attacking the laws through the courts of justice alone. if the judge had been empowered to contest the laws on the ground of theoretical generalities; if he had been enabled to open an attack or to pass a censure on the legislator, he would have played a prominent part in the political sphere; and as the champion or the antagonist of a party, he would have arrayed the hostile passions of the nation in the conflict. but when a judge contests a law, applied to some particular case in an obscure proceeding, the importance of his attack is concealed from the public gaze; his decision bears upon the interest of an individual, and if the law is slighted, it is only collaterally. moreover, although it be censured, it is not abolished; its moral force may be diminished, but its cogency is by no means suspended; and its final destruction can only be accomplished by the reiterated attacks of judicial functionaries. it will readily be understood that by connecting the censorship of the laws with the private interests of members of the community, and by intimately uniting the prosecution of the law with the prosecution of an individual, the legislation is protected from wanton assailants, and from the daily aggressions of party spirit. the errors of the legislator are exposed whenever their evil consequences are most felt; and it is always a positive and appreciable fact which serves as the basis of a prosecution. i am inclined to believe this practice of the american courts to be at once the most favorable to liberty as well as to public order. if the judge could only attack the legislator openly and directly, he would sometimes be afraid to oppose any resistance to his will; and at other moments party spirit might encourage him to brave it every day. the laws would consequently be attacked when the power from which they emanate is weak, and obeyed when it is strong. that is to say, when it would be useful to respect them, they would be contested; and when it would be easy to convert them into an instrument of oppression, they would be respected. but the american judge is brought into the political arena independently of his own will. he only judges the law because he is obliged to judge a case. the political question which he is called upon to resolve is connected with the interest of the parties, and he cannot refuse to decide it without abdicating the duties of his post. he performs his functions as a citizen by fulfilling the strict duties which belong to his profession as a magistrate. it is true that upon this system the judicial censorship which is exercised by the courts of justice over the legislation cannot extend to all laws indiscriminately, inasmuch as some of them can never give rise to that precise species of contestation which is termed a lawsuit; and even when such a contestation is possible, it may happen that no one cares to bring it before a court of justice. the americans have often felt this disadvantage, but they have left the remedy incomplete, lest they should give it efficacy which in some cases might prove dangerous. within these limits, the power vested in the american courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional, forms one of the most powerful barriers which have ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies. * * * * * other powers granted to the american judges. in the united states all the citizens have the right of indicting the public functionaries before the ordinary tribunals.--how they use this right.--art. of the an viii.--the americans and the english cannot understand the purport of this clause. it is perfectly natural that in a free country like america all the citizens should have the right of indicting public functionaries before the ordinary tribunals, and that all the judges should have the power of punishing public offences. the right granted to the courts of justice, of judging the agents of the executive government, when they have violated the laws, is so natural a one that it cannot be looked upon as an extraordinary privilege. nor do the springs of government appear to me to be weakened in the united states by the custom which renders all public officers responsible to the judges of the land. the americans seem, on the contrary, to have increased by this means that respect which is due to the authorities, and at the same time to have rendered those who are in power more scrupulous of offending public opinion. i was struck by the small number of political trials which occur in the united states; but i have no difficulty in accounting for this circumstance. a lawsuit, of whatever nature it may be, is always a difficult and expensive undertaking. it is easy to attack a public man in a journal, but the motives which can warrant an action at law must be serious. a solid ground of complaint must therefore exist, to induce an individual to prosecute a public officer, and public officers careful not to furnish these grounds of complaint, when they are afraid of being prosecuted. this does not depend upon the republican form of the american institutions, for the same facts present themselves in england. these two nations do not regard the impeachment of the principal officers of state as a sufficient guarantee of their independence. but they hold that the right of minor prosecutions, which are within the reach of the whole community, is a better pledge of freedom than those great judicial actions which are rarely employed until it is too late. in the middle ages, when it was very difficult to overtake offenders, the judges inflicted the most dreadful tortures on the few who were arrested, which by no means diminished the number of crimes. it has since been discovered that when justice is more certain and more mild, it is at the same time more efficacious. the english and the americans hold that tyranny and oppression are to be treated like any other crime, by lessening the penalty and facilitating conviction. in the year viii. of the french republic, a constitution was drawn up in which the following clause was introduced: "art. . all the agents of the government below the rank of ministers can only be prosecuted for offences relating to their several functions by virtue of a decree of the conseil d'etat; in which case the prosecution takes place before the ordinary tribunals." this clause survived the "constitution de l'an viii.," and it is still maintained in spite of the just complaints of the nation. i have always found the utmost difficulty in explaining its meaning to englishmen or americans. they were at once led to conclude that the conseil d'etat in france was a great tribunal, established in the centre of the kingdom, which exercised a preliminary and somewhat tyrannical jurisdiction in all political causes. but when i told them that the conseil d'etat was not a judicial body, in the common sense of the term, but an administrative council composed of men dependent on the crown--so that the king, after having ordered one of his servants, called a prefect, to commit an injustice, has the power of commanding another of his servants, called a councillor of state, to prevent the former from being punished--when i demonstrated to them that the citizen who had been injured by the order of the sovereign is obliged to solicit from the sovereign permission to obtain redress, they refused to credit so flagrant an abuse, and were tempted to accuse me of falsehood or of ignorance. it frequently happened before the revolution that a parliament issued a warrant against a public officer who had committed an offence; and sometimes the proceedings were annulled by the authority of the crown. despotism then displayed itself openly, and obedience was extorted by force. we have then retrograded from the point which our forefathers had reached, since we allow things to pass under the color of justice and the sanction of the law, which violence alone could impose upon them. * * * * * notes: [ ] see appendix l. [ ] see appendix m. chapter vii. political jurisdiction in the united states. definition of political jurisdiction.--what is understood by political jurisdiction in france, in england, and in the united states.--in america the political judge can only pass sentence on public officers.--he more frequently passes a sentence of removal from office than a penalty.--political jurisdiction, as it exists in the united states, is, notwithstanding its mildness, and perhaps in consequence of that mildness, a most powerful instrument in the hands of the majority. i understand, by political jurisdiction, that temporary right of pronouncing a legal decision with which a political body may be invested. in absolute governments no utility can accrue from the introduction of extraordinary forms of procedure; the prince, in whose name an offender is prosecuted, is as much the sovereign of the courts of justice as of everything else, and the idea which is entertained of his power is of itself a sufficient security. the only thing he has to fear is, that the external formalities of justice may be neglected, and that his authority may be dishonored, from a wish to render it more absolute. but in most free countries, in which the majority can never exercise the same influence upon the tribunals as an absolute monarch, the judicial power has occasionally been vested for a time in the representatives of society. it has been thought better to introduce a temporary confusion between the functions of the different authorities, than to violate the necessary principle of the unity of government. england, france, and the united states, have established this political jurisdiction in their laws; and it is curious to examine the different use which these three great nations have made of the principle. in england and in france the house of lords and the chambre des pairs constitute the highest criminal court of their respective nations; and although they do not habitually try all political offences, they are competent to try them all. another political body enjoys the right of impeachment before the house of lords: the only difference which exists between the two countries in this respect is, that in england the commons may impeach whomsoever they please before the lords, while in france the deputies can only employ this mode of prosecution against the ministers of the crown. in both countries the upper house make use of all the existing penal laws of the nation to punish the delinquents. in the united states, as well as in europe, one branch of the legislature is authorized to impeach, and another to judge: the house of representatives arraigns the offender, and the senate awards his sentence. but the senate can only try such persons as are brought before it by the house of representatives, and those persons must belong to the class of public functionaries. thus the jurisdiction of the senate is less extensive than that of the peers of france, while the right of impeachment by the representatives is more general than that of the deputies. but the great difference which exists between europe and america is, that in europe political tribunals are empowered to inflict all the dispositions of the penal code, while in america, when they have deprived the offender of his official rank, and have declared him incapable of filling any political office for the future, their jurisdiction terminates and that of the ordinary tribunals begins. suppose, for instance, that the president of the united states has committed the crime of high treason; the house of representatives impeaches him, and the senate degrades him; he must then be tried by a jury, which alone can deprive him of his liberty or his life. this accurately illustrates the subject we are treating. the political jurisdiction which is established by the laws of europe is intended to try great offenders, whatever may be their birth, their rank, or their powers in the state; and to this end all the privileges of the courts of justice are temporarily extended to a great political assembly. the legislator is then transformed into a magistrate: he is called upon to admit, to distinguish, and to punish the offence; and as he exercises all the authority of a judge, the law restricts him to the observance of all the duties of that high office, and of all the formalities of justice. when a public functionary is impeached before an english or a french political tribunal, and is found guilty, the sentence deprives him _ipso facto_ of his functions, and it may pronounce him to be incapable of resuming them or any others for the future. but in this case the political interdict is a consequence of the sentence, and not the sentence itself. in europe the sentence of a political tribunal is therefore to be regarded as a judicial verdict, rather than as an administrative measure. in the united states the contrary takes place; and although the decision of the senate is judicial in its form, since the senators are obliged to comply with the practices and formalities of a court of justice; although it is judicial in respect to the motives on which it is founded, since the senate is in general obliged to take an offence at common law as the basis of its sentence; nevertheless the object of the proceeding is purely administrative. if it had been the intention of the american legislator to invest a political body with great judicial authority, its action would not have been limited to the circle of public functionaries, since the most dangerous enemies of the state may be in the possession of no functions at all; and this is especially true in republics, where party favor is the first of authorities, and where the strength of many a leader is increased by his exercising no legal power. if it had been the intention of the american legislator to give society the means of repressing state offences by exemplary punishment, according to the practice of ordinary judgment, the resources of the penal code would all have been placed at the disposal of the political tribunals. but the weapon with which they are intrusted is an imperfect one, and it can never reach the most dangerous offenders; since men who aim at the entire subversion of the laws are not likely to murmur at a political interdict. the main object of the political jurisdiction which obtains in the united states is, therefore, to deprive the citizen of an authority which he has used amiss, and to prevent him from ever acquiring it again. this is evidently an administrative measure sanctioned by the formalities of judicial investigation. in this matter the americans have created a mixed system: they have surrounded the act which removes a public functionary with the securities of a political trial; and they have deprived all political condemnations of their severest penalties. every link of the system may easily be traced from this point; we at once perceive why the american constitutions subject all the civil functionaries to the jurisdiction of the senate, while the military, whose crimes are nevertheless more formidable, are exempt from that tribunal. in the civil service none of the american functionaries can be said to be removeable; the places which some of them occupy are inalienable, and the others derive their rights from a power which cannot be abrogated. it is therefore necessary to try them all in order to deprive them of their authority. but military officers are dependent on the chief magistrate of the state, who is himself a civil functionary; and the decision which condemns him is a blow upon them all. if we now compare the american and european systems, we shall meet with differences no less striking in the different effects which each of them produces or may produce. in france and in england the jurisdiction of political bodies is looked upon as an extraordinary resource, which is only to be employed in order to rescue society from unwonted dangers. it is not to be denied that these tribunals, as they are constituted in europe, are apt to violate the conservative principle of the balance of power in the state, and to threaten incessantly the lives and liberties of the subject. the same political jurisdiction in the united states is only indirectly hostile to the balance of power; it cannot menace the lives of the citizens, and it does not hover, as in europe, over the heads of the community, since those only who have before-hand submitted to its authority upon accepting office are exposed to its severity. it is at the same time less formidable and less efficacious; indeed, it has not been considered by the legislators of the united states as a remedy for the more violent evils of society, but as an ordinary means of conducting the government. in this respect it probably exercises more real influence on the social body in america than in europe. we must not be misled by the apparent mildness of the american legislation in all that relates to political jurisdiction. it is to be observed, in the first place, that in the united states the tribunal which passes sentence is composed of the same elements, and subject to the same influences, as the body which impeaches the offender, and that this uniformity gives an almost irresistible impulse to the vindictive passions of parties. if political judges in the united states cannot inflict such heavy penalties as those of europe, there is the less chance of their acquitting a prisoner; and the conviction, if it is less formidable, is more certain. the principal object of the political tribunals of europe is to punish the offender; the purpose of those in america is to deprive him of his authority. a political condemnation in the united states may, therefore, be looked upon as a preventive measure; and there is no reason for restricting the judges to the exact definitions of criminal law. nothing can be more alarming than the excessive latitude with which political offences are described in the laws of america. article ii., section iv., of the constitution of the united states runs thus: "the president, vice-president, and all the civil officers of the united states shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, _or other high crimes and misdemeanors_." many of the constitutions of the states are even less explicit. "public officers," says the constitution of massachusetts,[ ] "shall be impeached for misconduct or mal-administration." the constitution of virginia declares that all the civil officers who shall have offended against the state by mal-administration, corruption, or other high crimes, may be impeached by the house of delegates: in some constitutions no offences are specified, in order to subject the public functionaries to an unlimited responsibility.[ ] but i will venture to affirm, that it is precisely their mildness which renders the american laws most formidable in this respect. we have shown that in europe the removal of a functionary and his political interdiction are consequences of the penalty he is to undergo, and that in america they constitute the penalty itself. the result is, that in europe political tribunals are invested with rights which they are afraid to use, and that the fear of punishing too much hinders them from punishing at all. but in america no one hesitates to inflict a penalty from which humanity does not recoil. to condemn a political opponent to death, in order to deprive him of his power, is to commit what all the world would execrate as a horrible assassination; but to declare that opponent unworthy to exercise that authority, to deprive him of it, and to leave him uninjured in life and liberty, may appear to be the fair issue of the struggle. but this sentence, which is so easy to pronounce, is not the less fatally severe to the majority of those upon whom it is inflicted. great criminals may undoubtedly brave its intangible rigor, but ordinary offenders will dread it as a condemnation which destroys their position in the world, casts a blight upon their honor, and condemns them to a shameful inactivity worse than death. the influence exercised in the united states upon the progress of society by the jurisdiction of political bodies may not appear to be formidable, but it is only the more immense. it does not act directly upon the governed, but it renders the majority more absolute over those who govern; it does not confer an unbounded authority on the legislator which can only be exerted at some momentous crisis, but it establishes a temperate and regular influence, which is at all times available. if the power is decreased, it can, on the other hand, be more conveniently employed, and more easily abused. by preventing political tribunals from inflicting judicial punishments, the americans seem to have eluded the worst consequences of legislative tyranny, rather than tyranny itself; and i am not sure that political jurisdiction, as it is constituted in the united states, is not the most formidable which has ever been placed in the rude grasp of a popular majority. when the american republics begin to degenerate, it will be easy to verify the truth of this observation, by remarking whether the number of political impeachments augments.[ ] * * * * * notes: [ ] chapter i., sect. ii., § . [ ] see the constitutions of illinois, maine, connecticut, and georgia. [ ] see appendix n. chapter viii. the federal constitution. i have hitherto considered each state as a separate whole, and i have explained the different springs which the people sets in motion, and the different means of action which it employs. but all the states which i have considered as independent are forced to submit, in certain cases, to the supreme authority of the union. the time is now come for me to examine the partial sovereignty which has been conceded to the union, and to cast a rapid glance over the federal constitution.[ ] * * * * * history of the federal constitution. origin of the first union.--its weakness.--congress appeals to the constituent authority.--interval of two years between the appeal and the promulgation of the new constitution. the thirteen colonies which simultaneously threw off the yoke of england toward the end of the last century, possessed, as i have already observed, the same religion, the same language, the same customs, and almost the same laws; they were struggling against a common enemy; and these reasons were sufficiently strong to unite them one to another, and to consolidate them into one nation. but as each of them had enjoyed a separate existence, and a government within its own control, the peculiar interests and customs which resulted from this system, were opposed to a compact and intimate union, which would have absorbed the individual importance of each in the general importance of all. hence arose two opposite tendencies, the one prompting the anglo-americans to unite, the other to divide their strength. as long as the war with the mother-country lasted, the principle of union was kept alive by necessity; and although the laws which constituted it were defective, the common tie subsisted in spite of their imperfections.[ ] but no sooner was peace concluded than the faults of the legislation became manifest, and the state seemed to be suddenly dissolved. each colony became an independent republic, and assumed an absolute sovereignty. the federal government, condemned to impotence by its constitution, and no longer sustained by the presence of a common danger, saw the outrages offered to its flag by the great nations of europe, while it was scarcely able to maintain its ground against the indian tribes, and to pay the interest of the debt which had been contracted during the war of independence. it was already on the verge of destruction, when it officially proclaimed its inability to conduct the government, and appealed to the constituent authority of the nation.[ ] if america ever approached (for however brief a time) that lofty pinnacle of glory to which the proud fancy of its inhabitants is wont to point, it was at the solemn moment at which the power of the nation abdicated, as it were, the empire of the land. all ages have furnished the spectacle of a people struggling with energy to win its independence; and the efforts of the americans in throwing off the english yoke have been considerably exaggerated. separated from their enemies by three thousand miles of ocean, and backed by a powerful ally, the success of the united states may be more justly attributed to their geographical position, than to the valor of their armies or the patriotism of their citizens. it would be ridiculous to compare the american war to the wars of the french revolution, or the efforts of the americans to those of the french, who, when they were attacked by the whole of europe, without credit and without allies, were still capable of opposing a twentieth part of their population to their foes, and of bearing the torch of revolution beyond their frontiers while they stifled its devouring flame within the bosom of their country. but it is a novelty in the history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of government had stopped; to see it carefully examine the extent of the evil, and patiently wait for two whole years until a remedy was discovered, which it voluntarily adopted without having wrung a tear or a drop of blood from mankind. at the time when the inadequacy of the first constitution was discovered, america possessed the double advantage of that calm which had succeeded the effervescence of the revolution, and of those great men who had led the revolution to a successful issue. the assembly which accepted the task of composing the second constitution was small;[ ] but george washington was its president, and it contained the choicest talents and the noblest hearts which had ever appeared in the new world. this national commission, after long and mature deliberation, offered to the acceptance of the people the body of general laws which still rules the union. all the states adopted it successively.[ ] the new federal government commenced its functions in , after an interregnum of two years. the revolution of america terminated when that of france began. * * * * * summary of the federal constitution. division of authority between the federal government and the states.--the government of the states is the rule: the federal government the exception. the first question which awaited the americans was intricate, and by no means easy of solution; the object was so to divide the authority of the different states which composed the union, that each of them should continue to govern itself in all that concerned its internal prosperity, while the entire nation, represented by the union, should continue to form a compact body, and to provide for the exigencies of the people. it was as impossible to determine beforehand, with any degree of accuracy, the share of authority which each of the two governments was to enjoy, as to foresee all the incidents in the existence of a nation. the obligations and the claims of the federal government were simple and easily definable, because the union had been formed with the express purpose of meeting the general exigencies of the people; but the claims and obligations of the states were, on the other hand, complicated and various, because those governments penetrated into all the details of social life. the attributes of the federal government were, therefore, carefully enumerated, and all that was not included among them was declared to constitute a part of the privileges of the several governments of the states. thus the government of the states remained the rule, and that of the confederation became the exception.[ ] but as it was foreseen, that, in practice, questions might arise as to the exact limits of this exceptional authority, and that it would be dangerous to submit these questions to the decision of the ordinary courts of justice, established in the states by the states themselves, a high federal court was created,[ ] which was destined, among other functions, to maintain the balance of power which had been established by the constitution between the two rival governments.[ ] * * * * * prerogative of the federal government. power of declaring war, making peace, and levying general taxes vested in the federal government.--what part of the internal policy of the country it may direct.--the government of the union in some respects more central than the king's government in the old french monarchy. the external relations of a people may be compared to those of private individuals, and they cannot be advantageously maintained without the agency of the single head of a government. the exclusive right of making peace and war, of concluding treaties of commerce, of raising armies, and equipping fleets, was therefore granted to the union.[ ] the necessity of a national government was less imperiously felt in the conduct of the internal affairs of society; but there are certain general interests which can only be attended to with advantage by a general authority. the union was invested with the power of controlling the monetary system, of directing the post-office, and of opening the great roads which were to establish communication between the different parts of the country.[ ] the independence of the government of each state was formally recognized in its sphere; nevertheless the federal government was authorized to interfere in the internal affairs of the states[ ] in a few predetermined cases, in which an indiscreet abuse of their independence might compromise the security of the union at large. thus, while the power of modifying and changing their legislation at pleasure was preserved in all the republics, they were forbidden to enact _ex post facto_ laws, or to create a class of nobles in their community.[ ] lastly, as it was necessary that the federal government should be able to fulfil its engagements, it was endowed with an unlimited power of levying taxes.[ ] in examining the balance of power as established by the federal constitution; in remarking on the one hand the portion of sovereignty which has been reserved to the several states, and on the other the share of power which the union has assumed, it is evident that the federal legislators entertained the clearest and most accurate notions on the nature of the centralisation of government. the united states form not only a republic, but a confederation; nevertheless the authority of the nation is more central than it was in several of the monarchies of europe when the american constitution was formed. take, for instance, the two following examples:-- thirteen supreme courts of justice existed in france, which, generally speaking, had the right of interpreting the law without appeal; and those provinces, styled _pays d'etats_, were authorized to refuse their assent to an impost which had been levied by the sovereign who represented the nation. in the union there is but one tribunal to interpret, as there is one legislature to make the laws; and an impost voted by the representatives of the nation is binding upon all the citizens. in these two essential points, therefore, the union exercises more central authority than the french monarchy possessed, although the union is only an assemblage of confederate republics. in spain certain provinces had the right of establishing a system of customhouse duties peculiar to themselves, although that privilege belongs, by its very nature, to the national sovereignty. in america the congress alone has the right of regulating the commercial relations of the states. the government of the confederation is therefore more centralized in this respect than the kingdom of spain. it is true that the power of the crown in france or in spain was always able to obtain by force whatever the constitution of the country denied, and that the ultimate result was consequently the same; and i am here discussing the theory of the constitution. * * * * * federal powers. after having settled the limits within which the federal government was to act, the next point was to determine the powers which it was to exert. * * * * * legislative powers. division of the legislative body into two branches.--difference in the manner of forming the two houses.--the principle of the independence of the states predominates in the formation of the senate.--the principle of the sovereignty of the nation in the composition of the house of representatives.--singular effects of the fact that a constitution can only be logical in the early stages of a nation. the plan which had been laid down beforehand for the constitution of the several states was followed, in many points, in the organization of the powers of the union. the federal legislature of the union was composed of a senate and a house of representatives. a spirit of conciliation prescribed the observance of distinct principles in the formation of each of these two assemblies. i have already shown that two contrary interests were opposed to each other in the establishment of the federal constitution. these two interests had given rise to two opinions. it was the wish of one party to convert the union into a league of independent states, or a sort of congress, at which the representatives of the several peoples would meet to discuss certain points of their common interests. the other party desired to unite the inhabitants of the american colonies into one sole nation, and to establish a government, which should act as the sole representative of the nation, as far as the limited sphere of its authority would permit. the practical consequences of these two theories were exceedingly different. the question was, whether a league was to be established instead of a national government; whether the majority of the states, instead of a majority of the inhabitants of the union, was to give the law; for every state, the small as well as the great, then retained the character of an independent power, and entered the union upon a footing of perfect equality. if, on the contrary, the inhabitants of the united states were to be considered as belonging to one and the same nation, it was natural that the majority of the citizens of the union should prescribe the law. of course the lesser states could not subscribe to the application of this doctrine without, in fact, abdicating their existence in relation to the sovereignty of the confederation; since they would have passed from the condition of a co-equal and co-legislative authority, to that of an insignificant fraction of a great people. the former system would have invested them with an excessive authority, the latter would have annulled their influence altogether. under these circumstances, the result was, that the strict rules of logic were evaded, as is usually the case when interests are opposed to arguments. a middle course was hit upon by the legislators, which brought together by force two systems theoretically irreconcilable. the principle of the independence of the states prevailed in the formation of the senate, and that of the sovereignty of the nation predominated in the composition of the house of representatives. it was decided that each state should send two senators to congress, and a number of representatives proportioned to its population.[ ] it results from this arrangement that the state of new york has at the present day forty representatives, and only two senators; the state of delaware has two senators, and only one representative; the state of delaware is therefore equal to the state of new york in the senate, while the latter has forty times the influence of the former in the house of representatives. thus, if the minority of the nation preponderates in the senate, it may paralyze the decisions of the majority represented in the other house, which is contrary to the spirit of constitutional government. the facts show how rare and how difficult it is rationally and logically to combine all the several parts of legislation. in the course of time different interests arise, and different principles are sanctioned by the same people; and when a general constitution is to be established, these interests and principles are so many natural obstacles to the rigorous application of any political system, with all its consequences. the early stages of national existence are the only periods at which it is possible to maintain the complete logic of legislation; and when we perceive a nation in the enjoyment of this advantage, before we hasten to conclude that it is wise, we should do well to remember that it is young. when the federal constitution was formed, the interest of independence for the separate states, and the interest of union for the whole people, were the only two conflicting interests which existed among the anglo-americans; and a compromise was necessarily made between them. it is, however, just to acknowledge that this part of the constitution has not hitherto produced those evils which might have been feared. all the states are young and contiguous; their customs, their ideas, and their wants, are not dissimilar; and the differences which result from their size or inferiority do not suffice to set their interests at variance. the small states have consequently never been induced to league themselves together in the senate to oppose the designs of the larger ones; and indeed there is so irresistible an authority in the legitimate expression of the will of a people, that the senate could offer but a feeble opposition to the vote of the majority of the house of representatives. it must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that it was not in the power of the american legislators to reduce to a single nation the people for whom they were making laws. the object of the federal constitution was not to destroy the independence of the states, but to restrain it. by acknowledging the real authority of these secondary communities (and it was impossible to deprive them of it), they disavowed beforehand the habitual use of constraint in enforcing the decisions of the majority. upon this principle the introduction of the influence of the states into the mechanism of the federal government was by no means to be wondered at; since it only attested the existence of an acknowledged power, which was to be humored, and not forcibly checked. * * * * * a farther difference between the senate and the house of representatives. the senate named by the provincial legislature--the representatives, by the people.--double election of the former--single election of the latter.--term of the different offices.--peculiar functions of each house. the senate not only differs from the other house in the principle which it represents, but also in the mode of its election, in the term for which it is chosen, and in the nature of its functions. the house of representatives is named by the people, the senate by the legislators of each state; the former is directly elected; the latter is elected by an elected body; the term for which the representatives are chosen is only two years, that of the senators is six. the functions of the house of representatives are purely legislative, and the only share it takes in the judicial power is in the impeachment of public officers. the senate co-operates in the work of legislation, and tries those political offences which the house of representatives submits to its decision. it also acts as the great executive council of the nation; the treaties which are concluded by the president must be ratified by the senate; and the appointments he may make must be definitively approved by the same body.[ ] * * * * * the executive power.[ ] dependence of the president--he is elective and responsible.--he is free to act in his own sphere under the inspection, but not under the direction, of the senate.--his salary fixed at his entry into office.--suspensive veto. the american legislators undertook a difficult task in attempting to create an executive power dependent on the majority of the people and nevertheless sufficiently strong to act without restraint in its own sphere. it was indispensable to the maintenance of the republican form of government that the representatives of the executive power should be subject to the will of the nation. the president is an elective magistrate. his honor, his property, his liberty, and his life, are the securities which the people has for the temperate use of his power. but in the exercise of his authority he cannot be said to be perfectly independent; the senate takes cognizance of his relations with foreign powers, and of the distribution of public appointments, so that he can neither be bribed, nor can he employ the means of corruption. the legislators of the union acknowledged that the executive power would be incompetent to fulfill its task with dignity and utility, unless it enjoyed a greater degree of stability and of strength than had been granted to it in the separate states. the president is chosen for four years, and he may be re-elected; so that the chances of a prolonged administration may inspire him with hopeful undertakings for the public good, and with the means of carrying them into execution. the president was made the sole representative of the executive power of the union; and care was taken not to render his decisions subordinate to the vote of a council--a dangerous measure, which tends at the same time to clog the action of the government and to diminish its responsibility. the senate has the right of annulling certain acts of the president; but it cannot compel him to take any steps, nor does it participate in the exercise of the executive power. the action of the legislature on the executive power may be direct; and we have just shown that the americans carefully obviated this influence; but it may, on the other hand, be indirect. public assemblies which have the power of depriving an officer of state of his salary, encroach upon his independence; and as they are free to make the laws, it is to be feared lest they should gradually appropriate to themselves a portion of that authority which the constitution had vested in his hands. this dependence of the executive power is one of the defects inherent in republican constitutions. the americans have not been able to counteract the tendency which legislative assemblies have to get possession of the government, but they have rendered this propensity less irresistible. the salary of the president is fixed, at the time of his entering upon office, for the whole period of his magistracy. the president is, moreover, provided with a suspensive veto, which allows him to oppose the passing of such laws as might destroy the portion of independence which the constitution awards him. the struggle between the president and the legislature must always be an unequal one, since the latter is certain of bearing down all resistance by persevering in its plans; but the suspensive veto forces it at least to reconsider the matter, and, if the motion be persisted in, it must then be backed by a majority of two-thirds of the whole house. the veto is, in fact, a sort of appeal to the people. the executive power, which, without this security, might have been secretly oppressed, adopts this means of pleading its cause and stating its motives. but if the legislature is certain of overpowering all resistance by persevering in its plans, i reply, that in the constitutions of all nations, of whatever kind they may be, a certain point exists at which the legislator is obliged to have recourse to the good sense and the virtue of his fellow-citizens. this point is more prominent and more discoverable in republics, while it is more remote and more carefully concealed in monarchies, but it always exists somewhere. there is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality. * * * * * difference between the position of the president of the united states and that of a constitutional king of france. executive power in the united states as limited and as partial as the supremacy which it represents.--executive power in france as universal as the supremacy it represents.--the king a branch of the legislature.--the president the mere executor of the law.--other differences resulting from the duration of the two powers.--the president checked in the exercise of the executive authority.--the king independent in its exercise.--notwithstanding these discrepancies, france is more akin to a republic than the union to a monarchy.--comparison of the number of public officers depending upon the executive power in the two countries. the executive power has so important an influence on the destinies of nations that i am inclined to pause for an instant at this portion of my subject, in order more clearly to explain the part it sustains in america. in order to form an accurate idea of the position of the president of the united states, it may not be irrelevant to compare it to that of one of the constitutional kings of europe. in this comparison i shall pay but little attention to the external signs of power, which are more apt to deceive the eye of the observer than to guide his researches. when a monarchy is being gradually transformed into a republic, the executive power retains the titles, the honors, the etiquette, and even the funds of royalty, long after its authority has disappeared. the english, after having cut off the head of one king, and expelled another from his throne, were accustomed to accost the successors of those princes upon their knees. on the other hand, when a republic falls under the sway of a single individual, the demeanor of the sovereign is simple and unpretending, as if his authority was not yet paramount. when the emperors exercised an unlimited control over the fortunes and the lives of their fellow-citizens, it was customary to call them caesar in conversation, and they were in the habit of supping without formality at their friends' houses. it is therefore necessary to look below the surface. the sovereignty of the united states is shared between the union and the states, while in france it is undivided and compact: hence arises the first and the most notable difference which exists between the president of the united states and the king of france. in the united states the executive power is as limited and partial as the sovereignty of the union in whose name it acts; in france it is as universal as the authority of the state. the americans have a federal, and the french a national government. the first cause of inferiority results from the nature of things, but it is not the only one; the second in importance is as follows: sovereignty may be defined to be the right of making laws: in france, the king really exercises a portion of the sovereign power, since the laws have no weight till he has given his assent to them; he is moreover the executor of all they ordain. the president is also the executor of the laws, but he does not really co-operate in their formation, since the refusal of his assent does not annul them. he is therefore merely to be considered as the agent of the sovereign power. but not only does the king of france exercise a portion of the sovereign power, he also contributes to the nomination of the legislature, which exercises the other portion. he has the privilege of appointing the members of one chamber, and of dissolving the other at his pleasure; whereas the president of the united states has no share in the formation of the legislative body, and cannot dissolve any part of it. the king has the same right of bringing forward measures as the chambers; a right which the president does not possess. the king is represented in each assembly by his ministers, who explain his intentions, support his opinions, and maintain the principles of the government. the president and his ministers are alike excluded from congress; so that his influence and his opinions can only penetrate indirectly into that great body. the king of france is therefore on an equal footing with the legislature, which can no more act without him, than he can without it. the president exercises an authority inferior to, and depending upon, that of the legislature. even in the exercise of the executive power, properly so called, the point upon which his position seems to be almost analogous to that of the king of france--the president labors under several causes of inferiority. the authority of the king, in france, has, in the first place, the advantage of duration over that of the president: and durability is one of the chief elements of strength; nothing is either loved or feared but what is likely to endure. the president of the united states is a magistrate elected for four years. the king, in france, is an hereditary sovereign. in the exercise of the executive power the president of the united states is constantly subject to jealous scrutiny. he may make, but he cannot conclude a treaty; he may designate, but he cannot appoint, a public officer.[ ] the king of france is absolute in the sphere of the executive power. the president of the united states is responsible for his actions; but the person of the king is declared inviolable by the french charter. nevertheless, the supremacy of public opinion is no less above the head of one than of the other. this power is less definite, less evident, and less sanctioned by the laws in france than in america, but in fact exists. in america it acts by elections and decrees; in france it proceeds by revolutions; but notwithstanding the different constitutions of these two countries, public opinion is the predominant authority in both of them. the fundamental principle of legislation--a principle essentially republican--is the same in both countries, although its consequences may be different, and its results more or less extensive. whence i am led to conclude, that france with its king is nearer akin to a republic, than the union with its president is to a monarchy. in what i have been saying i have only touched upon the main points of distinction; and if i could have entered into details, the contrast would have been rendered still more striking. i have remarked that the authority of the president in the united states is only exercised within the limits of a partial sovereignty, while that of the king, in france, is undivided. i might have gone on to show that the power of the king's government in france exceeds its natural limits, however extensive they may be, and penetrates in a thousand different ways into the administration of private interests. among the examples of this influence may be quoted that which results from the great number of public functionaries, who all derive their appointments from the government. this number now exceeds all previous limits; it amounts to , [ ] nominations, each of which may be considered as an element of power. the president of the united states has not the exclusive right of making any public appointments, and their whole number scarcely exceeds , .[ ] [those who are desirous of tracing the question respecting the power of the president to remove every executive officer of the government without the sanction of the senate, will find some light upon it by referring to th marshall's life of washington, p. : sergeant and rawle's reports (pennsylvania), : elliot's debates on the federal constitution, vol iv., p. , contains the debate in the house of representatives, june , , when the question was first mooted: report of a committee of the senate in , in niles's register of th august in that year. it is certainly very extraordinary that such a vast power, and one so extensively affecting the whole administration of the government, should rest on such slight foundations, as an _inference_ from an act of congress, providing that when the secretary of the treasury should be removed by the president, his assistant should discharge the duties of the office. how congress could confer the power, even by a direct act, is not perceived. it must be a necessary implication from the words of the constitution, or it does not exist. it has been repeatedly denied in and out of congress, and must be considered, as yet, an unsettled question.--_american editor_.] * * * * * accidental causes which may increase the influence of the executive. external security of the union.--army of six thousand men.--few ships.--the president has no opportunity of exercising his great prerogatives.--in the prerogatives he exercises he is weak. if the executive power is feebler in america than in france, the cause is more attributable to the circumstances than to the laws of the country. it is chiefly in its foreign relations that the executive power of a nation is called upon to exert its skill and vigor. if the existence of the union were perpetually threatened, and its chief interest were in daily connexion with those of other powerful nations, the executive government would assume an increased importance in proportion to the measures expected of it, and those which it would carry into effect. the president of the united states is the commander-in-chief of the army, but of an army composed of only six thousand men; he commands the fleet, but the fleet reckons but few sail; he conducts the foreign relations of the union, but the united states are a nation without neighbors. separated from the rest of the world by the ocean, and too weak as yet to aim at the dominion of the seas, they have no enemies, and their interests rarely come into contact with those of any other nation of the globe. the practical part of a government must not be judged by the theory of its constitution. the president of the united states is in the possession of almost royal prerogatives, which he has no opportunity of exercising; and those privileges which he can at present use are very circumscribed: the laws allow him to possess a degree of influence which circumstances do not permit him to employ. on the other hand, the great strength of the royal prerogative in france arises from circumstances far more than from the laws. there the executive government is constantly struggling against prodigious obstacles, and exerting all its energies to repress them; so that it increases by the extent of its achievements, and by the importance of the events it controls, without, for that reason, modifying its constitution. if the laws had made it as feeble and as circumscribed as it is in the union, its influence would very soon become much greater. * * * * * why the president of the united states does not require the majority of the two houses in order to carry on the government. it is an established axiom in europe that a constitutional king cannot persevere in a system of government which is opposed by the two other branches of the legislature. but several presidents of the united states have been known to lose the majority in the legislative body, without being obliged to abandon the supreme power, and without inflicting a serious evil upon society. i have heard this fact quoted as an instance of the independence and power of executive government in america: a moment's reflection will convince us, on the contrary, that it is a proof of its extreme weakness. a king in europe requires the support of the legislature to enable him to perform the duties imposed upon him by the constitution, because those duties are enormous. a constitutional king in europe is not merely the executor of the law, but the execution of its provisions devolves so completely upon him, that he has the power of paralyzing its influence if it opposes his designs. he requires the assistance of the legislative assemblies to make the law, but those assemblies stand in need of his aid to execute it: these two authorities cannot subsist without each other, and the mechanism of government is stopped as soon as they are at variance. in america the president cannot prevent any law from being passed, nor can he evade the obligation of enforcing it. his sincere and zealous co-operation is no doubt useful, but it is not indispensable in the carrying on of public affairs. all his important acts are directly or indirectly submitted to the legislature; and where he is independent of it he can do but little. it is therefore his weakness, and not his power, which enables him to remain in opposition to congress. in europe, harmony must reign between the crown and the other branches of the legislature, because a collision between them may prove serious; in america, this harmony is not indispensable, because such a collision is impossible. * * * * * election of the president. dangers of the elective system increase in proportion to the extent of the prerogative.--this system possible in america because no powerful executive authority is required.--what circumstances are favorable to the elective system.--why the election of the president does not cause a deviation from the principles of the government.--influence of the election of the president on secondary functionaries. the dangers of the system of election applied to the head of the executive government of a great people, have been sufficiently exemplified by experience and by history; and the remarks i am about to make refer to america alone. these dangers may be more or less formidable in proportion to the place which the executive power occupies, and to the importance it possesses in the state; and they may vary according to the mode of election, and the circumstances in which the electors are placed. the most weighty argument against the election of a chief-magistrate is, that it offers so splendid a lure to private ambition, and is so apt to inflame men in the pursuit of power, that when legitimate means are wanting, force may not unfrequently seize what right denies. it is clear that the greater the privileges of the executive authority are, the greater is the temptation; the more the ambition of the candidates is excited, the more warmly are their interests espoused by a throng of partisans who hope to share the power when their patron has won the prize. the dangers of the elective system increase, therefore, in the exact ratio of the influence exercised by the executive power in the affairs of state. the revolutions of poland are not solely attributable to the elective system in general, but to the fact that the elected magistrate was the head of a powerful monarchy. before we can discuss the absolute advantages of the elective system, we must make preliminary inquiries as to whether the geographical position, the laws, the habits, the manners, and the opinions of the people among whom it is to be introduced, will admit of the establishment of a weak and dependent executive government; for to attempt to render the representative of the state a powerful sovereign, and at the same time elective, is, in my opinion, to entertain two incompatible designs. to reduce hereditary royalty to the condition of an elective authority, the only means that i am acquainted with are to circumscribe its sphere of action beforehand, gradually to diminish its prerogatives, and to accustom the people to live without its protection. nothing, however, is farther from the designs of the republicans of europe than this course: as many of them only owe their hatred of tyranny to the sufferings which they have personally undergone, the extent of the executive power does not excite their hostility, and they only attack its origin without perceiving how nearly the two things are connected. hitherto no citizen has shown any disposition to expose his honor and his life, in order to become the president of the united states; because the power of that office is temporary, limited, and subordinate. the prize of fortune must be great to encourage adventurers in so desperate a game. no candidate has as yet been able to arouse the dangerous enthusiasm or the passionate sympathies of the people in his favor, for the very simple reason, that when he is at the head of the government he has but little power, but little wealth, and but little glory to share among his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or the ruin of a faction to depend upon the elevation of an individual to power. the great advantage of hereditary monarchies is, that as the private interest of a family is always intimately connected with the interests of the state, the executive government is never suspended for a single instant; and if the affairs of a monarchy are not better conducted than those of a republic, at least there is always some one to conduct them, well or ill, according to his capacity. in elective states, on the contrary, the wheels of government cease to act, as it were of their own accord, at the approach of an election, and even for some time previous to that event. the laws may indeed accelerate the operation of the election, which may be conducted with such simplicity and rapidity that the seat of power will never be left vacant; but, notwithstanding these precautions, a break necessarily occurs in the minds of the people. at the approach of an election the head of the executive government is wholly occupied by the coming struggle; his future plans are doubtful; he can undertake nothing new, and he will only prosecute with indifference those designs which another will perhaps terminate. "i am so near the time of my retirement from office," said president jefferson on the st of january, (six weeks before the election), "that i feel no passion, i take no part, i express no sentiment. it appears to me just to leave to my successor the commencement of those measures which he will have to prosecute, and for which he will be responsible." on the other hand, the eyes of the nation are centred on a single point; all are watching the gradual birth of so important an event. the wider the influence of the executive power extends, the greater and the more necessary is its constant action, the more fatal is the term of suspense; and a nation which is accustomed to the government, or, still more, one used to the administrative protection of a powerful executive authority, would be infallibly convulsed by an election of this kind. in the united states the action of the government may be slackened with impunity, because it is always weak and circumscribed. one of the principal vices of the elective system is, that it always introduces a certain degree of instability into the internal and external policy of the state. but this disadvantage is less sensibly felt if the share of power vested in the elected magistrate is small. in rome the principles of the government underwent no variation, although the consuls were changed every year, because the senate, which was an hereditary assembly, possessed the directing authority. if the elective system were adopted in europe, the condition of most of the monarchical states would be changed at every new election. in america the president exercises a certain influence on state affairs, but he does not conduct them; the preponderating power is vested in the representatives of the whole nation. the political maxims of the country depend therefore on the mass of the people, not on the president alone; and consequently in america the elective system has no very prejudicial influence on the fixed principles of the government. but the want of fixed principles is an evil so inherent in the elective system, that it is still extremely perceptible in the narrow sphere to which the authority of the president extends. the americans have admitted that the head of the executive power, who has to bear the whole responsibility of the duties he is called upon to fulfil, ought to be empowered to choose his own agents, and to remove them at pleasure: the legislative bodies watch the conduct of the president more than they direct it. the consequence of this arrangement is, that at every new election the fate of all the federal public officers is in suspense. mr. quincy adams, on his entry into office, discharged the majority of the individuals who had been appointed by his predecessor; and i am not aware that general jackson allowed a single removeable functionary employed in the federal service to retain his place beyond the first year which succeeded his election. it is sometimes made a subject of complaint, that in the constitutional monarchies of europe the fate of the humbler servants of an administration depends upon that of the ministers. but in elective governments this evil is far greater. in a constitutional monarchy successive ministers are rapidly formed; but as the principal representative of the executive power does not change, the spirit of innovation is kept within bounds; the changes which take place are in the details rather than in the principles of the administrative system; but to substitute one system for another, as is done in america every four years by law, is to cause a sort of revolution. as to the misfortunes which may fall upon individuals in consequence of this state of things, it must be allowed that the uncertain situation of the public officers is less fraught with evil consequences in america than elsewhere. it is so easy to acquire an independent position in the united states, that the public officer who loses his place may be deprived of the comforts of life, but not of the means of subsistence. i remarked at the beginning of this chapter that the dangers of the elective system applied to the head of the state, are augmented or decreased by the peculiar circumstances of the people which adopts it. however the functions of the executive power may be restricted, it must always exercise a great influence upon the foreign policy of the country, for a negotiation cannot be opened or successfully carried on otherwise than by a single agent. the more precarious and the more perilous the position of a people becomes, the more absolute is the want of a fixed and consistent external policy, and the more dangerous does the elective system of the chief magistrate become. the policy of the americans in relation to the whole world is exceedingly simple; and it may almost be said that no country stands in need of them, nor do they require the co-operation of any other people. their independence is never threatened. in their present condition, therefore, the functions of the executive power are no less limited by circumstances, than by the laws; and the president may frequently change his line of policy without involving the state in difficulty or destruction. whatever the prerogatives of the executive power may be, the period which immediately precedes an election, and the moment of its duration, must always be considered as a national crisis, which is perilous in proportion to the internal embarrassments and the external dangers of the country. few of the nations of europe could escape the calamities of anarchy or of conquest, every time they might have to elect a new sovereign. in america society is so constituted that it can stand without assistance upon its own basis; nothing is to be feared from the pressure of external dangers; and the election of the president is a cause of agitation, but not of ruin. * * * * * mode of election. skill of the american legislators shown in the mode of election adopted by them.--creation of a special electoral body.--separate votes of these electors.--case in which the house of representatives is called upon to choose the president.--results of the twelve elections which have taken place since the constitution has been established. beside the dangers which are inherent in the system, many other difficulties may arise from the mode of election, which may be obviated by the precaution of the legislator. when a people met in arms on some public spot to choose its head, it was exposed to all the chances of civil war resulting from so martial a mode of proceeding, beside the dangers of the elective system in itself. the polish laws, which subjected the election of the sovereign to the veto of a single individual, suggested the murder of that individual, or prepared the way to anarchy. in the examination of the institutions, and the political as well as the social condition of the united states, we are struck by the admirable harmony of the gifts of fortune and the efforts of man. that nation possessed two of the main causes of internal peace; it was a new country, but it was inhabited by a people grown old in the exercise of freedom. america had no hostile neighbors to dread; and the american legislators, profiting by these favorable circumstances, created a weak and subordinate executive power, which could without danger be made elective. it then only remained for them to choose the least dangerous of the various modes of election; and the rules which they laid down upon this point admirably complete the securities which the physical and political constitution of the country already afforded. their object was to find the mode of election which would best express the choice of the people with the least possible excitement and suspense. it was admitted in the first place that the _simple_ majority should be decisive; but the difficulty was to obtain this majority without an interval of delay which it was most important to avoid. it rarely happens that an individual can at once collect the majority of the suffrages of a great people; and this difficulty is enhanced in a republic of confederate states, where local influences are apt to preponderate. the means by which it was proposed to obviate this second obstacle was to delegate the electoral powers of the nation to a body of representatives. the mode of election rendered a majority more probable; for the fewer the electors are, the greater is the chance of their coming to a final decision. it also offered an additional probability of a judicious choice. it then remained to be decided whether this right of election was to be intrusted to the legislative body, the habitual representative assembly of the nation, or whether an electoral assembly should be formed for the express purpose of proceeding to the nomination of a president. the americans chose the latter alternative, from a belief that the individuals who were returned to make the laws were incompetent to represent the wishes of the nation in the election of its chief magistrate; and that as they are chosen for more than a year, the constituency they represented might have changed its opinion in that time. it was thought that if the legislature was empowered to elect the head of the executive power, its members would, for some time before the election, be exposed to the manoeuvres of corruption, and the tricks of intrigue; whereas, the special electors would, like a jury, remain mixed up with the crowd till the day of action, when they would appear for the sole purpose of giving their votes. it was therefore established that every state should name a certain number of electors,[ ] who in their turn should elect the president; and as it had been observed that the assemblies to which the choice of a chief magistrate had been intrusted in elective countries, inevitably became the centres of passion and of cabal; that they sometimes usurped an authority which did not belong to them: and that their proceedings, or the uncertainty which resulted from them, were sometimes prolonged so much as to endanger the welfare of the state, it was determined that the electors should all vote upon the same day, without being convoked to the same place.[ ] this double election rendered a majority probable, though not certain; for it was possible that as many differences might exist between the electors as between their constituents. in this case it was necessary to have recourse to one of three measures; either to appoint new electors, or to consult a second time those already appointed, or to defer the election to another authority. the first two of these alternatives, independently of the uncertainty of their results, were likely to delay the final decision, and to perpetuate an agitation which must always be accompanied with danger. the third expedient was therefore adopted, and it was agreed that the votes should be transmitted sealed to the president of the senate, and that they should be opened and counted in the presence of the senate and the house of representatives. if none of the candidates has a majority, the house of representatives then proceeds immediately to elect the president; but with the condition that it must fix upon one of the three candidates who have the highest numbers.[ ] thus it is only in case of an event which cannot often happen, and which can never be foreseen, that the election is intrusted to the ordinary representatives of the nation; and even then they are obliged to choose a citizen who has already been designated by a powerful minority of the special electors. it is by this happy expedient that the respect due to the popular voice is combined with the utmost celerity of execution and those precautions which the peace of the country demands. but the decision of the question by the house of representatives does not necessarily offer an immediate solution of the difficulty, for the majority of that assembly may still be doubtful, and in this case the constitution prescribes no remedy. nevertheless, by restricting the number of candidates to three, and by referring the matter to the judgment of an enlightened public body, it has smoothed all the obstacles[ ] which are not inherent in the elective system. in the forty years which have elapsed since the promulgation of the federal constitution, the united states have twelve times chosen a president. ten of these elections took place simultaneously by the votes of the special electors in the different states. the house of representatives has only twice exercised its conditional privilege of deciding in cases of uncertainty: the first time was at the election of mr. jefferson in ; the second was in , when mr. john quincy adams was chosen. * * * * * crisis of the election. the election may be considered as a national crisis.--why?--passions of the people.--anxiety of the president.--calm which succeeds the agitation of the election. i have shown what the circumstances are which favored the adoption of the elective system in the united states, and what precautions were taken by the legislators to obviate its dangers. the americans are accustomed to all kinds of elections; and they know by experience the utmost degree of excitement which is compatible with security. the vast extent of the country, and the dissemination of the inhabitants, render a collision between parties less probable and less dangerous there than elsewhere. the political circumstances under which the elections have hitherto been carried on, have presented no real embarrassments to the nation. nevertheless, the epoch of the election of a president of the united states may be considered as a crisis in the affairs of the nation. the influence which he exercises on public business is no doubt feeble and indirect; but the choice of the president, which is of small importance to each individual citizen, concerns the citizens collectively; and however trifling an interest may be, it assumes a great degree of importance as soon as it becomes general. the president possesses but few means of rewarding his supporters in comparison to the kings of europe; but the places which are at his disposal are sufficiently numerous to interest, directly or indirectly, several thousand electors in his success. moreover, political parties in the united states, as well as elsewhere, are led to rally around an individual, in order to acquire a more tangible shape in the eyes of the crowd, and the name of the candidate for the presidency is put forth as the symbol and personification of their theories. for these reasons parties are strongly interested in gaining the election, not so much with a view to the triumph of their principles under the auspices of the president elected, as to show, by the majority which returned him, the strength of the supporters of those principles. for a long while before the appointed time is at hand, the election becomes the most important and the all-engrossing topic of discussion. the ardor of faction is redoubled; and all the artificial passions which the imagination can create in the bosom of a happy and peaceful land are agitated and brought to light. the president, on the other hand, is absorbed by the cares of self-defence. he no longer governs for the interest of the state, but for that of his re-election; he does homage to the majority, and instead of checking its passions, as his duty commands him to do, he frequently courts its worst caprices. as the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into several camps, each of which assumes the name of its favorite candidate; the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the public papers, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present. as soon as the choice is determined, this ardor is dispelled; and as a calmer season returns, the current of the state, which has nearly broken its banks, sinks to its usual level; but who can refrain from astonishment at the causes of the storm? * * * * * re-election of the president. when the head of the executive power is re-eligible, it is the state which is the source of intrigue and corruption.--the desire of being re-elected, the chief aim of a president of the united states.--disadvantage of the system peculiar to america.--the natural evil of democracy is that it subordinates all authority to the slightest desires of the majority.--the re-election of the president encourages this evil. it may be asked whether the legislators of the united states did right or wrong in allowing the re-election of the president. it seems at first sight contrary to all reason to prevent the head of the executive power from being elected a second time. the influence which the talents and the character of a single individual may exercise upon the fate of a whole people, especially in critical circumstances or arduous times, is well known: a law preventing the re-election of the chief magistrate would deprive the citizens of the surest pledge of the prosperity and the security of the commonwealth; and, by a singular inconsistency, a man would be excluded from the government at the very time when he had shown his ability in conducting its affairs. but if these arguments are strong, perhaps still more powerful reasons may be advanced against them. intrigue and corruption are the natural defects of elective government; but when the head of the state can be re-elected, these evils rise to a great height, and compromise the very existence of the country. when a simple candidate seeks to rise by intrigue, his manoeuvres must necessarily be limited to a narrow sphere; but when the chief magistrate enters the lists, he borrows the strength of the government for his own purposes. in the former case the feeble resources of an individual are in action; in the latter, the state itself, with all its immense influence, is busied in the work of corruption and cabal. the private citizen, who employs the most immoral practices to acquire power, can only act in a manner indirectly prejudicial to the public prosperity. but if the representative of the executive descends into the lists, the cares of government dwindle into second-rate importance, and the success of his election is his first concern. all laws and negotiations are then to him nothing more than electioneering schemes; places become the reward of services rendered, not to the nation, but to its chief; and the influence of the government, if not injurious to the country, is at least no longer beneficial to the community for which it was created. it is impossible to consider the ordinary course of affairs in the united states without perceiving that the desire of being re-elected is the chief aim of the president; that his whole administration, and even his most indifferent measures, tend to this object; and that, as the crisis approaches, his personal interest takes the place of his interest in the public good. the principle of re-eligibility renders the corrupt influence of elective governments still more extensive and pernicious. it tends to degrade the political morality of the people, and to substitute adroitness for patriotism. in america it exercises a still more fatal influence on the sources of national existence. every government seems to be afflicted by some evil inherent in its nature, and the genius of the legislator is shown in eluding its attacks. a state may survive the influence of a host of bad laws, and the mischief they cause is frequently exaggerated; but a law which encourages the growth of the canker within must prove fatal in the end, although its bad consequences may not be immediately perceived. the principle of destruction in absolute monarchies lies in the excessive and unreasonable extension of the prerogative of the crown; and a measure tending to remove the constitutional provisions which counterbalance this influence would be radically bad, even if its consequences should long appear to be imperceptible. by a parity of reasoning, in countries governed by a democracy, where the people is perpetually drawing all authority to itself, the laws which increase or accelerate its action are the direct assailants of the very principle of the government. the greatest proof of the ability of the american legislators is, that they clearly discerned this truth, and that they had the courage to act up to it. they conceived that a certain authority above the body of the people was necessary, which should enjoy a degree of independence, without however being entirely beyond the popular control; an authority which would be forced to comply with the _permanent_ determinations of the majority, but which would be able to resist its caprices, and to refuse its most dangerous demands. to this end they centred the whole executive power of the nation in a single arm; they granted extensive prerogatives to the president, and they armed him with the veto to resist the encroachments of the legislature. but by introducing the principle of re-election, they partly destroyed their work; and they rendered the president but little inclined to exert the great power they had invested in his hands. if ineligible a second time, the president would be far from independent of the people, for his responsibility would not be lessened; but the favor of the people would not be so necessary to him as to induce him to court it by humoring its desires. if re-eligible (and this is more especially true at the present day, when political morality is relaxed, and when great men are rare), the president of the united states becomes an easy tool in the hands of the majority. he adopts its likings and its animosities, he hastens to anticipate its wishes, he forestalls its complaints, he yields to its idlest cravings, and instead of guiding it, as the legislature intended that he should do, he is ever ready to follow its bidding. thus, in order not to deprive the state of the talents of an individual, those talents have been rendered almost useless, and to reserve an expedient for extraordinary perils the country has been exposed to daily dangers. [the question of the propriety of leaving the president re-eligible, is one of that class which probably must for ever remain undecided. the author himself, at page , gives a strong reason for re-eligibility, "so that the chance of a prolonged administration may inspire him with hopeful undertakings for the public good, and with the means of carrying them into execution,"--considerations of great weight. there is an important fact bearing upon this question, which should be stated in connexion with it. president washington established the practice of declining a third election, and every one of his successors, either from a sense of its propriety or from apprehensions of the force of public opinion, has followed the example. so that it has become as much a part of the constitution, that no citizen can be a third time elected president, as if it were expressed in that instrument in words. this may perhaps be considered a fair adjustment of objections on either side. those against a continued and perpetual re-eligibility are certainly met: while the arguments in favor of an opportunity to prolong an administration under circumstances that may justify it, are allowed their due weight. one effect of this practical interpolation of the constitution unquestionably is, to increase the chances of a president's being once re-elected; as men will be more disposed to acquiesce in a measure that thus practically excludes the individual from ever again entering the field of competition.--_american editor_] * * * * * federal courts.[ ] political importance of the judiciary in the united states.--difficulty of treating this subject.--utility of judicial power in confederations--what tribunals could be introduced into the union.--necessity of establishing federal courts of justice.--organization of the national judiciary.--the supreme court.--in what it differs from all known tribunals. i have inquired into the legislative and executive power of the union, and the judicial power now remains to be examined; but in this place i cannot conceal my fears from the reader. judicial institutions exercise a great influence on the condition of the anglo-americans, and they occupy a prominent place among what are properly called political institutions: in this respect they are peculiarly deserving of our attention. but i am at a loss to explain the political action of the american tribunals without entering into some technical details on their constitution and their forms of proceeding; and i know not how to descend to these minutiae without wearying the curiosity of the reader by the natural aridity of the subject, or without risking to fall into obscurity through a desire to be succinct. i can scarcely hope to escape these various evils; for if i appear too prolix to a man of the world, a lawyer may on the other hand complain of my brevity. but these are the natural disadvantages of my subject, and more especially of the point which i am about to discuss. the great difficulty was, not to devise the constitution of the federal government, but to find out a method of enforcing its laws. governments have in general but two means of overcoming the opposition of the people they govern, viz., the physical force which is at their own disposal, and the moral force which they derive from the decisions of the courts of justice. a government which should have no other means of exacting obedience than open war, must be very near its ruin; for one of two alternatives would then probably occur: if its authority was small, and its character temperate, it would not resort to violence till the last extremity, and it would connive at a number of partial acts of insubordination, in which case the state would gradually fall into anarchy; if it was enterprising and powerful, it would perpetually have recourse to its physical strength, and would speedily degenerate into a military despotism. so that its activity would not be less prejudicial to the community than its inaction. the great end of justice is to substitute the notion of right for that of violence; and to place a legal barrier between the power of the government and the use of physical force. the authority which is awarded to the intervention of a court of justice by the general opinion of mankind is so surprisingly great, that it clings to the mere formalities of justice, and gives a bodily influence to the shadow of the law. the moral force which courts of justice possess renders the introduction of physical force exceedingly rare, and it is very frequently substituted for it; but if the latter proves to be indispensable, its power is doubled by the association of the idea of law. a federal government stands in greater need of the support of judicial institutions than any other, because it is naturally weak, and opposed to formidable opposition.[ ] if it were always obliged to resort to violence in the first instance, it could not fulfil its task. the union, therefore, required a national judiciary to enforce the obedience of the citizens to the laws, and to repel the attacks which might be directed against them. the question then remained what tribunals were to exercise these privileges; were they to be intrusted to the courts of justice which were already organized in every state? or was it necessary to create federal courts? it may easily be proved that the union could not adapt the judicial power of the state to its wants. the separation of the judiciary from the administrative power of the state, no doubt affects the security of every citizen, and the liberty of all. but it is no less important to the existence of the nation that these several powers should have the same origin, should follow the same principles, and act in the same sphere; in a word, that they should be correlative and homogeneous. no one, i presume, ever suggested the advantage of trying offences committed in france, by a foreign court of justice, in order to ensure the impartiality of the judges. the americans form one people in relation to their federal government; but in the bosom of this people divers political bodies have been allowed to subsist, which are dependent on the national government in a few points, and independent in all the rest--which have all a distinct origin, maxims peculiar to themselves, and special means of carrying on their affairs. to intrust the execution of the laws of the union to tribunals instituted by these political bodies, would be to allow foreign judges to preside over the nation. nay more, not only is each state foreign to the union at large, but it is in perpetual opposition to the common interests, since whatever authority the union loses turns to the advantage of the states. thus to enforce the laws of the union by means of the tribunals of the states, would be to allow not only foreign, but partial judges to preside over the nation. but the number, still more than the mere character, of the tribunals of the states rendered them unfit for the service of the nation. when the federal constitution was formed, there were already thirteen courts of justice in the united states which decided causes without appeal. that number is now increased to twenty-four. to suppose that a state can subsist, when its fundamental laws may be subjected to four-and-twenty different interpretations at the same time, is to advance a proposition alike contrary to reason and to experience. the american legislators therefore agreed to create a federal judiciary power to apply the laws of the union, and to determine certain questions affecting general interests, which were carefully determined beforehand. the entire judicial power of the union was centred in one tribunal, which was denominated the supreme court of the united states. but, to facilitate the expedition of business, inferior courts were appended to it, which were empowered to decide causes of small importance without appeal, and with appeal causes of more magnitude. the members of the supreme court are named neither by the people nor the legislature, but by the president of the united states, acting with the advice of the senate. in order to render them independent of the other authorities, their office was made inalienable; and it was determined that their salary, when once fixed, should not be altered by the legislature.[ ] it was easy to proclaim the principle of a federal judiciary, but difficulties multiplied when the extent of its jurisdiction was to be determined. * * * * * means of determining the jurisdiction of the federal courts. difficulty of determining the jurisdiction of separate courts of justice in confederation.--the courts of the union obtained the right of fixing their own jurisdiction.--in what respect this rule attacks the portion of sovereignty reserved to the several states.--the sovereignty of these states restricted by the laws, and the interpretation of the laws.--consequently, the danger of the several states is more apparent than real. as the constitution of the united states recognized two distinct powers, in presence of each other, represented in a judicial point of view by two distinct classes of courts of justice, the utmost care which could be taken in defining their separate jurisdictions would have been insufficient to prevent frequent collisions between those tribunals. the question then arose, to whom the right of deciding the competency of each court was to be referred. in nations which constitute a single body politic, when a question is debated between two courts relating to their mutual jurisdiction, a third tribunal is generally within reach to decide the difference; and this is effected without difficulty, because in these nations the questions of judicial competency have no connexion with the privileges of the national supremacy. but it was impossible to create an arbiter between a superior court of the union and the superior court of a separate state, which would not belong to one of these two classes. it was therefore necessary to allow one of these courts to judge its own cause, and to take or to retain cognizance of the point which was contested. to grant this privilege to the different courts of the states, would have been to destroy the sovereignty of the union _de facto_, after having established it _de jure_; for the interpretation of the constitution would soon have restored that portion of independence to the states of which the terms of that act deprived them. the object of the creation of a federal tribunal was to prevent the courts of the states from deciding questions affecting the national interests in their own department, and so to form a uniform body of jurisprudence for the interpretation of the laws of the union. this end would not have been accomplished if the courts of the several states had been competent to decide upon cases in their separate capacities, from which they were obliged to abstain as federal tribunals. the supreme court of the united states was therefore invested with the right of determining all questions of jurisdiction.[ ] this was a severe blow upon the independence of the states, which was thus restricted not only by the laws, but by the interpretation of them; by one limit which was known, and by another which was dubious; by a rule which was certain, and a rule which was arbitrary. it is true the constitution had laid down the precise limits of the federal supremacy, but whenever this supremacy is contested by one of the states, a federal tribunal decides the question. nevertheless, the dangers with which the independence of the states was threatened by this mode of proceeding are less serious than they appear to be. we shall see hereafter that in america the real strength of the country is vested in the provincial far more than in the federal government. the federal judges are conscious of the relative weakness of the power in whose name they act, and they are more inclined to abandon a right of jurisdiction in cases where it is justly their own, than to assert a privilege to which they have no legal claim. * * * * * different cases of jurisdiction. the matter and the party are the first conditions of the federal jurisdiction.--suits in which ambassadors are engaged.--suits of the union.--of a separate state.--by whom tried.--causes resulting from the laws of the union.--why judged by the federal tribunal.--causes relating to the non-performance of contracts tried by the federal courts.--consequences of this arrangement. after having appointed the means of fixing the competency of the federal courts, the legislators of the union defined the cases which should come within their jurisdiction. it was established, on the one hand, that certain parties must always be brought before the federal courts, without any regard to the special nature of the cause; and, on the other, that certain causes must always be brought before the same courts, without any regard to the quality of the parties in the suit. these distinctions were therefore admitted to be the bases of the federal jurisdiction. ambassadors are the representatives of nations in a state of amity with the union, and whatever concerns these personages concerns in some degree the whole union. when i an ambassador is a party in a suit, that suit affects the welfare of the nation, and a federal tribunal is naturally called upon to decide it. the union itself may be involved in legal proceedings, and in this case it would be alike contrary to the customs of all nations, and to common sense, to appeal to a tribunal representing any other sovereignty than its own; the federal courts, therefore, take cognizance of these affairs. when two parties belonging to two different states are engaged in a suit, the case cannot with propriety be brought before a court of either state. the surest expedient is to select a tribunal like that of the union, which can excite the suspicions of neither party, and which offers the most natural as well as the most certain remedy. when the two parties are not private individuals, but states, an important political consideration is added to the same motive of equity. the quality of the parties, in this case, gives a national importance to all their disputes; and the most trifling litigation of the states may be said to involve the peace of the whole union.[ ] the nature of the cause frequently prescribes the rule of competency. thus all the questions which concern maritime commerce evidently fall under the cognizance of the federal tribunals.[ ] almost all these questions are connected with the interpretation of the law of nations; and in this respect they essentially interest the union in relation to foreign powers. moreover, as the sea is not included within the limits of any peculiar jurisdiction, the national courts can only hear causes which originate in maritime affairs. the constitution comprises under one head almost all the cases which by their very nature come within the limits of the federal courts. the rule which it lays down is simple, but pregnant with an entire system of ideas, and with a vast multitude of facts. it declares that the judicial power of the supreme court shall extend to all cases in law and equity _arising under the laws of the united states_. two examples will put the intentions of the legislator in the clearest light:-- the constitution prohibits the states from making laws on the value and circulation of money: if, notwithstanding this prohibition, a state passes a law of this kind, with which the interested parties refuse to comply because it is contrary to the constitution, the case must come before a federal court, because it arises under the laws of the united states. again, if difficulties arise in the levying of import duties which have been voted by congress, the federal court must decide the case, because it arises under the interpretation of a law of the united states. this rule is in perfect accordance with the fundamental principles of the federal constitution. the union as it was established in , possesses, it is true, a limited supremacy; but it was intended that within its limits it should form one and the same people.[ ] within those limits the union is sovereign. when this point is established and admitted, the inference is easy; for if it be acknowledged that the united states constitute one and the same people within the bounds prescribed by their constitution, it is impossible to refuse them the rights which belong to other nations. but it has been allowed, from the origin of society, that every nation has the right of deciding by its own courts those questions which concern the execution of its own laws. to this it is answered, that the union is in so singular a position, that in relation to some matters it constitutes a people, and that in relation to all the rest it is a nonentity. but the inference to be drawn is, that in the laws relating to these matters the union possesses all the rights of absolute sovereignty. the difficulty is to know what these matters are; and when once it is resolved (and we have shown how it was resolved, in speaking of the means of determining the jurisdiction of the federal courts), no farther doubt can arise; for as soon as it is established that a suit is federal, that is to say, that it belongs to the share of sovereignty reserved by the constitution to the union, the natural consequence is that it should come within the jurisdiction of a federal court. whenever the laws of the united states are attacked, or whenever they are resorted to in self-defence, the federal courts must be appealed to. thus the jurisdiction of the tribunals of the union extends and narrows its limits exactly in the same ratio as the sovereignty of the union augments or decreases. we have shown that the principal aim of the legislators of was to divide the sovereign authority into two parts. in the one they placed the control of all the general interests of the union, in the other the control of the special interest of its component states. their chief solicitude was to arm the federal government with sufficient power to enable it to resist, within its sphere, the encroachments of the several states. as for these communities, the principle of independence within certain limits of their own was adopted in their behalf; and they were concealed from the inspection, and protected from the control, of the central government. in speaking of the division of the authority, i observed that this latter principle had not always been held sacred, since the states are prevented from passing certain laws, which apparently belong to their own particular sphere of interest. when a state of the union passes a law of this kind, the citizens who are injured by its execution can appeal to the federal courts. [the remark of the author, that whenever the laws of the united states are attacked, or whenever they are resorted to in self-defence, the federal courts _must be_ appealed to, which is more strongly expressed in the original, is erroneous and calculated to mislead on a point of some importance. by the grant of power to the courts of the united states to decide certain cases, the powers of the state courts are not suspended, but are exercised concurrently, subject to an appeal to the courts of the united states. but if the decision of the state court is _in favor_ of the right, title, or privilege claimed under the constitution, a treaty, or under a law of congress, no appeal lies to the federal courts. the appeal is given only when the decision _is against_ the claimant under the treaty or law. see d cranch, . wheaton, .--_american editor._] thus the jurisdiction of the general courts extends not only to all the cases which arise under the laws of the union, but also to those which arise under laws made by the several states in opposition to the constitution. the states are prohibited from making _ex-post-facto_ laws in criminal cases; and any person condemned by virtue of a law of this kind can appeal to the judicial power of the union. the states are likewise prohibited from making laws which may have a tendency to impair the obligations of contracts.[ ] if a citizen thinks that an obligation of this kind is impaired by a law passed in his state, he may refuse to obey it, and may appeal to the federal courts.[ ] this provision appears to me to be the most serious attack upon the independence of the states. the rights awarded to the federal government for purposes of obvious national importance are definite and easily comprehensible; but those with which this last clause invests it are not either clearly appreciable or accurately defined. for there are vast numbers of political laws which influence the obligations of contracts, which may thus furnish an easy pretext for the aggressions of the central authority. [the fears of the author respecting the danger to the independence of the states of that provision of the constitution, which gives to the federal courts the authority of deciding when a state law impairs the obligation of a contract, are deemed quite unfounded. the citizens of every state have a deep interest in preserving the obligation of the contracts entered into by them in other states: indeed without such a controlling power, "commerce among several states" could not exist. the existence of this common arbiter is of the last importance to the continuance of the union itself, for if there were no peaceable means of enforcing the obligations of contracts, independent of all state authority, the states themselves would inevitably come in collision in their efforts to protect their respective citizens from the consequences of the legislation of another state. m. de tocqueville's observation, that the rights with which the clause in question invests the federal government "are not clearly appreciable or accurately defined," proceeds upon a mistaken view of the clause itself. it relates to the _obligation_ of a contract, and forbids any act by which that obligation is impaired. to american lawyers, this seems to be as precise and definite as any rule can be made by human language. the distinction between the _right_ to the fruits of a contract, and the time, tribunal, and manner, in which that right is to be enforced, seems very palpable. at all events, since the decision of the supreme court of the united states in those cases in which this clause has been discussed, no difficulty is found, practically, in understanding the exact limits of the prohibition. the next observation of the author, that "there are vast numbers of political laws which influence the obligations of contracts, which may thus furnish an easy pretext for the aggressions of the central authority," is rather obscure. is it intended that political laws may be passed by the central authority, influencing the obligation of a contract, and thus the contracts themselves be destroyed? the answer to this would be, that the question would not arise under the clause forbidding laws impairing the obligation of contracts, for that clause applies only to the states and not to the federal government. if it be intended, that the states may find it necessary to pass political laws, which affect contracts, and that under the pretence of vindicating the obligation of contracts, the central authority may make aggressions on the states and annul their political laws:--the answer is, that the motive to the adoption of the clause was to reach laws of every description, political as well as all others, and that it was the abuse by the states of what may be called political laws, viz.: acts confiscating demands of foreign creditors, that gave rise to the prohibition. the settled doctrine now is, that states may pass laws in respect to the making of contracts, may prescribe what contracts shall be made, and how, but that they cannot impair any that are already made. the writer of this note is unwilling to dismiss the subject, without remarking upon what he must think a fundamental error of the author, which is exhibited in the passage commented on, as well as in other passages:--and that is, in supposing the judiciary of the united states, and particularly the supreme court, to be a part of the _political_ federal government, and as the ready instrument to execute its designs upon the state authorities. although the judges are in form commissioned by the united states, yet, in fact, they are appointed by the delegates of the state, in the senate of the united states, concurrently with, and acting upon, the nomination of the president. if the legislature of each state in the union were to elect a judge of the supreme court, he would not be less a political officer of the united states than he now is. in truth, the judiciary have no political duties to perform; they are arbiters chosen by the federal and state governments, jointly, and when appointed, as independent of the one as of the other. they cannot be removed without the consent of the states represented in the senate, and they can be removed without the consent of the president, and against his wishes. such is the theory of the constitution. and it has been felt practically, in the rejection by the senate of persons nominated as judges, by a president of the same political party with a majority of the senators. two instances of this kind occurred during the administration of mr. jefferson. if it be alleged that they are exposed to the influence of the executive of the united states, by the expectation of offices in his gift, the answer is, that judges of state courts are equally exposed to the same influence--that all state officers, from the highest to the lowest, are in the same predicament; and that this circumstance does not, therefore, deprive them of the character of impartial and independent arbiters. these observations receive confirmation from every recent decision of the supreme court of the united states, in which certain laws of individual states have been sustained, in cases where, to say the least, it was very questionable whether they did not infringe the provisions of the constitution, and where a disposition to construe those previsions broadly and extensively, would have found very plausible grounds to indulge itself in annulling the state laws referred to. see the cases of _city of new york vs. miln_, th _peters_, ; _briscoe vs. the bank of the commonwealth of kentucky_, ib., ; _charles river bridge vs. warren bridge_, ib., .--_american ed._] * * * * * procedure of the federal courts. natural weakness of the judiciary power in confederations.--legislators ought to strive as much as possible to bring private individuals, and not states, before the federal courts.--how the americans have succeeded in this.--direct prosecutions of private individuals in the federal courts.--indirect prosecution in the states which violate the laws of the union.--the decrees of the supreme court enervate but do not destroy the provincial laws. i have shown what the privileges of the federal courts are, and it is no less important to point out the manner in which they are exercised. the irresistible authority of justice in countries in which the sovereignty is undivided, is derived from the fact that the tribunals of those countries represent the entire nation at issue with the individual against whom their decree is directed; and the idea of power is thus introduced to corroborate the idea of right. but this is not always the case in countries in which the sovereignty is divided: in them the judicial power is more frequently opposed to a fraction of the nation than to an isolated individual, and its moral authority and physical strength are consequently diminished. in federal states the power of the judge is naturally decreased, and that of the justiciable parties is augmented. the aim of the legislator in confederate states ought therefore to be, to render the position of the courts of justice analogous to that which they occupy in countries where the sovereignty is undivided; in other words, his efforts ought constantly to tend to maintain the judicial power of the confederation as the representative of the nation, and the justiciable party as the representative of an individual interest. every government, whatever may be its constitution, requires the means of constraining its subjects to discharge their obligations, and of protecting its privileges from their assaults. as far as the direct action of the government on the community is concerned, the constitution of the united states contrived, by a master-stroke of policy, that the federal courts, acting in the name of the laws, should only take cognizance of parties in an individual capacity. for, as it had been declared that the union consisted of one and the same people within the limits laid down by the constitution, the inference was that the government created by this constitution, and acting within these limits, was invested with all the privileges of a national government, one of the principal of which is the right of transmitting its injunctions directly to the private citizen. when, for instance, the union votes an impost, it does not apply to the states for the levying of it, but to every american citizen, in proportion to his assessment. the supreme court, which is empowered to enforce the execution of this law of the union, exerts its influence not upon a refractory state, but upon the private taxpayer; and, like the judicial power of other nations, it is opposed to the person of an individual. it is to be observed that the union chose its own antagonist; and as that antagonist is feeble, he is naturally worsted. but the difficulty increases when the proceedings are not brought forward _by_ but _against_ the union. the constitution recognizes the legislative power of the state; and a law so enacted may impair the privileges of the union, in which case a collision is unavoidable between that body and the state which had passed the law; and it only remains to select the least dangerous remedy, which is very clearly deducible from the general principles i have before established.[ ] it may be conceived that, in the case under consideration, the union might have sued the state before a federal court, which would have annulled the act; and by this means it would have adopted a natural course of proceeding: but the judicial power would have been placed in open hostility to the state, and it was desirable to avoid this predicament as much as possible. the americans hold that it is nearly impossible that a new law should not impair the interests of some private individuals by its provisions: these private interests are assumed by the american legislators as the ground of attack against such measures as may be prejudicial to the union, and it is to these cases that the protection of the supreme court is extended. suppose a state vends a certain portion of its territory to a company, and that a year afterwards it passes a law by which the territory is otherwise disposed of, and that clause of the constitution, which prohibits laws impairing the obligation of contracts, is violated. when the purchaser under the second act appears to take possession, the possessor under the first act brings his action before the tribunals of the union, and causes the title of the claimant to be pronounced null and void.[ ] this, in point of fact, the judicial power of the union is contesting the claims of the sovereignty of a state; but it only acts indirectly and upon a special application of detail: it attacks the law in its consequences, not in its principle, and it rather weakens than destroys it. the last hypothesis that remained was that each state formed a corporation enjoying a separate existence and distinct civil rights, and that it could therefore sue or be sued before a tribunal. thus a state could bring an action against another state. in this instance, the union was not called upon to contest a provincial law, but to try a suit in which a state was a party. this suit was perfectly similar to any other cause, except that the quality of the parties was different; and here the danger pointed out at the beginning of this chapter exists with less chance of being avoided. the inherent disadvantage of the very essence of federal constitutions is, that they engender parties in the bosom of the nation which present powerful obstacles to the free course of justice. * * * * * high rank of the supreme courts among the great powers of state. no nation ever constituted so great a judicial power as the americans. extent of its prerogative.--its political influence.--the tranquillity and the very existence of the union depend on the discretion of the seven federal judges. when we have successfully examined in detail the organization of the supreme court, and the entire prerogatives which it exercises, we shall readily admit that a more imposing judicial power was never constituted by any people. the supreme court is placed at the head of all known tribunals, both by the nature of its rights and the class of justiciable parties which it controls. in all the civilized countries of europe, the government has always shown the greatest repugnance to allow the cases to which it was itself a party to be decided by the ordinary course of justice. this repugnance naturally attains its utmost height in an absolute government; and, on the other hand, the privileges of the courts of justice are extended with the increasing liberties of the people; but no european nation has at present held that all judicial controversies, without regard to their origin, can be decided by the judges of common law. in america this theory has been actually put in practice; and the supreme court of the united states is the sole tribunal of the nation. its power extends to all the cases arising under laws and treaties made by the executive and legislative authorities, to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, and in general to all points which affect the law of nations. it may even be affirmed that, although its constitution is essentially judicial, its prerogatives are almost entirely political. its sole object is to enforce the execution of the laws of the union; and the union only regulates the relations of the government with the citizens, and of the nation with foreign powers: the relations of citizens among themselves are almost exclusively regulated by the sovereignty of the states. a second and still greater cause of the preponderance of this court may be adduced. in the nations of europe the courts of justice are only called upon to try the controversies of private individuals; but the supreme court of the united states summons sovereign powers to its bar. when the clerk of the court advances on the steps of the tribunal, and simply says, "the state of new york _versus_ the state of ohio," it is impossible not to feel that the court which he addresses is no ordinary body; and when it is recollected that one of these parties represents one million, and the other two millions of men, one is struck by the responsibility of the seven judges whose decision is about to satisfy or to disappoint so large a number of their fellow-citizens. the peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the union, are invested in the hands of the seven judges. without their active co-operation the constitution would be a dead letter: the executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative powers; the legislature demands their protection from the designs of the executive; they defend the union from the disobedience of the states, the states from the exaggerated claims of the union, the public interest against the interests of private citizens, and the conservative spirit of order against the fleeting innovations of democracy. their power is enormous, but it is clothed in the authority of public opinion. they are the all-powerful guardians of a people which respects law; but they would be impotent against popular neglect or popular contempt. the force of public opinion is the most intractable of agents, because its exact limits cannot be defined; and it is not less dangerous to exceed, than to remain below the boundary prescribed. the federal judges must not only be good citizens, and men possessed of that information and integrity which are indispensable to magistrates, but they must be statesmen--politicians, not unread in the signs of the times, not afraid to brave the obstacles which can be subdued, nor slow to turn aside such encroaching elements as may threaten the supremacy of the union and the obedience which is due to the laws. the president, who exercises a limited power, may err without causing great mischief in the state. congress may decide amiss without destroying the union, because the electoral body in which congress originates may cause it to retract its decision by changing its members. but if the supreme court is ever composed of imprudent men or bad citizens, the union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war. the real cause of this danger, however, does not lie in the constitution of the tribunal, but in the very nature of federal governments. we have observed that in confederate peoples it is especially necessary to consolidate the judicial authority, because in no other nations do those independent persons who are able to cope with the social body, exist, in greater power or in a better condition to resist the physical strength of the government. but the more a power requires to be strengthened, the more extensive and independent it must be made; and the dangers which its abuse may create are heightened by its independence and its strength. the source of the evil is not, therefore, in the constitution of the power, but in the constitution of those states which renders its existence necessary. * * * * * in what respects the federal constitution is superior to that of the states. in what respects the constitution of the union can be compared to that of the states.--superiority of the constitution of the union attributable to the wisdom of the federal legislators.--legislature of the union less dependent on the people than that of the states.--executive power more independent in its sphere.--judicial power less subjected to the inclinations of the majority.--practical consequences of these facts.--the dangers inherent in a democratic government eluded by the federal legislators, and increased by the legislators of the states. the federal constitution differs essentially from that of the states in the ends which it is intended to accomplish; but in the means by which these ends are promoted, a greater analogy exists between them. the objects of the governments are different, but their forms are the same; and in this special point of view there is some advantage in comparing them together. i am of opinion that the federal constitution is superior to all the constitutions of the states, for several reasons. the present constitution of the union was formed at a later period than those of the majority of the states, and it may have derived some melioration from past experience. but we shall be led to acknowledge that this is only a secondary cause of its superiority, when we recollect that eleven new states have been added to the american confederation since the promulgation of the federal constitution, and that these new republics have always rather exaggerated than avoided the defects which existed in the former constitutions. the chief cause of the superiority of the federal constitution lay in the character of the legislators who composed it. at the time when it was formed the dangers of the confederation were imminent, and its ruin seemed inevitable. in this extremity the people chose the men who most deserved the esteem, rather than those who had gained the affections of the country. i have already observed, that distinguished as almost all the legislators of the union were for their intelligence, they were still more so for their patriotism. they had all been nurtured at a time when the spirit of liberty was braced by a continual struggle against a powerful and predominant authority. when the contest was terminated, while the excited passions of the populace persisted in warring with dangers which had ceased to threaten them, these men stopped short in their career; they cast a calmer and more penetrating look upon the country which was now their own; they perceived that the war of independence was definitely ended, and that the only dangers which america had to fear were those which might result from the abuse of the freedom she had won. they had the courage to say what they believed to be true, because they were animated by a warm and sincere love of liberty; and they ventured to propose restrictions, because they were resolutely opposed to destruction.[ ] the greater number of the constitutions of the states assign one year for the duration of the house of representatives, and two years for that of the senate; so that members of the legislative body are constantly and narrowly tied down by the slightest desires of their constituents. the legislators of the union were of opinion that this excessive dependence of the legislature tended to alter the nature of the main consequences of the representative system, since it vested the source not only of authority, but of government, in the people. they increased the length of the time for which the representatives were returned, in order to give them freer scope for the exercise of their own judgment. the federal constitution, as well as the constitutions of the different states, divided the legislative body into two branches. but in the states these two branches were composed of the same elements and elected in the same manner. the consequence was that the passions and inclinations of the populace were as rapidly and as energetically represented in one chamber as in the other, and that laws were made with all the characteristics of violence and precipitation. by the federal constitution the two houses originate in like manner in the choice of the people; but the conditions of eligibility and the mode of election were changed, to the end that if, as is the case in certain nations, one branch of the legislature represents the same interests as the other, it may at least represent a superior degree of intelligence and discretion. a mature age was made one of the conditions of the senatorial dignity, and the upper house was chosen by an elected assembly of a limited number of members. to concentrate the whole social force in the hands of the legislative body is the natural tendency of democracies; for as this is the power which emanates the most directly from the people, it is made to participate most fully in the preponderating authority of the multitude, and it is naturally led to monopolise every species of influence. this concentration is at once prejudicial to a well-conducted administration, and favorable to the despotism of the majority. the legislators of the states frequently yielded to these democratic propensities, which were invariably and courageously resisted by the founders of the union. in the states the executive power is vested in the hands of a magistrate, who is apparently placed upon a level with the legislature, but who is in reality nothing more than the blind agent and the passive instrument of its decisions. he can derive no influence from the duration of his functions, which terminate with the revolving year, or from the exercise of prerogatives which can scarcely be said to exist. the legislature can condemn him to inaction by intrusting the execution of the laws to special committees of its own members, and can annul his temporary dignity by depriving him of his salary. the federal constitution vests all the privileges and all the responsibility of the executive power in a single individual. the duration of the presidency is fixed at four years; the salary of the individual who fills that office cannot be altered during the term of his functions; he is protected by a body of official dependents, and armed with a suspensive veto. in short, every effort was made to confer a strong and independent position upon the executive authority, within the limits which had been prescribed to it. in the constitution of all the states the judicial power is that which remains the most independent of the legislative authority: nevertheless, in all the states the legislature has reserved to itself the right of regulating the emoluments of the judges, a practice which necessarily subjects these magistrates to its immediate influence. in some states the judges are only temporarily appointed, which deprives them of a great portion of their power and their freedom. in others the legislative and judicial powers are entirely confounded: thus the senate of new york, for instance, constitutes in certain cases the superior court of the state. the federal constitution, on the other hand, carefully separates the judicial authority from all external influences: and it provides for the independence of the judges, by declaring that their salary shall not be altered, and that their functions shall be inalienable. [it is not universally correct, as supposed by the author, that the state legislatures can deprive their governor of his salary at pleasure. in the constitution of new york it is provided, that the governor "shall receive for his services a compensation which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the term for which he shall have been elected;" and similar provisions are believed to exist in other states. nor is the remark strictly correct, that the federal constitution "provides for the independence of the judges, by declaring that their salary shall not be _altered_." the provision of the constitution is, that they shall, "at stated times, receive for their services a compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office."--_american editor_.] the practical consequences of these different systems may easily be perceived. an attentive observer will soon remark that the business of the union is incomparably better conducted than that of any individual state. the conduct of the federal government is more fair and more temperate than that of the states; its designs are more fraught with wisdom, its projects are more durable and more skilfully combined, its measures are put into execution with more vigor and consistency. i recapitulate the substance of this chapter in a few words:-- the existence of democracies is threatened by two dangers, viz.: the complete subjection of the legislative body to the caprices of the electoral body; and the concentration of all the powers of the government in the legislative authority. the growth of these evils has been encouraged by the policy of the legislators of the states; but it has been resisted by the legislators of the union by every means which lay within their control. * * * * * characteristics which distinguish the federal constitution of the united states of america from all other federal constitutions. american union appears to resemble all other confederations.--nevertheless its effects are different.--reason of this.--distinctions between the union and all other confederations.--the american government not a federal, but an imperfect national government. the united states of america do not afford either the first or the only instance of confederate states, several of which have existed in modern europe, without adverting to those of antiquity. switzerland, the germanic empire, and the republic of the united provinces, either have been or still are confederations. in studying the constitutions of these different countries, the politician is surprised to observe that the powers with which they invested the federal government are nearly identical with the privileges awarded by the american constitution to the government of the united states. they confer upon the central power the same rights of making peace and war, of raising money and troops, and of providing for the general exigencies and the common interests of the nation. nevertheless the federal government of these different people has always been as remarkable for its weakness and inefficiency as that of the union is for its vigorous and enterprising spirit. again, the first american confederation perished through the excessive weakness of its government; and this weak government was, notwithstanding, in possession of rights even more extensive than those of the federal government of the present day. but the more recent constitution of the united states contains certain principles which exercise a most important influence, although they do not at once strike the observer. this constitution, which may at first sight be confounded with the federal constitutions which preceded it, rests upon a novel theory, which may be considered as a great invention in modern political science. in all the confederations which had been formed before the american constitution of , the allied states agreed to obey the injunctions of a federal government: but they reserved to themselves the right of ordaining and enforcing the execution of the laws of the union. the american states which combined in agreed that the federal government should not only dictate the laws, but it should execute its own enactments. in both cases the right is the same, but the exercise of the right is different; and this alteration produced the most momentous consequences. in all the confederations which have been formed before the american union, the federal government demanded its supplies at the hands of the separate governments; and if the measure it prescribed was onerous to any one of those bodies, means were found to evade its claims: if the state was powerful, it had recourse to arms; if it was weak, it connived at the resistance which the law of the union, its sovereign, met with, and resorted to inaction under the plea of inability. under these circumstances one of two alternatives has invariably occurred: either the most preponderant of the allied peoples has assumed the privileges of the federal authority, and ruled all the other states in its name,[ ] or the federal government has been abandoned by its natural supporters, anarchy has arisen between the confederates, and the union has lost all power of action.[ ] in america the subjects of the union are not states, but private citizens: the national government levies a tax, not upon the state of massachusetts, but upon each inhabitant of massachusetts. all former confederate governments presided over communities, but that of the union rules individuals; its force is not borrowed, but self-derived; and it is served by its own civil and military officers, by its own army, and its own courts of justice. it cannot be doubted that the spirit of the nation, the passions of the multitude, and the provincial prejudices of each state, tend singularly to diminish the authority of a federal authority thus constituted, and to facilitate the means of resistance to its mandates; but the comparative weakness of a restricted sovereignty is an evil inherent in the federal system. in america, each state has fewer opportunities of resistance, and fewer temptations to non-compliance; nor can such a design be put in execution (if indeed it be entertained), without an open violation of the laws of the union, a direct interruption of the ordinary course of justice, and a bold declaration of revolt; in a word, without a decisive step, which men hesitate to adopt. in all former confederations, the privileges of the union furnished more elements of discord than of power, since they multiplied the claims of the nation without augmenting the means of enforcing them: and in accordance with this fact it may be remarked, that the real weakness of federal governments has almost always been in the exact ratio of their nominal power. such is not the case with the american union, in which, as in ordinary governments, the federal government has the means of enforcing all it is empowered to demand. the human understanding more easily invents new things than new words, and we are thence constrained to employ a multitude of improper and inadequate expressions. when several nations form a permanent league, and establish a supreme authority, which, although it has not the same influence over the members of the community as a national government, acts upon each of the confederate states in a body, this government, which is so essentially different from all others, is denominated a federal one. another form of society is afterward discovered, in which several peoples are fused into one and the same nation with regard to certain common interests, although they remain distinct, or at least only confederate, with regard to all their other concerns. in this case the central power acts directly upon those whom it governs, whom it rules, and whom it judges, in the same manner as, but in a more limited circle than, a national government. here the term of federal government is clearly no longer applicable to a state of things which must be styled an incomplete national government: a form of government has been found out which is neither exactly national nor federal; but no farther progress has been made, and the new word which will one day designate this novel invention does not yet exist. the absence of this new species of confederation has been the cause which has brought all unions to civil war, to subjection, or to a stagnant apathy; and the peoples which formed these leagues have been either too dull to discern, or too pusillanimous to apply this great remedy. the american confederation perished by the same defects. but the confederate states of america had been long accustomed to form a portion of one empire before they had won their independence: they had not contracted the habit of governing themselves, and their national prejudices had not taken deep root in their minds. superior to the rest of the world in political knowledge, and sharing that knowledge equally among themselves, they were little agitated by the passions which generally oppose the extension of federal authority in a nation, and those passions were checked by the wisdom of the chief citizens. the americans applied the remedy with prudent firmness as soon as they were conscious of the evil; they amended their laws, and they saved their country. * * * * * advantages of the federal system in general, and its special utility in america. happiness and freedom of small nations.--power of great nations.--great empires favorable to the growth of civilisation.--strength often the first element of national prosperity.--aim of the federal system to unite the twofold advantages resulting from a small and from a large territory.--advantages derived by the united states from this system.--the law adapts itself to the exigencies of the population; population does not conform to the exigencies of the law.--activity, melioration, love, and enjoyment of freedom in the american communities.--public spirit of the union the abstract of provincial patriotism.--principles and things circulate freely over the territory of the united states.--the union is happy and free as a little nation, and respected as a great empire. in small nations the scrutiny of society penetrates into every part, and the spirit of improvement enters into the most trifling details; as the ambition of the people is necessarily checked by its weakness, all the efforts and resources of the citizens are turned to the internal benefit of the community, and are not likely to evaporate in the fleeting breath of glory. the desires of every individual are limited, because extraordinary faculties are rarely to be met with. the gifts of an equal fortune render the various conditions of life uniform; and the manners of the inhabitants are orderly and simple. thus, if we estimate the gradations of popular morality and enlightenment, we shall generally find that in small nations there are more persons in easy circumstances, a more numerous population, and a more tranquil state of society than in great empires. when tyranny is established in the bosom of a small nation, it is more galling than elsewhere, because, as it acts within a narrow circle, every point of that circle is subject to its direct influence. it supplies the place of those great designs which it cannot entertain, by a violent or an exasperating interference in a multitude of minute details; and it leaves the political world to which it properly belongs, to meddle with the arrangements of domestic life. tastes as well as actions are to be regulated at its pleasure; and the families of the citizens as well as the affairs of the state are to be governed by its decisions. this invasion of rights occurs, however, but seldom, and freedom is in truth the natural state of small communities. the temptations which the government offers to ambition are too weak, and the resources of private individuals are too slender, for the sovereign power easily to fall within the grasp of a single citizen: and should such an event have occurred, the subjects of the state can without difficulty overthrow the tyrant and his oppression by a simultaneous effort. small nations have therefore ever been the cradles of political liberty: and the fact that many of them have lost their immunities by extending their dominion, shows that the freedom they enjoyed was more a consequence of their inferior size than of the character of the people. the history of the world affords no instance of a great nation retaining the form of a republican government for a long series of years,[ ] and this had led to the conclusion that such a state of things is impracticable. for my own part, i cannot but censure the imprudence of attempting to limit the possible, and to judge the future, on the part of a being who is hourly deceived by the most palpable realities of life, and who is constantly taken by surprise in the circumstances with which he is most familiar. but it may be advanced with confidence that the existence of a great republic will always be exposed to far greater perils than that of a small one. all the passions which are most fatal to republican institutions spread with an increasing territory, while the virtues which maintain their dignity do not augment in the same proportion. the ambition of the citizens increases with the power of the state; the strength of parties, with the importance of the ends they have in view; but that devotion to the common weal, which is the surest check on destructive passions, is not stronger in a large than in a small republic. it might, indeed, be proved without difficulty that it is less powerful and less sincere. the arrogance of wealth and the dejection of wretchedness, capital cities of unwonted extent, a lax morality, a vulgar egotism, and a great confusion of interests, are the dangers which almost invariably arise from the magnitude of states. but several of these evils are scarcely prejudicial to a monarchy, and some of them contribute to maintain its existence. in monarchical states the strength of the government is its own; it may use, but it does not depend on, the community: and the authority of the prince is proportioned to the prosperity of the nation: but the only security which a republican government possesses against these evils lies in the support of the majority. this support is not, however, proportionably greater in a large republic than it is in a small one; and thus while the means of attack perpetually increase both in number and in influence, the power of resistance remains the same; or it may rather be said to diminish, since the propensities and interests of the people are diversified by the increase of the population, and the difficulty of forming a compact majority is constantly augmented. it has been observed, moreover, that the intensity of human passions is heightened, not only by the importance of the end which they propose to attain, but by the multitude of individuals who are animated by them at the same time. every one has had occasion to remark that his emotions in the midst of a sympathizing crowd are far greater than those which he would have felt in solitude. in great republics the impetus of political passion is irresistible, not only because it aims at gigantic purposes, but because it is felt and shared by millions of men at the same time. it may therefore be asserted as a general proposition, that nothing is more opposed to the well-being and the freedom of man than vast empires. nevertheless it is important to acknowledge the peculiar advantages of great states. for the very reason which renders the desire of power more intense in these communities than among ordinary men, the love of glory is also more prominent in the hearts of a class of citizens, who regard the applause of a great people as a reward worthy of their exertions, and an elevating encouragement to man. if we would learn why it is that great nations contribute more powerfully to the spread of human improvement than small states, we shall discover an adequate cause in the rapid and energetic circulation of ideas, and in those great cities which are the intellectual centres where all the rays of human genius are reflected and combined. to this it may be added that most important discoveries demand a display of national power which the government of a small state is unable to make; in great nations the government entertains a greater number of general notions, and is more completely disengaged from the routine of precedent and the egotism of local prejudice; its designs are conceived with more talent, and executed with more boldness. in time of peace the well-being of small nations is undoubtedly more general and more complete; but they are apt to suffer more acutely from the calamities of war than those great empires whose distant frontiers may for ages avert the presence of the danger from the mass of the people, which is more frequently afflicted than ruined by the evil. but in this matter, as in many others, the argument derived from the necessity of the case predominates over all others. if none but small nations existed, i do not doubt that mankind would be more happy and more free; but the existence of great nations is unavoidable. this consideration introduces the element of physical strength as a condition of national prosperity. it profits a people but little to be affluent and free, if it is perpetually exposed to be pillaged or subjugated; the number of its manufactures and the extent of its commerce are of small advantage, if another nation has the empire of the seas and gives the law in all the markets of the globe. small nations are often impoverished, not because they are small, but because they are weak; and great empires prosper less because they are great than because they are strong. physical strength is therefore one of the first conditions of the happiness and even of the existence of nations. hence it occurs, that unless very peculiar circumstances intervene, small nations are always united to large empires in the end, either by force or by their own consent; yet i am unacquainted with a more deplorable spectacle than that of a people unable either to defend or to maintain its independence. the federal system was created with the intention of combining the different advantages which result from the greater and the lesser extent of nations; and a single glance over the united states of america suffices to discover the advantages which they have derived from its adoption. in great centralized nations the legislator is obliged to impart a character of uniformity to the laws, which does not always suit the diversity of customs and of districts; as he takes no cognizance of special cases, he can only proceed upon general principles; and the population is obliged to conform to the exigencies of the legislation, since the legislation cannot adapt itself to the exigencies and customs of the population; which is the cause of endless trouble and misery. this disadvantage does not exist in confederations; congress regulates the principal measures of the national government, and all the details of the administration are reserved to the provincial legislatures. it is impossible to imaging how much this division of sovereignty contributes to the well-being of each of the states which compose the union. in these small communities, which are never agitated by the desire of aggrandizement or the cares of self-defence, all public authority and private energy is employed in internal melioration. the central government of each state, which is in immediate juxtaposition to the citizens, is daily apprised of the wants which arise in society; and new projects are proposed every year, which are discussed either at town-meetings or by the legislature of the state, and which are transmitted by the press to stimulate the zeal and to excite the interest of the citizens. this spirit of melioration is constantly alive in the american republics, without compromising their tranquillity; the ambition of power yields to the less refined and less dangerous love of comfort. it is generally believed in america that the existence and the permanence of the republican form of government in the new world depend upon the existence and the permanence of the federal system; and it is not unusual to attribute a large share of the misfortunes which have befallen the new states of south america to the injudicious erection of great republics, instead of a divided and confederate sovereignty. it is incontestably true that the love and the habits of republican government in the united states were engendered in the townships and in the provincial assemblies. in a small state, like that of connecticut for instance, where cutting a canal or laying down a road is a momentous political question, where the state has no army to pay and no wars to carry on, and where much wealth and much honor cannot be bestowed upon the chief citizens, no form of government can be more natural or more appropriate than that of a republic. but it is this same republican spirit, it is these manners and customs of a free people, which are engendered and nurtured in the different states, to be afterward applied to the country at large. the public spirit of the union is, so to speak, nothing more than an abstract of the patriotic zeal of the provinces. every citizen of the united states transfuses his attachment to his little republic into the common store of american patriotism. in defending the union, he defends the increasing prosperity of his own district, the right of conducting its affairs, and the hope of causing measures of improvement to be adopted which may be favorable to his own interests; and these are motives which are wont to stir men more readily than the general interests of the country and the glory of the nation. on the other hand, if the temper and the manners of the inhabitants especially fitted them to promote the welfare of a great republic, the federal system smoothed the obstacles which they might have encountered. the confederation of all the american states presents none of the ordinary disadvantages resulting from great agglomerations of men. the union is a great republic in extent, but the paucity of objects for which its government provides assimilates it to a small state. its acts are important, but they are rare. as the sovereignty of the union is limited and incomplete, its exercise is not incompatible with liberty; for it does not excite those insatiable desires of fame and power which have proved so fatal to great republics. as there is no common centre to the country, vast capital cities, colossal wealth, abject poverty, and sudden revolutions are alike unknown; and political passion, instead of spreading over the land like a torrent of desolation, spends its strength against the interests and the individual passions of every state. nevertheless, all commodities and ideas circulate throughout the union as freely as in a country inhabited by one people. nothing checks the spirit of enterprise. the government avails itself of the assistance of all who have talents or knowledge to serve it. within the frontiers of the union the profoundest peace prevails, as within the heart of some great empire; abroad, it ranks with the most powerful nations of the earth: two thousand miles of coast are open to the commerce of the world; and as it possesses the keys of the globe, its flag is respected in the most remote seas. the union is as happy and as free as a small people, and as glorious and as strong as a great nation. * * * * * why the federal system is not adapted to all peoples, and how the anglo-americans were enabled to adopt it. every federal system contains defects which baffle the efforts of the legislator.--the federal system is complex.--it demands a daily exercise of discretion on the part of the citizens.--practical knowledge of the government common among the americans.--relative weakness of the government of the union another defect inherent in the federal system.--the americans have diminished without remedying it.--the sovereignty of the separate states apparently weaker, but really stronger, than that of the union.--why.--natural causes of union must exist between confederate peoples beside the laws.--what these causes are among the anglo-americans.--maine and georgia, separated by a distance of a thousand miles, more naturally united than normandy and britany.--war, the main peril of confederations.--this proved even by the example of the united states.--the union has no great wars to fear.--why.--dangers to which europeans would be exposed if they adopted the federal system of the americans. when a legislator succeeds, after persevering efforts, in exercising an indirect influence upon the destiny of nations, his genius is lauded by mankind, while in point of fact, the geographical position of the country which he is unable to change, a social condition which arose without his co-operation, manners and opinions which he cannot trace to their source, and an origin with which he is unacquainted, exercise so irresistible an influence over the courses of society, that he is himself borne away by the current, after an ineffectual resistance. like the navigator, he may direct the vessel which bears him along, but he can neither change its structure, nor raise the winds, nor lull the waters which swell beneath him. i have shown the advantages which the americans derive from their federal system; it remains for me to point out the circumstances which render that system practicable, as its benefits are not to be enjoyed by all nations. the incidental defects of the federal system which originate in the laws may be corrected by the skill of the legislator, but there are farther evils inherent in the system which cannot be counteracted by the peoples which adopt it. these nations must therefore find the strength necessary to support the natural imperfections of the government. the most prominent evil of all federal systems is the very complex nature of the means they employ. two sovereignties are necessarily in the presence of each other. the legislator may simplify and equalize the action of these two sovereignties, by limiting each of them to a sphere of authority accurately defined; but he cannot combine them into one, or prevent them from running into collision at certain points. the federal system therefore rests upon a theory which is necessarily complicated, and which demands the daily exercise of a considerable share of discretion on the part of those it governs. a proposition must be plain to be adopted by the understanding of a people. a false notion, which is clear and precise, will always meet with a greater number of adherents in the world than a true principle which is obscure or involved. hence it arises that parties, which are like small communities in the heart of the nation, invariably adopt some principle or some name as a symbol, which very inadequately represents the end they have in view, and the means which are at their disposal, but without which they could neither act nor subsist. the governments which are founded upon a single principle or a single feeling which is easily defined, are perhaps not the best, but they are unquestionably the strongest and the most durable in the world. in examining the constitution of the united states, which is the most perfect federal constitution that ever existed, one is startled, on the other hand, at the variety of information and the excellence of discretion which it presupposes in the people whom it is meant to govern. the government of the union depends entirely upon legal fictions; the union is an ideal notion which only exists in the mind, and whose limits and extent can only be discerned by the understanding. when once the general theory is comprehended, numerous difficulties remain to be solved in its application; for the sovereignty of the union is so involved in that of the states, that it is impossible to distinguish its boundaries at the first glance. the whole structure of the government is artificial and conventional; and it would be ill-adapted to a people which has not long been accustomed to conduct its own affairs, or to one in which the science of politics has not descended to the humblest classes of society. i have never been more struck by the good sense and the practical judgment of the americans than in the ingenious devices by which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their federal constitution. i scarcely ever met with a plain american citizen who could not distinguish, with surprising facility, the obligations created by the laws of congress from those created by the laws of his own state; and who, after having discriminated between the matters which come under the cognizance of the union, and those which the local legislature is competent to regulate, could not point out the exact limit of the several jurisdictions of the federal courts and the tribunals of the state. the constitution of the united states is like those exquisite productions of human industry which ensure wealth and renown to their inventors, but which are profitless in any other hands. this truth is exemplified by the condition of mexico at the present time. the mexicans were desirous of establishing a federal system, and they took the federal constitution of their neighbors the anglo-americans as their model, and copied it with considerable accuracy.[ ] but although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to introduce the spirit and the sense which gave it life. they were involved in ceaseless embarrassments between the mechanism of their double government; the sovereignty of the states and that of the union perpetually exceeded their respective privileges, and entered into collision; and to the present day mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism. the second and the most fatal of all the defects i have alluded to, and that which i believe to be inherent in the federal system, is the relative weakness of the government of the union. the principle upon which all confederations rest is that of a divided sovereignty. the legislator may render this partition less perceptible, he may even conceal it for a time from the public eye, but he cannot prevent it from existing; and a divided sovereignty must always be less powerful than an entire supremacy. the reader has seen in the remarks i have made on the constitution of the united states, that the americans have displayed singular ingenuity in combining the restriction of the power of the union within the narrow limits of the federal government, with the semblance, and to a certain extent with the force of a national government. by this means the legislators of the union have succeeded in diminishing, though not in counteracting, the natural danger of confederations. it has been remarked that the american government does not apply itself to the states, but that it immediately transmits its injunctions to the citizens, and compels them as isolated individuals to comply with its demands. but if the federal law were to clash with the interests and prejudices of a state, it might be feared that all the citizens of that state would conceive themselves to be interested in the cause of a single individual who should refuse to obey. if all the citizens of the state were aggrieved at the same time and in the same manner by the authority of the union, the federal government would vainly attempt to subdue them individually; they would instinctively unite in the common defence, and they would derive a ready-prepared organization from the share of sovereignty which the institution of their state allows them to enjoy. fiction would give way to reality, and an organized portion of the territory might then contest the central authority. the same observation holds good with regard to the federal jurisdiction. if the courts of the union violated an important law of a state in a private case, the real, if not the apparent contest would arise between the aggrieved state, represented by a citizen, and the union, represented by its courts of justice.[ ] he would have but a partial knowledge of the world who should imagine that it is possible, by the aid of legal fictions, to prevent men from finding out and employing those means of gratifying their passions which have been left open to them; and it may be doubted whether the american legislators, when they rendered a collision between the two sovereignties less probable, destroyed the causes of such a misfortune. but it may even be affirmed that they were unable to ensure the preponderance of the federal element in a case of this kind. the union is possessed of money and of troops, but the affections and the prejudices of the people are in the bosom of the states. the sovereignty of the union is an abstract being, which is connected with but few external objects; the sovereignty of the states is hourly perceptible, easily understood, constantly active; and if the former is of recent creation, the latter is coeval with the people itself. the sovereignty of the union is factitious, that of the states is natural, and derives its existence from its own simple influence, like the authority of a parent. the supreme power of the nation affects only a few of the chief interests of society; it represents an immense but remote country, and claims a feeling of patriotism which is vague and ill-defined; but the authority of the states controls every individual citizen at every hour and in all circumstances; it protects his property, his freedom, and his life; and when we recollect the traditions, the customs, the prejudices of local and familiar attachment with which it is connected, we cannot doubt the superiority of a power which is interwoven with every circumstance that renders the love of one's native country instinctive to the human heart. since legislators are unable to obviate such dangerous collisions as occur between the two sovereignties which co-exist in the federal system, their first object must be, not only to dissuade the confederate states from warfare, but to encourage such institutions as may promote the maintenance of peace. hence it results that the federal compact cannot be lasting unless there exists in the communities which are leagued together, a certain number of inducements to union which render their common dependance agreeable, and the task of the government light; and that system cannot succeed without the presence of favorable circumstances added to the influence of good laws. all the people which have ever formed a confederation have been held together by a certain number of common interests, which served as the intellectual ties of association. but the sentiments and the principles of man must be taken into consideration as well as his immediate interest. a certain uniformity of civilisation is not less necessary to the durability of a confederation, than a uniformity of interests in the states which compose it. in switzerland the difference which exists between the canton of uri and the canton of vaud is equal to that between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries; and, properly speaking, switzerland has never possessed a federal government. the union between these two cantons only subsists upon the map; and their discrepancies would soon be perceived if an attempt were made by a central authority to prescribe the same laws to the whole territory. one of the circumstances which most powerfully contribute to support the federal government in america, is that the states have not only similar interests, a common origin, and a common tongue, but that they are also arrived at the same stage of civilisation; which almost always renders a union feasible. i do not know of any european nation, how small soever it may be, which does not present less uniformity in its different provinces than the american people, which occupies a territory as extensive as one half of europe. the distance from the state of maine to that of georgia is reckoned at about one thousand miles; but the difference between the civilisation of maine and that of georgia is slighter than the difference between the habits of normandy and those of britany. maine and georgia, which are placed at the opposite extremities of a great empire, are consequently in the natural possession of more real inducements to form a confederation than normandy and britany, which are only separated by a bridge. the geographical position of the country contributed to increase the facilities which the american legislators derived from the manners and customs of the inhabitants; and it is to this circumstance that the adoption and the maintenance of the federal system are mainly attributable. the most important occurrence which can mark the annals of a people is the breaking out of a war. in war a people struggle with the energy of a single man against foreign nations, in the defence of its very existence. the skill of a government, the good sense of the community, and the natural fondness which men entertain for their country, may suffice to maintain peace in the interior of a district, and to favor its internal prosperity; but a nation can only carry on a great war at the cost of more numerous and more painful sacrifices; and to suppose that a great number of men will of their own accord comply with the exigencies of the state, is to betray an ignorance of mankind. all the peoples which have been obliged to sustain a long and serious warfare have consequently been led to augment the power of their government. those which have not succeeded in this attempt have been subjugated. a long war almost always places nations in the wretched alternative of being abandoned to ruin by defeat, or to despotism by success. war therefore renders the symptoms of the weakness of a government most palpable and most alarming; and i have shown that the inherent defect of federal governments is that of being weak. the federal system is not only deficient in every kind of centralized administration, but the central government itself is imperfectly organized, which is invariably an influential cause of inferiority when the nation is opposed to other countries which are themselves governed by a single authority. in the federal constitution of the united states, by which the central government possesses more real force, this evil is still extremely sensible. an example will illustrate the case to the reader. the constitution confers upon congress the right of "calling forth militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions;" and another article declares that the president of the united states is the commander-in-chief of the militia. in the war of , the president ordered the militia of the northern states to march to the frontiers; but connecticut and massachusetts, whose interests were impaired by the war, refused to obey the command. they argued that the constitution authorizes the federal government to call forth the militia in cases of insurrection or invasion, but that, in the present instance, there was neither invasion nor insurrection. they added, that the same constitution which conferred upon the union the right of calling forth the militia, reserved to the states that of naming the officers; and that consequently (as they understood the clause) no officer of the union had any right to command the militia, even during war, except the president in person: and in this case they were ordered to join an army commanded by another individual. these absurd and pernicious doctrines received the sanction not only of the governors and legislative bodies, but also of the courts of justice in both states; and the federal government was constrained to raise elsewhere the troops which it required.[ ] the only safeguard which the american union, with all the relative perfection of its laws, possesses against the dissolution which would be produced by a great war, lies in its probable exemption from that calamity. placed in the centre of an immense continent, which offers a boundless field for human industry, the union is almost as much insulated from the world as if its frontiers were girt by the ocean. canada contains only a million of inhabitants, and its population is divided into two inimical nations. the rigor of the climate limits the extension of its territory, and shuts up its ports during the six months of winter. from canada to the gulf of mexico a few savage tribes are to be met with, which retire, perishing in their retreat, before six thousand soldiers. to the south, the union has a point of contact with the empire of mexico; and it is thence that serious hostilities may one day be expected to arise. but for a long while to come, the uncivilized state of the mexican community, the depravity of its morals, and its extreme poverty, will prevent that country from ranking high among nations. as for the powers of europe, they are too distant to be formidable.[ ] the great advantage of the united states does not, then, consist in a federal constitution which allows them to carry on great wars, but in a geographical position, which renders such enterprises improbable. no one can be more inclined than i am myself to appreciate the advantages of the federal system, which i hold to be one of the combinations most favorable to the prosperity and freedom of man. i envy the lot of those nations which have been enabled to adopt it; but i cannot believe that any confederate peoples could maintain a long or an equal contest with a nation of similar strength in which the government should be centralised. a people which should divide its sovereignty into fractional powers, in the presence of the great military monarchies of europe, would, in my opinion, by that very act, abdicate its power, and perhaps its existence and its name. but such is the admirable position of the new world, that man has no other enemy than himself; and that in order to be happy and to be free, it suffices to seek the gifts of prosperity and the knowledge of freedom. * * * * * notes: [ ] see the constitution of the united states. [ ] see the articles of the first confederation formed in . this constitution was not adopted by all the states until . see also the analysis given of this constitution in the federalist, from no. to no. inclusive, and story's "commentary on the constitution of the united states," pp. - . [ ] congress made this declaration on the st of february, . [ ] it consisted of fifty-five members: washington, madison, hamilton, and the two morrises, were among the number. [ ] it was not adopted by the legislative bodies, but representatives were elected by the people for this sole purpose; and the new constitution was discussed at length in each of these assemblies. [ ] see the amendment to the federal constitution; federalist, no. . story, p. . kent's commentaries, vol. i., p. . it is to be observed, that whenever the _exclusive_ right of regulating certain matters is not reserved to congress by the constitution, the states may take up the affair, until it is brought before the national assembly. for instance, congress has the right of making a general law of bankruptcy, which, however, it neglects to do. each state is then at liberty to make a law for itself. this point, however, has been established by discussion in the law-courts, and may be said to belong more properly to jurisprudence. [ ] the action of this court is indirect, as we shall hereafter show. [ ] it is thus that the federalist, no. , explains the division of supremacy between the union and the states: "the powers delegated by the constitution to the federal government are few and defined. those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. the former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. the powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the internal order and prosperity of the state." i shall often have occasion to quote the federalist in this work. when the bill which has since become the constitution of the united states was submitted to the approval of the people, and the discussions were still pending, three men who had already acquired a portion of that celebrity which they have since enjoyed, john jay, hamilton, and madison, formed an association with the intention of explaining to the nation the advantages of the measure which was proposed. with this view they published a series of articles in the shape of a journal, which now form a complete treatise. they entitled their journal, "the federalist," a name which has been retained in the work. the federalist is an excellent book, which ought to be familiar to the statesmen of all countries, although it especially concerns america. [ ] see constitution, sect. . federalist, nos. and . kent's commentaries, vol. i., p. . story, pp. - ; - . [ ] several other privileges of the same kind exist, such as that which empowers the union to legislate on bankruptcy, to grant patents, and other matters in which its intervention is clearly necessary. [ ] even in these cases its interference is indirect. the union interferes by means of the tribunals, as will be hereafter shown. [ ] federal constitution, sect. , art. . [ ] constitution, sect. , , and . federalist, nos. - inclusive, and - . kent's commentaries, vol. i., pp. and . story pp. and . [ ] every ten years congress fixes anew the number of representatives which each state is to furnish. the total number was in , and in . (see american almanac, , p. .) the constitution decided that there should not be more than one representative for every , persons; but no minimum was fixed upon. the congress has not thought fit to augment the number of representatives in proportion to the increase of population. the first act which was passed on the subject ( th april, : see laws of the united states, by story, vol. i., p. ) decided that there should be one representative for every , inhabitants. the last act, which was passed in , fixes the proportion at one for , . the population represented is composed of all the freemen and of three-fifths of the slaves. [ ] see the federalist, nos. - , inclusive. story, pp. - constitution of the united states, sections and . [ ] see the federalist, nos. - . constitution of the united states, a. t. . story, pp. ; - . kent's commentaries, p. . [ ] the constitution had left it doubtful whether the president was obliged to consult the senate in the removal as well as in the appointment of federal officers. the federalist (no. ) seemed to establish the affirmative; but in , congress formally decided that as the president was responsible for his actions, he ought not to be forced to employ agents who had forfeited his esteem. see kent's commentaries, vol. i., p. . [ ] the sums annually paid by the state to these officers amount to , , francs (eight millions sterling). [ ] this number is extracted from the "national calendar," for . the national calendar is an american almanac which contains the names of all the federal officers. it results from this comparison that the king of france has eleven times as many places at his disposal as the president, although the population of france is not much more than double that of the union. [ ] as many as it sends members to congress. the number of electors at the election of was . (see the national calendar, .) [ ] the electors of the same state assemble, but they transmit to the central government the list of their individual votes, and not the mere result of the vote of the majority. [ ] in this case it is the majority of the states, and not the majority of the members, which decides the question; so that new york has not more influence in the debate than rhode island. thus the citizens of the union are first consulted as members of one and the same community; and, if they cannot agree, recourse is had to the division of the states, each of which has a separate and independent vote. this is one of the singularities of the federal constitution which can only be explained by the jar of conflicting interests. [ ] jefferson, in , was not elected until the thirty-sixth time of balloting. [ ] see chapter vi., entitled, "judicial power in the united states." this chapter explains the general principles of the american theory of judicial institutions. see also the federal constitution, art. . see the federalist, nos. - , inclusive: and a work entitled, "constitutional law, being a view of the practice and jurisdiction of the courts of the united states," by thomas sergeant. see story, pp. , , , , , ; and the organic law of the th september, , in the collection of the laws of the united states, by story, vol. i., p. . [ ] federal laws are those which most require courts of justice, and those at the same time which have most rarely established them. the reason is that confederations have usually been formed by independent states, which entertained no real intention of obeying the central government, and which very readily ceded the right of commanding to the federal executive, and very prudently reserved the right of non-compliance to themselves. [ ] the union was divided into districts, in each of which a resident federal judge was appointed, and the court in which he presided was termed a "district court." each of the judges of the supreme court annually visits a certain portion of the republic, in order to try the most important causes upon the spot; the court presided over by this magistrate is styled a "circuit court." lastly, all the most serious cases of litigation are brought before the supreme court, which holds a solemn session once a year, at which all the judges of the circuit courts must attend. the jury was introduced into the federal courts in the same manner, and in the same cases as into the courts of the states. it will be observed that no analogy exists between the supreme court of the united states and the french cour de cassation, since the latter only hears appeals. the supreme court decides upon the evidence of the fact, as well as upon the law of the case, whereas the cour de cassation does not pronounce a decision of its own, but refers the cause to the arbitration of another tribunal. see the law of th september, , laws of the united states, by story, vol. i., p. . [ ] in order to diminish the number of these suits, it was decided that in a great many federal causes, the courts of the states should be empowered to decide conjointly with those of the union, the losing party having then a right of appeal to the supreme court of the united states. the supreme court of virginia contested the right of the supreme court of the united states to judge an appeal from its decisions, but unsuccessfully. see kent's commentaries, vol. i., pp. , , _et seq._; story's commentaries, p. ; and "the organic law of the united states," vol. i., p. [ ] the constitution also says that the federal courts shall decide "controversies between a state and the citizens of another state." and here a most important question of a constitutional nature arose, which was, whether the jurisdiction given by the constitution in cases in which a state is a party, extended to suits brought _against_ a state as well as _by_ it, or was exclusively confined to the latter. this question was most elaborately considered in the case of _chisholme_ v. _georgia_, and was decided by the majority of the supreme court in the affirmative. the decision created general alarm among the states, and an amendment was proposed and ratified by which the power was entirely taken away so far as it regards suits brought against a state. see story's commentaries, p. , or in the large edition, § . [ ] as, for instance, all cases of piracy. [ ] this principle was in some measure restricted by the introduction of the several states as independent powers into the senate, and by allowing them to vote separately in the house of representatives when the president is elected by that body; but these are exceptions, and the contrary principle is the rule. [ ] it is perfectly clear, says mr. story (commentaries, p. , or in the large edition, § ), that any law which enlarges, abridges, or in any manner changes the intention of the parties, resulting from the stipulations in the contract, necessarily impairs it. he gives in the same place a very long and careful definition of what is understood by a contract in federal jurisprudence. a grant made by the state to a private individual, and accepted by him, is a contract, and cannot be revoked by any future law. a charter granted by the state to a company is a contract, and equally binding to the state as to the grantee. the clause of the constitution here referred to ensures, therefore, the existence of a great part of acquired rights, but not of all. property may legally be held, though it may not have passed into the possessor's hands by means of a contract; and its possession is an acquired right, not guaranteed by the federal constitution. [ ] a remarkable instance of this is given by mr. story (p. , or in the large edition, § ). "dartmouth college in new hampshire had been founded by a charter granted to certain individuals before the american revolution, and its trustees formed a corporation under this charter. the legislature of new hampshire had, without the consent of this corporation, passed an act changing the organization of the original provincial charter of the college, and transferring all the rights, privileges, and franchises, from the old charter trustees to new trustees appointed under the act. the constitutionality of the act was contested, and after solemn arguments, it was deliberately held by the supreme court that the provincial charter was a contract within the meaning of the constitution (art. i, sect. ), and that the amendatory act was utterly void, as impairing the obligation of that charter. the college was deemed, like other colleges of private foundation, to be a private eleemosynary institution, endowed by its charter with a capacity to take property unconnected with the government. its funds were bestowed upon the faith of the charter, and those funds consisted entirely of private donations. it is true that the uses were in some sense public, that is, for the general benefit, and not for the mere benefit of the corporators; but this did not make the corporation a public corporation. it was a private institution for general charity. it was not distinguishable in principle from a private donation, vested in private trustees, for a public charity, or for a particular purpose of beneficence. and the state itself, if it had bestowed funds upon a charity of the same nature, could not resume those funds." [ ] see chapter vi., on judicial power in america. [ ] see kent's commentaries, vol. i., p. . [ ] at this time alexander hamilton, who was one of the principal founders of the constitution, ventured to express the following sentiments in the federalist, no. : "there are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation. but such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purpose for which government was instituted, as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted. the republican principle demands that the deliberative sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the managements of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. it is a just observation that the people commonly _intend_ the _public good_. this often applies to their very errors. but their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they would always _reason right_, about the _means_ of promoting it. they know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants; by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate; by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it; and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. when occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve at the peril of their displeasure." [ ] this was the case in greece, when philip undertook to execute the decree of the amphictyons; in the low countries, where the province of holland always gave the law; and in our time in the germanic confederation, in which austria and prussia assume a great degree of influence over the whole country, in the name of the diet. [ ] such has always been the situation of the swiss confederation, which would have perished ages ago but for the mutual jealousies of its neighbors. [ ] i do not speak of a confederation of small republics, but of a great consolidated republic. [ ] see the mexican constitution of . [ ] for instance, the union possesses by the constitution the right of selling unoccupied lands for its own profit. supposing that the state of ohio should claim the same right in behalf of certain territories lying within its boundaries, upon the plea that the constitution refers to those lands alone which do not belong to the jurisdiction of any particular state, and consequently should choose to dispose of them itself, the litigation would be carried on in the name of the purchasers from the state of ohio, and the purchasers from the union, and not in the names of ohio and the union. but what would become of this legal fiction if the federal purchaser was confirmed in his right by the courts of the union, while the other competitor was ordered to retain possession by the tribunals of the state of ohio? [the difficulty supposed by the author in this note is imaginary. the question of title to the lands in the case put, must depend upon the constitution, treaties, and laws of the united states; and a decision in the state court adverse to the claim or title set up under those laws, must, by the very words of the constitution and of the judiciary act, be subject to review by the supreme court of the united states, whose decision is final. the remarks in the text of this page upon the relative weakness of the government of the union, are equally applicable to any form of republican or democratic government, and are not peculiar to a federal system. under the circumstances supposed by the author, of all the citizens of a state, or a large majority of them, aggrieved at the same time and in the same manner, by the operation of any law, the same difficulty would arise in executing the laws of the state as those of the union. indeed, such instances of the total inefficacy of state laws are not wanting. the fact is, that all republics depend on the willingness of the people to execute the laws. if they will not enforce them, there is, so far, an end to the government, for it possesses no power adequate to the control of the physical power of the people. not only in theory, but in fact, a republican government must be administered by the people themselves. they, and they alone, must execute the laws. and hence, the first principles in such governments, that on which all others depend, and without which no other can exist, is and must be, obedience to the existing laws at all times and under all circumstances. it is the vital condition of the social compact. he who claims a dispensing power for himself, by which he suspends the operation of the law in his own case, is worse than a usurper, for he not only tramples under foot the constitution of his country, but violates the reciprocal pledge which he has given to his fellow-citizens, and has received from them, that he will abide by the laws constitutionally enacted; upon the strength of which pledge, his own personal rights and acquisitions are protected by the rest of the community.--_american editor_.] [ ] kent's commentaries, vol. i., p. . i have selected an example which relates to a time posterior to the promulgation of the present constitution. if i had gone back to the days of the confederation, i might have given still more striking instances. the whole nation was at that time in a state of enthusiastic excitement; the revolution was represented by a man who was the idol of the people; but at that very period congress had, to say the truth, no resources at all at its disposal. troops and supplies were perpetually wanting. the best devised projects failed in the execution, and the union, which was constantly on the verge of destruction, was saved by the weakness of its enemies far more than by its own strength. [ ] appendix o. chapter ix. why the people may strictly be said to govern in the united states. i have hitherto examined the institutions of the united states; i have passed their legislation in review, and i have depicted the present characteristics of political society in that country. but a sovereign power exists above these institutions and beyond these characteristic features, which may destroy or modify them at its pleasure; i mean that of the people. it remains to be shown in what manner this power, which regulates the laws, acts: its propensities and its passions remain to be pointed out, as well as the secret springs which retard, accelerate, or direct its irresistible course; and the effects of its unbounded authority, with the destiny which is probably reserved for it. in america the people appoints the legislative and the executive power, and furnishes the jurors who punish all offences against the laws. the american institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences; and the people elects its representatives _directly_, and for the most part _annually_, in order to ensure their dependence. the people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society. in the united states the majority governs in the name of the people, as is the case in all the countries in which the people is supreme. this majority is principally composed of peaceable citizens, who, either by inclination or by interest, are sincerely desirous of the welfare of their country. but they are surrounded by the incessant agitation of parties, which attempt to gain their co-operation and to avail themselves of their support. chapter x. parties in the united states. great division to be made between parties.--parties which are to each other as rival nations.--parties properly so called.--difference between great and small parties.--epochs which produce them.--their characteristics.--america has had great parties.--they are extinct.--federalists.--republicans.--defeat of the federalists.--difficulty of creating parties in the united states.--what is done with this intention.--aristocratic and democratic character to be met with in all parties.--struggle of general jackson against the bank. a great division must be made between parties. some countries are so large that the different populations which inhabit them have contradictory interests, although they are the subjects of the same government; and they may thence be in a perpetual state of opposition. in this case the different fractions of the people may more properly be considered as distinct nations than as mere parties; and if a civil war breaks out, the struggle is carried off by rival peoples rather than by factions in the state. but when the citizens entertain different opinions upon subjects which affect the whole country alike, such, for instance, as the principles upon which the government is to be conducted, then distinctions arise which may correctly be styled parties. parties are a necessary evil in free governments; but they have not at all times the same character and the same propensities. at certain periods a nation may be oppressed by such insupportable evils as to conceive the design of effecting a total change in its political constitution; at other times the mischief lies still deeper, and the existence of society itself is endangered. such are the times of great revolutions and of great parties. but between these epochs of misery and of confusion there are periods during which human society seems to rest, and mankind to make a pause. this pause is, indeed, only apparent; for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for men; they are all advancing toward a goal with which they are unacquainted; and we only imagine them to be stationary when their progress escapes our observation; as men who are going at a foot pace seem to be standing still to those who run. but however this may be, there are certain epochs at which the changes that take place in the social and political constitution of nations are so slow and so insensible, that men imagine their present condition to be a final state; and the human mind, believing itself to be firmly based upon certain foundations, does not extend its researches beyond the horizon which it descries. these are the times of small parties and of intrigue. the political parties which i style great are those which cling to principles more than to consequences; to general, and not to especial cases; to ideas, and not to men. these parties are usually distinguished by a nobler character, by more generous passions, more genuine convictions, and a more bold and open conduct than the others. in them, private interest, which always plays the chief part in political passions, is more studiously veiled under the pretext of the public good; and it may even be sometimes concealed from the eyes of the very person whom it excites and impels. minor parties are, on the other hand, generally deficient in political faith. as they are not sustained or dignified by a lofty purpose, they ostensibly display the egotism of their character in their actions. they glow with a factitious zeal; their language is vehement, but their conduct is timid and irresolute. the means they employ are as wretched as the end at which they aim. hence it arises that when a calm state of things succeeds a violent revolution, the leaders of society seem suddenly to disappear, and the powers of the human mind to lie concealed. society is convulsed by great parties, by minor ones it is agitated; it is torn by the former, by the latter it is degraded; and if these sometimes save it by a salutary perturbation, those invariably disturb it to no good end. america has already lost the great parties which once divided the nation; and if her happiness is considerably increased, her morality has suffered by their extinction. when the war of independence was terminated, and the foundations of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided between two opinions--two opinions which are as old as the world, and which are perpetually to be met with under all the forms and all the names which have ever obtained in free communities--the one tending to limit, the other to extend indefinitely, the power of the people. the conflict of these two opinions never assumed that degree of violence in america which it has frequently displayed elsewhere. both parties of the americans were in fact agreed upon the most essential points; and neither of them had to destroy a traditionary constitution, or to overthrow the structure of society, in order to insure its own triumph. in neither of them, consequently, were a great number of private interests affected by success or by defeat; but moral principles of a high order, such as the love of equality and of independence, were concerned in the struggle, and they sufficed to kindle violent passions. the party which desired to limit the power of the people, endeavored to apply its doctrines more especially to the constitution of the union, whence it derived its name of _federal_. the other party, which affected to be more exclusively attached to the cause of liberty, took that of _republican_. america is the land of democracy, and the federalists were always in a minority; but they reckoned on their side almost all the great men who had been called forth by the war of independence, and their moral influence was very considerable. their cause was, moreover, favored by circumstances. the ruin of the confederation had impressed the people with a dread of anarchy, and the federalists did not fail to profit by this transient disposition of the multitude. for ten or twelve years they were at the head of affairs, and they were able to apply some, though not all, of their principles; for the hostile current was becoming from day to day too violent to be checked or stemmed. in the republicans got possession of the government: thomas jefferson was named president; and he increased the influence of their party by the weight of his celebrity, the greatness of his talents, and the immense extent of his popularity. the means by which the federalists had maintained their position were artificial, and their resources were temporary: it was by the virtues or the talents of their leaders that they had risen to power. when the republicans attained to that lofty station, their opponents were overwhelmed by utter defeat. an immense majority declared itself against the retiring party, and the federalists found themselves in so small a minority, that they at once despaired of their future success. from that moment the republican or democratic party has proceeded from conquest to conquest, until it has acquired absolute supremacy in the country. the federalists, perceiving that they were vanquished without resource, and isolated in the midst of the nation, fell into two divisions, of which one joined the victorious republicans, and the other abandoned its rallying point and its name. many years have already elapsed since they ceased to exist as a party. the accession of the federalists to power was, in my opinion, one of the most fortunate incidents which accompanied the formation of the great american union: they resisted the inevitable propensities of their age and of their country. but whether their theories were good or bad, they had the defect of being inapplicable, as a system, to the society which they professed to govern; and that which occurred under the auspices of jefferson must therefore have taken place sooner or later. but their government gave the new republic time to acquire a certain stability, and afterward to support the rapid growth of the very doctrines which they had combated. a considerable number of their principles were in point of fact embodied in the political creed of their opponents; and the federal constitution, which subsists at the present day, is a lasting monument of their patriotism and their wisdom. great political parties are not, then, to be met with in the united states at the present time. parties, indeed, may be found which threaten the future tranquillity of the union; but there are none which seem to contest the present form of government, or the present course of society. the parties by which the union is menaced do not rest upon abstract principles, but upon temporal interests. these interests, disseminated in the provinces of so vast an empire, may be said to constitute rival nations rather than parties. thus, upon a recent occasion, the north contended for the system of commercial prohibition, and the south took up arms in favor of free trade, simply because the north is a manufacturing, and the south an agricultural district; and that the restrictive system which was profitable to the one, was prejudicial to the other. in the absence of great parties, the united states abound with lesser controversies; and public opinion is divided into a thousand minute shades of difference upon questions of very little moment. the pains which are taken to create parties are inconceivable, and at the present day it is no easy task. in the united states there is no religious animosity, because all religion is respected, and no sect is predominant; there is no jealousy of rank, because the people is everything, and none can contest its authority; lastly, there is no public misery to serve as a means of agitation, because the physical position of the country opens so wide a field to industry, that man is able to accomplish the most surprising undertakings with his own native resources. nevertheless, ambitious men are interested in the creation of parties, since it is difficult to eject a person from authority upon the mere ground that his place is coveted by others. the skill of the actors in the political world lies, therefore, in the art of creating parties. a political aspirant in the united states begins by discriminating his own interest, and by calculating upon those interests which may be collected around, and amalgamated with it; he then contrives to discover some doctrine or some principle which may suit the purposes of this new association, and which he adopts in order to bring forward his party and to secure its popularity: just as the _imprimatur_ of a king was in former days incorporated with the volume which it authorized, but to which it nowise belonged. when these preliminaries are terminated, the new party is ushered into the political world. all the domestic controversies of the americans at first appear to a stranger to be so incomprehensible and so puerile, that he is at a loss whether to pity a people which takes such arrant trifles in good earnest, or to envy that happiness which enables it to discuss them. but when he comes to study the secret propensities which govern the factions of america, he easily perceives that the greater part of them are more or less connected with one or the other of these two divisions which have always existed in free communities. the deeper we penetrate into the workings of these parties, the more do we perceive that the object of the one is to limit, and that of the other to extend, the popular authority. i do not assert that the ostensible end, or even that the secret aim, of american parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy or democracy in the country, but i affirm that aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and that, although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and the very soul of every faction in the united states. to quote a recent example: when the president attacked the bank, the country was excited and parties were formed; the well-informed classes rallied round the bank, the common people round the president. but it must not be imagined that the people had formed a rational opinion upon a question which offers so many difficulties to the most experienced statesmen. the bank is a great establishment which enjoys an independent existence, and the people, accustomed to make and unmake whatsoever it pleases, is startled to meet with this obstacle to its authority. in the midst of the perpetual fluctuation of society, the community is irritated by so permanent an institution, and is led to attack it, in order to see whether it can be shaken and controlled, like all the other institutions of the country. * * * * * remains of the aristocratic party in the united states. secret opposition of wealthy individuals to democracy.--their retirement.--their tastes for exclusive pleasures and for luxury at home.--their simplicity abroad.--their affected condescension toward the people. it sometimes happens in a people among which various opinions prevail, that the balance of the several parties is lost, and one of them obtains an irresistible preponderance, overpowers all obstacles, harasses its opponents, and appropriates all the resources of society to its own purposes. the vanquished citizens despair of success, and they conceal their dissatisfaction in silence and in a general apathy. the nation seems to be governed by a single principle, and the prevailing party assumes the credit of having restored peace and unanimity to the country. but this apparent unanimity is merely a cloak to alarming dissensions and perpetual opposition. this is precisely what occurred in america; when the democratic party got the upper hand, it took exclusive possession of the conduct of affairs, and from that time the laws and customs of society have been adapted to its caprices. at the present day the more affluent classes of society are so entirely removed from the direction of political affairs in the united states, that wealth, far from conferring a right to the exercise of power, is rather an obstacle than a means of attaining to it. the wealthy members of the community abandon the lists, through unwillingness to contend, and frequently to contend in vain, against the poorest classes of their fellow-citizens. they concentrate all their enjoyments in the privacy of their homes, where they occupy a rank which cannot be assumed in public; and they constitute a private society in the state, which has its own tastes and its own pleasures. they submit to this state of things as an irremediable evil, but they are careful not to show that they are galled by its continuance; it is even not uncommon to hear them laud the delights of a republican government, and the advantages of democratic institutions when they are in public. next to hating their enemies, men are most inclined to flatter them. mark, for instance, that opulent citizen, who is as anxious as a jew of the middle ages to conceal his wealth. his dress is plain, his demeanor unassuming; but the interior of his dwelling glitters with luxury, and none but a few chosen guests whom he haughtily styles his equals, are allowed to penetrate into this sanctuary. no european noble is more exclusive in his pleasures, or more jealous of the smallest advantages which his privileged station confers upon him. but the very same individual crosses the city to reach a dark counting-house in the centre of traffic, where every one may accost him who pleases. if he meets his cobbler upon the way, they stop and converse; the two citizens discuss the affairs of the state in which they have an equal interest, and they shake hands before they part. but beneath this artificial enthusiasm, and these obsequious attentions to the preponderating power, it is easy to perceive that the wealthy members of the community entertain a hearty distaste to the democratic institutions of their country. the populace is at once the object of their scorn and of their fears. if the mal-administration of the democracy ever brings about a revolutionary crisis, and if monarchical institutions ever become practicable in the united states, the truth of what i advance will become obvious. the two chief weapons which parties use in order to ensure success, are the _public press_, and the formation of _associations_. chapter xi. liberty of the press in the united states. difficulty of restraining the liberty of the press.--particular reasons which some nations have to cherish this liberty.--the liberty of the press a necessary consequence of the sovereignty of the people as it is understood in america.--violent language of the periodical press in the united states.--propensities of the periodical press.--illustrated by the united states.--opinion of the americans upon the repression of the abuse of the liberty of the press by judicial prosecutions.--reasons for which the press is less powerful in america than in france. the influence of the liberty of the press does not affect political opinions alone, but it extends to all the opinions of men, and it modifies customs as well as laws. in another part of this work i shall attempt to determine the degree of influence which the liberty of the press has exercised upon civil society in the united states, and to point out the direction which it has given to the ideas, as well as the tone which it has imparted to the character and the feelings of the anglo-americans, but at present i purpose simply to examine the effects produced by the liberty of the press in the political world. i confess that i do not entertain that firm and complete attachment to the liberty of the press, which things that are supremely good in their very nature are wont to excite in the mind; and i approve of it more from a recollection of the evils it prevents, than from a consideration of the advantages it ensures. if any one can point out an intermediate, and yet a tenable position, between the complete independence and the entire subjection of the public expression of opinion, i should perhaps be inclined to adopt it; but the difficulty is to discover this position. if it is your intention to correct the abuses of unlicensed printing, and to restore the use of orderly language, you may in the first instance try the offender by a jury; but if the jury acquits him, the opinion which was that of a single individual becomes the opinion of the country at large. too much and too little has therefore hitherto been done; if you proceed, you must bring the delinquent before permanent magistrates; but even here the cause must be heard before it can be decided; and the very principles which no book would have ventured to avow are blazoned forth in the pleadings, and what was obscurely hinted at in a single composition is then repeated in a multitude of other publications. the language in which a thought is embodied is the mere carcase of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work is too subtle for their authority: too much has still been done to recede, too little to attain your end: you must therefore proceed. if you establish a censorship of the press, the tongue of the public speaker will still make itself heard, and you have only increased the mischief. the powers of thought do not rely, like the powers of physical strength, upon the number of their mechanical agents, nor can a host of authors be reckoned like the troops which compose an army; on the contrary, the authority of a principle is often increased by the smallness of the number of men by whom it is expressed. the words of a strong-minded man, which penetrate amid the passions of a listening assembly, have more weight than the vociferations of a thousand orators; and if it be allowed to speak freely in any public place, the consequence is the same as if free speaking was allowed in every village. the liberty of discourse must therefore be destroyed as well as the liberty of the press; this is the necessary term of your efforts; but if your object was to repress the abuses of liberty, they have brought you to the feet of a despot. you have been led from the extreme of independence to the extreme of subjection, without meeting with a single tenable position for shelter or repose. there are certain nations which have peculiar reasons for cherishing the press, independently of the general motives which i have just pointed out. for in certain countries which profess to enjoy the privileges of freedom, every individual agent of the government may violate the laws with impunity, since those whom he oppresses cannot prosecute him before the courts of justice. in this case the liberty of the press is not merely a guarantee, but it is the only guarantee of their liberty and their security which the citizens possess. if the rulers of these nations proposed to abolish the independence of the press, the people would be justified in saying: "give us the right of prosecuting your offences before the ordinary tribunals, and perhaps we may then waive our right of appeal to the tribunal of public opinion." but in the countries in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but it is absurd. when the right of every citizen to co-operate in the government of society is acknowledged, every citizen must be presumed to possess the power of discriminating between the different opinions of his contemporaries, and of appreciating the different facts from which inferences may be drawn. the sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be looked upon as correlative institutions; just as the censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcileably opposed, and which cannot long be retained among the institutions of the same people. not a single individual of the twelve millions who inhabit the territory of the united states has as yet dared to propose any restrictions to the liberty of the press. the first newspaper over which i cast my eyes, after my arrival in america, contained the following article: "in all this affair, the language of jackson has been that of a heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority. ambition is his crime, and it will be his punishment too: intrigue is his native element, and intrigue will confound his tricks, and will deprive him of his power; he governs by means of corruption, and his immoral practices will redound to his shame and confusion. his conduct in the political arena has been that of a shameless and lawless gamester. he succeeded at the time, but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings, to throw aside his false dice, and to end his days in some retirement where he may curse his madness at his leisure; for repentance is a virtue with which his heart is likely to remain for ever unacquainted." it is not uncommonly imagined in france, that the virulence of the press originates in the uncertain social condition, in the political excitement, and the general sense of consequent evil which prevail in that country; and it is therefore supposed that as soon as society has resumed a certain degree of composure, the press will abandon its present vehemence. i am inclined to think that the above causes explain the reason of the extraordinary ascendency it has acquired over the nation, but that they do not exercise much influence upon the tone of its language. the periodical press appears to me to be actuated by passions and propensities independent of the circumstances in which it is placed; and the present position of america corroborates this opinion. america is, perhaps, at this moment, the country of the whole world which contains the fewest germs of revolution; but the press is not less destructive in its principles than in france, and it displays the same violence without the same reasons for indignation. in america, as in france, it constitutes a singular power, so strangely composed of mingled good and evil, that it is at the same time indispensable to the existence of freedom, and nearly incompatible with the maintenance of public order. its power is certainly much greater in france than in the united states; though nothing is more rare in the latter country than to hear of a prosecution having been instituted against it. the reason of this is perfectly simple; the americans having once admitted the doctrine of sovereignty of the people, apply it with perfect consistency. it was never their intention to found a permanent state of things with elements which undergo daily modifications; and there is consequently nothing criminal in an attack upon the existing laws, provided it be not attended with a violent infraction of them. they are moreover of opinion that courts of justice are unable to check the abuses of the press; and that as the subtlety of human language perpetually eludes the severity of judicial analysis, offences of this nature are apt to escape the hand which attempts to apprehend them. they hold that to act with efficacy upon the press, it would be necessary to find a tribunal, not only devoted to the existing order of things, but capable of surmounting the influence of public opinion; a tribunal which should conduct its proceedings without publicity, which should pronounce its decrees without assigning its motives, and punish the intentions even more than the language of an author. whosoever should have the power of creating and maintaining a tribunal of this kind, would waste his time in prosecuting the liberty of the press; for he would be the supreme master of the whole community, and he would be as free to rid himself of the authors as of their writings. in this question, therefore, there is no medium between servitude and extreme license; in order to enjoy the inestimable benefits which the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils which it engenders. to expect to acquire the former, and to escape the latter, is to cherish one of those illusions which commonly mislead nations in their times of sickness, when, tired with faction and exhausted by effort, they attempt to combine hostile opinions and contrary principles upon the same soil. the small influence of the american journals is attributable to several reasons, among which are the following:-- the liberty of writing, like all other liberty, is most formidable when it is a novelty; for a people which has never been accustomed to co-operate in the conduct of state affairs, places implicit confidence in the first tribune who arouses its attention. the anglo-americans have enjoyed this liberty ever since the foundation of the settlements; moreover, the press cannot create human passions by its own power, however skilfully it may kindle them where they exist. in america politics are discussed with animation and a varied activity, but they rarely touch those deep passions which are excited whenever the positive interest of a part of the community is impaired: but in the united states the interests of the community are in a most prosperous condition. a single glance upon a french and an american newspaper is sufficient to show the difference which exists between the two nations on this head. in france the space allotted to commercial advertisements is very limited, and the intelligence is not considerable, but the most essential part of the journal is that which contains the discussion of the politics of the day. in america three quarters of the enormous sheet which is set before the reader are filled with advertisements, and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes: it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to passionate discussions like those with which the journalists of france are wont to indulge their readers. it has been demonstrated by observation, and discovered by the innate sagacity of the pettiest as well as the greatest of despots, that the influence of a power is increased in proportion as its direction is rendered more central. in france the press combines a twofold centralisation: almost all its power is centred in the same spot, and vested in the same hands, for its organs are far from numerous. the influence of a public press thus constituted, upon a sceptical nation, must be unbounded. it is an enemy with which a government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time. neither of these kinds of centralisation exists in america. the united states have no metropolis; the intelligence as well as the power of the country is dispersed abroad, and instead of radiating from a point, they cross each other in every direction; the americans have established no central control over the expression of opinion, any more than over the conduct of business. these are circumstances which do not depend on human foresight; but it is owing to the laws of the union that there are no licenses to be granted to the printers, no securities demanded from editors, as in france, and no stamp duty as in france and england. the consequence of this is that nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper, and a small number of readers suffices to defray the expenses of the editor. the number of periodical and occasional publications which appear in the united states actually surpasses belief. the most enlightened americans attribute the subordinate influence of the press to this excessive dissemination; and it is adopted as an axiom of political science in that country, that the only way to neutralise the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely. i cannot conceive why a truth which is so self-evident has not already been more generally admitted in europe; it is comprehensible that the persons who hope to bring about revolutions, by means of the press, should be desirous of confining its action to a few powerful organs; but it is perfectly incredible that the partisans of the existing state of things, and the natural supporters of the laws, should attempt to diminish the influence of the press by concentrating its authority. the governments of europe seem to treat the press with the courtesy of the knights of old; they are anxious to furnish it with the same central power which they have found to be so trusty a weapon, in order to enhance the glory of their resistance to its attacks. in america there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper. it may readily be imagined that neither discipline nor unity of design can be communicated to so multifarious a host, and each one is constantly led to fight under his own standard. all the political journals of the united states are indeed arrayed on the side of the administration or against it; but they attack and defend it in a thousand different ways. they cannot succeed in forming those great currents of opinion which overwhelm the most solid obstacles. this division of the influence of the press produces a variety of other consequences which are scarcely less remarkable. the facility with which journals can be established induces a multitude of individuals to take a part in them; but as the extent of competition precludes the possibility of considerable profit, the most distinguished classes of society are rarely led to engage in these undertakings. but such is the number of the public prints, that even if they were a source of wealth, writers of ability could not be found to direct them all. the journalists of the united states are usually placed in a very humble position, with a scanty education, and a vulgar turn of mind. the will of the majority is the most general of laws, and it establishes certain habits which form the characteristics of each peculiar class of society; thus it dictates the etiquette practised at courts and the etiquette of the bar. the characteristics of the french journalist consist in a violent, but frequently an eloquent and lofty manner of discussing the politics of the day; and the exceptions to this habitual practice are only occasional. the characteristics of the american journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors. nothing can be more deplorable than this abuse of the powers of thought; i shall have occasion to point out hereafter the influence of the newspapers upon the taste and the morality of the american people, but my present subject exclusively concerns the political world. it cannot be denied that the effects of this extreme license of the press tend indirectly to the maintenance of public order. the individuals who are already in possession of a high station in the esteem of their fellow citizens, are afraid to write in the newspapers, and they are thus deprived of the most powerful instrument which they can use to excite the passions of the multitude to their own advantage.[ ] the personal opinions of the editors have no kind of weight in the eyes of the public: the only use of a journal is, that it imparts the knowledge of certain facts, and it is only by altering or distorting those facts, that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own views. but although the press is limited to these resources, its influence in america is immense. it is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory. its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion. it rallies the interests of the community round certain principles, and it draws up the creed which factions adopt; for it affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear, and which address each other, without ever having been in immediate contact. when a great number of the organs of the press adopt the same line of conduct, their influence becomes irresistible; and public opinion, when it is perpetually assailed from the same side, eventually yields to the attack. in the united states each separate journal exercises but little authority: but the power of the periodical press is only second to that of the people.[ ] in the united states the democracy perpetually raises fresh individuals to the conduct of public affairs; and the measures of the administration are consequently seldom regulated by the strict rules of consistency or of order. but the general principles of the government are more stable, and the opinions most prevalent in society are generally more durable than in many other countries. when once the americans have taken up an idea, whether it be well or ill-founded, nothing is more difficult than to eradicate it from their minds. the same tenacity of opinion has been observed in england, where, for the last century, greater freedom of conscience, and more invincible prejudices have existed, than in all the other countries of europe. i attribute this consequence to a cause which may at first sight appear to have a very opposite tendency, namely, to the liberty of the press. the nations among which this liberty exists are as apt to cling to their opinions from pride as from conviction. they cherish them because they hold them to be just, and because they exercised their own free will in choosing them; and they maintain them, not only because they are true, but because they are their own. several other reasons conduce to the same end. it was remarked by a man of genius, that "ignorance lies at the two ends of knowledge." perhaps it would have been more correct to say that absolute convictions are to be met with at the two extremities, and that doubt lies in the middle; for the human intellect may be considered in three distinct states, which frequently succeed one another. a man believes implicitly, because he adopts a proposition without inquiry. he doubts as soon as he is assailed by the objections which his inquiries may have aroused. but he frequently succeeds in satisfying these doubts, and then he begins to believe afresh: he no longer lays hold on a truth in its most shadowy and uncertain form, but he sees it clearly before him, and he advances onward by the light it gives him.[ ] when the liberty of the press acts upon men who are in the first of these three states, it does not immediately disturb their habit of believing implicitly without investigation, but it constantly modifies the objects of their intuitive convictions. the human mind continues to discern but one point upon the whole intellectual horizon, and that point is in continual motion. such are the symptoms of sudden revolutions, and of the misfortunes that are sure to befall those generations which abruptly adopt the unconditional freedom of the press. the circle of novel ideas is, however, soon terminated; the torch of experience is upon them, and the doubt and mistrust which their uncertainty produces, become universal. we may rest assured that the majority of mankind will either believe they know not wherefore, or will not know what to believe. few are the beings who can ever hope to attain that state of rational and independent conviction which true knowledge can beget, in defiance of the attacks of doubt. it has been remarked that in times of great religious fervor, men sometimes change their religious opinions; whereas, in times of general scepticism, every one clings to his own persuasion. the same thing takes place in politics under the liberty of the press. in countries where all the theories of social science have been contested in their turn, the citizens who have adopted one of them, stick to it, not so much because they are assured of its excellence, as because they are not convinced of the superiority of any other. in the present age men are not very ready to die in defence of their opinions, but they are rarely inclined to change them; and there are fewer martyrs as well as fewer apostates. another still more valid reason may yet be adduced: when no abstract opinions are looked upon as certain, men cling to the mere propensities and external interest of their position, which are naturally more tangible and more permanent than any opinions in the world. it is not a question of easy solution whether the aristocracy or the democracy is most fit to govern a country. but it is certain that democracy annoys one part of the community, and that aristocracy oppresses another part. when the question is reduced to the simple expression of the struggle between poverty and wealth, the tendency of each side of the dispute becomes perfectly evident without farther controversy. * * * * * notes: [ ] they only write in the papers when they choose to address the people in their own name; as, for instance, when they are called upon to repel calumnious imputations, and to correct a mis-statement of facts. [ ] see appendix p. [ ] it may, however, be doubted whether this rational and self-guiding conviction arouses as much fervor or enthusiastic devotedness in men as their first dogmatical belief. chapter xii. political associations in the united states. daily use which the anglo-americans make of the right of association.--three kinds of political association.--in what manner the americans apply the representative system to associations.--dangers resulting to the state.--great convention of relative to the tariff. legislative character of this convention.--why the unlimited exercise of the right of association is less dangerous in the united states than elsewhere.--why it may be looked upon as necessary.--utility of associations in a democratic people. in no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in america. beside the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals. the citizen of the united states is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions, in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it. this habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined. the same spirit pervades every act of social life. if a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power, which remedies the inconvenience, before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned. if the public pleasures are concerned, an association is formed to provide for the splendor and the regularity of the entertainment. societies are formed to resist enemies which are exclusively of a moral nature, and to diminish the vice of intemperance: in the united states associations are established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and religion; for there is no end which the human will, seconded by the collective exertions of individuals, despairs of attaining. i shall hereafter have occasion to show the effects of association upon the course of society, and i must confine myself for the present to the political world. when once the right of association is recognized, the citizens may employ it in several different ways. an association consists simply in the public assent which a number of individuals give to certain doctrines; and in the engagement which they contract to promote the spread of those doctrines by their exertions. the right of associating with these views is very analogous to the liberty of unlicensed writing; but societies thus formed possess more authority than the press. when an opinion is represented by a society, it necessarily assumes a more exact and explicit form. it numbers its partisans, and compromises their welfare in its cause; they, on the other hand, become acquainted with each other, and their zeal is increased by their number. an association unites the efforts of minds which have a tendency to diverge, in one single channel, and urges them vigorously toward one single end which it points out. the second degree in the right of association is the power of meeting. when an association is allowed to establish centres of action at certain important points in the country, its activity is increased, and its influence extended. men have the opportunity of seeing each other; means of execution are more readily combined; and opinions are maintained with a degree of warmth and energy which written language cannot approach. lastly, in the exercise of the right of political association, there is a third degree: the partisans of an opinion may unite in electoral bodies, and choose delegates to represent them in a central assembly. this is, properly speaking, the application of the representative system to a party. thus, in the first instance, a society is formed between individuals professing the same opinion, and the tie which keeps it together is of a purely intellectual nature: in the second case, small assemblies are formed which only represent a fraction of the party. lastly, in the third case, they constitute a separate nation in the midst of the nation, a government within the government. their delegates, like the real delegates of the majority, represent the entire collective force of their party; and they enjoy a certain degree of that national dignity and great influence which belong to the chosen representatives of the people. it is true that they have not the right of making the laws; but they have the power of attacking those which are in being, and of drawing up beforehand those which they may afterward cause to be adopted. if, in a people which is imperfectly accustomed to the exercise of freedom, or which is exposed to violent political passions, a deliberating minority, which confines itself to the contemplation of future laws, be placed in juxtaposition to the legislative majority, i cannot but believe that public tranquillity incurs very great risks in that nation. there is doubtless a very wide difference between proving that one law is in itself better than another, and proving that the former ought to be substituted for the latter. but the imagination of the populace is very apt to overlook this difference, which is so apparent in the minds of thinking men. it sometimes happens that a nation is divided into two nearly equal parties, each of which affects to represent the majority. if, in immediate contiguity to the directing power, another power be established, which exercises almost as much moral authority as the former, it is not to be believed that it will long be content to speak without acting; or that it will always be restrained by the abstract consideration of the nature of associations, which are meant to direct, but not to enforce opinions, to suggest but not to make the laws. the more we consider the independence of the press in its principal consequences, the more are we convinced that it is the chief, and, so to speak, the constitutive element of freedom in the modern world. a nation which is determined to remain free, is therefore right in demanding the unrestrained exercise of this independence. but the _unrestrained_ liberty of political association cannot be entirely assimilated to the liberty of the press. the one is at the same time less necessary and more dangerous than the other. a nation may confine it within certain limits without forfeiting any part of its self-control; and it may sometimes be obliged to do so in order to maintain its own authority. in america the liberty of association for political purposes is unbounded. an example will show in the clearest light to what an extent this privilege is tolerated. the question of the tariff, or of free trade, produced a great manifestation of party feeling in america; the tariff was not only a subject of debate as a matter of opinion, but it exercised a favorable or a prejudicial influence upon several very powerful interests of the states. the north attributed a great portion of its prosperity, and the south all its sufferings, to this system. insomuch, that for a long time the tariff was the sole source of the political animosities which agitated the union. in , when the dispute was raging with the utmost virulence, a private citizen of massachusetts proposed to all the enemies of the tariff, by means of the public prints, to send delegates to philadelphia in order to consult together upon the means which were most fitted to promote the freedom of trade. this proposal circulated in a few days from maine to new orleans by the power of the printing press: the opponents of the tariff adopted it with enthusiasm; meetings were formed on all sides, and delegates were named. the majority of these individuals were well known, and some of them had earned a considerable degree of celebrity. south carolina alone, which afterward took up arms in the same cause, sent sixty-three delegates. on the st october, , this assembly, which, according to the american custom, had taken the name of a convention, met at philadelphia; it consisted of more than two hundred members. its debates were public, and they at once assumed a legislative character; the extent of the powers of congress, the theories of free trade, and the different clauses of the tariff, were discussed in turn. at the end of ten days' deliberation, the convention broke up, after having published an address to the american people, in which it is declared: i. the congress had not the right of making a tariff, and that the existing tariff was unconstitutional. ii. that the prohibition of free trade was prejudicial to the interests of all nations, and to that of the american people in particular. it must be acknowledged that the unrestrained liberty of political association has not hitherto produced, in the united states, those fatal consequences which might perhaps be expected from it elsewhere. the right of association was imported from england, and it has always existed in america. so that the exercise of this privilege is now amalgamated with the manners and customs of the people. at the present time, the liberty of association is become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority. in the united states, as soon as a party has become preponderant, all the public authority passes under its control; its private supporters occupy all the places, and have all the force of the administration at their disposal. as the most distinguished partisans of the other side of the question are unable to surmount the obstacles which exclude them from power, they require some means of establishing themselves upon their own basis, and of opposing the moral authority of the minority to the physical power which domineers over it. thus, a dangerous expedient is used to obviate a still more formidable danger. the omnipotence of the majority appears to me to present such extreme perils to the american republics, that the dangerous measure which is used to repress it, seems to be more advantageous than prejudicial. and here i am about to advance a proposition which may remind the reader of what i said before in speaking of municipal freedom. there are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction, or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted. in aristocratic nations, the body of the nobles and the more opulent part of the community are in themselves natural associations, which act as checks upon the abuses of power. in countries in which those associations do not exist, if private individuals are unable to create an artificial and a temporary substitute for them, i can imagine no permanent protection against the most galling tyranny; and a great people may be oppressed by a small faction, or by a single individual, with impunity. the meeting of a great political convention (for there are conventions of all kinds), which may frequently become a necessary measure, is always a serious occurrence, even in america, and one which is never looked forward to by the judicious friends of the country, without alarm. this was very perceptible in the convention of , at which the exertions of all the most distinguished members of the assembly tended to moderate its language, and to restrain the subjects which it treated within certain limits. it is probable, in fact, that the convention of exercised a very great influence upon the minds of the malcontents, and prepared them for the open revolt against the commercial laws of the union, which took place in . it cannot be denied that the unrestrained liberty of association for political purposes, is the privilege which a people is longest in learning how to exercise. if it does not throw the nation into anarchy, it perpetually augments the chances of that calamity. on one point, however, this perilous liberty offers a security against dangers of another kind; in countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. in america there are numerous factions, but no conspiracies. the most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow-creatures, and of acting in common with them. i am therefore led to conclude, that the right of association is almost as inalienable as the right of personal liberty. no legislator can attack it without impairing the very foundations of society. nevertheless, if the liberty of association is a fruitful source of advantages and prosperity to some nations, it may be perverted or carried to excess by others, and the element of life may be changed into an element of destruction. a comparison of the different methods which associations pursue, in those countries in which they are managed with discretion, as well as in those where liberty degenerates into license, may perhaps be thought useful both to governments and to parties. the greater part of europeans look upon an association as a weapon which is to be hastily fashioned, and immediately tried in the conflict. a society is to be formed for discussion, but the idea of impending action prevails in the minds of those who constitute it: it is, in fact, an army; and the time given to parley, serves to reckon up the strength and to animate the courage of the host, after which they direct the march against the enemy. resources which lie within the bounds of the law may suggest themselves to the persons who compose it, as means, but never as the only means, of success. such, however, is not the manner in which the right of association is understood in the united states. in america, the citizens who form the minority associate, in order, in the first place, to show their numerical strength, and so to diminish the moral authority of the majority; and, in the second place, to stimulate competition, and to discover those arguments which are most fitted to act upon the majority; for they always entertain hopes of drawing over their opponents to their own side, and of afterward disposing of the supreme power in their name. political associations in the united states are therefore peaceable in their intentions, and strictly legal in the means which they employ; and they assert with perfect truth, that they only aim at success by lawful expedients. the difference which exists between the americans and ourselves depends on several causes. in europe there are numerous parties so diametrically opposed to the majority, that they can never hope to acquire its support, and at the same time they think that they are sufficiently strong in themselves to struggle and to defend their cause. when a party of this kind forms an association, its object is, not to conquer, but to fight. in america, the individuals who hold opinions very much opposed to those of the majority, are no sort of impediment to its power; and all other parties hope to win it over to their own principles in the end. the exercise of the right of association becomes dangerous in proportion to the impossibility which excludes great parties from acquiring the majority. in a country like the united states, in which the differences of opinion are mere differences of hue, the right of association may remain unrestrained without evil consequences. the inexperience of many of the european nations in the enjoyment of liberty, leads them only to look upon the liberty of association as a right of attacking the government. the first notion which presents itself to a party, as well as to an individual, when it has acquired a consciousness of its own strength, is that of violence: the notion of persuasion arises at a later period, and is only derived from experience. the english, who are divided into parties which differ most essentially from each other, rarely abuse the right of association, because they have long been accustomed to exercise it. in france, the passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the state, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life. but perhaps the most powerful of the causes which tend to mitigate the excesses of political association in the united states is universal suffrage. in countries in which universal suffrage exists, the majority is never doubtful, because neither party can pretend to represent that portion of the community which has not voted. the associations which are formed are aware, as well as the nation at large, that they do not represent the majority; this is, indeed, a condition inseparable from their existence; for if they did represent the preponderating power, they would change the law instead of soliciting its reform. the consequence of this is, that the moral influence of the government which they attack is very much increased, and their own power is very much enfeebled. in europe there are few associations which do not affect to represent the majority, or which do not believe that they represent it. this conviction or this pretension tends to augment their force amazingly, and contributes no less to legalize their measures. violence may seem to be excusable in defence of the cause of oppressed right. thus it is, in the vast labyrinth of human laws, that extreme liberty sometimes corrects abuses of license, and that extreme democracy obviates the dangers of democratic government. in europe, associations consider themselves, in some degree, as the legislative and executive councils of the people, which is unable to speak for itself. in america, where they only represent a minority of the nation, they argue and they petition. the means which the associations of europe employ, are in accordance with the end which they propose to obtain. as the principal aim of these bodies is to act, and not to debate, to fight rather than to persuade, they are naturally led to adopt a form of organization which differs from the ordinary customs of civil bodies, and which assumes the habits and the maxims of military life. they centralize the direction of their resources as much as possible, and they intrust the power of the whole party to a very small number of leaders. the members of these associations reply to a watchword, like soldiers on duty: they profess the doctrine of passive obedience; say rather, that in uniting together they at once abjure the exercise of their own judgment and free will; and the tyrannical control, which these societies exercise, is often far more insupportable than the authority possessed over society by the government which they attack. their moral force is much diminished by these excesses, and they lose the powerful interest which is always excited by a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. the man who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his activity, and even his opinions, to their control, can have no claim to rank as a free citizen. the americans have also established certain forms of government which are applied to their associations, but these are invariably borrowed from the forms of the civil administration. the independence of each individual is formally recognized; the tendency of the members of the association points, as it does in the body of the community, toward the same end, but they are not obliged to follow the same track. no one abjures the exercise of his reason and his free will; but every one exerts that reason and that will for the benefit of a common undertaking. chapter xiii. government of the democracy in america. i am well aware of the difficulties which attend this part of my subject, but although every expression which i am about to make use of may clash, upon some one point, with the feelings of the different parties which divide my country, i shall speak my opinion with the most perfect openness. in europe we are at a loss how to judge the true character and the more permanent propensities of democracy, because in europe two conflicting principles exist, and we do not know what to attribute to the principles themselves, and what to refer to the passions which they bring into collision. such, however, is not the case in america; there the people reigns without any obstacle, and it has no perils to dread, and no injuries to avenge. in america, democracy is swayed by its own free propensities; its course is natural, and its activity is unrestrained: the united states consequently afford the most favorable opportunity of studying its real character. and to no people can this inquiry be more vitally interesting than to the french nation, which is blindly driven onward by a daily and irresistible impulse, toward a state of things which may prove either despotic or republican, but which will assuredly be democratic. * * * * * universal suffrage. i have already observed that universal suffrage has been adopted in all the states of the union: it consequently occurs among different populations which occupy very different positions in the scale of society. i have had opportunities of observing its effects in different localities, and among races of men who are nearly strangers to each other by their language, their religion, and their manner of life; in louisiana as well as in new england, in georgia and in canada. i have remarked that universal suffrage is far from producing in america either all the good or all the evil consequences which are assigned to it in europe, and that its effects differ very widely from those which are usually attributed to it. * * * * * choice of the people, and instinctive preferences of the american democracy. in the united states the most talented individuals are rarely placed at the head of affairs.--reasons of this peculiarity.--the envy which prevails in the lower orders of france against the higher classes, is not a french, but a purely democratic sentiment.--for what reason the most distinguished men in america frequently seclude themselves from public affairs. many people in europe are apt to believe without saying it, or to say without believing it, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is, that it intrusts the direction of public affairs to men who are worthy of the public confidence. they admit that the people is unable to govern for itself, but they aver that it is always sincerely disposed to promote the welfare of the state, and that it instinctively designates those persons who are animated by the same good wishes, and who are the most fit to wield the supreme authority. i confess that the observations i made in america by no means coincide with these opinions. on my arrival in the united states i was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the subjects, and so little among the heads of the government. it is a well-authenticated fact, that at the present day the most talented men in the united states are very rarely placed at the head of affairs; and it must be acknowledged that such has been the result, in proportion as democracy has outstepped all its former limits. the race of american statesmen has evidently dwindled most remarkably in the course of the last fifty years. several causes may be assigned to this phenomenon. it is impossible, notwithstanding the most strenuous exertions, to raise the intelligence of the people above a certain level. whatever may be the facilities of acquiring information, whatever may be the profusion of easy methods and of cheap science, the human mind can never be instructed and educated without devoting a considerable space of time to those objects. the greater or the lesser possibility of subsisting without labor is therefore the necessary boundary of intellectual improvement. this boundary is more remote in some countries, and more restricted in others; but it must exist somewhere as long as the people is constrained to work in order to procure the means of physical subsistence, that is to say, as long as it retains its popular character. it is therefore quite as difficult to imagine a state in which all the citizens should be very well-informed, as a state in which they should all be wealthy; these two difficulties may be looked upon as correlative. it may very readily be admitted that the mass of the citizens are sincerely disposed to promote the welfare of their country; nay more, it may even be allowed that the lower classes are less apt to be swayed by considerations of personal interest than the higher orders; but it is always more or less impossible for them to discern the best means of attaining the end, which they desire with sincerity. long and patient observation, joined to a multitude of different notions, is required to form a just estimate of the character of a single individual; and can it be supposed that the vulgar have the power of succeeding in an inquiry which misleads the penetration of genius itself? the people has neither the time nor the means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation of this kind; its conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question. hence it often assents to the clamor of a mountebank, who knows the secret of stimulating its tastes; while its truest friends frequently fail in their exertions. moreover, the democracy is not only deficient in that soundness of judgment which is necessary to select men really deserving of its confidence, but it has neither the desire nor the inclination to find them out. it cannot be denied that democratic institutions have a very strong tendency to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to every one the means of rising to the level of any of his fellow-citizens, as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. this complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment when it thinks to hold it fast, and "flies," as pascal says, "with eternal flight;" the people is excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is the more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown, or sufficiently near to be enjoyed. the lower orders are agitated by the chance of success, they are irritated by its uncertainty; and they pass from the enthusiasm of pursuit to the exhaustion of ill-success, and lastly to the acrimony of disappointment. whatever transcends their own limits appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no kind of superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight. it has been supposed that the secret instinct, which leads the lower orders to remove their superiors as much as possible from the direction of public affairs, is peculiar to france. this, however, is an error; the propensity to which i allude is not inherent in any particular nation, but in democratic institutions in general; and although it may have been heightened by peculiar political circumstances, it owes its origin to a higher cause. in the united states, the people is not disposed to hate the superior class of society; but it is not very favorably inclined toward them, and it carefully excludes them from the exercise of authority. it does not entertain any dread of distinguished talents, but it is rarely captivated by them; and it awards its approbation very sparingly to such as have risen without the popular support. while the natural propensities of democracy induce the people to reject the most distinguished citizens as its rulers, these individuals are no less apt to retire from a political career, in which it is almost impossible to retain their independence, or to advance without degrading themselves. this opinion has been very candidly set forth by chancellor kent, who says, in speaking with great eulogium of that part of the constitution which empowers the executive to nominate the judges: "it is indeed probable that the men who are best fitted to discharge the duties of this high office would have too much reserve in their manners, and too much austerity in their principles, for them to be returned by the majority at an election where universal suffrage is adopted." such were the opinions which were printed without contradiction in america in the year . i hold it to be sufficiently demonstrated, that universal suffrage is by no means a guarantee of the wisdom of the popular choice; and that whatever its advantages may be, this is not one of them. * * * * * causes which may partly correct these tendencies of the democracy. contrary effects produced on peoples as well as on individuals by great dangers.--why so many distinguished men stood at the head of affairs in america fifty years ago.--influence which the intelligence and the manners of the people exercise upon its choice.--example of new england.--states of the southwest--influence of certain laws upon the choice of the people.--election by an elected body.--its effects upon the composition of the senate. when a state is threatened by serious dangers, the people frequently succeed in selecting the citizens who are the most able to save it. it has been observed that man rarely retains his customary level in presence of very critical circumstances; he rises above, or he sinks below, his usual condition, and the same thing occurs in nations at large. extreme perils sometimes quench the energy of a people instead of stimulating it; they excite without directing its passions; and instead of clearing, they confuse its powers of perception. the jews deluged the smoking ruins of their temples with the carnage of the remnant of their host. but it is more common, both in the case of nations and in that of individuals, to find extraordinary virtues arising from the very imminence of the danger. great characters are then thrown into relief, as the edifices which are concealed by the gloom of night, are illuminated by the glare of a conflagration. at those dangerous times genius no longer abstains from presenting itself in the arena; and the people, alarmed by the perils of its situation, buries its envious passions in a short oblivion. great names may then be drawn from the urn of an election. i have already observed that the american statesmen of the present day are very inferior to those who stood at the head of affairs fifty years ago. this is as much a consequence of the circumstances, as of the laws of the country. when america was struggling in the high cause of independence to throw off the yoke of another country, and when it was about to usher a new nation into the world, the spirits of its inhabitants were roused to the height which their great efforts required. in this general excitement, the most distinguished men were ready to forestall the wants of the community, and the people clung to them for support, and placed them at its head. but events of this magnitude are rare; and it is from an inspection of the ordinary course of affairs that our judgment must be formed. if passing occurrences sometimes act as checks upon the passions of democracy, the intelligence and the manners of the community exercise an influence which is not less powerful, and far more permanent. this is extremely perceptible in the united states. in new england the education and the liberties of the communities were engendered by the moral and religious principles of their founders. where society has acquired a sufficient degree of stability to enable it to hold certain maxims and to retain fixed habits, the lower orders are accustomed to respect intellectual superiority, and to submit to it without complaint, although they set at naught all those privileges which wealth and birth have introduced among mankind. the democracy in new england consequently makes a more judicious choice than it does elsewhere. but as we descend toward the south, to those states in which the constitution of society is more modern and less strong, where instruction is less general, and where the principles of morality, of religion, and of liberty, are less happily combined, we perceive that the talents and the virtues of those who are in authority become more and more rare. lastly, when we arrive at the new southwestern states, in which the constitution of society dates but from yesterday, and presents an agglomeration of adventurers and speculators, we are amazed at the persons who are invested with public authority, and we are led to ask by what force, independent of the legislation and of the men who direct it, the state can be protected, and society be made to flourish. there are certain laws of a democratic nature which contribute, nevertheless, to correct, in some measure, the dangerous tendencies of democracy. on entering the house of representatives at washington, one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly. the eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity within its walls. its members are almost all obscure individuals, whose names present no associations to the mind: they are mostly village-lawyers, men in trade, or even persons belonging to the lower classes of society. in a country in which education is very general, it is said that the representatives of the people do not always know how to write correctly. at a few yards distance from this spot is the door of the senate, which contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of america. scarcely an individual is to be perceived in it who does not recall the idea of an active and illustrious career: the senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of europe. what then is the cause of this strange contrast, and why are the most able citizens to be found in one assembly rather than in the other? why is the former body remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent, while the latter seems to enjoy a monopoly of intelligence and of sound judgment? both of these assemblies emanate from the people; both of them are chosen by universal suffrage; and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert, in america, that the senate is hostile to the interests of the people. from what cause, then, does so startling a difference arise? the only reason which appears to me adequately to account for it is, that the house of representatives is elected by the populace directly, and that of the senate is elected by elected bodies. the whole body of the citizens names the legislature of each state, and the federal constitution converts these legislatures into so many electoral bodies, which return the members of the senate. the senators are elected by an indirect application of universal suffrage; for the legislatures which name them are not aristocratic or privileged bodies which exercise the electoral franchise in their own right; but they are chosen by the totality of the citizens; they are generally elected every year, and new members may constantly be chosen, who will employ their electoral rights in conformity with the wishes of the public. but this transmission of the popular authority through an assembly of chosen men, operates an important change in it, by refining its discretion and improving the forms which it adopts. men who are chosen in this manner, accurately represent the majority of the nation which governs them; but they represent the elevated thoughts which are current in the community, the generous propensities which prompt its nobler actions, rather than the petty passions which disturb, or the vices which disgrace it. the time may be already anticipated at which the american republics will be obliged to introduce the plan of election by an elected body more frequently into their system of representation, or they will incur no small risk of perishing miserably among the shoals of democracy. and here i have no scruple in confessing that i look upon this peculiar system of election as the only means of bringing the exercise of political power to the level of all classes of the people. those thinkers who regard this institution as the exclusive weapon of a party, and those who fear, on the other hand, to make use of it, seem to me to fall into as great an error in the one case as in the other. * * * * * influence which the american democracy has exercised on the laws relating to elections. when elections are rare, they expose the state to a violent crisis.--when they are frequent, they keep up a degree of feverish excitement.--the americans have preferred the second of these two evils.--mutability of the laws.--opinions of hamilton and jefferson on this subject. when elections recur at long intervals, the state is exposed to violent agitation every time they take place. parties exert themselves to the utmost in order to gain a prize which is so rarely within their reach; and as the evil is almost irremediable for the candidates who fail, the consequence of their disappointed ambition may prove most disastrous: if, on the other hand, the legal struggle can be repeated within a short space of time, the defeated parties take patience. when elections occur frequently, this recurrence keeps society in a perpetual state of feverish excitement, and imparts a continual instability to public affairs. thus, on the one hand, the state is exposed to the perils of a revolution, on the other, to perpetual mutability; the former system threatens the very existence of the government, the latter is an obstacle to all steady and consistent policy. the americans have preferred the second of these evils to the first; but they were led to this conclusion by their instinct much more than by their reason; for a taste for variety is one of the characteristic passions of democracy. an extraordinary mutability has, by this means, been introduced into their legislation. many of the americans consider the instability of their laws as a necessary consequence of a system whose general results are beneficial. but no one in the united states affects to deny the fact of this instability, or to contend that it is not a great evil. hamilton, after having demonstrated the utility of a power which might prevent, or which might at least impede, the promulgation of bad laws, adds: "it may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones, and may be used to the one purpose as well as to the other. but this objection will have but little weight with those who can properly estimate the mischiefs of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws which form the greatest blemish in the character and genius of our government."--(federalist, no. .) and again, in no. of the same work, he observes: "the facility and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable.... the mischievous effects of the mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members, would fill a volume; every new election in the states is found to change one half of the representatives. from this change of men must proceed a change of opinions and of measures which forfeits the respect and confidence of nations, poisons the blessings of liberty itself, and diminishes the attachment and reverence of the people toward a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity." jefferson himself, the greatest democrat whom the democracy of america has as yet produced, pointed out the same evils. "the instability of our laws," he said in a letter to madison, "is really a very serious inconvenience. i think we ought to have obviated it by deciding that a whole year should always be allowed to elapse between the bringing in of a bill and the final passing of it. it should afterward be discussed and put to the vote without the possibility of making any alteration in it; and if the circumstances of the case required a more speedy decision, the question should not be decided by a simple majority, but by a majority of at least two thirds of both houses." * * * * * public officers under the control of the democracy of america. simple exterior of the american public officers.--no official costume.--all public officers are remunerated.--political consequences of this system.--no public career exists in america.--result of this. public officers in the united states are commingled with the crowd of citizens; they have neither palaces, nor guards, nor ceremonial costumes. this simple exterior of the persons in authority is connected, not only with the peculiarities of the american character, but with the fundamental principles of that society. in the estimation of the democracy, a government is not a benefit, but a necessary evil. a certain degree of power must be granted to public officers, for they would be of no use without it. but the ostensible semblance of authority is by no means indispensable to the conduct of affairs; and it is needlessly offensive to the susceptibility of the public. the public officers themselves are well aware that they only enjoy the superiority over their fellow citizens, which they derive from their authority, upon condition of putting themselves on a level with the whole community by their manners. a public officer in the united states is uniformly civil, accessible to all the world, attentive to all requests, and obliging in all his replies. i was pleased by these characteristics of a democratic government; and i was struck by the manly independence of the citizens, who respect the office more than the officer, and who are less attached to the emblems of authority than to the man who bears them. i am inclined to believe that the influence which costumes really exercise, in an age like that in which we live, has been a good deal exaggerated. i never perceived that a public officer in america was the less respected while he was in the discharge of his duties because his own merit was set off by no adventitious signs. on the other hand, it is very doubtful whether a peculiar dress contributes to the respect which public characters ought to have for their own position, at least when they are not otherwise inclined to respect it. when a magistrate (and in france such instances are not rare), indulges his trivial wit at the expense of a prisoner, or derides a predicament in which a culprit is placed, it would be well to deprive him of his robes of office, to see whether he would recall some portion of the natural dignity of mankind when he is reduced to the apparel of a private citizen. a democracy may, however, allow a certain show of magisterial pomp, and clothe its officers in silks and gold, without seriously compromising its principles. privileges of this kind are transitory; they belong to the place, and are distinct from the individual: but if public officers are not uniformly remunerated by the state, the public charges must be intrusted to men of opulence and independence, who constitute the basis of an aristocracy; and if the people still retains its right of election, that election can only be made from a certain class of citizens. when a democratic republic renders offices which had formerly been remunerated, gratuitous, it may safely be believed that that state is advancing to monarchical institutions; and when a monarchy begins to remunerate such officers as had hitherto been unpaid, it is a sure sign that it is approaching toward a despotic or a republican form of government. the substitution of paid for unpaid functionaries is of itself, in my opinion, sufficient to constitute a serious revolution. i look upon the entire absence of gratuitous functionaries in america as one of the most prominent signs of the absolute dominion which democracy exercises in that country. all public services, of whatsoever nature they may be, are paid; so that every one has not merely a right, but also the means of performing them. although, in democratic states, all the citizens are qualified to occupy stations in the government, all are not tempted to try for them. the number and the capacities of the candidates are more apt to restrict the choice of electors than the conditions of the candidateship. in nations in which the principle of election extends to every place in the state, no political career can, properly speaking, be said to exist. men are promoted as if by chance to the rank which they enjoy, and they are by no means sure of retaining it. the consequence is that in tranquil times public functions offer but few lures to ambition. in the united states the persons who engage in the perplexities of political life are individuals of very moderate pretensions. the pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power; and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the state until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs. the vast number of very ordinary men who occupy public stations is quite as attributable to these causes as to the bad choice of the democracy. in the united states, i am not sure that the people would return the men of superior abilities who might solicit its support, but it is certain that men of this description do not come forward. * * * * * arbitrary power of magistrates[ ] under the rule of american democracy. for what reason the arbitrary power of magistrates is greater in absolute monarchies and in democratic republics that it is in limited monarchies.--arbitrary power of the magistrates in new england. in two different kinds of government the magistrates exercise a considerable degree of arbitrary power; namely, under the absolute government of a single individual, and under that of a democracy. this identical result proceeds from causes which are nearly analogous. in despotic states the fortune of no citizen is secure; and public officers are not more safe than private individuals. the sovereign, who has under his control the lives, the property, and sometimes the honor of the men whom he employs, does not scruple to allow them a great latitude of action, because he is convinced that they will not use it to his prejudice. in despotic states the sovereign is so attached to the exercise of his power, that he dislikes the constraint even of his own regulations; and he is well pleased that his agents should follow a somewhat fortuitous line of conduct, provided he be certain that their actions will never counteract his desires. in democracies, as the majority has every year the right of depriving the officers whom it has appointed of their power, it has no reason to fear abuse of their authority. as the people is always able to signify its wishes to those who conduct the government, it prefers leaving them to make their own exertions, to prescribing an invariable rule of conduct which would at once fetter their activity and the popular authority. it may even be observed, on attentive consideration, that under the rule of a democracy the arbitrary power of the magistrate must be still greater than in despotic states. in the latter, the sovereign has the power of punishing all the faults with which he becomes acquainted, but it would be vain for him to hope to become acquainted with all those which are committed. in the former the sovereign power is not only supreme, but it is universally present. the american functionaries are, in point of fact, much more independent in the sphere of action which the law traces out for them, than any public officer in europe. very frequently the object which they are to accomplish is simply pointed out to them, and the choice of the means is left to their own discretion. in new england, for instance, the selectmen of each township are bound to draw up the list of persons who are to serve on the jury; the only rule which is laid down to guide them in their choice is that they are to select citizens possessing the elective franchise and enjoying a fair reputation.[ ] in france the lives and liberties of the subjects would be thought to be in danger, if a public officer of any kind was intrusted with so formidable a right. in new england, the same magistrates are empowered to post the names of habitual drunkards in public houses, and to prohibit the inhabitants of a town from supplying them with liquor.[ ] a censorial power of this excessive kind would be revolting to the population of the most absolute monarchies; here, however, it is submitted to without difficulty. nowhere has so much been left by the law to the arbitrary determination of the magistrates as in democratic republics, because this arbitrary power is unattended by any alarming consequences. it may even be asserted that the freedom of the magistrate increases as the elective franchise is extended, and as the duration of the time of office is shortened. hence arises the great difficulty which attends the conversion of a democratic republic into a monarchy. the magistrate ceases to be elective, but he retains the rights and the habits of an elected officer, which lead directly to despotism. it is only in limited monarchies that the law which prescribes the sphere in which public officers are to act, superintends all their measures. the cause of this may be easily detected. in limited monarchies the power is divided between the king and the people, both of whom are interested in the stability of the magistrate. the king does not venture to place the public officers under the control of the people, lest they should be tempted to betray his interests; on the other hand, the people fears lest the magistrates should serve to oppress the liberties of the country, if they were entirely dependent upon the crown: they cannot therefore be said to depend on either the one or the other. the same cause which induces the king and the people to render public officers independent, suggests the necessity of such securities as may prevent their independence from encroaching upon the authority of the former and the liberties of the latter. they consequently agree as to the necessity of restricting the functionary to a line of conduct laid down beforehand, and they are interested in confining him by certain regulations which he cannot evade. [the observations respecting the arbitrary powers of magistrates are practically among the most erroneous in the work. the author seems to have confounded the idea of magistrates being _independent_ with their being arbitrary. yet he had just before spoken of their dependance on popular election as a reason why there was no apprehension of the abuse of their authority. the independence, then, to which he alludes must be an immunity from responsibility to any other department. but it is a fundamental principle of our system, that all officers are liable to criminal prosecution "whenever they act partially or oppressively from a malicious or corrupt motive." see wendell's reports, . that our magistrates are independent when they do not act partially or oppressively is very true, and, it is to be hoped, is equally true in every form of government. there would seem, therefore, not to be such a degree of independence as necessarily to produce arbitrariness. the author supposes that magistrates are more arbitrary in a despotism and in a democracy than in a limited monarchy. and yet, the limits of independence and of responsibility existing in the united states are borrowed from and identical with those established in england--the most prominent instance of a limited monarchy. see the authorities referred to in the case in wendell's reports, before quoted. discretion in the execution of various ministerial duties, and in the awarding of punishment by judicial officers, is indispensable in every system of government, from the utter impossibility of "laying down beforehand a line of conduct" (as the author expresses it) in such cases. the very instances of discretionary power to which he refers, and which he considers _arbitrary_, exist in england. there, the persons from whom juries are to be formed for the trial of causes, civil and criminal, are selected by the sheriffs, who are appointed by the crown--a power, certainly more liable to abuse in their hands, than in those of selectmen or other town-officers, chosen annually by the people. the other power referred to, that of posting the names of habitual drunkards, and forbidding their being supplied with liquor, is but a reiteration of the principles contained in the english statute of geo. iii., ch. , respecting idle and disorderly persons. indeed it may be said with great confidence, that there is not an instance of discretionary power being vested in american magistrates which does not find its prototype in the english laws. the whole argument of the author on this point, therefore, would seem to fail.--_american editor_.] * * * * * instability of the administration in the united states. in america the public acts of a community frequently leave fewer traces than the occurrences of a family.--newspapers the only historical remains.--instability of the administration prejudicial to the art of government. the authority which public men possess in america is so brief, and they are so soon commingled with the ever-changing population of the country, that the acts of a community frequently leave fewer traces than the occurrences of a private family. the public administration is, so to speak, oral and traditionary. but little is committed to writing, and that little is wafted away for ever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by the smallest breeze. the only historical remains in the united states are the newspapers; but if a number be wanting, the chain of time is broken, and the present is severed from the past. i am convinced that in fifty years it will be more difficult to collect authentic documents concerning the social condition of the americans at the present day, than it is to find remains of the administration of france during the middle ages; and if the united states were ever invaded by barbarians, it would be necessary to have recourse to the history of other nations, in order to learn anything of the people which now inhabits them. the instability of the administration has penetrated into the habits of the people: it even appears to suit the general taste, and no one cares for what occurred before his time. no methodical system is pursued; no archives are formed; and no documents are brought together when it would be very easy to do so. where they exist little store is set upon them; and i have among my papers several original public documents which were given to me in answer to some of my inquiries. in america society seems to live from hand to mouth, like an army in the field. nevertheless, the art of administration may undoubtedly be ranked as a science, and no sciences can be improved, if the discoveries and observations of successive generations are not connected together in the order in which they occur. one man, in the short space of his life, remarks a fact; another conceives an idea; the former invents a means of execution, the latter reduces a truth to a fixed proposition; and mankind gathers the fruits of individual experience upon its way, and gradually forms the sciences. but the persons who conduct the administration in america can seldom afford any instruction to each other; and when they assume the direction of society, they simply possess those attainments which are most widely disseminated in the community, and no experience peculiar to themselves. democracy, carried to its farthest limits, is therefore prejudicial to the art of government; and for this reason it is better adapted to a people already versed in the conduct of an administration, than to a nation which is uninitiated in public affairs. this remark, indeed, is not exclusively applicable to the science of administration. although a democratic government is founded upon a very simple and natural principle, it always presupposes the existence of a high degree of culture and enlightenment in society.[ ] at the first glance it may be imagined to belong to the earliest ages of the world; but maturer observation will convince us that it could only come last in the succession of human history. [these remarks upon the "instability of administration" in america, are partly correct, but partly erroneous. it is certainly true that our public men are not educated to the business of government; even our diplomatists are selected with very little reference to their experience in that department. but the universal attention that is paid by the intelligent, to the measures of government and to the discussions to which they give rise, is in itself no slight preparation for the ordinary duties of legislation. and, indeed, this the author subsequently seems to admit. as to there being "no archives formed" of public documents, the author is certainly mistaken. the journals of congress, the journals of state legislatures, the public documents transmitted to and originating in those bodies, are carefully preserved and disseminated through the nation: and they furnish in themselves the materials of a full and accurate history. our great defect, doubtless, is in the want of statistical information. excepting the annual reports of the state of our commerce, made by the secretary of the treasury, under law, and excepting the census which is taken every ten years under the authority of congress, and those taken by the states, we have no official statistics. it is supposed that the author had this species of information in his mind when he alluded to the general deficiency of our archives.--_american editor_.] * * * * * charges levied by the state under the rule of the american democracy. in all communities citizens divisible into three classes.--habits of each of these classes in the direction of public finances.--why public expenditures must tend to increase when the people governs.--what renders the extravagance of a democracy less to be feared in america.--public expenditure under a democracy. before we can affirm whether a democratic form of government is economical or not, we must establish a suitable standard of comparison. the question would be one of easy solution if we were to attempt to draw a parallel between a democratic republic and an absolute monarchy. the public expenditure would be found to be more considerable under the former than under the latter; such is the case with all free states compared to those which are not so. it is certain that despotism ruins individuals by preventing them from producing wealth, much more than by depriving them of the wealth they have produced: it dries up the source of riches, while it usually respects acquired property. freedom, on the contrary, engenders far more benefits than it destroys; and the nations which are favored by free institutions, invariably find that their resources increase even more rapidly than their taxes. my present object is to compare free nations to each other; and to point out the influence of democracy upon the finances of a state. communities, as well as organic bodies, are subject to certain fixed rules in their formation which they cannot evade. they are composed of certain elements which are common to them at all times and under all circumstances. the people may always be mentally divided into three distinct classes. the first of these classes consists of the wealthy; the second, of those who are in easy circumstances; and the third is composed of those who have little or no property, and who subsist more especially by the work which they perform for the two superior orders. the proportion of the individuals who are included in these three divisions may vary according to the condition of society; but the divisions themselves can never be obliterated. it is evident that each of these classes will exercise an influence, peculiar to its own propensities, upon the administration of the finances of the state. if the first of the three exclusively possess the legislative power, it is probable that it will not be sparing of the public funds, because the taxes which are levied on a large fortune only tend to diminish the sum of superfluous enjoyment, and are, in point of fact, but little felt. if the second class has the power of making the laws, it will certainly not be lavish of taxes, because nothing is so onerous as a large impost which is levied upon a small income. the government of the middle classes appears to me to be the most economical, though perhaps not the most enlightened, and certainly not the most generous, of free governments. but let us now suppose that the legislative authority is vested in the lowest orders: there are two striking reasons which show that the tendency of the expenditure will be to increase, not to diminish. as the great majority of those who create the laws are possessed of no property upon which taxes can be imposed, all the money which is spent for the community appears to be spent to their advantage, at no cost of their own; and those who are possessed of some little property readily find means of regulating the taxes so that they are burthensome to the wealthy and profitable to the poor, although the rich are unable to take the same advantage when they are in possession of the government. in countries in which the poor[ ] should be exclusively invested with the power of making the laws, no great economy of public expenditure ought to be expected; that expenditure will always be considerable; either because the taxes do not weigh upon those who levy them, or because they are levied in such a manner as not to weigh upon those classes. in other words, the government of the democracy is the only one under which the power which lays on taxes escapes the payment of them. it may be objected (but the argument has no real weight) that the true interest of the people is indissolubly connected with that of the wealthier portion of the community, since it cannot but suffer by the severe measures to which it resorts. but is it not the true interest of kings to render their subjects happy; and the true interest of nobles to admit recruits into their order on suitable grounds? if remote advantages had power to prevail over the passions and the exigencies of the moment, no such thing as a tyrannical sovereign or an exclusive aristocracy could ever exist. again, it may be objected that the poor are never invested with the sole power of making the laws; but i reply, that wherever universal suffrage has been established, the majority of the community unquestionably exercises the legislative authority, and if it be proved that the poor always constitute the majority, it may be added, with perfect truth, that in the countries in which they possess the elective franchise, they possess the sole power of making laws. but it is certain that in all the nations of the world the greater number has always consisted of those persons who hold no property, or of those whose property is insufficient to exempt them from the necessity of working in order to procure an easy subsistence. universal suffrage does therefore in point of fact invest the poor with the government of society. the disastrous influence which popular authority may sometimes exercise upon the finances of a state, was very clearly seen in some of the democratic republics of antiquity, in which the public treasure was exhausted in order to relieve indigent citizens, or to supply the games and theatrical amusements of the populace. it is true that the representative system was then very imperfectly known, and that, at the present time, the influence of popular passions is less felt in the conduct of public affairs; but it may be believed that the delegate will in the end conform to the principles of his constituents, and favor their propensities as much as their interests. the extravagance of democracy is, however, less to be dreaded in proportion as the people acquires a share of property, because on the one hand the contributions of the rich are then less needed, and on the other, it is more difficult to lay on taxes which do not affect the interests of the lower classes. on this account universal suffrage would be less dangerous in france than in england, because in the latter country the property on which taxes may be levied is vested in fewer hands. america, where the great majority of the citizens is possessed of some fortune, is in a still more favorable position than france. there are still farther causes which may increase the sum of public expenditures in democratic countries. when the aristocracy governs, the individuals who conduct the affairs of state are exempted, by their own station in society, from every kind of privation: they are contented with their position; power and renown are the objects for which they strive; and, as they are placed far above the obscurer throng of citizens, they do not always distinctly perceive how the wellbeing of the mass of the people ought to redound to their own honor. they are not indeed, callous to the sufferings of the poor, but they cannot feel those miseries as acutely as if they were themselves partakers of them. provided that the people appear to submit to its lot, the rulers are satisfied and they demand nothing farther from the government. an aristocracy is more intent upon the means of maintaining its influence, than upon the means of improving its condition. when, on the contrary, the people is invested with the supreme authority, the perpetual sense of their own miseries impels the rulers of society to seek for perpetual meliorations. a thousand different objects are subjected to improvement; the most trivial details are sought out as susceptible of amendment; and those changes which are accompanied with considerable expense, are more especially advocated, since the object is to render the condition of the poor more tolerable, who cannot pay for themselves. moreover, all democratic communities are agitated by an ill-defined excitement, and by a kind of feverish impatience, that engenders a multitude of innovations, almost all of which are attended with expense. in monarchies and aristocracies, the natural taste which the rulers have for power and for renown, is stimulated by the promptings of ambition, and they are frequently incited by these temptations to very costly undertakings. in democracies, where the rulers labor under privations, they can only be courted by such means as improve their wellbeing, and these improvements cannot take place without a sacrifice of money. when a people begins to reflect upon its situation, it discovers a multitude of wants, to which it had not before been subject, and to satisfy these exigencies, recourse must be had to the coffers of the state. hence it arises, that the public charges increase in proportion as civilisation spreads, and that the imposts are augmented as knowledge pervades the community. the last cause which frequently renders a democratic government dearer than any other is, that a democracy does not always succeed in moderating its expenditure, because it does not understand the art of being economical. as the designs which it entertains are frequently changed, and the agents of those designs are more frequently removed, its undertakings are often ill-conducted or left unfinished; in the former case the state spends sums out of all proportion to the end which it proposes to accomplish; in the second, the expense itself is unprofitable. * * * * * tendencies of the american democracy as regards the salaries of public officers. in democracies those who establish high salaries have no chance of profiting by them.--tendency of the american democracy to increase the salaries of subordinate officers, and to lower those of the more important functionaries.--reason of this.--comparative statement of the salaries of public officers in the united states and in france. there is a powerful reason which usually induces democracies to economise upon the salaries of public officers. as the number of citizens who dispense the remuneration is extremely large in democratic countries, so the number of persons who can hope to be benefited by the receipt of it is comparatively small. in aristocratic countries, on the contrary, the individuals who appoint high salaries, have almost always a vague hope of profiting by them. these appointments may be looked upon as a capital which they create for their own use, or at least, as a resource for their children. it must, however, be allowed that a democratic state is most parsimonious toward its principal agents. in america the secondary officers are much better paid, and the dignitaries of the administration much worse than they are elsewhere. these opposite effects result from the same cause: the people fixes the salaries of the public officers in both cases; and the scale of remuneration is determined by the consideration of its own wants. it is held to be fair that the servants of the public should be placed in the same easy circumstances as the public itself;[ ] but when the question turns upon the salaries of the great officers of state, this rule fails, and chance alone can guide the popular decision. the poor have no adequate conceptions of the wants which the higher classes of society may feel. the sum which is scanty to the rich, appears enormous to the poor man, whose wants do not extend beyond the necessaries of life: and in his estimation the governor of a state, with his two or three hundred a year, is a very fortunate and enviable being.[ ] if you undertake to convince him that the representative of a great people ought to be able to maintain some show of splendor in the eyes of foreign nations, he will perhaps assent to your meaning; but when he reflects on his own humble dwelling, and on the hard-earned produce of his wearisome toil, he remembers all that he could do with a salary which you say is insufficient, and he is startled or almost frightened at the sight of such uncommon wealth. besides, the secondary public officer is almost on a level with the people, while the others are raised above it. the former may therefore excite his interest, but the latter begins to arouse his envy. this is very clearly seen in the united states, where the salaries seem to decrease as the authority of those who receive them augments.[ ] under the rule of an aristocracy it frequently happens, on the contrary, that while the high officers are receiving munificent salaries, the inferior ones have not more than enough to procure the necessaries of life. the reason of this fact is easily discoverable from causes very analogous to those to which i have just alluded. if a democracy is unable to conceive the pleasures of the rich, or to see them without envy, an aristocracy is slow to understand, or, to speak more correctly, is unacquainted with the privations of the poor. the poor man is not (if we use the term aright) the fellow of the rich one; but he is the being of another species. an aristocracy is therefore apt to care but little for the fate of its subordinate agents: and their salaries are only raised when they refuse to perform their service for too scanty a remuneration. it is the parsimonious conduct of democracy toward its principal officers, which has countenanced a supposition of far more economical propensities than any which it really possesses. it is true that it scarcely allows the means of honorable subsistence to the individuals who conduct its affairs; but enormous sums are lavished to meet the exigencies or to facilitate the enjoyments of the people.[ ] the money raised by taxation may be better employed, but it is not saved. in general, democracy gives largely to the community, and very sparingly to those who govern it. the reverse is the case in the aristocratic countries, where the money of the state is expended to the profit of the persons who are at the head of affairs. * * * * * difficulty of distinguishing the causes which contribute to the economy of the american government. we are liable to frequent errors in the research of those facts which exercise a serious influence upon the fate of mankind, since nothing is more difficult than to appreciate their real value. one people is naturally inconsistent and enthusiastic; another is sober and calculating; and these characteristics originate in their physical constitution, or in remote causes with which we are unacquainted. there are nations which are fond of parade and the bustle of festivity, and which do not regret the costly gaieties of an hour. others, on the contrary, are attached to more retiring pleasures, and seem almost ashamed of appearing to be pleased. in some countries the highest value is set upon the beauty of public edifices; in others the productions of art are treated with indifference, and everything which is unproductive is looked down upon with contempt. in some renown, in others money, is the ruling passion. independently of the laws, all these causes concur to exercise a very powerful influence upon the conduct of the finances of the state. if the americans never spend the money of the people in galas, it is not only because the imposition of taxes is under the control of the people, but because the people takes no delight in public rejoicings. if they repudiate all ornament from their architecture, and set no store on any but the more practical and homely advantages, it is not only because they live under democratic institutions, but because they are a commercial nation. the habits of private life are continued in public; and we ought carefully to distinguish that economy which depends upon their institutions, from that which is the natural result of their manners and customs. * * * * * whether the expenditure of the united states can be compared to that of france. two points to be established in order to estimate the extent of the public charges, viz.: the national wealth, and the rate of taxation.--the wealth and the charges of france not accurately known.--why the wealth and charges of the union cannot be accurately known.--researches of the author with a view to discover the amount of taxation in pennsylvania.--general symptoms which may serve to indicate the amount of the public charges in a given nation.--result of this investigation for the union. many attempts have recently been made in france to compare the public expenditure of that country with the expenditure of the united states; all these attempts have, however, been unattended by success; and a few words will suffice to show that they could not have had a satisfactory result. in order to estimate the amount of the public charges of a people, two preliminaries are indispensable; it is necessary, in the first place, to know the wealth of that people; and in the second, to learn what portion of that wealth is devoted to the expenditure of the state. to show the amount of taxation without showing the resources which are destined to meet the demand, is to undertake a futile labor; for it is not the expenditure, but the relation of the expenditure to the revenue, which it is desirable to know. the same rate of taxation which may easily be supported by a wealthy contributor, will reduce a poor one to extreme misery. the wealth of nations is composed of several distinct elements, of which population is the first, real property the second, and personal property the third. the first of these three elements may be discovered without difficulty. among civilized nations it is easy to obtain an accurate census of the inhabitants; but the two others cannot be determined with so much facility. it is difficult to take an exact account of all the lands in a country which are under cultivation, with their natural or their acquired value; and it is still more impossible to estimate the entire personal property which is at the disposal of the nation, and which eludes the strictest analysis by the diversity and number of shapes under which it may occur. and, indeed, we find that the most ancient civilized nations of europe, including even those in which the administration is most central, have not succeeded, as yet, in determining the exact condition of their wealth. in america the attempt has never been made; for how would such an investigation be possible in a country where society has not yet settled into habits of regularity and tranquillity; where the national government is not assisted by a multitude of agents whose exertions it can command, and direct to one sole end; and where statistics are not studied, because no one is able to collect the necessary documents, or can find time to peruse them? thus the primary elements of the calculations which have been made in france, cannot be obtained in the union; the relative wealth of the two countries is unknown: the property of the former is not accurately determined, and no means exist of computing that of the latter. i consent, therefore, for the sake of the discussion, to abandon this necessary term of the comparison, and i confine myself to a computation of the actual amount of taxation, without investigating the relation which subsists between the taxation and the revenue. but the reader will perceive that my task has not been facilitated by the limits which i here lay down for my researches. it cannot be doubted that the central administration of france, assisted by all the public officers who are at its disposal, might determine with exactitude the amount of the direct and indirect taxes levied upon the citizens. but this investigation, which no private individual can undertake, has not hitherto been completed by the french government, or, at least, its results have not been made public. we are acquainted with the sum total of the state; we know the amount of the departmental expenditure; but the expenses of the communal divisions have not been computed, and the amount of the public expenses of france is unknown. if we now turn to america, we shall perceive that the difficulties are multiplied and enhanced. the union publishes an exact return of the amount of its expenditure; the budgets of the four-and-twenty states furnish similar returns of their revenues; but the expenses incident to the affairs of the counties and the townships are unknown.[ ] the authority of the federal government cannot oblige the provincial governments to throw any light upon this point; and even if these governments were inclined to afford their simultaneous co-operation, it may be doubted whether they possess the means of procuring a satisfactory answer. independently of the natural difficulties of the task, the political organization of the country would act as a hindrance to the success of their efforts. the county and town magistrates are not appointed by the authorities of the state, and they are not subjected to their control. it is therefore very allowable to suppose, that if the state was desirous of obtaining the returns which we require, its designs would be counteracted by the neglect of those subordinate officers whom it would be obliged to employ.[ ] it is, in point of fact, useless to inquire what the americans might do to forward this inquiry, since it is certain that they have hitherto done nothing at all. there does not exist a single individual at the present day, in america or in europe, who can inform us what each citizen of the union annually contributes to the public charges of the nation.[ ] if i attempt to compare the french budget with the budget of the union, it must be remembered that the latter embraces much fewer objects than the central government of the former country, and that the expenditure must consequently be much smaller. if i contrast the budgets of the departments to those of the states which constitute the union, it must be observed, that as the power and control exercised by the states is much greater than that which is exercised by the departments, their expenditure is also more considerable. as for the budgets of the counties, nothing of the kind occurs in the french system of finance; and it is, again, doubtful whether the corresponding expenses should be referred to the budget of the state or to those of the municipal divisions. municipal expenses exist in both countries, but they are not always analogous. in america the townships discharge a variety of offices which are reserved in france to the departments or the state. it may, moreover, be asked, what is to be understood by the municipal expenses of america. the organization of the municipal bodies or townships differs in the several states: are we to be guided by what occurs in new england or in georgia, in pennsylvania or the state of illinois? a kind of analogy may very readily be perceived between certain budgets in the two countries: but as the elements of which they are composed always differ more or less, no fair comparison can be instituted between them. hence we must conclude, that it is no less difficult to compare the social expenditure, than it is to estimate the relative wealth of france and of america. i will even add, that it would be dangerous to attempt this comparison; for when statistics are not founded upon computations which are strictly accurate, they mislead instead of guiding aright. the mind is easily imposed upon by the false affectation of exactitude which prevails even in the mis-statements of the science, and adopts with confidence the errors which are apparelled in the forms of mathematical truth. we abandon, therefore, our numerical investigation, with the hope of meeting with data of another kind. in the absence of positive documents, we may form an opinion as to the proportion which the taxation of a people bears to its real prosperity, by observing whether its external appearance is flourishing; whether, after having discharged the calls of the state, the poor man retains the means of subsistence, and the rich the means of enjoyment; and whether both classes are contented with their position, seeking however to meliorate it by perpetual exertions, so that industry is never in want of capital, nor capital unemployed by industry. the observer who draws his inferences from these signs will, undoubtedly, be led to the conclusion, that the american of the united states contributes a much smaller portion of his income to the state than the citizen of france. nor, indeed, can the result be otherwise. a portion of the french debt is the consequence of two successive invasions; and the union has no similar calamity to fear. a nation placed upon the continent of europe is obliged to maintain a large standing army; the isolated position of the union enables it to have only , soldiers. the french have a fleet of sail; the americans have vessels.[ ] how, then, can the inhabitant of the union be called upon to contribute as largely as the inhabitant of france? no parallel can be drawn between the finances of two countries so differently situated. it is by examining what actually takes place in the union, and not by comparing the union with france, that we may discover whether the american government is really economical. on casting my eyes over the different republics which form the confederation, i perceive that their governments lack perseverance in their undertakings, and that they exercise no steady control over the men whom they employ. whence i naturally infer, that they must often spend the money of the people to no purpose, or consume more of it than is really necessary to their undertakings. great efforts are made, in accordance with the democratic origin of society, to satisfy the exigencies of the lower orders, to open the career of power to their endeavors, and to diffuse knowledge and comfort among them. the poor are maintained, immense sums are annually devoted to public instruction, all services whatsoever are remunerated, and the most subordinate agents are liberally paid. if this kind of government appears to me to be useful and rational, i am nevertheless constrained to admit that it is expensive. wherever the poor direct public affairs and dispose of the national resources, it appears certain, that as they profit by the expenditure of the state, they are apt to augment that expenditure. i conclude therefore, without having recourse to inaccurate computations, and without hazarding a comparison which might prove incorrect, that the democratic government of the americans is not a cheap government, as is sometimes asserted; and i have no hesitation in predicting, that if the people of the united states is ever involved in serious difficulties, its taxation will speedily be increased to the rate of that which prevails in the greater part of the aristocracies and the monarchies of europe. * * * * * corruption and vices of the rulers in a democracy, and consequent effects upon public morality. in aristocracies rulers sometimes endeavor to corrupt the people.--in democracies rulers frequently show themselves to be corrupt.--in the former their vices are directly prejudicial to the morality of the people.--in the latter their indirect influence is still more pernicious. a distinction must be made, when the aristocratic and the democratic principles mutually inveigh against each other, as tending to facilitate corruption. in aristocratic governments the individuals who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are solely desirous of power. in democracies statesmen are poor, and they have their fortunes to make. the consequence is, that in aristocratic states the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption, and have very little craving for money; while the reverse is the case in democratic nations. but in aristocracies, as those who are desirous of arriving at the head of affairs are possessed of considerable wealth, and as the number of persons by whose assistance they may rise is comparatively small, the government is, if i may use the expression, put up to a sort of auction. in democracies, on the contrary, those who are covetous of power are very seldom wealthy, and the number of citizens who confer that power is extremely great. perhaps in democracies the number of men who might be bought is by no means smaller, but buyers are rarely to be met with; and, besides, it would be necessary to buy so many persons at once, that the attempt is rendered nugatory. many of the men who have been in the administration in france during the last forty years, have been accused of making their fortunes at the expense of the state or of its allies; a reproach which was rarely addressed to the public characters of the ancient monarchy. but in france the practice of bribing electors is almost unknown, while it is notoriously and publicly carried on in england. in the united states i never heard a man accused of spending his wealth in corrupting the populace; but i have often heard the probity of public officers questioned; still more frequently have i heard their success attributed to low intrigues and immoral practices. if, then, the men who conduct the government of an aristocracy sometimes endeavor to corrupt the people, the heads of a democracy are themselves corrupt. in the former case the morality of the people is directly assailed; in the latter, an indirect influence is exercised upon the people, which is still more to be dreaded. as the rulers of democratic nations are almost always exposed to the suspicion of dishonorable conduct, they in some measure lend the authority of the government to the base practices of which they are accused. they thus afford an example which must prove discouraging to the struggles of virtuous independence, and must foster the secret calculations of a vicious ambition. if it be asserted that evil passions are displayed in all ranks of society; that they ascend the throne by hereditary right; and that despicable characters are to be met with at the head of aristocratic nations as well as in the sphere of a democracy; this objection has but little weight in my estimation. the corruption of men who have casually risen to power has a coarse and vulgar infection in it, which renders it contagious to the multitude. on the contrary, there is a kind of aristocratic refinement, and an air of grandeur, in the depravity of the great, which frequently prevents it from spreading abroad. the people can never penetrate the perplexing labyrinth of court intrigue, and it will always have difficulty in detecting the turpitude which lurks under elegant manners, refined tastes, and graceful language. but to pillage the public purse, and to vend the favors of the state, are arts which the meanest villain may comprehend, and hope to practise in his turn. in reality it is far less prejudicial to be a witness to the immorality of the great, than to that immorality which leads to greatness. in a democracy, private citizens see a man of their own rank in life, who rises from that obscure position, and who becomes possessed of riches and of power in a few years: the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy: and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal, is to-day their ruler. to attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant; for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous and less talented than he was. they are therefore led (and not unfrequently their conjecture is a correct one) to impute his success mainly to some of his defects; and an odious mixture is thus formed of the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor. * * * * * efforts of which a democracy is capable. the union has only had one struggle hitherto for its existence.--enthusiasm at the commencement of the war.--indifference toward its close.--difficulty of establishing a military conscription or impressment of seamen in america.--why a democratic people is less capable of sustained effort than another. i here warn the reader that i speak of a government which implicitly follows the real desires of the people, and not of a government which simply commands in its name. nothing is so irresistible as a tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people, because, while it exercises that moral influence which belongs to the decisions of the majority, it acts at the same time with the promptitude and the tenacity of a single man. it is difficult to say what degree of exertion a democratic government may be capable of making, at a crisis in the history of the nation. but no great democratic republic has hitherto existed in the world. to style the oligarchy which ruled over france in , by that name, would be to offer an insult to the republican form of government. the united states afford the first example of the kind. the american union has now subsisted for half a century, in the course of which time its existence has only once been attacked, namely, during the war of independence. at the commencement of that long war, various occurrences took place which betokened an extraordinary zeal for the service of the country.[ ] but as the contest was prolonged, symptoms of private egotism began to show themselves. no money was poured into the public treasury; few recruits could be raised to join the army; the people wished to acquire independence, but was very ill disposed to undergo the privations by which alone it could be obtained. "tax laws," says hamilton in the federalist (no. ), "have in vain been multiplied; new methods to enforce the collection have in vain been tried; the public expectation has been uniformly disappointed; and the treasuries of the states have remained empty. the popular system of administration inherent in the nature of popular government, coinciding with the real scarcity of money incident to a languid and mutilated state of trade, has hitherto defeated every experiment for extensive collections, and has at length taught the different legislatures the folly of attempting them." the united states have not had any serious war to carry on since that period. in order, therefore, to appreciate the sacrifices which democratic nations may impose upon themselves, we must wait until the american people is obliged to put half its entire income at the disposal of the government, as was done by the english; or until it sends forth a twentieth part of its population to the field of battle, as was done by france. in america the use of conscription is unknown, and men are induced to enlist by bounties. the notions and habits of the people of the united states are so opposed to compulsory enlistments, that i do not imagine that it can ever be sanctioned by the laws. what is termed the conscription in france is assuredly the heaviest tax upon the population of that country; yet how could a great continental war be carried on without it? the americans have not adopted the british impressment of seamen, and they have nothing which corresponds to the french system of maritime conscription; the navy, as well as the merchant service, is supplied by voluntary engagement. but it is not easy to conceive how a people can sustain a great maritime war, without having recourse to one or the other of these two systems. indeed, the union, which has fought with some honor upon the seas, has never possessed a very numerous fleet, and the equipment of the small number of american vessels has always been excessively expensive. [the remark that "in america the use of conscription is unknown, and men are induced to enlist by bounties," is not exactly correct. during the last war with great britain, the state of new york, in october, (see the laws of that session, p. ), passed an act to raise troops for the defence of the state, in which the whole body of the militia were directed to be classed, and each class to furnish one soldier, so as to make up the whole number of , directed to be raised. in case of the refusal of a class to furnish a man, one was to be detached from them by ballot, and was compelled to procure a substitute or serve personally. the intervention of peace rendered proceedings under the act unnecessary, and we have not, therefore, the light of experience to form an opinion whether such a plan of raising a military force is practicable. other states passed similar laws. the system of classing was borrowed from the practice of the revolution.--_american editor_.] i have heard american statesmen confess that the union will have great difficulty in maintaining its rank on the seas, without adopting the system of impressment or of maritime conscription; but the difficulty is to induce the people, which exercises the supreme authority, to submit to impressment or any compulsory system. it is incontestable, that in times of danger a free people displays far more energy than one which is not so. but i incline to believe, that this is more especially the case in those free nations in which the democratic element preponderates. democracy appears to me to be much better adapted for the peaceful conduct of society, or for an occasional effort of remarkable vigor, than for the hardy and prolonged endurance of the storms which beset the political existence of nations. the reason is very evident; it is enthusiasm which prompts men to expose themselves to dangers and privations; but they will not support them long without reflection. there is more calculation, even in the impulses of bravery, than is generally attributed to them; and although the first efforts are suggested by passion, perseverance is maintained by a distinct regard of the purpose in view. a portion of what we value is exposed, in order to save the remainder. but it is this distinct perception of the future, founded upon a sound judgment and an enlightened experience, which is most frequently wanting in democracies. the populace is more apt to feel than to reason; and if its present sufferings are great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant upon defeat will be forgotten. another cause tends to render the efforts of a democratic government less persevering than those of an aristocracy. not only are the lower classes less awakened than the higher orders to the good or evil chances of the future, but they are liable to suffer far more acutely from present privations. the noble exposes his life, indeed, but the chance of glory is equal to the chance of harm. if he sacrifices a large portion of his income to the state, he deprives himself for a time of the pleasure of affluence; but to the poor man death is embellished by no pomp or renown; and the imposts which are irksome to the rich are fatal to him. this relative impotence of democratic republics is, perhaps, the greatest obstacle to the foundation of a republic of this kind in europe. in order that such a state should subsist in one country of the old world, it would be necessary that similar institutions should be introduced into all the other nations. i am of opinion that a democratic government tends in the end to increase the real strength of society; but it can never combine, upon a single point and at a given time, so much power as an aristocracy or a monarchy. if a democratic country remained during a whole century subject to a republican government, it would probably at the end of that period be more populous and more prosperous than the neighboring despotic states. but it would have incurred the risk of being conquered much oftener than they would in that lapse of years. * * * * * self-control of the american democracy. the american people acquiesces slowly, or frequently does not acquiesce in what is beneficial to its interests.--the faults of the american democracy are for the most part reparable. the difficulty which a democracy has in conquering the passions, and in subduing the exigencies of the moment, with a view to the future, is conspicuous in the most trivial occurrences in the united states. the people which is surrounded by flatterers, has great difficulty in surmounting its inclinations; and whenever it is solicited to undergo a privation or any kind of inconvenience, even to attain an end which is sanctioned by its own rational conviction, it almost always refuses to comply at first. the deference of the americans to the laws has been very justly applauded; but it must be added, that in america the legislation is made by the people and for the people. consequently, in the united states, the law favors those classes which are most interested in evading it elsewhere. it may therefore be supposed that an offensive law, which should not be acknowledged to be one of immediate utility, would either not be enacted or would not be obeyed. in america there is no law against fraudulent bankruptcies; not because they are few, but because there are a great number of bankruptcies. the dread of being prosecuted as a bankrupt acts with more intensity upon the mind of the majority of the people, than the fear of being involved in losses or ruin by the failure of other parties; and a sort of guilty tolerance is extended by the public conscience, to an offence which every one condemns in his individual capacity. in the new states of the southwest, the citizens generally take justice into their own hands, and murders are of very frequent occurrence. this arises from the rude manners and the ignorance of the inhabitants of those deserts, who do not perceive the utility of investing the law with adequate force, and who prefer duels to prosecutions. some one observed to me one day, in philadelphia, that almost all crimes in america are caused by the abuse of intoxicating liquors, which the lower classes can procure in great abundance from their excessive cheapness.--"how comes it," said i, "that you do not put a duty upon brandy?"--"our legislators," rejoined my informant, "have frequently thought of this expedient; but the task of putting it in operation is a difficult one: a revolt might be apprehended; and the members who should vote for a law of this kind would be sure of losing their seats."--"whence i am to infer," i replied, "that the drinking population constitutes the majority in your country and that temperance is somewhat unpopular." when these things are pointed out to the american statesmen, they content themselves with assuring you that time will operate the necessary change, and that the experience of evil will teach the people its true interests. this is frequently true; although a democracy is more liable to error than a monarch or a body of nobles, the chances of its regaining the right path, when once it has acknowledged its mistake, are greater also; because it is rarely embarrassed by internal interests, which conflict with those of the majority, and resist the authority of reason. but a democracy can only obtain truth as the result of experience; and many nations may forfeit their existence, while they are awaiting the consequences of their errors. the great privilege of the americans does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit. to which it must be added, that a democracy cannot derive substantial benefit from past experience, unless it be arrived at a certain pitch of knowledge and civilisation. there are tribes and peoples whose education has been so vicious, and whose character presents so strange a mixture of passion, of ignorance, and of erroneous notions upon all subjects, that they are unable to discern the cause of their own wretchedness, and they fall a sacrifice to ills with which they are unacquainted. i have crossed vast tracts of country that were formerly inhabited by powerful indian nations which are now extinct; i have myself passed some time in the midst of mutilated tribes, which see the daily decline of their numerical strength, and of the glory of their independence; and i have heard these indians themselves anticipate the impending doom of their race. every european can perceive means which would rescue these unfortunate beings from inevitable destruction. they alone are insensible to the expedient; they feel the woe which year after year heaps upon their heads, but they will perish to a man without accepting the remedy. it would be necessary to employ force to induce them to submit to the protection and the constraint of civilisation. the incessant revolutions which have convulsed the south american provinces for the last quarter of a century have frequently been adverted to with astonishment, and expectations have been expressed that those nations would speedily return to their natural state. but can it be affirmed that the turmoil of revolution is not actually the most natural state of the south american spaniards at the present time? in that country society is plunged into difficulties from which all its efforts are insufficient to rescue it. the inhabitants of that fair portion of the western hemisphere seem obstinately bent on pursuing the work of inward havoc. if they fall into a momentary repose from the effects of exhaustion, that repose prepares them for a fresh state of phrensy. when i consider their condition, which alternates between misery and crime, i should be inclined to believe that despotism itself would be a benefit to them, if it were possible that the words despotism and benefit could ever be united in my mind. * * * * * conduct of foreign affairs by the american democracy. direction given to the foreign policy of the united states by washington and jefferson.--almost all the defects inherent in democratic institutions are brought to light in the conduct of foreign affairs.--their advantages are less perceptible. we have seen that the federal constitution intrusts the permanent direction of the external interests of the nation to the president and the senate;[ ] which tends in some degree to detach the general foreign policy of the union from the control of the people. it cannot therefore be asserted, with truth, that the external affairs of state are conducted by the democracy. the policy of america owes its rise to washington, and after him to jefferson, who established those principles which it observes at the present day. washington said, in the admirable letter which he addressed to his fellow-citizens, and which may be looked upon as his political bequest to the country:-- "the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little _political_ connexion as possible. so far as we have already formed engagements, let them lie fulfilled with perfect good faith. here let us stop. "europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. "our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. if we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel. "why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of european ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? "it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, i mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronising infidelity to existing engagements. i hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. i repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense; but in my opinion it is unnecessary, and would be unwise, to extend them. "taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, in a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." in a previous part of the same letter, washington makes the following admirable and just remark: "the nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is, in some degree, a slave. it is a slave to its animosity or its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." the political conduct of washington was always guided by these maxims. he succeeded in maintaining his country in a state of peace, while all the other nations of the globe were at war; and he laid it down as a fundamental doctrine, that the true interest of the americans consisted in a perfect neutrality with regard to the internal dissensions of the european powers. jefferson went still farther, and introduced a maxim into the policy of the union, which affirms, that "the americans ought never to solicit any privileges from foreign nations, in order not to be obliged to grant similar privileges themselves." these two principles, which were so plain and so just as to be adapted to the capacity of the populace, have greatly simplified the foreign policy of the united states. as the union takes no part in the affairs of europe, it has, properly speaking, no foreign interests to discuss, since it has at present no powerful neighbors on the american continent. the country is as much removed from the passions of the old world by its position, as by the line of policy which it has chosen; and it is neither called upon to repudiate nor to espouse the conflicting interests of europe; while the dissensions of the new world are still concealed within the bosom of the future. the union is free from all pre-existing obligations; and it is consequently enabled to profit by the experience of the old nations of europe, without being obliged, as they are, to make the best of the past, and to adapt it to their present circumstances; or to accept that immense inheritance which they derive from their forefathers--an inheritance of glory mingled with calamities, and of alliances conflicting with national antipathies. the foreign policy of the united states is reduced by its very nature to await the chances of the future history of the nation; and for the present it consists more in abstaining from interference than in exerting its activity. it is therefore very difficult to ascertain, at present, what degree of sagacity the american democracy will display in the conduct of the foreign policy of the country; and upon this point its adversaries, as well as its advocates, must suspend their judgment. as for myself, i have no hesitation in avowing my conviction, that it is most especially in the conduct of foreign relations, that democratic governments appear to me to be decidedly inferior to governments carried on upon different principles. experience, instruction, and habit, may almost always succeed in creating a species of practical discretion in democracies, and that science of the daily occurrences of life which is called good sense. good sense may suffice to direct the ordinary course of society; and among a people whose education has been provided for, the advantages of democratic liberty in the internal affairs of the country may more than compensate for the evils inherent in a democratic government. but such is not always the case in the mutual relations of foreign nations. foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses; and they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those faculties in which it is deficient. democracy is favorable to the increase of the internal resources of a state; it tends to diffuse a moderate independence; it promotes the growth of public spirit, and fortifies the respect which is entertained for law in all classes of society: and these are advantages which only exercise an indirect influence over the relations which one people bears to another. but a democracy is unable to regulate the details of an important undertaking, to persevere in a design, and to work out its execution in the presence of serious obstacles. it cannot combine its measures with secrecy, and will not await their consequences with patience. these are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or to an aristocracy; and they are precisely the means by which an individual people attains a predominant position. if, on the contrary, we observe the natural defects of aristocracy, we shall find that their influence is comparatively innoxious in the direction of the external affairs of a state. the capital fault of which aristocratic bodies may be accused, is that they are more apt to contrive their own advantage than that of the mass of the people. in foreign politics it is rare for the interest of the aristocracy to be in any way distinct from that of the people. the propensity which democracies have to obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence, and to abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice, was very clearly seen in america on the breaking out of the french revolution. it was then as evident to the simplest capacity as it is at the present time, that the interests of the americans forbade them to take any part in the contest which was about to deluge europe with blood, but which could by no means injure the welfare of their own country. nevertheless the sympathies of the people declared themselves with so much violence in behalf of france, that nothing but the inflexible character of washington, and the immense popularity which he enjoyed, could have prevented the americans from declaring war against england. and even then, the exertions, which the austere reason of that great man made to repress the generous but imprudent passions of his fellow-citizens, very nearly deprived him of the sole recompense which he had ever claimed--that of his country's love. the majority then reprobated the line of policy which he adopted and which has since been unanimously approved by the nation.[ ] if the constitution and the favor of the public had not intrusted the direction of the foreign affairs of the country to washington, it is certain that the american nation would at that time have taken the very measures which it now condemns. almost all the nations which have exercised a powerful influence upon the destinies of the world, by conceiving, following up, and executing vast designs--from the romans to the english--have been governed by aristocratic institutions. nor will this be a subject of wonder when we recollect that nothing in the world has so absolute a fixity of purpose as an aristocracy. the mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion; the mind of a king may be biased, and his perseverance in his designs may be shaken--beside which a king is not immortal; but an aristocratic body is too numerous to be led astray by the blandishments of intrigue, and yet not numerous enough to yield readily to the intoxicating influence of unreflecting passion: it has the energy of a firm and enlightened individual, added to the power which it derives from its perpetuity. * * * * * notes: [ ] i here use the word _magistrates_ in the widest sense in which it can be taken; i apply it to all the officers to whom the execution of the laws is intrusted. [ ] see the act th february, , general collection of the laws of massachusetts, vol. ii., p. . it should be added that the jurors are afterward drawn from these lists by lot. [ ] see the act of th february, , general collection of the laws of massachusetts, vol. i., p. . [ ] it is needless to observe, that i speak here of the democratic form of government as applied to a people, not merely to a tribe. [ ] the word _poor_ is used here, and throughout the remainder of this chapter, in a relative and not in an absolute sense. poor men in america would often appear rich in comparison with the poor of europe but they may with propriety be styled poor in comparison with their more affluent countrymen. [ ] the easy circumstances in which secondary functionaries are placed in the united states, result also from another cause, which is independent of the general tendencies of democracy: every kind of private business is very lucrative, and the state would not be served at all if it did not pay its servants. the country is in the position of a commercial undertaking, which is obliged to sustain an expensive competition, notwithstanding its taste for economy. [ ] the state of ohio, which contains a million of inhabitants, gives its governor a salary of only $ , ( _l_.) a year. [ ] to render this assertion perfectly evident, it will suffice to examine the scale of salaries of the agents of the federal government. i have added the salaries attached to the corresponding officers in france, to complete the comparison:-- united states. france. _treasury department_. _ministere des finances_ messenger . . . $ l. huissier, , fr. . . l. clerk with lowest salary clerk with lowest salary, . . . , , to , fr. . to clerk with highest clerk with highest salary salary. . , , to , fr. . to chief clerk . , secretaire-general, , fr. secretary of state . , , the minister, , fr. . , the president . . , , the king, , , fr. , i have perhaps done wrong in selecting france as my standard of comparison. in france the democratic tendencies of the nation exercise an ever-increasing influence upon the government, and the chambers show a disposition to raise the lowest salaries and to lower the principal ones. thus the minister of finance, who received , fr. under the empire, receives , fr., in ; the directeurs-generaux of finance, who then received , fr., now receive only , fr. [ ] see the american budgets for the cost of indigent citizens and gratuitous instruction. in , , _l_. were spent in the state of new york for the maintenance of the poor; and at least , _l_. were devoted to gratuitous instruction. (williams's new york annual register, , pp. , .) the state of new york contained only , , inhabitants in the year ; which is not more than double the amount of population in the department du nord in france. [ ] the americans, as we have seen, have four separate budgets; the union, the states, the counties, and the townships, having each severally their own. during my stay in america i made every endeavor to discover the amount of the public expenditure in the townships and counties of the principal states of the union, and i readily obtained the budget of the larger townships, but i found it quite impossible to procure that of the smaller ones. i possess, however, some documents relating to county expenses, which, although incomplete, are still curious. i have to thank mr. richards, mayor of philadelphia, for the budgets of thirteen of the counties of pennsylvania, viz.: lebanon, centre, franklin, fayette, montgomery, luzerne, dauphin, butler, allegany, columbia, northampton, northumberland, and philadelphia, for the year . their population at that time consisted of , inhabitants. on looking at the map of pennsylvania, it will be seen that these thirteen counties are scattered in every direction, and so generally affected by the causes which usually influence the condition of a country, that they may easily be supposed to furnish a correct average of the financial state of the counties of pennsylvania in general; and thus, upon reckoning that the expenses of these counties amounted in the year to about , _l_., or nearly _s_. for each inhabitant, and calculating that each of them contributed in the same year about _s_. _d_. toward the union, and about _s_. to the state of pennsylvania, it appears that they each contributed as their share of all the public expenses (except those of the townships), the sum of _s_. _d_. this calculation is doubly incomplete, as it applies only to a single year and to one part of the public charges; but it has at least the merit of not being conjectural. [ ] those who have attempted to draw a comparison between the expenses of france and america, have at once perceived that no such comparison could be drawn between the total expenditures of the two countries; but they have endeavored to contrast detached portions of this expenditure. it may readily be shown that this second system is not at all less defective than the first. [ ] even if we knew the exact pecuniary contributions of every french and american citizen to the coffers of the state, we should only come at a portion of the truth. governments not only demand supplies of money, but they call for personal services, which may be looked upon as equivalent to a given sum. when a state raises an army, beside the pay of the troops which is furnished by the entire nation, each soldier must give up his time, the value of which depends on the use he might make of it if he were not in the service. the same remark applies to the militia: the citizen who is in the militia devotes a certain portion of valuable time to the maintenance of the public peace, and he does in reality surrender to the state those earnings which he is prevented from gaining. many other instances might be cited in addition to these. the governments of france and america both levy taxes of this kind, which weigh upon the citizens; but who can estimate with accuracy their relative amount in the two countries? this, however, is not the last of the difficulties which prevent us from comparing the expenditure of the union with that of france. the french government contracts certain obligations which do not exist in america, and _vice versâ_. the french government pays the clergy; in america, the voluntary principle prevails. in america, there is a legal provision for the poor; in france they are abandoned to the charity of the public. the french public officers are paid by a fixed salary: in america they are allowed certain perquisites. in france, contributions in kind take place on very few roads; in america upon almost all the thoroughfares: in the former country the roads are free to all travellers: in the latter turnpikes abound. all these differences in manner in which contributions are levied in the two countries, enhance the difficulty of comparing their expenditure; for there are certain expenses which the citizens would not be subjected to, or which would at any rate be much less considerable, if the state did not take upon itself to act in the name of the public. [ ] see the details in the budget of the french minister of marine, and for america, the national calendar of , p. . [ ] one of the most singular of these occurrences was the resolution which the americans took of temporarily abandoning the use of tea. those who know that men usually cling more to their habits than to their life, will doubtless admire this great and obscure sacrifice which was made by a whole people. [ ] "the president," says the constitution, art. ii., sect. , § , "shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur." the reader is reminded that the senators are returned for a term of six years, and that they are chosen by the legislature of each state. [ ] see the fifth volume of marshall's life of washington. "in a government constituted like that of the united states," he says, "it is impossible for the chief magistrate, however firm he may be, to oppose for any length of time the torrents of popular opinion; and the prevalent opinion of that day seemed to incline to war. in fact, in the session of congress held at the time, it was frequently seen that washington had lost the majority in the house of representatives." the violence of the language used against him in public was extreme, and in a political meeting they did not scruple to compare him indirectly to the treacherous arnold. "by the opposition," says marshall, "the friends of the administration were declared to be an aristocratic and corrupt faction, who, from a desire to introduce monarchy, were hostile to france, and under the influence of britain; that they were a paper nobility, whose extreme sensibility at every measure which threatened the funds, induced a tame submission to injuries and insults, which the interests and honor of the nation required them to resist." chapter xiv. what the real advantages are which american society derives from the government of the democracy. before i enter upon the subject of the present chapter, i am induced to remind the reader of what i have more than once adverted to in the course of this book. the political institutions of the united states appear to me to be one of the forms of government which a democracy may adopt but i do not regard the american constitution as the best, or as the only one which a democratic people may establish. in showing the advantages which the americans derive from the government of democracy, i am therefore very far from meaning, or from believing, that similar advantages can be obtained only from the same laws. * * * * * general tendency of the laws under the rule of the american democracy, and habits of those who apply them. defects of a democratic government easy to be discovered.--its advantages only to be discerned by long observation.--democracy in america often inexpert, but the general tendency of the laws advantageous.--in the american democracy public officers have no permanent interests distinct from those of the majority.--result of this state of things. the defects and the weaknesses of a democratic government may very readily be discovered; they are demonstrated by the most flagrant instances, while its beneficial influence is less perceptibly exercised. a single glance suffices to detect its evil consequences, but its good qualities can only be discerned by long observation. the laws of the american democracy are frequently defective or incomplete; they sometimes attack vested rights, or give a sanction to others which are dangerous to the community; but even if they were good, the frequent changes which they undergo would be an evil. how comes it, then, that the american republics prosper, and maintain their position? in the consideration of laws, a distinction must be carefully observed between the end at which they aim, and the means by which they are directed to that end; between their absolute and their relative excellence. if it be the intention of the legislator to favor the interests of the minority at the expense of the majority, and if the measures he takes are so combined as to accomplish the object he has in view with the least possible expense of time and exertion, the law may be well drawn up, although its purpose be bad; and the more efficacious it is, the greater is the mischief which it causes. democratic laws generally tend to promote the welfare of the greatest possible number; for they emanate from a majority of the citizens, who are subject to error, but who cannot have an interest opposed to their own advantage. the laws of an aristocracy tend, on the contrary, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the minority, because an aristocracy, by its very nature, constitutes a minority. it may therefore be asserted, as a general proposition, that the purpose of a democracy, in the conduct of its legislation, is useful to a greater number of citizens than that of an aristocracy. this is, however, the sum total of its advantages. aristocracies are infinitely more expert in the science of legislation than democracies ever can be. they are possessed of a self-control which protects them from the errors of a temporary excitement; and they form lasting designs which they mature with the assistance of favorable opportunities. aristocratic government proceeds with the dexterity of art; it understands how to make the collective force of all its laws converge at the same time to a given point. such is not the case with democracies, whose laws are almost always ineffective, or inopportune. the means of democracy are therefore more imperfect than those of aristocracy, and the measures which it unwittingly adopts are frequently opposed to its own cause; but the object it has in view is more useful. let us now imagine a community so organized by nature, or by its constitution, that it can support the transitory action of bad laws, and it can await, without destruction, the general tendency of the legislation: we shall then be able to conceive that a democratic government, notwithstanding its defects, will be most fitted to conduce to the prosperity of this community. this is precisely what has occurred in the united states; and i repeat, what i have before remarked, that the great advantage of the americans consists in their being able to commit faults which they may afterward repair. an analogous observation may be made respecting officers. it is easy to perceive that the american democracy frequently errs in the choice of the individuals to whom it intrusts the power of the administration; but it is more difficult to say why the state prospers under their rule. in the first place it is to be remarked, that if in a democratic state the governors have less honesty and less capacity than elsewhere, the governed on the other hand are more enlightened and more attentive to their interests. as the people in democracies is more incessantly vigilant in its affairs, and more jealous of its rights, it prevents its representatives from abandoning that general line of conduct which its own interest prescribes. in the second place, it must be remembered that if the democratic magistrate is more apt to misuse his power, he possesses it for a shorter period of time. but there is yet another reason which is still more general and conclusive. it is no doubt of importance to the welfare of nations that they should be governed by men of talents and virtue; but it is perhaps still more important that the interests of those men should not differ from the interests of the community at large; for if such were the case, virtues of a high order might become useless, and talents might be turned to a bad account. i say that it is important that the interests of the persons in authority should not conflict with or oppose the interests of the community at large; but i do not insist upon their having the same interests as the _whole_ population, because i am not aware that such a state of things ever existed in any country. no political form has hitherto been discovered, which is equally favorable to the prosperity and the development of all the classes into which society is divided. these classes continue to form, as it were, a certain number of distinct nations in the same nation; and experience has shown that it is no less dangerous to place the fate of these classes exclusively in the hands of any one of them, than it is to make one people the arbiter of the destiny of another. when the rich alone govern, the interest of the poor is always endangered; and when the poor make the laws, that of the rich incurs very serious risks. the advantage of democracy does not consist, therefore, as has been sometimes asserted, in favoring the prosperity of all, but simply in contributing to the well-being of the greatest possible number. the men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs in the united states, are frequently inferior, both in capacity and of morality, to those whom aristocratic institutions would raise to power. but their interest is identified and confounded with that of the majority of their fellow-citizens. they may frequently be faithless, and frequently mistake; but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct opposed to the will of the majority; and it is impossible that they should give a dangerous or an exclusive tendency to the government. the mal-administration of a democratic magistrate is a mere isolated fact, which only occurs during the short period for which he is elected. corruption and incapacity do not act as common interests, which may connect men permanently with one another. a corrupt or an incapable magistrate will concert his measures with another magistrate, simply because that individual is as corrupt and as incapable as himself; and these two men will never unite their endeavors to promote the corruption and inaptitude of their remote posterity. the ambition and manoeuvres of the one will serve, on the contrary, to unmask the other. the vices of a magistrate, in democratic states, are usually peculiar to his own person. but under aristocratic governments public men are swayed by the interests of their order, which, if it is sometimes confounded with the interests of the majority, is very frequently distinct from them. this interest is the common and lasting bond which unites them together; it induces them to coalesce, and to combine their efforts in order to attain an end which does not always ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number; and it serves not only to connect the persons in authority, but to unite them to a considerable portion of the community, since a numerous body of citizens belongs to the aristocracy, without being invested with official functions. the aristocratic magistrate is therefore constantly supported by a portion of the community, as well as by the government of which he is a member. the common purpose which connects the interest of the magistrates in aristocracies, with that of a portion of their contemporaries, identifies it with that of future generations; their influence belongs to the future as much as to the present. the aristocratic magistrate is urged at the same time toward the same point, by the passions of the community, by his own, and i may almost add, by those of his posterity. is it, then, wonderful that he does not resist such repeated impulses? and, indeed, aristocracies are often carried away by the spirit of their order without being corrupted by it; and they unconsciously fashion society to their own ends, and prepare it for their own descendants. the english aristocracy is perhaps the most liberal which ever existed, and no body of men has ever, uninterruptedly, furnished so many honorable and enlightened individuals to the government of a country. it cannot, however, escape observation, that in the legislation of england the good of the poor has been sacrificed to the advantage of the rich, and the rights of the majority to the privileges of the few. the consequence is that england, at the present day, combines the extremes of fortune in the bosom of her society; and her perils and calamities are almost equal to her power and her renown. in the united states, where the public officers have no interests to promote connected with their caste, the general and constant influence of the government is beneficial, although the individuals who conduct it are frequently unskilful and sometimes contemptible. there is, indeed, a secret tendency in democratic institutions to render the exertions of the citizens subservient to the prosperity of the community, notwithstanding their private vices and mistakes; while in aristocratic institutions there is a secret propensity, which, notwithstanding the talents and the virtues of those who conduct the government, leads them to contribute to the evils which oppress their fellow creatures. in aristocratic governments public men may frequently do injuries which they do not intend; and in democratic states they produce advantages which they never thought of. * * * * * public spirit in the united states. patriotism of instinct.--patriotism of reflection.--their different characteristics.--nations ought to strive to acquire the second when the first has disappeared.--efforts of the americans to acquire it.--interest of the individual intimately connected with that of the country. there is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. this natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansion of their fathers. they enjoy the tranquillity which it affords them; they cling to the peaceful habits which they have contracted within its bosom; they are attached to the reminiscences which it awakens, and they are even pleased by the state of obedience in which they are placed. this patriotism is sometimes stimulated by religious enthusiasm, and then it is capable of making the most prodigious efforts. it is in itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and of sentiment. by some nations the monarch has been regarded as a personification of the country; and the fervor of patriotism being converted into the fervor of loyalty, they took a sympathetic pride in his conquests, and gloried in his power. at one time, under the ancient monarchy, the french felt a sort of satisfaction in the sense of their dependence upon the arbitrary pleasure of their king, and they were wont to say with pride: "we are the subjects of the most powerful king in the world." but, like all instinctive passions, this kind of patriotism is more apt to prompt transient exertion than to supply the motives of continuous endeavor. it may save the state in critical circumstances, but it will not unfrequently allow the nation to decline in the midst of peace. while the manners of a people are simple, and its faith unshaken, while society is steadily based upon traditional institutions, whose legitimacy has never been contested, this instinctive patriotism is wont to endure. but there is another species of attachment to a country which is more rational than the one we have been describing. it is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful and more lasting; it is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights, and in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen. a man comprehends the influence which the prosperity of his country has upon his own welfare; he is aware that the laws authorize him to contribute his assistance to that prosperity, and he labors to promote it as a portion of his interest in the first place, and as a portion of his right in the second. but epochs sometimes occur, in the course of the existence of a nation, at which the ancient customs of a people are changed, public morality destroyed, religious belief disturbed, and the spell of tradition broken, while the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect, and the civil rights of the community are ill secured, or confined within very narrow limits. the country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to look upon as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. the country is lost to their senses, they can neither discover it under its own, nor under borrowed features, and they intrench themselves within the dull precincts of a narrow egotism. they are emancipated from prejudice, without having acknowledged the empire of reason; they are animated neither by the instinctive patriotism of monarchical subjects, nor by the thinking patriotism of republican citizens; but they have stopped half-way between the two, in the midst of confusion and of distress. in this predicament, to retreat is impossible; for a people cannot restore the vivacity of its earlier times, any more than a man can return to the innocence and the bloom of childhood; such things may be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. the only thing, then, which remains to be done, is to proceed, and to accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is gone by for ever. i am certainly very far from averring, that, in order to obtain this result, the exercise of political rights should be immediately granted to all the members of the community. but i maintain that the most powerful, and perhaps the only means of interesting men in the welfare of their country, which we still possess, is to make them partakers in the government. at the present time civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable from the exercise of political rights; and i hold that the number of citizens will be found to augment or decrease in europe in proportion as those rights are extended. in the united states, the inhabitants were thrown but as yesterday upon the soil which they now occupy, and they brought neither customs nor traditions with them there; they meet each other for the first time with no previous acquaintance; in short, the instinctive love of their country can scarcely exist in their minds; but every one takes as zealous an interest in the affairs of his township, his country, and of the whole state, as if they were his own, because every one, in his sphere, takes an active part in the government of society. the lower orders in the united states are alive to the perception of the influence exercised by the general prosperity upon their own welfare; and simple as this observation is, it is one which is but too rarely made by the people. but in america the people regard this prosperity as the result of its own exertions; the citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his private interest, and he co-operates in its success, not so much from a sense of pride or of duty, as from what i shall venture to term cupidity. it is unnecessary to study the institutions and the history of the americans in order to discover the truth of this remark, for their manners render it sufficiently evident. as the american participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is himself. the consequence is that his national pride resorts to a thousand artifices, and to all the petty tricks of individual vanity. nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the americans. a stranger may be well inclined to praise many of the institutions of their country, but he begs permission to blame some of the peculiarities which he observes--a permission which is however inexorably refused. america is therefore a free country, in which, lest anybody should be hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed to speak freely of private individuals or of the state; of the citizens or of the authorities; of public or of private undertakings; or, in short, of anything at all, except it be of the climate and the soil; and even then americans will be found ready to defend either the one or the other, as if they had been contrived by the inhabitants of the country. in our times, option must be made between the patriotism of all and the government of a few; for the force and activity which the first confers, are irreconcilable with the guarantees of tranquillity which the second furnishes. * * * * * notion of rights in the united states. no great people without a notion of rights.--how the notion of rights can be given to a people.--respect of rights in the united states.--whence it arises. after the idea of virtue, i am acquainted with no higher principle than that of right; or, to speak more accurately, these two ideas are commingled in one. the idea of right is simply that of virtue introduced into the political world. it is the idea of right which enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny; and which taught them to remain independent without arrogance, as well as to obey without servility. the man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he obeys the mandate of one who possesses that right of authority which he acknowledges in a fellow creature, he rises in some measure above the person who delivers the command. there are no great men without virtue, and there are no great nations--it may also be added that there would be no society--without the notion of rights; for what is the condition of a mass of rational and intelligent beings who are only united together by the bond of force? i am persuaded that the only means which we possess at the present time of inculcating the notion of rights, and of rendering it, as it were, palpable to the senses, is to invest all the members of the community with the peaceful exercise of certain rights: this is very clearly seen in children, who are men without the strength and the experience of manhood. when a child begins to move in the midst of the objects which surround him, he is instinctively led to turn everything which he can lay his hands upon to his own purpose; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things, and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be deprived of his possessions, he becomes more circumspect, and he observes those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. the principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys, is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own. in america those complaints against property in general, which are so frequent in europe, are never heard, because in america there are no paupers; and as every one has property of his own to defend, every one recognizes the principle upon which he holds it. the same thing occurs in the political world. in america the lowest classes have conceived a very high notion of political rights, because they exercise those rights; and they refrain from attacking those of other people, in order to ensure their own from attack. while in europe the same classes sometimes recalcitrate even against the supreme power, the american submits without a murmur to the authority of the pettiest magistrate. this truth is exemplified by the most trivial details of national peculiarities. in france very few pleasures are exclusively reserved for the higher classes; the poor are admitted wherever the rich are received; and they consequently behave with propriety, and respect whatever contributes to the enjoyments in which they themselves participate. in england, where wealth has a monopoly of amusement as well as of power, complaints are made that whenever the poor happen to steal into the enclosures which are reserved for the pleasures of the rich, they commit acts of wanton mischief: can this be wondered at, since care has been taken that they should have nothing to lose? the government of the democracy brings the notion of political rights to the level of the humblest citizens, just as the dissemination of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all the members of the community; and i confess that, to my mind, this is one of its greatest advantages. i do not assert that it is easy to teach men to exercise political rights; but i maintain that when it is possible, the effects which result from it are highly important: and i add that if there ever was a time at which such an attempt ought to be made, that time is our own. it is clear that the influence of religious belief is shaken, and that the notion of divine rights is declining; it is evident that public morality is vitiated, and the notion of moral rights is also disappearing: these are general symptoms of the substitution of argument for faith, and of calculation for the impulses of sentiment. if, in the midst of this general disruption, you do not succeed in connecting the notion of rights with that of personal interest, which is the only immutable point in the human heart, what means will you have of governing the world except by fear? when i am told that since the laws are weak and the populace is wild, since passions are excited and the authority of virtue is paralyzed, no measures must be taken to increase the rights of the democracy; i reply that it is for these very reasons that some measures of the kind must be taken; and i am persuaded that governments are still more interested in taking them than society at large, because governments are liable to be destroyed, and society cannot perish. i am not, however, inclined to exaggerate the example which america furnishes. in those states the people was invested with political rights at a time when they could scarcely be abused, for the citizens were few in number and simple in their manners. as they have increased, the americans have not augmented the power of the democracy, but they have, if i may use the expression, extended its dominions. it cannot be doubted that the moment at which political rights are granted to a people that had before been without them, is a very critical, though it be a very necessary one. a child may kill before he is aware of the value of life; and he may deprive another person of his property before he is aware that his own may be taken away from him. the lower orders, when first they are invested with political rights, stand in relation to those rights, in the same position as a child does to the whole of nature, and the celebrated adage may then be applied to them, _homo, puer robustus_. this truth may even be perceived in america. the states in which the citizens have enjoyed their rights longest are those in which they make the best use of them. it cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. such is not the case with despotic institutions; despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills; it supports the right, it protects the oppressed, and it maintains public order. the nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity which accrues to it, until it is roused to a sense of its own misery. liberty, on the contrary, is generally established in the midst of agitation, it is perfected by civil discord, and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old. * * * * * respect for the law in the united states. respect of the americans for the law.--parental affection which they entertain for it.--personal interest of every one to increase the authority of the law. it is not always feasible to consult the whole people, either directly or indirectly, in the formation of the law; but it cannot be denied that when such a measure is possible, the authority of the law is very much augmented. this popular origin, which impairs the excellence and the wisdom of legislation, contributes prodigiously to increase its power. there is an amazing strength in the expression of the determination of a whole people; and when it declares itself, the imagination of those who are most inclined to contest it, is overawed by its authority. the truth of this fact is very well known by parties; and they consequently strive to make out a majority whenever they can. if they have not the greater number of voters on their side, they assert that the true majority abstained from voting; and if they are foiled even there, they have recourse to the body of those persons who had no votes to give. in the united states, except slaves, servants, and paupers in the receipt of relief from the townships, there is no class of persons who do not exercise the elective franchise, and who do not contribute indirectly to make the laws. those who design to attack the laws must consequently either modify the opinion of the nation or trample upon its decision. a second reason, which is still more weighty, may be farther adduced: in the united states every one is personally interested in enforcing the obedience of the whole community to the law; for as the minority may shortly rally the majority to its principles, it is interested in professing that respect for the decrees of the legislator, which it may soon have occasion to claim for its own. however irksome an enactment may be, the citizen of the united states complies with it, not only because it is the work of the majority, but because it originates in his own authority; and he regards it as a contract to which he is himself a party. in the united states, then, that numerous and turbulent multitude does not exist, which always looks upon the law as its natural enemy, and accordingly surveys it with fear and with distrust. it is impossible, on the other hand, not to perceive that all classes display the utmost reliance upon the legislation of their country, and that they are attached to it by a kind of parental affection. i am wrong, however, in saying all classes; for as in america the european scale of authority is inverted, the wealthy are there placed in a position analogous to that of the poor in the old world, and it is the opulent classes which frequently look upon the law with suspicion. i have already observed that the advantage of democracy is not, as has been sometimes asserted, that it protects the interests of the whole community, but simply that it protects those of the majority. in the united states, where the poor rule, the rich have always some reason to dread the abuses of their power. this natural anxiety of the rich may produce a sullen dissatisfaction, but society is not disturbed by it; for the same reason which induces the rich to withhold their confidence in the legislative authority, makes them obey its mandates; their wealth, which prevents them from making the law, prevents them from withstanding it. among civilized nations revolts are rarely excited except by such persons as have nothing to lose by them; and if the laws of a democracy are not always worthy of respect, at least they always obtain it; for those who usually infringe the laws have no excuse for not complying with the enactments they have themselves made, and by which they are themselves benefited, while the citizens whose interests might be promoted by the infraction of them, are induced, by their character and their station, to submit to the decisions of the legislature, whatever they may be. beside which, the people in america obeys the law not only because it emanates from the popular authority, but because that authority may modify it in any points which may prove vexatory; a law is observed because it is a self-imposed evil in the first place, and an evil of transient duration in the second. * * * * * activity which pervades all the branches of the body politic in the united states; influence which it exercises upon society. more difficult to conceive the political activity which pervades the united states than the freedom and equality which reign here.--the great activity which perpetually agitates the legislative bodies is only an episode to the general activity.--difficult for an american to confine himself to his own business.--political agitation extends to all social intercourse.--commercial activity of the americans partly attributable to this cause.--indirect advantages which society derives from a democratic government. on passing from a country in which free institutions are established to one where they do not exist, the traveller is struck by the change; in the former all is bustle and activity, in the latter everything is calm and motionless. in the one, melioration and progress are the general topics of inquiry; in the other, it seems as if the community only aspired to repose in the enjoyment of the advantages which it has acquired. nevertheless, the country which exerts itself so strenuously to promote its welfare is generally more wealthy and more prosperous than that which appears to be so contented with its lot; and when we compare them together, we can scarcely conceive how so many new wants are daily felt in the former, while so few seem to occur in the latter. if this remark is applicable to those free countries in which monarchical and aristocratic institutions subsist, it is still more striking with regard to democratic republics. in these states it is not only a portion of the people which is busied with the melioration of its social condition, but the whole community is engaged in the task; and it is not the exigencies and the convenience of a single class for which a provision is to be made, but the exigencies and the convenience of all ranks of life. it is not impossible to conceive the surpassing liberty which the americans enjoy; some idea may likewise be formed of the extreme equality which subsists among them; but the political activity which pervades the united states must be seen in order to be understood. no sooner do you set foot upon the american soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants. everything is in motion around you; here, the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; there, the election of a representative is going on; a little further, the delegates of a district are posting to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; or, in another place, the laborers of a village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon the project of a road or a public school. meetings are called for the sole purpose of declaring their disapprobation of the line of conduct pursued by the government; while in other assemblies the citizens salute the authorities of the day as the fathers of their country. societies are formed, which regard drunkenness as the principal cause of the evils under which the state labors, and which solemnly bind themselves to give a constant example of temperance.[ ] the great political agitation of the american legislative bodies, which is the only kind of excitement that attracts the attention of foreign countries, is a mere episode or a sort of continuation of that universal movement which originates in the lowest classes of the people and extends successively to all the ranks of society. it is impossible to spend more efforts in the pursuit of enjoyment. the cares of political life engross a most prominent place in the occupation of a citizen in the united states; and almost the only pleasure of which an american has any idea, is to take a part in the government, and to discuss the part he has taken. this feeling pervades the most trifling habits of life; even the women frequently attend public meetings, and listen to political harangues as a recreation after their household labors. debating clubs are to a certain extent a substitute for theatrical entertainments: an american cannot converse, but he can discuss; and when he attempts to talk he falls into a dissertation. he speaks to you as if he were addressing a meeting; and if he should warm in the course of the discussion, he will infallibly say "gentlemen," to the person with whom he is conversing. in some countries the inhabitants display a certain repugnance to avail themselves of the political privileges with which the law invests them; it would seem that they set too high a value upon their time to spend it on the interests of the community; and they prefer to withdraw within the exact limits of a wholesome egotism, marked out by four sunk fences and a quickset hedge. but if an american were condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable.[ ] i am persuaded that if ever a despotic government is established in america, it will find it more difficult to surmount the habits which free institutions have engendered, than to conquer the attachment of the citizens to freedom. this ceaseless agitation which democratic government has introduced into the political world, influences all social intercourse. i am not sure that upon the whole this is not the greatest advantage of democracy; and i am much less inclined to applaud it for what it does, than for what it causes to be done. it is incontestable that the people frequently conducts public business very ill; but it is impossible that the lower orders should take a part in public business without extending the circle of their ideas, and without quitting the ordinary routine of their mental acquirements. the humblest individual who is called upon to co-operate in the government of society, acquires a certain degree of self-respect; and as he possesses authority, he can command the services of minds much more enlightened than his own. he is canvassed by a multitude of applicants, who seek to deceive him in a thousand different ways, but who instruct him by their deceit. he takes a part in political undertakings which did not originate in his own conception, but which give him a taste for undertakings of the kind. new meliorations are daily pointed out in the property which he holds in common with others, and this gives him the desire of improving that property which is more peculiarly his own. he is perhaps neither happier nor better than those who came before him, but he is better informed and more active. i have no doubt that the democratic institutions of the united states, joined to the physical constitution of the country, are the cause (not the direct, as is so often asserted, but the indirect cause) of the prodigious commercial activity of the inhabitants. it is not engendered by the laws, but the people learns how to promote it by the experience derived from legislation. when the opponents of democracy assert that a single individual performs the duties which he undertakes much better than the government of the community, it appears to me that they are perfectly right. the government of an individual, supposing an equality of instruction on either side, is more consistent, more persevering, and more accurate than that of a multitude, and it is much better qualified judiciously to discriminate the characters of the men it employs. if any deny what i advance, they have certainly never seen a democratic government, or have formed their opinion upon very partial evidence. it is true that even when local circumstances and the disposition of the people allow democratic institutions to subsist, they never display a regular and methodical system of government. democratic liberty is far from accomplishing all the projects it undertakes, with the skill of an adroit despotism. it frequently abandons them before they have borne their fruits, or risks them when the consequences may prove dangerous; but in the end it produces more than any absolute government, and if it do fewer things well, it does a great number of things. under its sway, the transactions of the public administration are not nearly so important as what is done by private exertion. democracy does not confer the most skilful kind of government upon the people, but it produces that which the most skilful governments are frequently unable to awaken, namely, an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it, and which may, under favorable circumstances, beget the most amazing benefits. these are the true advantages of democracy. in the present age, when the destinies of christendom seem to be in suspense, some hasten to assail democracy as its foe while it is yet in its early growth; and others are ready with their vows of adoration for this new duty which is springing forth from chaos: but both parties are very imperfectly acquainted with the object of their hatred or of their desires; they strike in the dark, and distribute their blows by mere chance. we must first understand what the purport of society and the aim of government are held to be. if it be your intention to confer a certain elevation upon the human mind, and to teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings; to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantage; to give birth to living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations; nor unprepared for those high enterprises, which, whatever be the result of its efforts, will leave a name for ever famous in time--if you believe such to be the principal object of society, you must avoid the government of democracy, which would be a very uncertain guide to the end you have in view. but if you hold it to be expedient to divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and to the acquirement of the necessaries of life; if a clear understanding be more profitable to men than genius; if your object be not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but to create habits of peace; if you had rather behold vices than crimes, and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offences be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant state of society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of opinion that the principal object of a government is not to confer the greatest possible share of power and of glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest degree of enjoyment, and the least degree of misery, to each of the individuals who compose it--if such be your desires, you can have no surer means of satisfying them than by equalizing the condition of men, and establishing democratic institutions. but if the time be past at which such a choice was possible, and if some superhuman power impel us toward one or the other of these two governments without consulting our wishes, let us at least endeavor to make the best of that which is allotted to us: and let us so inquire into its good and its evil propensities as to be able to foster the former, and repress the latter to the utmost. * * * * * notes: [ ] at the time of my stay in the united states the temperance societies already consisted of more than , members; and their effect had been to diminish the consumption of fermented liquors by , gallons per annum in the state of pennsylvania alone. [ ] the same remark was made at rome under the first caesars. montesquieu somewhere alludes to the excessive despondency of certain roman citizens who, after the excitement of political life, were all at once flung back into the stagnation of private life. chapter xv. unlimited power of the majority in the united states and its consequences. natural strength of the majority in democracies.--most of the american constitutions have increased this strength by artificial means.--how this has been done.--pledged delegates.--moral power of the majority.--opinions as to its infallibility.--respect for its rights, how augmented in the united states. the very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority: for there is nothing in democratic states which is capable of resisting it. most of the american constitutions have sought to increase this natural strength of the majority by artificial means.[ ] the legislature is, of all political institutions, the one which is most easily swayed by the wishes of the majority. the americans determined that the members of the legislature should be elected by the people immediately, and for a very brief term, in order to subject them not only to the general convictions, but even to the daily passions of their constituents. the members of both houses are taken from the same class in society, and are nominated in the same manner; so that the modifications of the legislative bodies are almost as rapid and quite as irresistible as those of a single assembly. it is to a legislature thus constituted, that almost all the authority of the government has been intrusted. but while the law increased the strength of those authorities which of themselves were strong, it enfeebled more and more those which were naturally weak. it deprived the representatives of the executive of all stability and independence; and by subjecting them completely to the caprices of the legislature, it robbed them completely of the slender influence which the nature of a democratic government might have allowed them to retain. in several states the judicial power was also submitted to the elective discretion of the majority; and in all of them its existence was made to depend on the pleasure of the legislative authority, since the representatives were empowered annually to regulate the stipend of the judges. custom, however, has done even more than law. a proceeding which will in the end set all the guarantees of representative government at naught, is becoming more and more general in the united states: it frequently happens that the electors, who choose a delegate, point out a certain line of conduct to him, and impose upon him a certain number of positive obligations which he is pledged to fulfil. with the exception of the tumult, this comes to the same thing as if the majority of the populace held its deliberations in the market-place. several other circumstances concur in rendering the power of the majority in america, not only preponderant, but irresistible. the moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion, that there is more intelligence and more wisdom in a great number of men collected together than in a single individual, and that the quantity of legislators is more important than their quality. the theory of equality is in fact applied to the intellect of man; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat, by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and in which they very slowly concur. like all other powers, and perhaps more than all other powers, the authority of the many requires the sanction of time; at first it enforces obedience by constraint; but its laws are not respected until they have long been maintained. the right of governing society, which the majority supposes itself to derive from its superior intelligence, was introduced into the united states by the first settlers; and this idea, which would be sufficient of itself to create a free nation, has now been amalgamated with the manners of the people, and the minor incidents of social intercourse. the french, under the old monarchy, held it for a maxim (which is still a fundamental principle of the english constitution), that the king could do no wrong; and if he did wrong, the blame was imputed to his advisers. this notion was highly favorable to habits of obedience; and it enabled the subject to complain of the law, without ceasing to love and honor the lawgiver. the americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority. the moral power of the majority is founded upon yet another principle, which is, that the interests of the many are to be preferred to those of the few. it will readily be perceived that the respect here professed for the rights of the majority must naturally increase or diminish according to the state of parties. when a nation is divided into several irreconcilable factions, the privilege of the majority is often overlooked, because it is intolerable to comply with its demands. if there existed in america a class of citizens whom the legislating majority sought to deprive of exclusive privileges, which they had possessed for ages, and to bring down from an elevated station to the level of the ranks of the multitude, it is probable that the minority would be less ready to comply with its laws. but as the united states were colonized by men holding an equal rank among themselves, there is as yet no natural or permanent source of dissension between the interests of its different inhabitants. there are certain communities in which the persons who constitute the minority can never hope to draw over the majority to their side, because they must then give up the very point which is at issue between them. thus, an aristocracy can never become a majority while it retains its exclusive privileges, and it cannot cede its privileges without ceasing to be an aristocracy. in the united states, political questions cannot be taken up in so general and absolute a manner; and all parties are willing to recognize the rights of the majority, because they all hope to turn those rights to their own advantage at some future time. the majority therefore in that country exercises a prodigious actual authority, and a moral influence which is scarcely less preponderant; no obstacles exist which can impede, or so much as retard its progress, or which can induce it to heed the complaints of those whom it crushes upon its path. this state of things is fatal in itself and dangerous for the future. * * * * * how the unlimited power of the majority increases, in america, the instability of legislation and the administration inherent in democracy. the americans increase the mutability of the laws which is inherent in democracy by changing the legislature every year, and by vesting it with unbounded authority.--the same effect is produced upon the administration.--in america social melioration is conducted more energetically, but less perseveringly than in europe. i have already spoken of the natural defects of democratic institutions, and they all of them increase in the exact ratio of the power of the majority. to begin with the most evident of them all; the mutability of the laws is an evil inherent in democratic government, because it is natural to democracies to raise men to power in very rapid succession. but this evil is more or less sensible in proportion to the authority and the means of action which the legislature possesses. in america the authority exercised by the legislative bodies is supreme; nothing prevents them from accomplishing their wishes with celerity, and with irresistible power, while they are supplied by new representatives every year. that is to say, the circumstances which contribute most powerfully to democratic instability, and which admit of the free application of caprice to every object in the state, are here in full operation. in conformity with this principle, america is, at the present day, the country in the world where laws last the shortest time. almost all the american constitutions have been amended within the course of thirty years: there is, therefore, not a single american state which has not modified the principles of its legislation in that lapse of time. as for the laws themselves, a single glance upon the archives of the different states of the union suffices to convince one, that in america the activity of the legislator never slackens. not that the american democracy is naturally less stable than any other, but that it is allowed to follow its capricious propensities in the formation of the laws.[ ] the omnipotence of the majority and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the united states, have not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but they exercise the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration. as the majority is the only power which it is important to court, all its projects are taken up with the greatest ardor; but no sooner is its attention distracted, than all this ardor ceases; while in the free states of europe, the administration is at once independent and secure, so that the projects of the legislature are put into execution, although its immediate attention may be directed to other objects. in america certain meliorations are undertaken with much more zeal and activity than elsewhere; in europe the same ends are promoted by much less social effort, more continuously applied. some years ago several pious individuals undertook to meliorate the condition of the prisons. the public was excited by the statements which they put forward, and the regeneration of criminals became a very popular undertaking. new prisons were built; and, for the first time, the idea of reforming as well as of punishing the delinquent, formed a part of prison discipline. but this happy alteration, in which the public had taken so hearty an interest, and which the exertions of the citizens had irresistibly accelerated, could not be completed in a moment. while the new penitentiaries were being erected (and it was the pleasure of the majority they should be terminated with all possible celerity), the old prisons existed, which still contained a great number of offenders. these jails became more unwholesome and more corrupt in proportion as the new establishments were beautified and improved, forming a contrast which may readily be understood. the majority was so eagerly employed in founding the new prisons, that those which already existed were forgotten; and as the general attention was diverted to a novel object, the care which had hitherto been bestowed upon the others ceased. the salutary regulations of discipline were first relaxed, and afterward broken; so that in the immediate neighborhood of a prison which bore witness to the mild and enlightened spirit of our time, dungeons might be met with, which reminded the visitor of the barbarity of the middle ages. * * * * * tyranny of the majority. how the principle of the sovereignty of the people is to be understood.--impossibility of conceiving a mixed government.--the sovereign power must centre somewhere.--precautions to be taken to control its action.--these precautions have not been taken in the united states.--consequences. i hold it to be an impious and an execrable maxim that, politically speaking, a people has a right to do whatsoever it pleases; and yet i have asserted that all authority originates in the will of the majority. am i, then, in contradiction with myself? a general law--which bears the name of justice--has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. the rights of every people are consequently confined within the limits of what is just. a nation may be considered in the light of a jury which is empowered to represent society at large, and to apply the great and general law of justice. ought such a jury, which represents society, to have more power than the society in which the laws it applies originate? when i refuse to obey an unjust law, i do not contest the right which the majority has of commanding, but i simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind. it has been asserted that a people can never entirely outstep the boundaries of justice and of reason in those affairs which are more peculiarly its own; and that consequently full power may fearlessly be given to the majority by which it is represented. but this language is that of a slave. a majority taken collectively may be regarded as a being whose opinions, and most frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another being, which is styled a minority. if it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? men are not apt to change their characters by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength.[ ] and for these reasons i can never willingly invest any number of my fellow-creatures with that unlimited authority which i should refuse to any one of them. i do not think it is possible to combine several principles in the same government, so as at the same time to maintain freedom, and really to oppose them to one another. the form of government which is usually termed _mixed_ has always appeared to me to be a mere chimera. accurately speaking, there is no such thing as a mixed government (with the meaning usually given to that word), because in all communities some one principle of action may be discovered, which preponderates over the others. england in the last century, which has been more especially cited as an example of this form of government, was in point of fact an essentially aristocratic state, although it comprised very powerful elements of democracy: for the laws and customs of the country were such, that the aristocracy could not but preponderate in the end, and subject the direction of public affairs to its own will. the error arose from too much attention being paid to the actual struggle which was going on between the nobles and the people, without considering the probable issue of the contest, which was in reality the important point. when a community really has a mixed government, that is to say, when it is equally divided between two adverse principles, it must either pass through a revolution, or fall into complete dissolution. i am therefore of opinion that some one social power must always be made to predominate over the others; but i think that liberty is endangered when this power is checked by no obstacles which may retard its course, and force it to moderate its own vehemence. unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing; human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion; and god alone can be omnipotent, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power. but no power upon earth is so worthy of honor for itself, or of reverential obedience to the rights which it represents, that i would consent to admit its uncontrolled and all-predominate authority. when i see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, i recognize the germ of tyranny, and i journey onward to a land of more hopeful institutions. in my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not arise, as is often asserted in europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and i am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country, as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny. when an individual or a party is wronged in the united states, to whom can he apply for redress? if to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority, and implicitly obeys its instructions: if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and is a passive tool in its hands; the public troops consist of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. however iniquitous or absurd the evil of which you complain may be, you must submit to it as well as you can.[ ] if, on the other hand, a legislative power could be so constituted as to represent the majority without necessarily being the slave of its passions; an executive, so as to retain a certain degree of uncontrolled authority; and a judiciary, so as to remain independent of the two other powers; a government would be formed which would still be democratic, without incurring any risk of tyrannical abuse. i do not say that tyrannical abuses frequently occur in america at the present day; but i maintain that no sure barrier is established against them, and that the causes which mitigate the government are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than its laws. * * * * * effects of the unlimited power of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of the american public officers. liberty left by the american laws to public officers within a certain sphere.--their power. a distinction must be drawn between tyranny and arbitrary power. tyranny may be exercised by means of the law, and in that case it is not arbitrary; arbitrary power may be exercised for the good of the community at large, in which case it is not tyrannical. tyranny usually employs arbitrary means, but, if necessary, it can rule without them. in the united states the unbounded power of the majority, which is favorable to the legal despotism of the legislature, is likewise favorable to the arbitrary authority of the magistrates. the majority has an entire control over the law when it is made and when it is executed; and as it possesses an equal authority over those who are in power, and the community at large, it considers public officers as its passive agents, and readily confides the task of serving its designs to their vigilance. the details of their office and the privileges which they are to enjoy are rarely defined beforehand; but the majority treats them as a master does his servants, when they are always at work in his sight, and he has the power of directing or reprimanding them at every instant. in general the american functionaries are far more independent than the french civil officers, within the sphere which is prescribed to them. sometimes, even, they are allowed by the popular authority to exceed those bounds; and as they are protected by the opinion, and backed by the cooperation of the majority, they venture upon such manifestations of their power as astonish a european. by this means habits are formed in the heart of a free country which may some day prove fatal to its liberties. * * * * * power exercised by the majority in america upon opinion. in america, when the majority has once irrevocably decided a question, all discussion ceases.--reason of this.--moral power exercised by the majority upon opinion.--democratic republics have deprived despotism of its physical instruments.--their despotism sways the minds of men. it is in the examination of the display of public opinion in the united states, that we clearly perceive how far the power of the majority surpasses all the powers with which we are acquainted in europe. intellectual principles exercise an influence which is so invisible and often so inappreciable, that they baffle the toils of oppression. at the present time the most absolute monarchs in europe are unable to prevent certain notions, which are opposed to their authority, from circulating in secret throughout their dominions, and even in their courts. such is not the case in america; so long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, a submissive silence is observed; and the friends, as well as the opponents of the measure, unite in assenting to its propriety. the reason of this is perfectly clear: no monarch is so absolute as to combine all the powers of society in his own hands, and to conquer all opposition, with the energy of a majority, which is invested with the right of making and of executing the laws. the authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. i know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in america. in any constitutional state in europe every sort of religious and political theory may be advocated and propagated abroad; for there is no country in europe so subdued by any single authority, as not to contain citizens who are ready to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth, from the consequences of his hardihood. if he is unfortunate enough to live under an absolute government, the people is upon his side; if he inhabits a free country, he may find a shelter behind the authority of the throne, if he require one. the aristocratic part of society supports him in some countries, and the democracy in others. but in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the united states, there is but one sole authority, one single element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it. in america, the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. his political career is closed for ever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. before he published his opinions, he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly, than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, while those who think, without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. he yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth. fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilisation of our age has refined the arts of despotism, which seemed however to have been sufficiently perfected before. the excesses of monarchical power had devised a variety of political means of oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind, as that will which it is intended to coerce. under the absolute sway of an individual despot, the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it, and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. the sovereign can no longer say, "you shall think as i do on pain of death;" but he says, "you are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but if such be your determination, you are henceforth an alien among your people. you may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow-citizens, if you solicit their suffrages; and they will affect to scorn you, if you solicit their esteem. you will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being; and those who are most persuaded of your innocence will abandon you too, lest they should be shunned in their turn. go in peace! i have given you your life, but it is an existence incomparably worse than death." absolute monarchies have thrown an odium upon despotism; let us beware lest democratic republics should restore oppression, and should render it less odious and less degrading in the eyes of the many, by making it still more onerous to the few. works have been published in the proudest nations of the old world, expressly intended to censure the vices and deride the follies of the time; labruyère inhabited the palace of louis xiv. when he composed his chapter upon the great, and molière criticised the courtiers in the very pieces which were acted before the court. but the ruling power in the united states is not to be made game of; the smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, and the slightest joke which has any foundation in truth, renders it indignant; from the style of its language to the more solid virtues of its character, everything must be made the subject of encomium. no writer, whatever be his eminence, can escape from this tribute of adulation to his fellow-citizens. the majority lives in the perpetual exercise of self-applause; and there are certain truths which the americans can only learn from strangers or from experience. if great writers have not at present existed in america, the reason is very simply given in these facts; there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in america. the inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in spain. the empire of the majority succeeds much better in the united states, since it actually removes the wish of publishing them. unbelievers are to be met with in america, but, to say the truth, there is no public organ of infidelity. attempts have been made by some governments to protect the morality of nations by prohibiting licentious books. in the united states no one is punished for this sort of works, but no one is induced to write them; not because all the citizens are immaculate in their manners, but because the majority of the community is decent and orderly. in these cases the advantages derived from the exercise of this power are unquestionable; and i am simply discussing the nature of the power itself. this irresistible authority is a constant fact, and its beneficent exercise is an accidental occurrence. * * * * * effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character in the americans. effects of the tyranny of the majority more sensibly felt hitherto in the manners than in the conduct of society.--they check the development of leading characters.--democratic republics, organized like the united states, bring the practice of courting favor within the reach of the many.--proofs of this spirit in the united states.--why there is more patriotism in the people than in those who govern in its name. the tendencies which i have just alluded to are as yet very slightly perceptible in political society; but they already begin to exercise an unfavorable influence upon the national character of the americans. i am inclined to attribute the paucity of distinguished political characters to the ever-increasing activity of the despotism of the majority in the united states. when the american revolution broke out, they arose in great numbers; for public opinion then served, not to tyrannize over, but to direct the exertions of individuals. those celebrated men took a full part in the general agitation of mind common at that period, and they attained a high degree of personal fame, which was reflected back upon the nation, but which was by no means borrowed from it. in absolute governments, the great nobles who are nearest to the throne flatter the passions of the sovereign, and voluntarily truckle to his caprices. but the mass of the nation does not degrade itself by servitude; it often submits from weakness, from habit, or from ignorance, and sometimes from loyalty. some nations have been known to sacrifice their own desires to those of the sovereign with pleasure and with pride; thus exhibiting a sort of independence in the very act of submission. these peoples are miserable, but they are not degraded. there is a great difference between doing what one does not approve, and feigning to approve what one does; the one is the necessary case of a weak person, the other befits the temper of a lacquey. in free countries, where every one is more or less called upon to give his opinions in the affairs of state; in democratic republics, where public life is incessantly commingled with domestic affairs, where the sovereign authority is accessible on every side, and where its attention can almost always be attracted by vociferation, more persons are to be met with who speculate upon its foibles, and live at the cost of its passions, than in absolute monarchies. not because men are naturally worse in these states than elsewhere, but the temptation is stronger, and of easier access at the same time. the result is a far more extensive debasement of the characters of citizens. democratic republics extend the practice of currying favor with the many, and they introduce it into a great number of classes at once: this is one of the most serious reproaches that can be addressed to them. in democratic states organized on the principles of the american republics, this is more especially the case, where the authority of the majority is so absolute and so irresistible, that a man must give up his rights as a citizen, and almost abjure his quality as a human being, if he intends to stray from the track which it lays down. in that immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the united states, i found very few men who displayed any of that manly candor, and that masculine independence of opinion, which frequently distinguished the americans in former times, and which constitute the leading feature in distinguished characters wheresoever they may be found. it seems, at first sight, as if all the minds of the americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they correspond in their manner of judging. a stranger does, indeed, sometimes meet with americans who dissent from these rigorous formularies; with men who deplore the defects of the laws, the mutability and the ignorance of democracy; who even go so far as to observe the evil tendencies which impair the national character, and to point out such remedies as it might be possible to apply; but no one is there to hear these things besides yourself, and you, to whom these secret reflections are confided, are a stranger and a bird of passage. they are very ready to communicate truths which are useless to you, but they continue to hold a different language in public. if ever these lines are read in america, i am well assured of two things: in the first place, that all who peruse them will raise their voices to condemn me; and in the second place, that very many of them will acquit me at the bottom of their conscience. [the author's views upon what he terms the tyranny of the majority, the despotism of public opinion in the united states, have already excited some remarks in this country, and will probably give occasion to more. as stated in the preface to this edition, the editor does not conceive himself called upon to discuss the speculative opinions of the author and supposes he will best discharge his duty by confining his observations to what he deems errors of fact or law. but in reference to this particular subject, it seems due to the author to remark, that he visited the united states at a particular time, when a successful political chieftain had succeeded in establishing his party in power, as it seemed, firmly and permanently; when the preponderance of that party was immense, and when there seemed little prospect of any change. he may have met with men, who sank under the astonishing popularity of general jackson, who despaired of the republic, and who therefore shrank from the expression of their opinions. it must be confessed, however, that the author is obnoxious to the charge which has been made, of the want of perspicuity and distinctness in this part of his work. he does not mean that the press was silent, for he has himself not only noticed, but furnished proof of the great freedom, not to say licentiousness, with which it assailed the character of the president, and the measures of his administration. he does not mean to represent the opponents of the dominant party as having thrown down their weapons of warfare, for his book shows throughout his knowledge of the existence of an active and able party, constantly opposing and harassing the administration. but, after a careful perusal of the chapters on this subject, the editor is inclined to the opinion, that m. de tocqueville intends to speak of the _tyranny of the party_ in excluding from public employment all those who do not adopt the _shibboleth_ of the majority. the language at pp. , , which he puts in the mouth of a majority, and his observations immediately preceding this note, seem to furnish the key to his meaning; although it must be admitted that there are other passages to which a wider construction may be given. perhaps they may be reconciled by the idea that the author considers the acts and opinions of the dominant party as the just and true expression of public opinion. and hence, when he speaks of the intolerance of public opinion, he means the exclusiveness of the party, which, for the time being, may be predominant. he had seen men of acknowledged competency removed from office, or excluded from it, wholly on the ground of their entertaining opinions hostile to those of the dominant party, or majority. and he had seen this system extended to the very lowest officers of the government, and applied by the electors in their choice of all officers of all descriptions; and this he deemed persecution--tyranny--despotism. but he surely is mistaken in representing the effect of this system of terror as stifling all complaint, silencing all opposition, and inducing "enemies and friends to yoke themselves alike to the triumphant car of the majority." he mistook a temporary state of parties for a permanent and ordinary result, and he was carried away by the immense majority that then supported the administration, to the belief of a universal acquiescence. without intending here to speak of the merits or demerits of those who represented that majority, it is proper to remark, that the great change which has taken place since the period when the author wrote, in the political condition of the very persons who he supposed then wielded the terrors of disfranchisement against their opponents, in itself furnishes a full and complete demonstration of the error of his opinions respecting the "true independence of mind and freedom of discussion" in america. for without such discussion to enlighten the minds of the people, and without a stern independence of the rewards and threats of those in power, the change alluded to could not have occurred. there is reason to complain not only of the ambiguity, but of the style of exaggeration which pervades all the remarks of the author on this subject--so different from the well considered and nicely adjusted language employed by him on all other topics. thus, p. , he implies that there is no means of redress afforded even by the judiciary, for a wrong committed by the majority. his error is, _first_, in supposing the jury to constitute the judicial power; _second_, overlooking what he has himself elsewhere so well described, the independence of the judiciary, and its means of controlling the action of a majority in a state or in the federal government; and _thirdly_, in omitting the proper consideration of the frequent changes of popular sentiment by which the majority of yesterday becomes the minority of to-day, and its acts of injustice are reversed. certain it is that the instances which he cites at this page, do not establish his position respecting the disposition of the majority. the riot at baltimore was, like other riots in england and in france, the result of popular phrensy excited to madness by conduct of the most provoking character. the majority in the state of maryland and throughout the united states, highly disapproved the acts of violence committed on the occasion. the acquittal by a jury of those arraigned for the murder of general lingan, proves only that there was not sufficient evidence to identify the accused, or that the jury was governed by passion. it is not perceived how the majority of the people are answerable for the verdicts rendered. the guilty have often been erroneously acquitted in all countries, and in france particularly, recent instances are not wanting of acquittals especially in prosecutions for political offences, against clear and indisputable testimony. and it was entirely fortuitous that the jury was composed of men whose sympathies were with the rioters and murderers, if the fact was so. it not unfrequently happens that a jury taken from lists furnished years perhaps, and always a long time, before the trial, are decidedly hostile to the temporary prevailing sentiments of their city, county, or state. as in the other instance, if the inhabitant of pennsylvania intended to intimate to our author, that a colored voter would be in personal jeopardy for venturing to appear at the polls to exercise his right, it must be said in truth, that the incident was local and peculiar, and contrary to what is annually seen throughout the states where colored persons are permitted to vote, who exercise that privilege with as full immunity from injury or oppression, as any white citizen. and, after all, it is believed that the state of feeling intimated by the informant of our author, is but an indication of dislike to a _caste_ degraded by servitude and ignorance; and it is not perceived how it proves the despotism of a majority over the freedom and independence of opinion. if it be true, it proves a detestable tyranny over _acts_, over the exercise of an acknowledged right. the apprehensions of a mob committing violence deterred the colored voters from approaching the polls. are instances unknown in england or even in france, of peaceable subjects being prevented by mobs or the fear of them, from the exercise of a right, from the discharge of a duty? and are they evidences of the despotism of a majority in those countries?--_american editor._] i have heard of patriotism in the united states, and it is a virtue which may be found among the people, but never among the leaders of the people. this may be explained by analogy; despotism debases the oppressed, much more than the oppressor; in absolute monarchies the king has often great virtues, but the courtiers are invariably servile. it is true that the american courtiers do not say, "sire," or "your majesty"--a distinction without a difference. they are for ever talking of the natural intelligence of the populace they serve; they do not debate the question as to which of the virtues of their master are pre-eminently worthy of admiration; for they assure him that he possesses all the virtues under heaven without having acquired them, or without caring to acquire them: they do not give him their daughters and their wives to be raised at his pleasure to the rank of his concubines, but, by sacrificing their opinions, they prostitute themselves. moralists and philosophers in america are not obliged to conceal their opinions under the veil of allegory; but, before they venture upon a harsh truth, they say: "we are aware that the people which we are addressing is too superior to all the weaknesses of human nature to lose the command of its temper for an instant; and we should not hold this language if we were not speaking to men, whom their virtues and their intelligence render more worthy of freedom than all the rest of the world." it would have been impossible for the sycophants of louis xiv. to flatter more dexterously. for my part, i am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will cling to power. the only means of preventing men from degrading themselves, is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the surest method of debasing them. * * * * * the greatest dangers of the american republics proceed from the unlimited power of the majority. democratic republics liable to perish from a misuse of their power, and not by impotence.--the governments of the american republics are more centralized and more energetic than those of the monarchies of europe.--dangers resulting from this.--opinions of hamilton and jefferson upon this point. governments usually fall a sacrifice to impotence or to tyranny. in the former case their power escapes from them: it is wrested from their grasp in the latter. many observers who have noticed the anarchy of domestic states, have imagined that the government of those states was naturally weak and impotent. the truth is, that when once hostilities are begun between parties, the government loses its control over society. but i do not think that a democratic power is naturally without resources: say rather, that it is almost always by the abuse of its force, and the misemployment of its resources, that a democratic government fails. anarchy is almost always produced by its tyranny or its mistakes, but not by its want of strength. it is important not to confound stability with force, or the greatness of a thing with its duration. in democratic republics, the power which directs[ ] society is not stable; for it often changes hands and assumes a new direction. but whichever way it turns, its force is almost irresistible. the governments of the american republics appear to me to be as much centralized as those of the absolute monarchies of europe, and more energetic than they are. i do not, therefore, imagine that they will perish from weakness.[ ] if ever the free institutions of america are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism. mr. hamilton expresses the same opinion in the federalist, no. . "it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. justice is the end of government. it is the end of civil society. it ever has been, and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. in a society, under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger: and as in the latter state even the stronger individuals are prompted by the uncertainty of their condition to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves, so in the former state will the more powerful factions be gradually induced by a like motive to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful. it can be little doubted, that if the state of rhode island was separated from the confederacy and left to itself, the insecurity of rights under the popular form of government within such narrow limits, would be displayed by such reiterated oppression of the factious majorities, that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it." jefferson has also expressed himself in a letter to madison:[ ] "the executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal object of my solicitude. the tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. the tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period." i am glad to cite the opinion of jefferson upon this subject rather than that of another, because i consider him to be the most powerful advocate democracy has ever sent forth. * * * * * notes: [ ] we observed in examining the federal constitution that the efforts of the legislators of the union had been diametrically opposed to the present tendency. the consequence has been that the federal government is more independent in its sphere than that of the states. but the federal government scarcely ever interferes in any but external affairs; and the governments of the states are in reality the authorities which direct society in america. [ ] the legislative acts promulgated by the state of massachusetts alone, from the year to the present time, already fill three stout volumes: and it must not be forgotten that the collection to which i allude was published in , when many old laws which had fallen into disuse were omitted. the state of massachusetts, which is not more populous than a department of france, may be considered as the most stable, the most consistent, and the most sagacious in its undertakings of the whole union. [ ] no one will assert that a people cannot forcibly wrong another people: but parties may be looked upon as lesser nations within a greater one, and they are aliens to each other: if therefore it be admitted that a nation can act tyrannically toward another nation, it cannot be denied that a party may do the same toward another party. [ ] a striking instance of the excesses which may be occasioned by the despotism of the majority occurred at baltimore in the year . at that time the war was very popular in baltimore. a journal which had taken the other side of the question excited the indignation of the inhabitants by its opposition. the populace assembled, broke the printing-presses, and attacked the houses of the newspaper editors. the militia was called out, but no one obeyed the call; and the only means of saving the poor wretches who were threatened by the phrensy of the mob, was to throw them into prison as common malefactors. but even this precaution was ineffectual; the mob collected again during the night; the magistrates again made a vain attempt to call out the militia; the prison was forced, one of the newspaper editors was killed upon the spot, and the others were left for dead: the guilty parties were acquitted by the jury when they were brought to trial. i said one day to an inhabitant of pennsylvania: "be so good as to explain to me how it happens, that in a state founded by quakers, and celebrated for its toleration, freed blacks are not allowed to exercise civil rights. they pay the taxes: is it not fair that they should have a vote." "you insult us," replied my informant, "if you imagine that our legislators could have committed so gross an act of injustice and intolerance." "what, then, the blacks possess the right of voting in this country?" "without the smallest doubt." "how comes it then, that at the polling-booth this morning i did not perceive a single negro in the whole meeting?" "this is not the fault of the law; the negroes have the undisputed right of voting; but they voluntarily abstain from making their appearance." "a very pretty piece of modesty on their parts," rejoined i. "why, the truth is, that they are not disinclined to vote, but they are afraid of being maltreated; in this country the law is sometimes unable to maintain its authority without the support of the majority. but in this case the majority entertains very strong prejudices against the blacks, and the magistrates are unable to protect them in the exercise of their legal privileges." "what, then, the majority claims the right not only of making the laws, but of breaking the laws it has made?" [ ] this power may be centred in an assembly, in which case it will be strong without being stable; or it may be centred in an individual, in which case it will be less strong, but more stable. [ ] i presume that it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader here, as well as throughout the remainder of this chapter, that i am speaking not of the federal government, but of the several governments of each state which the majority controls at its pleasure. [ ] th march, . chapter xvi. causes which mitigate the tyranny of the majority in the united states. * * * * * absence of central administration. the national majority does not pretend to conduct all business.--is obliged to employ the town and county magistrates to execute its supreme decisions. i have already pointed out the distinction which is to be made between a centralized government and a centralized administration. the former exists in america, but the latter is nearly unknown there. if the directing power of the american communities had both these instruments of government at its disposal, and united the habit of executing its own commands to the right of commanding; if, after having established the general principles of government, it descended to the details of public business; and if, having regulated the great interests of the country, it would penetrate into the privacy of individual interest, freedom would soon be banished from the new world. but in the united states the majority, which so frequently displays the tastes and the propensities of a despot, is still destitute of the more perfect instruments of tyranny. in the american republics the activity of the central government has never as yet been extended beyond a limited number of objects sufficiently prominent to call forth its attention. the secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by its authority; and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of interfering in them. the majority is become more and more absolute, but it has not increased the prerogatives of the central government; those great prerogatives have been confined to a certain sphere; and although the despotism of the majority may be galling upon one point, it cannot be said to extend to all. however the predominant party of the nation may be carried away by its passions; however ardent it may be in the pursuit of its projects, it cannot oblige all the citizens to comply with its desire in the same manner, and at the same time, throughout the country. when the central government which represents that majority has issued a decree, it must intrust the execution of its will to agents, over whom it frequently has no control, and whom it cannot perpetually direct. the townships, municipal bodies, and counties, may therefore be looked upon as concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement. if an oppressive law were passed, the liberties of the people would still be protected by the means by which that law would be put in execution: the majority cannot descend to the details, and (as i will venture to style them) the puerilities of administrative tyranny. nor does the people entertain that full consciousness of its authority, which would prompt it to interfere in these matters; it knows the extent of its natural powers, but it is unacquainted with the increased resources which the art of government might furnish. this point deserves attention; for if a democratic republic, similar to that of the united states, were ever founded in a country where the power of a single individual had previously subsisted, and the effects of a centralized administration had sunk deep into the habits and the laws of the people, i do not hesitate to assert, that in that country a more insufferable despotism would prevail than any which now exists in the absolute monarchies of europe; or indeed than any which could be found on this side the confines of asia. * * * * * the profession of the law in the united states serves to counterpoise the democracy. utility of discriminating the natural propensities of the members of the legal profession.--these men called upon to act a prominent part in future society.--in what manner the peculiar pursuits of lawyers give an aristocratic turn to their ideas.--accidental causes which may check this tendency.--ease with which the aristocracy coalesces with legal men.--use of lawyers to a despot.--the profession of the law constitutes the only aristocratic element with which the natural elements of democracy will combine.--peculiar causes which tend to give an aristocratic turn of mind to the english and american lawyer.--the aristocracy of america is on the bench and at the bar.--influence of lawyers upon american society.--their peculiar magisterial habits affect the legislature, the administration, and even the people. in visiting the americans and in studying their laws, we perceive that the authority they have intrusted to members of the legal profession, and the influence which these individuals exercise in the government, is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy. this effect seems to me to result from a general cause which it is useful to investigate, since it may produce analogous consequences elsewhere. the members of the legal profession have taken an important part in all the vicissitudes of political society in europe during the last five hundred years. at one time they have been the instruments of those who are invested with political authority, and at another they have succeeded in converting political authorities into their instrument. in the middle ages they afforded a powerful support to the crown; and since that period they have exerted themselves to the utmost to limit the royal prerogative. in england they have contracted a close alliance with the aristocracy; in france they have proved to be the most dangerous enemies of that class. it is my object to inquire whether, under all these circumstances, the members of the legal profession have been swayed by sudden and momentary impulses; or whether they have been impelled by principles which are inherent in their pursuits, and which will always recur in history. i am incited to this investigation by reflecting that this particular class of men will most likely play a prominent part in that order of things to which the events of our time are giving birth. men who have more especially devoted themselves to legal pursuits, derive from those occupations certain habits of order, a taste for formalities, and a kind of instinctive regard for the regular connexion of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflecting passions of the multitude. the special information which lawyers derive from their studies, ensures them a separate station in society: and they constitute a sort of privileged body in the scale of intelligence. this notion of their superiority perpetually recurs to them in the practice of their profession: they are the masters of a science which is necessary, but which is not very generally known: they serve as arbiters between the citizens; and the habit of directing the blind passions of parties in litigation to their purpose, inspires them with a certain contempt for the judgment of the multitude. to this it may be added, that they naturally constitute _a body_; not by any previous understanding, or by any agreement which directs them to a common end; but the analogy of their studies and the uniformity of their proceedings connect their minds together, as much as a common interest would combine their endeavors. a portion of the tastes and of the habits of the aristocracy may consequently be discovered in the characters of men in the profession of the law. they participate in the same instinctive love of order and of formalities; and they entertain the same repugnance to the actions of the multitude, and the same secret contempt of the government of the people. i do not mean to say that the natural propensities of lawyers are sufficiently strong to sway them irresistibly; for they, like most other men, are governed by their private interests and the advantages of the moment. in a state of society in which the members of the legal profession are prevented from holding that rank in the political world which they enjoy in private life, we may rest assured that they will be the foremost agents of revolution. but it must then be inquired whether the cause which induces them to innovate and to destroy is accidental, or whether it belongs to some lasting purpose which they entertain. it is true that lawyers mainly contributed to the overthrow of the french monarchy in ; but it remains to be seen whether they acted thus because they had studied the laws, or because they were prohibited from co-operating in the work of legislation. five hundred years ago the english nobles headed the people, and spoke in its name; at the present time, the aristocracy supports the throne, and defends the royal prerogative. but aristocracy has, notwithstanding this, its peculiar instincts and propensities. we must be careful not to confound isolated members of a body with the body itself. in all free governments, of whatsoever form they may be, members of the legal profession may be found at the head of all parties. the same remark is also applicable to the aristocracy; for almost all the democratic convulsions which have agitated the world have been directed by nobles. a privileged body can never satisfy the ambition of all its members; it has always more talents and more passions than it can find places to content and to employ; so that a considerable number of individuals are usually to be met with, who are inclined to attack those very privileges, which they find it impossible to turn to their own account. i do not, then, assert that _all_ the members of the legal profession are at _all_ times the friends of order and the opponents of innovation, but merely that most of them usually are so. in a community in which lawyers are allowed to occupy, without opposition, that high station which naturally belongs to them, their general spirit will be eminently conservative and anti-democratic. when an aristocracy excludes the leaders of that profession from its ranks, it excites enemies which are the more formidable to its security as they are independent of the nobility by their industrious pursuits; and they feel themselves to be its equal in point of intelligence, although they enjoy less opulence and less power. but whenever an aristocracy consents to impart some of its privileges to these same individuals, the two classes coalesce very readily, and assume, as it were, the consistency of a single order of family interests. i am, in like manner, inclined to believe that a monarch will always be able to convert legal practitioners into the most serviceable instruments of his authority. there is a far greater affinity between this class of individuals and the executive power, than there is between them and the people; just as there is a greater natural affinity between the nobles and monarch, than between the nobles and the people, although the higher orders of society have occasionally resisted the prerogative of the crown in concert with the lower classes. lawyers are attached to public order beyond every other consideration, and the best security of public order is authority. it must not be forgotten, that if they prize the free institutions of their country much, they nevertheless value the legality of those institutions far more; they are less afraid of tyranny than of arbitrary power: and provided that the legislature takes upon itself to deprive men of their independence, they are not dissatisfied.[ ] i am therefore convinced that the prince who, in presence of an encroaching democracy, should endeavor to impair the judicial authority in his dominions, and to diminish the political influence of lawyers, would commit a great mistake. he would let slip the substance of authority to grasp at the shadow. he would act more wisely in introducing men connected with the law into the government; and if he intrusted them with the conduct of a despotic power, bearing some marks of violence, that power would most likely assume the external features of justice and of legality in their hands. the government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers; for when the wealthy, the noble, and the prince, are excluded from the government, they are sure to occupy the highest stations in their own right, as it were, since they are the only men of information and sagacity, beyond the sphere of the people, who can be the object of the popular choice. if, then, they are led by their tastes to combine with the aristocracy, and to support the crown, they are naturally brought into contact with the people by their interests. they like the government of democracy, without participating in its propensities, and without imitating its weaknesses; whence they derive a twofold authority from it and over it. the people in democratic states does not mistrust the members of the legal profession, because it is well known that they are interested in serving the popular cause; and it listens to them without irritation, because it does not attribute to them any sinister designs. the object of lawyers is not, indeed, to overthrow the institutions of democracy, but they constantly endeavor to give it an impulse which diverts it from its real tendency, by means which are foreign to its nature. lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, to the aristocracy by habit and by taste, and they may be looked upon as the natural bond and connecting link of the two great classes of society. the profession of the law is the only aristocratic element which can be amalgamated without violence with the natural elements of democracy, and which can be advantageously and permanently combined with them. i am not unacquainted with the defects which are inherent in the character of that body of men; but without this admixture of lawyer-like sobriety with the democratic principle, i question whether democratic institutions could long be maintained; and i cannot believe that a republic could subsist at the present time, if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people. this aristocratic character, which i hold to be common to the legal profession, is much more distinctly marked in the united states and in england than in any other country. this proceeds not only from the legal studies of the english and american lawyers, but from the nature of the legislation, and the position which those persons occupy, in the two countries. the english and the americans have retained the law of precedents; that is to say, they continue to found their legal opinions and the decisions of their courts upon the opinions and decisions of their forefathers. in the mind of an english or an american lawyer, a taste and a reverence for what is old are almost always united to a love of regular and lawful proceedings. this predisposition has another effect upon the character of the legal profession and upon the general course of society. the english and american lawyers investigate what has been done; the french advocate inquires what should have been done: the former produces precedents; the latter reasons. a french observer is surprised to hear how often an english or american lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; while the reverse occurs in france. there, the most trifling litigation is never conducted without the introduction of an entire system of ideas peculiar to the counsel employed; and the fundamental principles of law are discussed in order to obtain a perch of land by the decision of the court. this abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the english and american lawyer, this subjection of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more sluggish inclinations in england and america than in france. the french codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents. the indispensable want of legal assistance which is felt in england and in the united states, and the high opinion which is generally entertained of the ability of the legal profession, tend to separate it more and more from the people, and to place it in a distinct class. the french lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the english or american lawyer resembles the hierophants of egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science. [the remark that english and american lawyers found their opinions and their decisions upon those of their forefathers, is calculated to excite surprise in an american reader, who supposes that law, as a prescribed rule of action, can only be ascertained in cases where the statutes are silent, by reference to the decisions of courts. on the continent, and particularly in france, as the writer of this note learned from the conversation of m. de tocqueville, the judicial tribunals do not deem themselves bound by any precedents, or by any decisions of their predecessors or of the appellate tribunals. they respect such decisions as the opinions of distinguished men, and they pay no higher regard to their own previous adjudications of any case. it is not easy to perceive how the law can acquire any stability under such a system, or how any individual can ascertain his rights, without a lawsuit. this note should not be concluded without a single remark upon what the author calls an implicit deference to the opinions of our forefathers, and abnegation of our own opinions. the common law consists of principles founded on the common sense of mankind, and adapted to the circumstances of man in civilized society. when these principles are once settled by competent authority, or rather _declared_ by such authority, they are supposed to express the common sense and the common justice of the community; and it requires but a moderate share of modesty for any one entertaining a different view of them, to consider that the disinterested and intelligent judges who have declared them, are more likely to be right than he is. perfection, even in the law, he does not consider attainable by human beings, and the greatest approximation to it is all he expects or desires. besides, there are very few cases of positive and abstract rule, where it is of any consequence which, of any two or more modifications of it, should be adopted. the great point is, that there should be _a rule_ by which conduct may be regulated. thus, whether in mercantile transactions notice of a default by a principal shall be given to an endorser, or a guarantor, and when and how such notice shall be given, are not so important in themselves, as it is that there should be some rule to which merchants may adapt themselves and their transactions. statutes cannot or at least do not, prescribe the rules in a large majority of cases. if then they are not drawn from the decision of courts, they will not exist, and men will be wholly at a loss for a guide in the most important transactions of business. hence the deference paid to legal decisions. but this is not implicit, as the author supposes. the course of reasoning by which the courts have come to their conclusions, is often assailed by the advocate and shown to be fallacious, and the instances are not unfrequent of courts disregarding prior decisions and overruling them when not fairly deducible from sound reason. again, the principles of the common law are flexible, and adapt themselves to changes in society, and a well-known maxim in our system, that when the reason of the law ceases, the law itself ceases, has overthrown many an antiquated rule. within these limits, it is conceived that there is range enough for the exercise of all the reason of the advocate and the judge, without unsettling everything and depriving the conduct of human affairs of all guidance from human authority;--and the talent of our lawyers and courts finds sufficient exercise in applying the principles of one case to facts of another.--_american editor_.] the station which lawyers occupy in england and america exercises no less an influence upon their habits and their opinions. the english aristocracy, which has taken care to attract to its sphere whatever is at all analogous to itself, has conferred a high degree of importance and of authority upon the members of the legal profession. in english society lawyers do not occupy the first rank, but they are contented with the station assigned to them; they constitute, as it were, the younger branch of the english aristocracy, and they are attached to their elder brothers, although they do not enjoy all their privileges. the english lawyers consequently mingle the tastes and the ideas of the aristocratic circles in which they move, with the aristocratic interest of their profession. and indeed the lawyer-like character which i am endeavoring to depict, is most distinctly to be met with in england: there laws are esteemed not so much because they are good, as because they are old; and if it be necessary to modify them in any respect, or to adapt them to the changes which time operates in society, recourse is had to the most inconceivable contrivances in order to uphold the traditionary fabric, and to maintain that nothing has been done which does not square with the intentions, and complete the labors, of former generations. the very individuals who conduct these changes disclaim all intention of innovation, and they had rather resort to absurd expedients than plead guilty of so great a crime. this spirit more especially appertains to the english lawyers; they seem indifferent to the real meaning of what they treat, and they direct all their attention to the letter, seeming inclined to infringe the rules of common sense and of humanity, rather than to swerve one tittle from the law. the english legislation may be compared to the stock of an old tree, upon which lawyers have engrafted the most various shoots, with the hope, that, although their fruits may differ, their foliage at least will be confounded with the venerable trunk which supports them all. in america there are no nobles or literary men, and the people is apt to mistrust the wealthy; lawyers consequently form the highest political class, and the most cultivated circle of society. they have therefore nothing to gain by innovation, which adds a conservative interest to their natural taste for public order. if i were asked where i place the american aristocracy, i should reply without hesitation, that it is not composed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar. the more we reflect upon all that occurs in the united states, the more shall we be persuaded that the lawyers, as a body, form the most powerful, if not the only counterpoise to the democratic element. in that country we perceive how eminently the legal profession is qualified by its powers, and even by its defects, to neutralize the vices which are inherent in popular government. when the american people is intoxicated by passion, or carried away by the impetuosity of its ideas, it is checked and stopped by the almost invisible influence of its legal counsellors, who secretly oppose their aristocratic propensities to its democratic instincts, their superstitious attachment to what is antique to its love of novelty, their narrow views to its immense designs, and their habitual procrastination to its ardent impatience. the courts of justice are the most visible organs by which the legal profession is enabled to control the democracy. the judge is a lawyer, who, independently of the taste for regularity and order which he has contracted in the study of legislation, derives an additional love of stability from his own inalienable functions. his legal attainments have already raised him to a distinguished rank among his fellow-citizens; his political power completes the distinction of his station, and gives him the inclinations natural to privileged classes. armed with the power of declaring the laws to be unconstitutional,[ ] the american magistrate perpetually interferes in political affairs. he cannot force the people to make laws, but at least he can oblige it not to disobey its own enactments, or to act inconsistently with its own principles. i am aware that a secret tendency to diminish the judicial power exists in the united states; and by most of the constitutions of the several states, the government can, upon the demand of the two houses of the legislature, remove the judges from their station. by some other constitutions the members of the tribunals are elected, and they are even subjected to frequent re-elections. i venture to predict that these innovations will sooner or later be attended with fatal consequences; and that it will be found out at some future period, that the attack which is made upon the judicial power has affected the democratic republic itself. it must not, however, be supposed that the legal spirit of which i have been speaking has been confined in the united states to the courts of justice; it extends far beyond them. as the lawyers constitute the only enlightened class which the people does not mistrust, they are naturally called upon to occupy most of the public stations. they fill the legislative assemblies, and they conduct the administration; they consequently exercise a powerful influence upon the formation of the law, and upon its execution. the lawyers are, however, obliged to yield to the current of public opinion, which is too strong for them to resist it; but it is easy to find indications of what their conduct would be, if they were free to act as they chose. the americans who have made such copious innovations in their political legislation, have introduced very sparing alterations in their civil laws, and that with great difficulty, although those laws are frequently repugnant to their social condition. the reason of this is, that in matters of civil law the majority is obliged to defer to the authority of the legal profession, and that the american lawyers are disinclined to innovate when they are left to their own choice. it is curious for a frenchman, accustomed to a very different state of things, to hear the perpetual complaints which are made in the united states, against the stationary propensities of legal men, and their prejudices in favor of existing institutions. the influence of the legal habits which are common in america extends beyond the limits i have just pointed out. scarcely any question arises in the united states which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate; hence all parties are obliged to borrow the ideas, and even the language, usual in judicial proceedings, in their daily controversies. as most public men are, or have been, legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and technicalities of their profession into the affairs of the country. the jury extends this habitude to all classes. the language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that the whole people contracts the habits and the tastes of the magistrate. the lawyers of the united states form a party which is but little feared and scarcely perceived, which has no badge peculiar to itself, which adapts itself with great flexibility to the exigencies of the time, and accommodates itself to all the movements of the social body: but this party extends over the whole community, and it penetrates into all classes of society; it acts upon the country imperceptibly, but it finally fashions it to suit its purposes. * * * * * trial by jury in the united states considered as a political institution. trial by jury, which is one of the instruments of the sovereignty of the people, deserves to be compared with the other laws which establish that sovereignty.--composition of the jury in the united states.--effect of trial by jury upon the national character.--it educates the people.--it tends to establish the authority of the magistrates, and to extend a knowledge of law among the people. since i have been led by my subject to recur to the administration of justice in the united states, i will not pass over this point without adverting to the institution of the jury. trial by jury may be considered in two separate points of view: as a judicial, and as a political institution. if it entered into my present purpose to inquire how far trial by jury (more especially in civil cases) contributes to ensure the best administration of justice, i admit that its utility might be contested. as the jury was first introduced at a time when society was in an uncivilized state, and when courts of justice were merely called upon to decide on the evidence of facts, it is not an easy task to adapt it to the wants of a highly civilized community, when the mutual relations of men are multiplied to a surprising extent, and have assumed the enlightened and intellectual character of the age.[ ] my present object is to consider the jury as a political institution; and any other course would divert me from my subject. of trial by jury, considered as a judicial institution, i shall here say but very few words. when the english adopted trial by jury they were a semi-barbarous people; they are become, in course of time, one of the most enlightened nations of the earth; and their attachment to this institution seems to have increased with their increasing cultivation. they soon spread beyond their insular boundaries to every corner of the habitable globe; some have formed colonies, others independent states; the mother-country has maintained its monarchical constitution; many of its offspring have founded powerful republics; but wherever the english have been, they have boasted of the privilege of trial by jury.[ ] they have established it, or hastened to re-establish it, in all their settlements. a judicial institution which obtains the suffrages of a great people for so long a series of ages, which is zealously renewed at every epoch of civilisation, in all the climates of the earth, and under every form of human government, cannot be contrary to the spirit of justice.[ ] i turn, however, from this part of the subject. to look upon the jury as a mere judicial institution, is to confine our attention to a very narrow view of it; for, however great its influence may be upon the decisions of the law-courts, that influence is very subordinate to the powerful effects which it produces on the destinies of the community at large. the jury is above all a political institution, and it must be regarded in this light in order to be duly appreciated. by the jury, i mean a certain number of citizens chosen indiscriminately, and invested with a temporary right of judging. trial by jury, as applied to the repression of crime, appears to me to introduce an eminently republican element into the government, upon the following grounds:-- the institution of the jury may be aristocratic or democratic, according to the class of society from which the jurors are selected; but it always preserves its republican character, inasmuch as it places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or of a portion of the governed, instead of leaving it under the authority of the government. force is never more than a transient element of success; and after force comes the notion of right. a government which should only be able to crush its enemies upon a field of battle, would very soon be destroyed. the true sanction of political laws is to be found in penal legislation, and if that sanction be wanting, the law will sooner or later lose its cogency. he who punishes infractions of the law is therefore the real master of society. now, the institution of the jury raises the people itself, or at least a class of citizens, to the bench of judicial authority. the institution of the jury consequently invests the people, or that class of citizens, with the direction of society.[ ] in england the jury is returned from the aristocratic portion of the nation,[ ] the aristocracy makes the laws, applies the laws, and punishes all infractions of the laws; everything is established upon a consistent footing, and england may with truth be said to constitute an aristocratic republic. in the united states the same system is applied to the whole people. every american citizen is qualified to be an elector, a juror, and is eligible to office.[ ] the system of the jury, as it is understood in america, appears to me to be as direct and as extreme a consequence of the sovereignty of the people, as universal suffrage. these institutions are two instruments of equal power, which contribute to the supremacy of the majority. all the sovereigns who have chosen to govern by their own authority, and to direct society instead of obeying its direction, have destroyed or enfeebled the institution of the jury. the monarchs of the house of tudor sent to prison jurors who refused to convict, and napoleon caused them to be returned by his agents. however clear most of these truths may seem to be, they do not command universal assent, and in france, at least, the institution of trial by jury is still very imperfectly understood. if the question arise as to the proper qualification of jurors, it is confined to a discussion of the intelligence and knowledge of the citizens who may be returned, as if the jury was merely a judicial institution. this appears to me to be the least part of the subject. the jury is pre-eminently a political institution; it must be regarded as one form of the sovereignty of the people; when that sovereignty is repudiated, it must be rejected; or it must be adapted to the laws by which that sovereignty is established. the jury is that portion of the nation to which the execution of the laws is intrusted, as the houses of parliament constitute that part of the nation which makes the laws; and in order that society may be governed with consistency and uniformity, the list of citizens qualified to serve on juries must increase and diminish with the list of electors. this i hold to be the point of view must worthy of the attention of the legislator; and all that remains is merely accessary. i am so entirely convinced that the jury is pre-eminently a political institution, that i still consider it in this light when it is applied in civil causes. laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of a nation: manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people. when the jury is reserved for criminal offences, the people only sees its occasional action in certain particular cases; the ordinary course of life goes on without its interference, and it is considered as an instrument, but not as the only instrument, of obtaining justice. this is true _a fortiori_ when the jury is only applied to certain criminal causes. when, on the contrary, the influence of the jury is extended to civil causes, its application is constantly palpable; it affects all the interests of the community; every one co-operates in its work: it thus penetrates into all the usages of life, it fashions the human mind to its peculiar forms, and is gradually associated with the idea of justice itself. the institution of the jury, if confined to criminal causes, is always in danger; but when once it is introduced into civil proceedings, it defies the aggressions of time and of man. if it had been as easy to remove the jury from the manners as from the laws of england, it would have perished under henry viii. and elizabeth: and the civil jury did in reality, at that period, save the liberties of the country. in whatever manner the jury be applied, it cannot fail to exercise a powerful influence upon the national character; but this influence is prodigiously increased when it is introduced into civil causes. the jury, and more especially the civil jury, serves to communicate the spirit of the judges to the minds of all the citizens; and this spirit, with the habits which attend it, is the soundest preparation for free institutions. it imbues all classes with a respect for the thing judged, and with the notion of right. if these two elements be removed, the love of independence is reduced to a more destructive passion. it teaches men to practise equity; every man learns to judge his neighbor as he would himself be judged: and this is especially true of the jury in civil causes; for, while the number of persons who have reason to apprehend a criminal prosecution is small, every one is liable to have a civil action brought against him. the jury teaches every man not to recoil before the responsibility of his own actions, and impresses him with that manly confidence without which political virtue cannot exist. it invests each citizen with a kind of magistracy; it makes them all feel the duties which they are bound to discharge toward society; and the part which they take in the government. by obliging men to turn their attention to affairs which are not exclusively their own, it rubs off that individual egotism which is the rust of society. the jury contributes most powerfully to form the judgment, and to increase the natural intelligence of a people; and this is, in my opinion, its greatest advantage. it may be regarded as a gratuitous public school ever open, in which every juror learns to exercise his rights, enters into daily communication with the most learned and enlightened members of the upper classes, and becomes practically acquainted with the laws of his country, which are brought within the reach of his capacity by the efforts of the bar, the advice of the judge, and even by the passions of the parties. i think that the practical intelligence and political good sense of the americans are mainly attributable to the long use which they have made of the jury in civil causes. i do not know whether the jury is useful to those who are in litigation; but i am certain it is highly beneficial to those who decide the litigation: and i look upon it as one of the most efficacious means for the education of the people, which society can employ. what i have hitherto said, applies to all nations; but the remark i am now about to make, is peculiar to the americans and to democratic peoples. i have already observed that in democracies the members of the legal profession, and the magistrates, constitute the only aristocratic body which can check the irregularities of the people. this aristocracy is invested with no physical power; but it exercises its conservative influence upon the minds of men: and the most abundant source of its authority is the institution of the civil jury. in criminal causes, when society is armed against a single individual, the jury is apt to look upon the judge as the passive instrument of social power, and to mistrust his advice. moreover, criminal causes are entirely founded upon the evidence of facts which common sense can readily appreciate; upon this ground the judge and the jury are equal. such, however, is not the case in civil causes; then the judge appears as a disinterested arbiter between the conflicting passions of the parties. the jurors look up to him with confidence, and listen to him with respect, for in this instance their intelligence is completely under the control of his learning. it is the judge who sums up the various arguments with which their memory has been wearied out, and who guides them through the devious course of the proceedings; he points their attention to the exact question of fact, which they are called upon to solve, and he puts the answer to the question of law into their mouths. his influence upon their verdict is almost unlimited. if i am called upon to explain why i am but little moved by the arguments derived from the ignorance of jurors in civil causes, i reply, that in these proceedings, whenever the question to be solved is not a mere question of fact, the jury has only the semblance of a judicial body. the jury sanctions the decisions of the judge; they, by the authority of society which they represent, and he, by that of reason and of law.[ ] in england and in america the judges exercise an influence upon criminal trials which the french judges have never possessed. the reason of this difference may easily be discovered; the english and american magistrates establish their authority in civil causes, and only transfer it afterward to tribunals of another kind, where that authority was not acquired. in some cases (and they are frequently the most important ones), the american judges have the right of deciding causes alone.[ ] upon these occasions they are, accidentally, placed in the position which the french judges habitually occupy: but they are still surrounded by the reminiscence of the jury, and their judgment has almost as much authority as the voice of the community at large, represented by that institution. their influence extends beyond the limits of the courts; in the recreations of private life, as well as in the turmoil of public business, abroad and in the legislative assemblies, the american judge is constantly surrounded by men who are accustomed to regard his intelligence as superior to their own; and after having exercised his power in the decision of causes, he continues to influence the habits of thought, and the character of the individuals who took a part in his judgment. [the remark in the text, that "in some cases, and they are frequently the most important ones, the american judges have the right of deciding causes alone," and the author's note, that "the federal judges decide, upon their own authority, almost all the questions most important to the country," seem to require explanation in consequence of their connexion with the context in which the author is speaking of the trial by jury. they seem to imply that there are some cases which ought to be tried by jury, that are decided by the judges. it is believed that the learned author, although a distinguished advocate in france, never thoroughly comprehended the grand divisions of our complicated system of law, in civil cases. _first_, is the distinction between cases in equity and those in which the rules of the common law govern.--those in equity are always decided by the judge or judges, who _may_, however, send questions of fact to be tried in the common law courts by a jury. but as a general rule this is entirely in the discretion of the equity judge. _second_, in cases at common law, there are questions of fact and questions of law:--the former are invariably tried by a jury, the latter, whether presented in the course of a jury trial, or by pleading, in which the facts are admitted, are always decided by the judges. _third_, cases of admiralty jurisdiction, and proceedings _in rem_ of an analogous nature, are decided by the judges without the intervention of a jury. the cases in this last class fall within the peculiar jurisdiction of the federal courts, and, with this exception, the federal judges do not decide upon their own authority any questions, which, if presented in the state courts, would not also be decided by the judges of those courts. the supreme court of the united states, from the nature of its institution as almost wholly an appellant court, is called on to decide merely questions of law, and in no case can that court decide a question of fact, unless it arises in suits peculiar to equity or admiralty jurisdiction. indeed the author's original note is more correct than the translation. it is as follows: "les juges fédéraux tranchent presque toujours seuls les questions qui touchent de plus près au _gouvernement_ du pays." and it is very true that the supreme court of the united states, in particular, decides those questions which most nearly affect the _government_ of the country, because those are the very questions which arise upon the constitutionality of the laws of congress and of the several states, the final and conclusive determination of which is vested in that tribunal.--_american editor_.] the jury, then, which seems to restrict the rights of magistracy, does in reality consolidate its power; and in no country are the judges so powerful as there where the people partakes their privileges. it is more especially by means of the jury in civil causes that the american magistrates imbue all classes of society with the spirit of their profession. thus the jury, which is the most energetic means of making the people rule, is also the most efficacious means of teaching it to rule well. * * * * * notes: [ ] this translation does not accurately convey the meaning of m. de tocqueville's expression. he says: "ils craignent moins la tyrannie que l'arbitraire, et pourvu que le législateur se charge lui-même d'enlever aux hommes leur indépendance, ils sont à peu près content." the more correct rendering would be: 'they fear tyranny less than arbitrary sway, and provided it is the legislator himself who undertakes to deprive men of their independence, they are almost content.'--_reviser_. [ ] see chapter vi., p. , on the judicial power in the united states. [ ] the investigation of trial by jury as a judicial institution, and the appreciation of its effects in the united states, together with the advantages the americans have derived from it, would suffice to form a book, and a book upon a very useful and curious subject. the state of louisiana would in particular afford the curious phenomenon of a french and english legislation, as well as a french and english population, which are generally combining with each other. see the "digeste des lois de la louisiane," in two volumes; and the "traité sur les regles des actions civiles," printed in french and english at new orleans in . [ ] all the english and american jurists are unanimous upon this head. mr. story, judge of the supreme court of the united states, speaks, in his treatise on the federal constitution, of the advantages of trial by jury in civil cases: "the inestimable privilege of a trial by jury in civil cases--a privilege scarcely inferior to that in criminal cases, which is counted by all persons to be essential to political and civil liberty" ... (story, book iii, ch. xxxviii.). [ ] if it were our province to point out the utility of the jury as a judicial institution in this place, much might be said, and the following arguments might be brought forward among others:-- by introducing the jury into the business of the courts, you are enabled to diminish the number of judges; which is a very great advantage. when judges are very numerous, death is perpetually thinning the ranks of the judicial functionaries, and laying places vacant for new comers. the ambition of the magistrates is therefore continually excited, and they are naturally made dependant upon the will of the majority, or the individual who fills up vacant appointments: the officers of the courts then rise like the officers of an army. this state of things is entirely contrary to the sound administration of justice, and to the intentions of the legislator. the office of a judge is made inalienable in order that he may remain independent; but of what advantage is it that his independence is protected, if he be tempted to sacrifice it of his own accord? when judges are very numerous, many of them must necessarily be incapable of performing their important duties; for a great magistrate is a man of no common powers; and i am inclined to believe that a half enlightened tribunal is the worst of all instruments for obtaining those objects which it is the purpose of courts of justice to accomplish. for my own part, i had rather submit the decision of a case to ignorant jurors directed by a skilfull judge, than to judges, a majority of whom are imperfectly acquainted with jurisprudence and with the laws. [i venture to remind the reader, lest this note should appear somewhat redundant to an english eye, that the jury is an institution which has only been naturalized in france within the present century; that it is even now exclusively applied to those criminal causes which come before the courts of assize, or to the prosecutions of the public press; and that the judges and counsellors of the numerous local tribunals of france--forming a body of many thousand judicial functionaries--try all civil causes, appeals from criminal causes, and minor offences, without the jury.--_translator's note_.] [ ] an important remark must however be made. trial by jury does unquestionably invest the people with a general control over the actions of citizens, but it does not furnish means of exercising this control in all cases, or with an absolute authority. when an absolute monarch has the right of trying offences by his representatives, the fate of the prisoner is, as it were, decided beforehand. but even if the people were predisposed to convict, the composition and the non-responsibility of the jury would still afford some chances favorable to the protection of innocence. [ ] in france, the qualification of the jurors is the same as the electoral qualification, namely, the payment of francs per annum in direct taxes: they are chosen by lot. in england they are returned by the sheriff; the qualifications of jurors were raised to _l_ per annum in england, and _l_ in wales, of freehold land or copyhold, by the statute w. and m., c. : leaseholders for a time determinable upon life or lives, of the clear yearly value of _l_ per annum over and above the rent reserved, are qualified to serve on juries; and jurors in the courts of westminster and city of london must be householders, and possessed of real and personal estates of the value of _l_. the qualifications, however, prescribed in different statutes, vary according to the object for which the jury is impannelled. see blackstone's commentaries, b. iii., c. .--_translator's note_. [ ] see appendix q. [ ] see appendix r. [ ] the federal judges decide upon their own authority almost all the questions most important to the country. chapter xvii. principal causes which tend to maintain the democratic republic in the united states. a democratic republic subsists in the united states; and the principal object of this book has been to account for the fact of its existence. several of the causes which contribute to maintain the institutions of america have been voluntarily passed by, or only hinted at, as i was borne along by my subject. others i have been unable to discuss and those on which i have dwelt most, are, as it were, buried in the details of the former part of this work. i think, therefore, that before i proceed to speak of the future, i cannot do better than collect within a small compass the reasons which best explain the present. in this retrospective chapter i shall be succinct; for i shall take care to remind the reader very summarily of what he already knows; and i shall only select the most prominent of those facts which i have not yet pointed out. all the causes which contribute to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states are reducible to three heads: i. the peculiar and accidental situation in which providence has placed the americans. ii. the laws. iii. the manners and customs of the people. * * * * * accidental or providential causes which contribute to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states. the union has no neighbors.--no metropolis.--the americans have had the chances of birth in their favor.--america an empty country.--how this circumstance contributes powerfully to the maintenance of the democratic republic in america.--how the american wilds are peopled.--avidity of the anglo-americans in taking possession of the solitudes of the new world.--influence of physical prosperity upon the political opinions of the americans. a thousand circumstances, independent of the will of man, concur to facilitate the maintenance of a democratic republic in the united states. some of these peculiarities are known, the others may easily be pointed out; but i shall confine myself to the most prominent among them. the americans have no neighbors, and consequently they have no great wars, or financial crises, or inroads, or conquests to dread; they require neither great taxes, nor great armies, nor great generals; and they have nothing to fear from a scourge which is more formidable to republics than all these evils combined, namely, military glory. it is impossible to deny the inconceivable influence which military glory exercises upon the spirit of a nation. general jackson, whom the americans have twice elected to be the head of their government, is a man of violent temper and mediocre talents; no one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people; and indeed the majority of the enlightened classes of the union has always been opposed to him. but he was raised to the presidency, and has been maintained in that lofty station, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained, twenty years ago, under the walls of new orleans; a victory which was, however, a very ordinary achievement, and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare. now the people who are thus carried away by the illusions of glory, are unquestionably the most cold and calculating, the most unmilitary (if i may use the expression), and the most prosaic of all the peoples of the earth. america has no great capital city,[ ] whose influence is directly or indirectly felt over the whole extent of the country, which i hold to be one of the first causes of the maintenance of republican institutions in the united states. in cities, men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention. to subject the provinces to the metropolis, is therefore not only to place the destiny of the empire in the hands of a portion of the community, which may be reprobated as unjust, but to place it in the hands of a populace acting under its own impulses, which must be avoided as dangerous. the preponderance of capital cities is therefore a serious blow upon the representative system; and it exposes modern republics to the same defect as the republics of antiquity, which all perished from not being acquainted with that system. it would be easy for me to adduce a great number of secondary causes which have contributed to establish, and which concur to maintain, the democratic republic of the united states. but i discern two principal circumstances among these favorable elements, which i hasten to point out. i have already observed that the origin of the american settlements may be looked upon as the first and most efficacious cause to which the present prosperity of the united states may be attributed. the americans had the chances of birth in their favor; and their forefathers imported that equality of conditions into the country, whence the democratic republic has very naturally taken its rise. nor was this all they did; for besides this republican condition of society, the early settlers bequeathed to their descendants those customs, manners, and opinions, which contribute most to the success of a republican form of government. when i reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, methinks i see the destiny of america embodied in the first puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man. the chief circumstance which has favored the establishment and the maintenance of a democratic republic in the united states, is the nature of the territory which the americans inhabit. their ancestors gave them the love of equality and of freedom: but god himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free, by placing them upon a boundless continent, which is open to their exertions. general prosperity is favorable to the stability of all governments, but more particularly of a democratic constitution, which depends upon the disposition of the majority, and more particularly of that portion of the community which is most exposed to feel the pressure of want. when the people rules, it must be rendered happy, or it will overturn the state: and misery is apt to stimulate it to those excesses to which ambition rouses kings. the physical causes, independent of the laws, which contribute to promote general prosperity, are more numerous in america than they have ever been in any other country in the world, at any other period of history. in the united states, not only is legislation democratic, but nature herself favors the cause of the people. in what part of human tradition can be found anything at all similar to that which is occurring under our eyes in north america? the celebrated communities of antiquity were all founded in the midst of hostile nations, which they were obliged to subjugate before they could flourish in their place. even the moderns have found, in some parts of south america, vast regions inhabited by a people of inferior civilisation, but which occupied and cultivated the soil. to found their new states, it was necessary to extirpate or to subdue a numerous population, until civilisation has been made to blush for their success. but north america was only inhabited by wandering tribes, who took no thought of the natural riches of the soil: and that vast country was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a desert land awaiting its inhabitants. everything is extraordinary in america, the social condition of the inhabitants, as well as the laws; but the soil upon which these institutions are founded is more extraordinary than all the rest. when man was first placed upon the earth by the creator, that earth was inexhaustible in its youth; but man was weak and ignorant: and when he had learned to explore the treasures which it contained, hosts of his fellow-creatures covered its surface, and he was obliged to earn an asylum for repose and for freedom by the sword. at that same period north america was discovered, as if it had been kept in reserve by the deity, and had just risen from beneath the waters of the deluge. that continent still presents, as it did in the primeval time, rivers which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned. in this state it is offered to man, not in the barbarous and isolated condition of the early ages, but to a being who is already in possession of the most potent secrets of the natural world, who is united to his fellow-men, and instructed by the experience of fifty centuries. at this very time thirteen millions of civilized europeans are peaceably spreading over those fertile plains, with whose resources and whose extent they are not yet accurately acquainted. three or four thousand soldiers drive the wandering races of the aborigines before them; these are followed by the pioneers, who pierce the woods, scare off the beasts of prey, explore the courses of the inland streams, and make ready the triumphal procession of civilisation across the waste. the favorable influence of the temporal prosperity of america upon the institutions of that country has been so often described by others, and adverted to by myself, that i shall not enlarge upon it beyond the addition of a few facts. an erroneous notion is generally entertained, that the deserts of america are peopled by european emigrants, who annually disembark upon the coasts of the new world, while the american population increases and multiplies upon the soil which its forefathers tilled. the european settler, however, usually arrives in the united states without friends, and sometimes without resources; in order to subsist he is obliged to work for hire, and he rarely proceeds beyond that belt of industrious population which adjoins the ocean. the desert cannot be explored without capital or credit, and the body must be accustomed to the rigors of a new climate before it can be exposed to the chances of forest life. it is the americans themselves who daily quit the spots which gave them birth, to acquire extensive domains in a remote country. thus the european leaves his country for the transatlantic shores; and the american, who is born on that very coast, plunges into the wilds of central america. this double emigration is incessant: it begins in the remotest parts of europe, it crosses the atlantic ocean, and it advances over the solitudes of the new world. millions of men are marching at once toward the same horizon; their language, their religion, their manners differ, their object is the same. the gifts of fortune are promised in the west, and to the west they bend their course. no event can be compared with this continuous removal of the human race, except perhaps those irruptions which preceded the fall of the roman empire. then, as well as now, generations of men were impelled forward in the same direction to meet and struggle on the same spot; but the designs of providence were not the same; then, every new comer was the harbinger of destruction and of death; now, every adventurer brings with him the elements of prosperity and of life. the future still conceals from us the ulterior consequences of this emigration of the american toward the west; but we can hardly apprehend its more immediate results. as a portion of the inhabitants annually leave the states in which they were born, the population of these states increases very slowly, although they have long been established: thus in connecticut, which only contains inhabitants to the square mile, the population has not been increased by more than one quarter in forty years, while that of england has been augmented by one third in the lapse of the same period. the european emigrant always lands, therefore, in a country which is but half full, and where hands are in request: he becomes a workman in easy circumstances; his son goes to seek his fortune in unpeopled regions, and he becomes a rich landowner. the former amasses the capital which the latter invests, and the stranger as well as the native is unacquainted with want. the laws of the united states are extremely favorable to the division of property; but a cause which is more powerful than the laws prevents property from being divided to excess.[ ] this is very perceptible in the states which are beginning to be thickly peopled; massachusetts is the most populous part of the union, but it contains only inhabitants to the square mile, which is much less than in france, where are reckoned to the same extent of country. but in massachusetts estates are very rarely divided; the eldest son takes the land, and the others go to seek their fortune in the desert. the law has abolished the right of primogeniture, but circumstances have concurred to re-establish it under a form of which none can complain, and by which no just rights are impaired. a single fact will suffice to show the prodigious number of individuals who leave new england, in this manner, to settle themselves in the wilds. we were assured in , that thirty-six of the members of congress were born in the little state of connecticut. the population of connecticut, which constitutes only one forty-third part of that of the united states, thus furnished one-eighth of the whole body of representatives. the state of connecticut, however, only sends five delegates to congress; and the thirty-one others sit for the new western states. if these thirty-one individuals had remained in connecticut, it is probable that instead of becoming rich landowners they would have remained humble laborers, that they would have lived in obscurity without being able to rise into public life, and that, far from becoming useful members of the legislature, they might have been unruly citizens. these reflections do not escape the observation of the americans any more than of ourselves. "it cannot be doubted," says chancellor kent in his treatise on american law, "that the division of landed estates must produce great evils when it is carried to such excess that each parcel of land is insufficient to support a family; but these disadvantages have never been felt in the united states, and many generations must elapse before they can be felt. the extent of our inhabited territory, the abundance of adjacent land, and the continual stream of emigration flowing from the shores of the atlantic toward the interior of the country, suffice as yet, and will long suffice, to prevent the parcelling out of estates." it is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the american rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. in the pursuit he fearlessly braves the arrow of the indian and the distempers of the forest; he is unimpressed by the silence of the woods; the approach of beasts of prey does not disturb him; for he is goaded onward by a passion more intense than the love of life. before him lies a boundless continent, and he urges onward as if time pressed, and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions. i have spoken of the emigration from the older states, but how shall i describe that which takes place from the more recent ones? fifty years have scarcely elapsed since that of ohio was founded; the greater part of its inhabitants were not born within its confines; its capital has only been built thirty years, and its territory is still covered by an immense extent of uncultivated fields; nevertheless, the population of ohio is already proceeding westward, and most of the settlers who descend to the fertile savannahs of illinois are citizens of ohio. these men left their first country to improve their condition; they quit their resting-place to meliorate it still more; fortune awaits them everywhere, but happiness they cannot attain. the desire of prosperity has become an ardent and restless passion in their minds, which grows by what it gains. they early broke the ties which bound them to their natal earth, and they have contracted no fresh ones on their way. emigration was at first necessary to them as a means of subsistence; and it soon becomes a sort of game of chance, which they pursue for the emotions it excites, as much as for the gain it procures. sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. the woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. it is not uncommon in crossing the new states of the west to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log-house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. in these abandoned fields, and over those ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation; the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own; and nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track. i remember that in crossing one of the woodland districts which still cover the state of new york, i reached the shore of a lake, which was embosomed with forests coeval with the world. a small island, covered with woods, whose thick foliage concealed its banks, rose from the centre of the waters. upon the shores of the lake no object attested the presence of man, except a column of smoke which might be seen on the horizon rising from the tops of the trees to the clouds, and seeming to hang from heaven rather than to be mounting to the sky. an indian shallop was hauled up on the sand, which tempted me to visit the islet that had at first attracted my attention, and in a few minutes i set foot upon its banks. the whole island formed one of those delicious solitudes of the new world, which almost lead civilized man to regret the haunts of the savage. a luxuriant vegetation bore witness to the incomparable fruitfulness of the soil. the deep silence, which is common to the wilds of north america, was only broken by the hoarse cooing of the wood-pigeon and the tapping of the woodpecker upon the bark of trees. i was far from supposing that this spot had ever been inhabited, so completely did nature seem to be left to her own caprices; but when i reached the centre of the isle i thought that i discovered some traces of man. i then proceeded to examine the surrounding objects with care, and i soon perceived that an european had undoubtedly been led to seek a refuge in this retreat. yet what changes had taken place in the scene of his labors! the logs which he had hastily hewn to build himself a shed had sprouted afresh; the very props were intertwined with living verdure, and his cabin was transformed into a bower. in the midst of these shrubs a few stones were to be seen, blackened with fire and sprinkled with thin ashes; here the hearth had no doubt been, and the chimney in falling had covered it with rubbish. i stood for some time in silent admiration of the exuberance of nature and the littleness of man; and when i was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, i exclaimed with melancholy, "are ruins, then, already here?" in europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of america. without these unquiet passions the population would collect in certain spots, and would soon be subject to wants like those of the old world, which it is difficult to satisfy; for such is the present good fortune of the new world, that the vices of its inhabitants are scarcely less favorable to society than their virtues. these circumstances exercise a great influence on the estimation in which human actions are held in the two hemispheres. the americans frequently term what we should call cupidity a laudable industry; and they blame as faint-heartedness what we consider to be the virtue of moderate desires. in france simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachment which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the state. but in america nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues. the french canadians, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of their pristine manners, are already embarrassed for room upon their small territory; and this little community, which has so recently begun to exist, will shortly be a prey to the calamities incident to old nations. in canada the most enlightened, patriotic, and humane inhabitants, make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content it. there the seductions of wealth are vaunted with as much zeal, as the charms of an honest but limited income in the old world: and more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. if we listen to the eulogies, we shall hear that nothing is more praiseworthy than to exchange the pure and homely pleasures which even the poor man tastes in his own country, for the dull delights of prosperity under a foreign sky; to leave the patrimonial hearth, and the turf beneath which his forefathers sleep; in short, to abandon the living and the dead in quest of fortune. at the present time america presents a field for human effort, far more extensive than any sum of labor which can be applied to work it. in america, too much knowledge cannot be diffused; for all knowledge, while it may serve him who possesses it, turns also to the advantage of those who are without it. new wants are not to be feared, since they can be satisfied without difficulty; the growth of human passions need not be dreaded, since all passions may find an easy and a legitimate object: nor can men be put in possession of too much freedom, since they are scarcely ever tempted to misuse their liberties. the american republics of the present day are like companies of adventurers, formed to explore in common the waste lands of the new world, and busied in a flourishing trade. the passions which agitate the americans most deeply, are not their political, but their commercial passions; or, to speak more correctly, they introduce the habits they contract in business into their political life. they love order, without which affairs do not prosper; and they set an especial value upon a regular conduct, which is the foundation of a solid business; they prefer the good sense which amasses large fortunes, to that enterprising spirit which frequently dissipates them; general ideas alarm their minds, which are accustomed to positive calculations; and they hold practice in more honor than theory. it is in america that one learns to understand the influence which physical prosperity exercises over political actions, and even over opinions which ought to acknowledge no sway but that of reason; and it is more especially among strangers that this truth is perceptible. most of the european emigrants to the new world carry with them that wild love of independence and of change, which our calamities are apt to engender. i sometimes met with europeans, in the united states, who had been obliged to leave their own country on account of their political opinions. they all astonished me by the language they held; but one of them surprised me more than all the rest. as i was crossing one of the most remote districts of pennsylvania, i was benighted, and obliged to beg for hospitality at the gate of a wealthy planter, who was a frenchman by birth. he bade me sit down beside his fire, and we began to talk with that freedom which befits persons who meet in the backwoods, two thousand leagues from their native country. i was aware that my host had been a great leveller and an ardent demagogue, forty years ago, and that his name was not unknown to fame. i was therefore not a little surprised to hear him discuss the rights of property as an economist or a landowner might have done: he spoke of the necessary gradations which fortune established among men, of obedience to established laws, of the influence of good morals in commonwealths, and of the support which religious opinions give to order and to freedom; he even went so far as to quote an evangelical authority in corroboration of one of his political tenets. i listened, and marvelled at the feebleness of human reason. a proposition is true or false, but no art can prove it to be one or the other, in the midst of the uncertainties of science and the conflicting lessons of experience, until a new incident disperses the clouds of doubt; i was poor, i become rich; and i am not to expect that prosperity will act upon my conduct, and leave my judgment free: my opinions change with my fortune, and the happy circumstances which i turn to my advantage, furnish me with that decisive argument which was before wanting. [the sentence beginning "i was poor, i become rich," &c, struck the editor, on perusal, as obscure, if not contradictory. the original seems more explicit, and justice to the author seems to require that it should be presented to the reader. "j'étais pauvre, me voici riche; du moins, si le bien-être, en agissant sur ma conduite, laissait mon jugement en liberté! mais non, mes opinions sont en effet changées avec ma fortune, et, dans l'événement heureux dont je profite, j'ai réellement découvert la raison déterminante qui jusque-là m'avait manqué."--_american editor_.] the influence of prosperity acts still more freely upon the american than upon strangers. the american has always seen the connexion of public order and public prosperity, intimately united as they are, go on before his eyes; he does not conceive that one can subsist without the other; he has therefore nothing to forget: nor has he, like so many europeans, to unlearn the lessons of his early education. * * * * * influence of the laws upon the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states. three principal causes of the maintenance of the democratic republic.--federal constitutions.--municipal institutions.--judicial power. the principal aim of this book has been to make known the laws of the united states; if this purpose has been accomplished, the reader is already enabled to judge for himself which are the laws that really tend to maintain the democratic republic, and which endanger its existence. if i have not succeeded in explaining this in the whole course of my work, i cannot hope to do so within the limits of a single chapter. it is not my intention to retrace the path i have already pursued; and a very few lines will suffice to recapitulate what i have previously explained. three circumstances seem to me to contribute most powerfully to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states. the first is that federal form of government which the americans have adopted, and which enables the union to combine the power of a great empire with the security of a small state;-- the second consists in those municipal institutions which limit the despotism of the majority, and at the same time impart a taste for freedom, and a knowledge of the art of being free, to the people;-- the third is to be met with in the constitution of the judicial power. i have shown in what manner the courts of justice serve to repress the excesses of democracy; and how they check and direct the impulses of the majority, without stopping its activity. * * * * * influence of manners upon the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states. i have previously remarked that the manners of the people may be considered as one of the general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic in the united states is attributable. i here use the word _manners_, with the meaning which the ancients attached to the word _mores_; for i apply it not only to manners, in their proper sense of what constitutes the character of social intercourse, but i extend it to the various notions and opinions current among men, and to the mass of those ideas which constitute their character of mind. i comprise, therefore, under this term the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people. my intention is not to draw a picture of american manners, but simply to point out such features of them as are favorable to the maintenance of political institutions. * * * * * religion considered as a political institution, which powerfully contributes to the maintenance of the democratic republic among the americans. north america peopled by men who professed a democratic and republican christianity.--arrival of the catholics.--for what reason the catholics form the most democratic and the most republican class at the present time. every religion is to be found in juxtaposition to a political opinion, which is connected with it by affinity. if the human mind be left to follow its own bent, it will regulate the temporal and spiritual institutions of society upon one uniform principle; and man will endeavor, if i may use the expression, to harmonize the state in which he lives upon earth, with the state he believes to await him in heaven. the greatest part of british america was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy: they brought with them into the new world a form of christianity, which i cannot better describe, than by styling it a democratic and republican religion. this sect contributed powerfully to the establishment of a democracy and a republic; and from the earliest settlement of the emigrants, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved. about fifty years ago ireland began to pour a catholic population into the united states; on the other hand, the catholics of america made proselytes, and at the present moment more than a million of christians, professing the truths of the church of rome, are to be met with in the union. these catholics are faithful to the observances of their religion; they are fervent and zealous in the support and belief of their doctrines. nevertheless they constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the united states; and although this fact may surprise the observer at first, the cause by which it is occasioned may easily be discovered upon reflection. i think that the catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy. among the various sects of christians, catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, to be one of those which are most favorable to the equality of conditions. in the catholic church, the religious community is composed of only two elements; the priest and the people. the priest alone rises above the rank of his flock, and all below him are equal. on doctrinal points the catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise and the ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the same creed; it imposes the same observances upon the rich and needy, it inflicts the same austerities upon the strong and the weak, it listens to no compromises with mortal man, but reducing all the human race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society at the foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight of god. if catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare them for inequality; but the contrary may be said of protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent, more than to render them equal. catholicism is like an absolute monarchy; if the sovereign be removed, all the other classes of society are more equal than they are in republics. it has not unfrequently occurred that the catholic priest has left the service of the altar to mix with the governing powers of society, and to make his place among the civil gradations of men. this religious influence has sometimes been used to secure the interests of that political state of things to which he belonged. at other times catholics have taken the side of aristocracy from a spirit of religion. but no sooner is the priesthood entirely separated from the government, as is the case in the united states, than it is found that no class of men are more naturally disposed than the catholics to transfuse the doctrine of the equality of conditions into the political world. if, then, the catholic citizens of the united states are not forcibly led by the nature of their tenets to adopt democratic and republican principles, at least they are not necessarily opposed to them; and their social position, as well as their limited number, obliges them to adopt these opinions. most of the catholics are poor, and they have no chance of taking a part in the government unless it be open to all the citizens. they constitute a minority, and all rights must be respected in order to ensure to them the free exercise of their own privileges. these two causes induce them, unconsciously, to adopt political doctrines which they would perhaps support with less zeal if they were rich and preponderant. the catholic clergy of the united states has never attempted to oppose this political tendency; but it seeks rather to justify its results. the priests in america have divided the intellectual world into two parts: in the one they place the doctrines of revealed religion, which command their assent; in the other they leave those truths, which they believe to have been freely left open to the researches of political inquiry. thus the catholics of the united states are at the same time the most faithful believers and the most zealous citizens. it may be asserted that in the united states no religious doctrine displays the slightest hostility to democratic and republican institutions. the clergy of all the different sects holds the same language; their opinions are consonant to the laws, and the human intellect flows onward in one sole current. i happened to be staying in one of the largest towns in the union, when i was invited to attend a public meeting which had been called for the purpose of assisting the poles, and of sending them supplies of arms and money. i found two or three thousand persons collected in a vast hall which had been prepared to receive them. in a short time a priest in his ecclesiastical robes advanced to the front of the hustings: the spectators rose, and stood uncovered, while he spoke in the following terms:-- "almighty god! the god of armies! thou who didst strengthen the hearts and guide the arms of our fathers when they were fighting for the sacred rights of national independence; thou who didst make them triumph over a hateful oppression, and hast granted to our people the benefits of liberty and peace; turn, o lord, a favorable eye upon the other hemisphere; pitifully look down upon that heroic nation which is even now struggling as we did in the former time, and for the same rights which we defended with our blood. thou, who didst create man in the likeness of the same image, let no tyranny mar thy work, and establish inequality upon the earth. almighty god! do thou watch over the destiny of the poles, and render them worthy to be free. may thy wisdom direct their councils, and may thy strength sustain their arms! shed forth thy terror over their enemies; scatter the powers which take counsel against them; and vouchsafe that the injustice which the world has beheld for fifty years, be not consummated in our time. o lord, who holdest alike the hearts of nations and of men in thy powerful hand, raise up allies to the sacred cause of right; arouse the french nation from the apathy in which its rulers retain it, that it go forth again to fight for the liberties of the world. "lord, turn not thou thy face from us, and grant that we may always be the most religious as well as the freest people of the earth. almighty god, hear our supplications this day. save the poles, we beseech thee, in the name of thy well beloved son, our lord jesus christ, who died upon the cross for the salvation of men. amen." the whole meeting responded "amen!" with devotion. * * * * * indirect influence of religious opinions upon political society in the united states. christian morality common to all sects.--influence of religion upon the manners of the americans.--respect for the marriage tie.--in what manner religion confines the imagination of the americans within certain limits, and checks the passion of innovation.--opinion of the americans on the political utility of religion.--their exertions to extend and secure its predominance. i have just shown what the direct influence of religion upon politics is in the united states; but its indirect influence appears to me to be still more considerable, and it never instructs the americans more fully in the art of being free than when it says nothing of freedom. the sects which exist in the united states are innumerable. they all differ in respect to the worship which is due from man to his creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man. each sect adores the deity in its own peculiar manner; but all the sects preach the same moral law in the name of god. if it be of the slightest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same. society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of very little importance to its interests. moreover, almost all the sects of the united states are comprised within the great unity of christianity, and christian morality is everywhere the same. it may be believed without unfairness, that a certain number of americans pursue a peculiar form of worship, from habit more than from conviction. in the united states the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in america; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth. i have remarked that the members of the american clergy in general, without even excepting those who do not admit religious liberty, are all in favor of civil freedom; but they do not support any particular political system. they keep aloof from parties, and from public affairs. in the united states religion exercises but little influence upon the laws, and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the manners of the community, and by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state. i do not question that the great austerity of manners which is observable in the united states, arises, in the first instance, from religious faith. religion is often unable to restrain man from the numberless temptations of fortune; nor can it check that passion for gain which every incident of his life contributes to arouse; but its influence over the mind of women is supreme, and women are the protectors of morals. there is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is so much respected as in america, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated. in europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. to despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home, is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires. agitated by the tumultuous passions which frequently disturb his dwelling, the european is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact. but when the american retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace. there his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; and as he finds that an orderly life is the surest path to happiness, he accustoms himself without difficulty to moderate his opinions as well as his tastes. while the european endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the american derives from his own home that love of order, which he afterward carries with him into public affairs. in the united states the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people. among the anglo-americans, there are some who profess the doctrines of christianity from a sincere belief in them, and others who do the same because they are afraid to be suspected of unbelief. christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as i have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates and the experiments of men. thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field; and, whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount. before it can perpetrate innovation, certain primal and immutable principles are laid down, and the boldest conceptions of human device are subjected to certain forms which retard and stop their completion. the imagination of the americans, even in its greatest flights, is circumspect and undecided; its impulses are checked, and its works unfinished. these habits of restraint recur in political society, and are singularly favorable both to the tranquillity of the people and the durability of the institutions it has established. nature and circumstances concurred to make the inhabitants of the united states bold men, as is sufficiently attested by the enterprising spirit with which they seek for fortune. if the minds of the americans were free from all trammels, they would very shortly become the most daring innovators and the most implacable disputants in the world. but the revolutionists of america are obliged to profess an ostensible respect for christian morality and equity, which does not easily permit them to violate the laws that oppose their designs; nor would they find it easy to surmount the scruples of their partisans, even if they were able to get over their own. hitherto no one, in the united states, has dared to advance the maxim, that everything is permissible with a view to the interests of society; an impious adage, which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom, to shelter all the tyrants of future ages. thus while the law permits the americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash and unjust. religion in america takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions. indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the united states themselves look upon religious belief. i do not know whether all the americans have a sincere faith in their religion; for who can search the human heart? but i am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. this opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society. in the united states, if a political character attacks a sect, this may not prevent even the partisans of that very sect, from supporting him; but if he attacks all the sects together, every one abandons him, and he remains alone. while i was in america, a witness, who happened to be called at the assizes of the county of chester (state of new york), declared that he did not believe in the existence of god or in the immortality of the soul. the judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say.[ ] the newspapers related the fact without any farther comment. the americans combine the notions of christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live. i have known of societies formed by the americans to send out ministers of the gospel into the new western states, to found schools and churches there, lest religion should be suffered to die away in those remote settlements, and the rising states be less fitted to enjoy free institutions than the people from which they emanated. i met with wealthy new englanders who abandoned the country in which they were born, in order to lay the foundations of christianity and of freedom on the banks of the missouri or in the prairies of illinois. thus religious zeal is perpetually stimulated in the united states by the duties of patriotism. these men do not act from an exclusive consideration of the promises of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion to the cause; and if you converse with these missionaries of christian civilisation, you will be surprised to find how much value they set upon the goods of this world, and that you meet with a politician where you expected to find a priest. they will tell you that "all the american republics are collectively involved with each other; if the republics of the west were to fall into anarchy, or to be mastered by a despot, the republican institutions which now flourish upon the shores of the atlantic ocean would be in great peril. it is therefore our interest that the new states should be religious, in order to maintain our liberties." such are the opinions of the americans; and if any hold that the religious spirit which i admire is the very thing most amiss in america, and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the human race is to believe in some blind cosmogony, or to assert with cabanis the secretion of thought by the brain, i can only reply, that those who hold this language have never been in america, and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation. when they return from their expedition, we shall hear what they have to say. there are persons in france who look upon republican institutions as a temporary means of power, of wealth and distinction; men who are the _condottieri_ of liberty, and who fight for their own advantage, whatever be the colors they wear: it is not to these that i address myself. but there are others who look forward to the republican form of government as a tranquil and lasting state, toward which modern society is daily impelled by the ideas and manners of the time, and who sincerely desire to prepare men to be free. when these men attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions to the prejudice of their interests. despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors, than in the monarchy which they attack; and it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. how is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? and what can be done with a people which is its own master, if it be not submissive to the divinity? * * * * * principal causes which render religion powerful in america. care taken by the americans to separate the church from the state.--the laws, public opinion, and even the exertions of the clergy concur to promote this end.--influence of religion upon the mind, in the united states, attributable to this cause.--reason of this.--what is the natural state of men with regard to religion at the present time.--what are the peculiar and incidental causes which prevent men, in certain countries, from arriving at this state. the philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual decay of religious faith in a very simple manner. religious zeal, said they, must necessarily fail, the more generally liberty is established and knowledge diffused. unfortunately, facts are by no means in accordance with their theory. there are certain populations in europe whose unbelief is only equalled by their ignorance and their debasement, while in america one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfils all the outward duties of religion with fervor. upon my arrival in the united states, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer i stayed there, the more did i perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which i was unaccustomed. in france i had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in america i found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. my desire to discover the causes of this phenomenon increased from day to day. in order to satisfy it, i questioned the members of all the different sects; and i more especially sought the society of the clergy, who are the depositaries of the different persuasions, and who are more especially interested in their duration. as a member of the roman catholic church i was more particularly brought into contact with several of its priests, with whom i became intimately acquainted. to each of these men i expressed my astonishment and i explained my doubts: i found that they differed upon matters of detail alone; and that they mainly attributed the peaceable dominion of religion in their country, to the separation of church and state. i do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in america, i did not meet with a single individual, of the clergy or of the laity, who was not of the same opinion upon this point. this led me to examine more attentively than i had hitherto done, the station which the american clergy occupy in political society. i learned with surprise that they fill no public appointments;[ ] not one of them is to be met with in the administration, and they are not even represented in the legislative assemblies. in several states[ ] the law excludes them from political life; public opinion in all. and when i came to inquire into the prevailing spirit of the clergy, i found that most of its members seemed to retire of their own accord from the exercise of power, and that they made it the pride of their profession to abstain from politics. i heard them inveigh against ambition and deceit, under whatever political opinions these vices might chance to lurk; but i learned from their discourses that men are not guilty in the eye of god for any opinions concerning political government, which they may profess with sincerity, any more than they are for their mistakes in building a house or in driving a furrow. i perceived that these ministers of the gospel eschewed all parties, with the anxiety attendant upon personal interest. these facts convinced me that what i had been told was true; and it then became my object to investigate their causes, and to inquire how it happened that the real authority of religion was increased by a state of things which diminished its apparent force: these causes did not long escape my researches. the short space of threescore years can never content the imagination of man; nor can the imperfect joys of this world satisfy his heart. man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt of existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation. these different feelings incessantly urge his soul to the contemplation of a future state, and religion directs his musings thither. religion, then, is simply another form of hope; and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself. men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect, and a sort of violent distortion of their true natures; but they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments; for unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. if we only consider religious institutions in a purely human point of view, they may be said to derive an inexhaustible element of strength from man himself, since they belong to one of the constituent principles of human nature. i am aware that at certain times religion may strengthen this influence, which originates in itself, by the artificial power of the laws, and by the support of those temporal institutions which direct society. religions, intimately united to the governments of the earth, have been known to exercise a sovereign authority derived from the twofold source of terror and of faith; but when a religion contracts an alliance of this nature, i do not hesitate to affirm that it commits the same error, as a man who should sacrifice his future to his present welfare; and in obtaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks that authority which is rightfully its own. when a religion founds its empire upon the desire of immortality which lives in every human heart, it may aspire to universal dominion: but when it connects itself with a government, it must necessarily adopt maxims which are only applicable to certain nations. thus, in forming an alliance with a political power, religion augments its authority over a few, and forfeits the hope of reigning over all. as long as a religion rests upon those sentiments which are the consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of mankind. but if it be mixed up with the bitter passions of the world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its interests, and not the principle of love, have given to it; or to repel as antagonists men who are still attached to its own spirit, however opposed they may be to the powers to which it is allied. the church cannot share the temporal power of the state, without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites. the political powers which seem to be most firmly established have frequently no better guarantee for their duration, than the opinions of a generation, the interests of the time, or the life of an individual. a law may modify the social condition which seems to be most fixed and determinate; and with the social condition everything else must change. the powers of society are more or less fugitive, like the years which we spend upon the earth; they succeed each other with rapidity like the fleeting cares of life; and no government has ever yet been founded upon an invariable disposition of the human heart, or upon an imperishable interest. as long as religion is sustained by those feelings, propensities, and passions, which are found to occur under the same forms at all the different periods of history, it may defy the efforts of time; or at least it can only be destroyed by another religion. but when religion clings to the interests of the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of the earth. it is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral authority, it shares their fortunes, and may fall with those transient passions which supported them for a day. the alliance which religion contracts with political powers must needs be onerous to itself; since it does not require their assistance to live, and by giving them its assistance it may be exposed to decay. the danger which i have just pointed out always exists, but it is not always equally visible. in some ages governments seem to be imperishable, in others the existence of society appears to be more precarious than the life of man. some constitutions plunge the citizens into a lethargic somnolence, and others rouse them to feverish excitement. when government appears to be so strong, and laws so stable, men do not perceive the dangers which may accrue from a union of church and state. when governments display so much inconstancy, the danger is self-evident, but it is no longer possible to avoid it; to be effectual, measures must be taken to discover its approach. in proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition of society, and as communities display democratic propensities, it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions; for the time is coming when authority will be bandied from hand to hand, when political theories will succeed each other, and when men, laws and constitutions, will disappear or be modified from day to day, and this not for a season only, but unceasingly. agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and inertness are the law of absolute monarchies. if the americans, who change the head of the government once in four years, who elect new legislators every two years, and renew the provincial officers every twelvemonth; if the americans, who have abandoned the political world to the attempts of innovators, had not placed religion beyond their reach, where could it abide in the ebb and flow of human opinions? where would that respect which belongs to it be paid, amid the struggles of faction? and what would become of its immortality in the midst of perpetual decay? the american clergy were the first to perceive this truth, and to act in conformity with it. they saw that they must renounce their religious influence, if they were to strive for political power; and they chose to give up the support of the state, rather than to share in its vicissitudes. in america, religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been at certain periods in the history of certain peoples; but its influence is more lasting. it restricts itself to its own resources, but of those none can deprive it: its circle is limited to certain principles, but those principles are entirely its own, and under its undisputed control. on every side in europe we hear voices complaining of the absence of religious faith, and inquiring the means of restoring to religion some remnant of its pristine authority. it seems to me that we must first attentively consider what ought to be _the natural state_ of men with regard to religion, at the present time; and when we know what we have to hope and to fear, we may discern the end to which our efforts ought to be directed. the two great dangers which threaten the existence of religions are schism and indifference. in ages of fervent devotion, men sometimes abandon their religion, but they only shake it off in order to adopt another. their faith changes the objects to which it is directed, but it suffers no decline. the old religion, then, excites enthusiastic attachment or bitter enmity in either party; some leave it with anger, others cling to it with increased devotedness, and although persuasions differ, irreligion is unknown. such, however, is not the case when a religious belief is secretly undermined by doctrines which may be termed negative, since they deny the truth of one religion without affirming that of any other. prodigious revolutions then take place in the human mind, without the apparent co-operation of the passions of man, and almost without his knowledge. men lose the object of their fondest hopes, as if through forgetfulness. they are carried away by an imperceptible current which they have not the courage to stem, but which they follow with regret, since it bears them from a faith they love, to a scepticism that plunges them into despair. in ages which answer to this description, men desert their religious opinions from lukewarmness rather than from dislike; they do not reject them, but the sentiments by which they were once fostered disappear. but if the unbeliever does not admit religion to be true, he still considers it useful. regarding religious institutions in a human point of view, he acknowledges their influence upon manners and legislation. he admits that they may serve to make men live in peace with one another and to prepare them gently for the hour of death. he regrets the faith which he has lost; and as he is deprived of a treasure which he has learned to estimate at its full value, he scruples to take it from those who still possess it. on the other hand, those who continue to believe, are not afraid openly to avow their faith. they look upon those who do not share their persuasion as more worthy of pity than of opposition; and they are aware, that to acquire the esteem of the unbelieving, they are not obliged to follow their example. they are hostile to no one in the world; and as they do not consider the society in which they live as an arena in which religion is bound to face its thousand deadly foes, they love their contemporaries, while they condemn their weaknesses, and lament their errors. as those who do not believe, conceal their incredulity; and as those who believe, display their faith, public opinion pronounces itself in favor of religion: love, support, and honor, are bestowed upon it, and it is only by searching the human soul, that we can detect the wounds which it has received. the mass of mankind, who are never without the feeling of religion, do not perceive anything at variance with the established faith. the instinctive desire of a future life brings the crowd about the altar, and opens the hearts of men to the precepts and consolations of religion. but this picture is not applicable to us; for there are men among us who have ceased to believe in christianity, without adopting any other religion; others who are in the perplexities of doubt, and who already affect not to believe; and others, again, who are afraid to avow that christian faith which they still cherish in secret. amid these lukewarm partisans and ardent antagonists, a small number of believers exist, who are ready to brave all obstacles, and to scorn all dangers in defence of their faith. they have done violence to human weakness, in order to rise superior to public opinion. excited by the effort they have made, they scarcely know where to stop; and as they know that the first use which the french made, of independence, was to attack religion, they look upon their contemporaries with dread, and they recoil in alarm from the liberty which their fellow-citizens are seeking to obtain. as unbelief appears to them to be a novelty, they comprise all that is new in one indiscriminate animosity. they are at war with their age and country, and they look upon every opinion which is put forth there as the necessary enemy of the faith. such is not the natural state of men with regard to religion at the present day; and some extraordinary or incidental cause must be at work in france, to prevent the human mind from following its original propensities, and to drive it beyond the limits at which it ought naturally to stop. i am intimately convinced that this extraordinary and incidental cause is the close connexion of politics and religion. the unbelievers of europe attack the christians as their political opponents, rather than as their religious adversaries; they hate the christian religion as the opinion of a party, much more than as an error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because they are the representatives of the divinity, than because they are the allies of authority. in europe, christianity has been intimately united to the powers of the earth. those powers are now in decay, and it is, as it were, buried under their ruins. the living body of religion has been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated polity; cut the bonds which restrain it, and that which is alive will rise once more. i know not what could restore the christian church of europe to the energy of its earlier days; that power belongs to god alone; but it may be the effect of human policy to leave the faith in all the full exercise of the strength which it still retains. * * * * * how the instruction, the habits, and the practical experience of the americans promote the success of their democratic institutions. what is to be understood by the instruction of the american people.--the human mind is more superficially instructed in the united states than in europe.--no one completely uninstructed.--reason of this rapidity with which opinions are diffused even in the uncultivated states of the west.--practical experience more serviceable to the americans than book-learning. i have but little to add to what i have already said, concerning the influence which the instruction and the habits of the americans exercise upon the maintenance of their political institutions. america has hitherto produced very few writers of distinction; it possesses no great historians, and not a single eminent poet. the inhabitants of that country look upon what are properly styled literary pursuits with a kind of disapprobation; and there are towns of very second rate importance in europe, in which more literary works are annually published, than in the twenty-four states of the union put together. the spirit of the americans is averse to general ideas; and it does not seek theoretical discoveries. neither politics nor manufactures direct them to these occupations; and although new laws are perpetually enacted in the united states, no great writers have hitherto inquired into the principles of their legislation. the americans have lawyers and commentators, but no jurists; and they furnish examples rather than lessons to the world. the same observation applies to the mechanical arts. in america, the inventions of europe are adopted with sagacity; they are perfected, and adapted with admirable skill to the wants of the country. manufactures exist, but the science of manufacture is not cultivated; and they have good workmen, but very few inventors. fulton was obliged to proffer his services to foreign nations for a long time before he was able to devote them to his own country. [the remark that in america "there are very good workmen but very few inventors," will excite surprise in this country. the inventive character of fulton he seems to admit, but would apparently deprive us of the credit of his name, by the remark that he was obliged to proffer his services to foreign nations for a long time. he might have added, that those proffers were disregarded and neglected, and that it was finally in his own country that he found the aid necessary to put in execution his great project. if there be patronage extended by the citizens of the united states to any one thing in preference to another, it is to the results of inventive genius. surely franklin, rittenhouse, and perkins, have been heard of by our author; and he must have heard something of that wonderful invention, the cotton-gin of whitney, and of the machines for making cards to comb wool. the original machines of fulton for the application of steam have been constantly improving, so that there is scarcely a vestige of them remaining. but to sum up the whole in one word, can it be possible that our author did not visit the patent office at washington? whatever may be said of the _utility_ of nine-tenths of the inventions of which the descriptions and models are there deposited, no one who has ever seen that depository, or who has read a description of its contents, can doubt that they furnish the most incontestible evidence of extraordinary inventive genius--a genius that has excited the astonishment of other european travellers.--_american editor_.] the observer who is desirous of forming an opinion on the state of instruction among the anglo-americans, must consider the same object from two different points of view. if he only singles out the learned, he will be astonished to find how rare they are; but if he counts the ignorant, the american people will appear to be the most enlightened community in the world. the whole population, as i observed in another place, is situated between these two extremes. in new england, every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its constitution. in the states of connecticut and massachusetts, it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon. when i compare the greek and roman republics with these american states; the manuscript libraries of the former, and their rude population, with the innumerable journals and the enlightened people of the latter; when i remember all the attempts which are made to judge the modern republics by the assistance of those of antiquity, and to infer what will happen in our time from what took place two thousand years ago, i am tempted to burn my books, in order to apply none but novel ideas to so novel a condition of society. what i have said of new england must not, however, be applied indiscriminately to the whole union: as we advance towards the west or the south, the instruction of the people diminishes. in the states which are adjacent to the gulf of mexico, a certain number of individuals may be found, as in our own countries, who are devoid of the rudiments of instruction. but there is not a single district in the united states sunk in complete ignorance; and for a very simple reason; the peoples of europe started from the darkness of a barbarous condition to advance toward the light of civilisation; their progress has been unequal; some of them have improved apace, while others have loitered in their course, and some have stopped, and are still sleeping upon the way. such has not been the case in the united states. the anglo-americans settled in a state of civilisation, upon that territory which their descendants occupy; they had not to begin to learn, and it was sufficient not to forget. now the children of these same americans are the persons who, year by year, transport their dwellings into the wilds: and with their dwellings their acquired information and their esteem for knowledge. education has taught them the utility of instruction, and has enabled them to transmit that instruction to their posterity. in the united states society has no infancy, but it is born in man's estate. the americans never use the word "peasant," because they have no idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager, have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilisation. at the extreme borders of the confederate states, upon the confines of society and of the wilderness, a population of bold adventurers have taken up their abode, who pierce the solitudes of the american woods, and seek a country there, in order to escape that poverty which awaited them in their native provinces. as soon as the pioneer arrives upon the spot which is to serve him for a retreat, he fells a few trees and builds a log-house. nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings. the traveller who approaches one of them toward night-fall, sees the flicker of the hearth-flame through the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees. who would not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and ignorance? yet no sort of comparison can be drawn between the pioneer and the dwelling which shelters him. everything about him is primitive and unformed, but he is himself the result of the labor and the experience of eighteen centuries. he wears the dress, and he speaks the language of cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious of the future, and ready for argument upon the present; he is, in short, a highly civilized being, who consents, for a time, to inhabit the back-woods, and who penetrates into the wilds of a new world with the bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers. it is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which public opinion circulates in the midst of these deserts.[ ] i do not think that so much intellectual intercourse takes place in the most enlightened and populous districts of france.[ ] it cannot be doubted that in the united states, the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of a democratic republic; and such must always be the case, i believe, where instruction, which awakens the understanding, is not separated from moral education which amends the heart. but i by no means exaggerate this benefit, and i am still farther from thinking, as so many people do think in europe, that men can be instantaneously made citizens by teaching them to read and write. true information is mainly derived from experience, and if the americans had not been gradually accustomed to govern themselves, their book-learning would not assist them much at the present day. i have lived a great deal with the people in the united states, and i cannot express how much i admire their experience and their good sense. an american should never be allowed to speak of europe; for he will then probably display a vast deal of presumption and very foolish pride. he will take up with those crude and vague notions which are so useful to the ignorant all over the world. but if you question him respecting his own country, the cloud which dimmed his intelligence will immediately disperse; his language will become as clear and as precise as his thoughts. he will inform you what his rights are, and by what means he exercises them; he will be able to point out the customs which obtain in the political world. you will find that he is well acquainted with the rules of the administration, and that he is familiar with the mechanism of the laws. the citizen of the united states does not acquire his practical science and his positive notions from books; the instruction he has acquired may have prepared him for receiving those ideas, but it did not furnish them. the american learns to know the laws by participating in the act of legislation; and he takes a lesson in the forms of government, from governing. the great work of society is ever going on beneath his eyes, and, as it were, under his hands. in the united states politics are the end and aim of education; in europe its principal object is to fit men for private life. the interference of the citizens in public affairs is too rare an occurrence for it to be anticipated beforehand. upon casting a glance over society in the two hemispheres, these differences are indicated even by its external aspect. in europe, we frequently introduce the ideas and the habits of private life into public affairs; and as we pass at once from the domestic circle to the government of the state, we may frequently be heard to discuss the great interests of society in the same manner in which we converse with our friends. the americans, on the other hand, transfuse the habits of public life into their manners in private; and in their country the jury is introduced into the games of school-boys, and parliamentary forms are observed in the order of a feast. * * * * * the laws contribute more to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states than the physical circumstances of the country, and the manners more than the laws. all the nations of america have a democratic state of society.--yet democratic institutions subsist only among the anglo-americans.--the spaniards of south america, equally favored by physical causes as the anglo-americans, unable to maintain a democratic republic.--mexico, which has adopted the constitution of the united states, in the same predicament.--the anglo-americans of the west less able to maintain it than those of the east.--reason of these different results. i have remarked that the maintenance of democratic institutions in the united states is attributable to the circumstances, the laws, and the manners of that country.[ ] most europeans are only acquainted with the first of these three causes, and they are apt to give it a preponderating importance which it does not really possess. it is true that the anglo-americans settled in the new world in a state of social equality; the low-born and the noble were not to be found among them; and professional prejudices were always as entirely unknown as the prejudices of birth. thus, as the condition of society was democratic, the empire of democracy was established without difficulty. but this circumstance is by no means peculiar to the united states; almost all the transatlantic colonies were founded by men equal among themselves, or who became so by inhabiting them. in no one part of the new world have europeans been able to create an aristocracy. nevertheless democratic institutions prosper nowhere but in the united states. the american union has no enemies to contend with; it stands in the wilds like an island in the ocean. but the spaniards of south america were no less isolated by nature; yet their position has not relieved them from the charge of standing armies. they make war upon each other when they have no foreign enemies to oppose; and the anglo-american democracy is the only one which has hitherto been able to maintain itself in peace. the territory of the union presents a boundless field to human activity, and inexhaustible materials for industry and labor. the passion of wealth takes the place of ambition, and the warmth of faction is mitigated by a sense of prosperity. but in what portion of the globe shall we meet with more fertile plains, with mightier rivers, or with more unexplored and inexhaustible riches, than in south america? nevertheless south america has been unable to maintain democratic institutions. if the welfare of nations depended on their being placed in a remote position, with an unbounded space of habitable territory before them, the spaniards of south america would have no reason to complain of their fate. and although they might enjoy less prosperity than the inhabitants of the united states, their lot might still be such as to excite the envy of some nations in europe. there are, however, no nations upon the face of the earth more miserable than those of south america. thus, not only are physical causes inadequate to produce results analogous to those which occur in north america, but they are unable to raise the population of south america above the level of european states, where they act in a contrary direction. physical causes do not therefore affect the destiny of nations so much as has been supposed. i have met with men in new england who were on the point of leaving a country, where they might have remained in easy circumstances, to go to seek their fortunes in the wilds. not far from that district i found a french population in canada, which was closely crowded on a narrow territory, although the same wilds were at hand; and while the emigrant from the united states purchased an extensive estate with the earnings of a short term of labor, the canadian paid as much for land as he would have done in france. nature offers the solitudes of the new world to europeans; but they are not always acquainted with the means of turning her gifts to account. other peoples of america have the same physical conditions of prosperity as the anglo-americans, but without their laws and their manners; and these peoples are wretched. the laws and manners of the anglo-americans are therefore that cause of their greatness which is the object of my inquiry. i am far from supposing that the american laws are preeminently good in themselves; i do not hold them to be applicable to all democratic peoples; and several of them seem to me to be dangerous, even in the united states. nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the american legislation, taken collectively, is extremely well adapted to the genius of the people and the nature of the country which it is intended to govern. the american laws are therefore good, and to them must be attributed a large portion of the success which attends the government of democracy in america: but i do not believe them to be the principal cause of that success; and if they seem to me to have more influence upon the social happiness of the americans than the nature of the country, on the other hand there is reason to believe that their effect is still inferior to that produced by the manners of the people. the federal laws undoubtedly constitute the most important part of the legislation of the united states. mexico, which is not less fortunately situated than the anglo-american union, has adopted these same laws, but is unable to accustom itself to the government of democracy. some other cause is therefore at work independently of those physical circumstances and peculiar laws which enable the democracy to rule in the united states. another still more striking proof may be adduced. almost all the inhabitants of the territory of the union are the descendants of a common stock; they speak the same language, they worship god in the same manner, they are affected by the same physical causes, and they obey the same laws. whence, then, do their characteristic differences arise? why, in the eastern states of the union, does the republican government display vigor and regularity, and proceed with mature deliberation? whence does it derive the wisdom and durability which mark its acts, while in the western states, on the contrary, society seems to be ruled by the powers of chance? there, public business is conducted with an irregularity, and a passionate and feverish excitement, which does not announce a long or sure duration. i am no longer comparing the anglo-american states to foreign nations; but i am contrasting them with each other, and endeavoring to discover why they are so unlike. the arguments which are derived from the nature of the country and the difference of legislation, are here all set aside. recourse must be had to some other cause; and what other cause can there be except the manners of the people? it is in the eastern states that the anglo-americans have been longest accustomed to the government of democracy, and that they have adopted the habits and conceived the notions most favorable to its maintenance. democracy has gradually penetrated into their customs, their opinions, and the forms of social intercourse; it is to be found in all the details of daily life equally as in the laws. in the eastern states the instruction and practical education of the people have been most perfected, and religion has been most thoroughly amalgamated with liberty. now these habits, opinions, customs, and convictions, are precisely the constituent elements of that which i have denominated manners. in the western states, on the contrary, a portion of the same advantages is still wanting. many of the americans of the west were born in the woods, and they mix the ideas and the customs of savage life with the civilisation of their parents. their passions are more intense; their religious morality less authoritative; and their convictions are less secure. the inhabitants exercise no sort of control over their fellow-citizens, for they are scarcely acquainted with each other. the nations of the west display, to a certain extent, the inexperience and the rude habits of a people in its infancy; for although they are composed of old elements, their assemblage is of recent date. the manners of the americans of the united states are, then, the real cause which renders that people the only one of the american nations that is able to support a democratic government; and it is the influence of manners which produces the different degrees of order and of prosperity, that may be distinguished in the several anglo-american democracies. thus the effect which the geographical position of a country may have upon the duration of democratic institutions is exaggerated in europe. too much importance is attributed to legislation, too little to manners. these three great causes serve, no doubt, to regulate and direct the american democracy; but if they were to be classed in their proper order, i should say that the physical circumstances are less efficient than the laws, and the laws very subordinate to the manners of the people. i am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a country: while the latter may turn the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws to some advantage. the importance of manners is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention. it may be regarded as a central point in the range of human observation, and the common termination of all inquiry. so seriously do i insist upon this head, that if i have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence which i attribute to the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, to the manners of the americans, upon the maintenance of their institutions, i have failed in the principal object of my work. * * * * * whether laws and manners are sufficient to maintain democratic institutions in other countries beside america. the anglo-americans, if transported into europe, would be obliged to modify their laws.--distinction to be made between democratic institutions and american institutions.--democratic laws may be conceived better than, or at least different from, those which the american democracy has adopted.--the example of america only proves that it is possible to regulate democracy by the assistance of manners and legislation. i have asserted that the success of democratic institutions in the united states is more intimately connected with the laws themselves, and the manners of the people, than with the nature of the country. but does it follow that the same causes would of themselves produce the same results, if they were put into operation elsewhere; and if the country is no adequate substitute for laws and manners, can laws and manners in their turn prove a substitute for a country? it will readily be understood that the necessary elements of a reply to this question are wanting: other peoples are to be found in the new world beside the anglo-americans, and as these peoples are affected by the same physical circumstances as the latter, they may fairly be compared together. but there are no nations out of america which have adopted the same laws and manners, being destitute of the physical advantages peculiar to the anglo-americans. no standard of comparison therefore exists, and we can only hazard an opinion upon this subject. it appears to me in the first place, that a careful distinction must be made between the institutions of the united states and democratic institutions in general. when i reflect upon the state of europe, its mighty nations, its populous cities, its formidable armies, and the complex nature of its politics, i cannot suppose that even the anglo-americans, if they were transported to our hemisphere, with their ideas, their religion, and their manners, could exist without considerably altering their laws. but a democratic nation may be imagined, organized differently from the american people. it is not impossible to conceive a government really established upon the will of the majority; but in which the majority, repressing its natural propensity to equality, should consent, with a view to the order and the stability of the state, to invest a family or an individual with all the prerogatives of the executive. a democratic society might exist, in which the forces of the nation would be more centralized than they are in the united states; the people would exercise a less direct and less irresistible influence upon public affairs, and yet every citizen, invested with certain rights, would participate, within his sphere, in the conduct of the government. the observations i made among the anglo-americans induce me to believe that democratic institutions of this kind, prudently introduced into society, so as gradually to mix with the habits and to be infused with the opinions of the people, might subsist in other countries beside america. if the laws of the united states were the only imaginable democratic laws, or the most perfect which it is possible to conceive, i should admit that the success of those institutions affords no proof of the success of democratic institutions in general, in a country less favored by natural circumstances. but as the laws of america appear to me to be defective in several respects, and as i can readily imagine others of the same general nature, the peculiar advantages of that country do not prove that democratic institutions cannot succeed in a nation less favored by circumstances, if ruled by better laws. if human nature were different in america from what it is elsewhere; or if the social condition of the americans engendered habits and opinions among them different from those which originate in the same social condition in the old world, the american democracies would afford no means of predicting what may occur in other democracies. if the americans displayed the same propensities as all other democratic nations, and if their legislators had relied upon the nature of the country and the favor of circumstances to restrain those propensities within due limits, the prosperity of the united states would be exclusively attributable to physical causes, and it would afford no encouragement to a people inclined to imitate their example, without sharing their natural advantages. but neither of these suppositions is borne out by facts. in america the same passions are to be met with as in europe; some originating in human nature, others in the democratic condition of society. thus in the united states i found that restlessness of heart which is natural to men, when all ranks are nearly equal and the chances of elevation are the same to all. i found the democratic feeling of envy expressed under a thousand different forms. i remarked that the people frequently displayed, in the conduct of affairs, a consummate mixture of ignorance and presumption, and i inferred that, in america, men are liable to the same failings and the same absurdities as among ourselves. but upon examining the state of society more attentively, i speedily discovered that the americans had made great and successful efforts to counteract these imperfections of human nature, and to correct the natural defects of democracy. their divers municipal laws appeared to me to be a means of restraining the ambition of the citizens within a narrow sphere, and of turning those same passions, which might have worked havoc in the state, to the good of the township or the parish. the american legislators have succeeded to a certain extent in opposing the notion of rights, to the feelings of envy; the permanence of the religious world, to the continual shifting of politics; the experience of the people, to its theoretical ignorance; and its practical knowledge of business, to the impatience of its desires. the americans, then, have not relied upon the nature of their country, to counterpoise those dangers which originate in their constitution and in their political laws. to evils which are common to all democratic peoples, they have applied remedies which none but themselves had ever thought of before; and although they were the first to make the experiment, they have succeeded in it. the manners and laws of the americans are not the only ones which may suit a democratic people; but the americans have shown that it would be wrong to despair of regulating democracy by the aid of manners and of laws. if other nations should borrow this general and pregnant idea from the americans, without however intending to imitate them in the peculiar application which they have made of it; if they should attempt to fit themselves for that social condition, which it seems to be the will of providence to impose upon the generations of this age, and so to escape from the despotism of the anarchy which threatens them; what reason is there to suppose that their efforts would not be crowned with success? the organization and the establishment of democracy in christendom, is the great political problem of the time. the americans, unquestionably, have not resolved this problem, but they furnish useful data to those who undertake the task. * * * * * importance of what precedes with respect to the state of europe. it may readily be discovered with what intention i undertook the foregoing inquiries. the question here discussed is interesting not only to the united states, but to the whole world; it concerns, not a nation, but all mankind. if those nations whose social condition is democratic could only remain free as long as they are inhabitants of the wilds, we could not but despair of the future destiny of the human race; for democracy is rapidly acquiring a more extended sway, and the wilds are gradually peopled with men. if it were true that laws and manners are insufficient to maintain democratic institutions, what refuge would remain open to the nations except the despotism of a single individual? i am aware that there are many worthy persons at the present time who are not alarmed at this latter alternative, and who are so tired of liberty as to be glad of repose, far from those storms by which it is attended. but these individuals are ill acquainted with the haven to which they are bound. they are so deluded by their recollections, as to judge the tendency of absolute power by what it was formerly, and not what it might become at the present time. if absolute power were re-established among the democratic nations of europe, i am persuaded that it would assume a new form, and appear under features unknown to our forefathers. there was a time in europe, when the laws and the consent of the people had invested princes with almost unlimited authority; but they scarcely ever availed themselves of it. i do not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility, of the authority of supreme courts of justice, of corporations and their chartered rights, or of provincial privileges, which served to break the blows of the sovereign authority, and to maintain a spirit of resistance in the nation. independently of these political institutions--which, however opposed they might be to personal liberty, served to keep alive the love of freedom in the mind of the public, and which may be esteemed to have been useful in this respect--the manners and opinions of the nation confined the royal authority within barriers which were not less powerful, although they were less conspicuous. religion, the affections of the people, the benevolence of the prince, the sense of honor, family pride, provincial prejudices, custom, and public opinion, limited the power of kings, and restrained their authority within an invisible circle. the constitution of nations was despotic at that time but their manners were free. princes had the right, but they had neither the means nor the desire, of doing whatever they pleased. but what now remains of those barriers which formerly arrested the aggressions of tyranny? since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary which divided good from evil is overthrown: the very elements of the moral world are indeterminate; the princes and the peoples of the earth are guided by chance, and none can define the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license. long revolutions have for ever destroyed the respect which surrounded the rulers of the state; and since they have been relieved from the burden of public esteem, princes may henceforward surrender themselves without fear to the seductions of arbitrary power. when kings find that the hearts of their subjects are turned toward them, they are clement, because they are conscious of their strength; and they are chary of the affection of their people, because the affection of their people is the bulwark of the throne. a mutual interchange of good will then takes place between the prince and the people, which resembles the gracious intercourse of domestic society. the subjects may murmur at the sovereign's decree, but they are grieved to displease him; and the sovereign chastises his subjects with the light hand of parental affection. but when once the spell of royalty is broken in the tumult of revolution; when successive monarchs have occupied the throne, and alternately displayed to the people the weakness of right, and the harshness of power, the sovereign is no longer regarded by any as the father of the state, and he is feared by all as its master. if he be weak, he is despised; if he be strong, he is detested. he is himself full of animosity and alarm; he finds that he is a stranger in his own country, and he treats his subjects like conquered enemies. when the provinces and the towns formed so many different nations in the midst of their common country, each of them had a will of its own, which was opposed to the general spirit of subjection; but now that all the parts of the same empire, after having lost their immunities, their customs, their prejudices, their traditions, and their names, are subjected and accustomed to the same laws, it is not more difficult to oppress them collectively, than it was formerly to oppress them singly. while the nobles enjoyed their power, and indeed long after that power was lost, the honor of aristocracy conferred an extraordinary degree of force upon their personal opposition. they afforded instances of men who, notwithstanding their weakness, still entertained a high opinion of their personal value, and dared to cope single-handed with the efforts of the public authority. but at the present day, when all ranks are more and more confounded, when the individual disappears in the throng, and is easily lost in the midst of a common obscurity, when the honor of monarchy has almost lost its empire without being succeeded by public virtue, and when nothing can enable man to rise above himself, who shall say at what point the exigencies of power and servility of weakness will stop? as long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends, and his kinsfolk. if this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity. but when patrimonial estates are divided, and when a few years suffice to confound the distinctions of a race, where can family feeling be found? what force can there be in the customs of a country which has changed, and is still perpetually changing its aspect; in which every act of tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an example; in which there is nothing so old that its antiquity can save it from destruction, and nothing so unparalleled that its novelty can prevent it from being done? what resistance can be offered by manners of so pliant a make, that they have already often yielded? what strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when not a man, nor a family, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor free institution, has the power of representing that opinion; and when every citizen--being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependant--has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government? the annals of france furnish nothing analogous to the condition in which that country might then be thrown. but it may more aptly be assimilated to the times of old, and to those hideous eras of roman oppression, when the manners of the people were corrupted, their traditions obliterated, their habits destroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom, expelled from the laws, could find no refuge in the land; when nothing protected the citizens, and the citizens no longer protected themselves; when human nature was the sport of man, and princes wearied out the clemency of heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects. those who hope to revive the monarchy of henry iv. or of louis xiv., appear to me to be afflicted with mental blindness; and when i consider the present condition of several european nations--a condition to which all the others tend--i am led to believe that they will soon be left with no other alternative than democratic liberty, or the tyranny of the caesars. and, indeed, it is deserving of consideration, whether men are to be entirely emancipated, or entirely enslaved; whether their rights are to be made equal, or wholly taken away from them. if the rulers of society were reduced either gradually to raise the crowd to their own level, or to sink the citizens below that of humanity, would not the doubts of many be resolved, the consciences of many be healed, and the community be prepared to make great sacrifices with little difficulty? in that case, the gradual growth of democratic manners and institutions should be regarded, not as the best, but as the only means of preserving freedom; and without liking the government of democracy, it might be adopted as the most applicable and the fairest remedy for the present ills of society. it is difficult to associate a people in the work of government; but it is still more difficult to supply it with experience, and to inspire it with the feelings which it requires in order to govern well. i grant that the caprices of democracy are perpetual; its instruments are rude, its laws imperfect. but if it were true that soon no just medium would exist between the empire of democracy and the dominion of a single arm, should we not rather incline toward the former, than submit voluntarily to the latter? and if complete equality be our fate, is it not better to be levelled by free institutions than by despotic power? those who, after having read this book, should imagine that my intention in writing it has been to propose the laws and manners of the anglo-americans for the imitation of all democratic peoples, would commit a very great mistake; they must have paid more attention to the form than to the substance of my ideas. my aim has been to show, by the example of america, that laws, and especially manners, may exist, which will allow a democratic people to remain free. but i am very far from thinking that we ought to follow the example of the american democracy, and copy the means which it has employed to attain its ends; for i am well aware of the influence which the nature of a country and its political precedents exercise upon a constitution; and i should regard it as a great misfortune for mankind, if liberty were to exist, all over the world, under the same forms. but i am of opinion that if we do not succeed in gradually introducing democratic institutions into france, and if we despair of imparting to the citizens those ideas and sentiments which first prepare them for freedom, and afterward allow them to enjoy it, there will be no independence at all, either for the middling classes or the nobility, for the poor or for the rich, but an equal tyranny over all; and i foresee that if the peaceable empire of the majority be not founded among us in time, we shall sooner or later arrive at the unlimited authority of a single despot. * * * * * notes: [ ] the united states have no metropolis; but they already contain several very large cities. philadelphia reckoned , inhabitants, and new york , , in the year . the lower orders which inhabit these cities constitute a rabble even more formidable than the populace of european towns. they consist of freed blacks in the first place, who are condemned by the laws and by public opinion, to an hereditary state of misery and degradation. they also contain a multitude of europeans who have been driven to the shores of the new world by their misfortunes or their misconduct; and these men inoculate the united states with all our vices, without bringing with them any of those interests which counteract their baneful influence. as inhabitants of a country where they have no civil rights, they are ready to turn all the passions which agitate the community to their own advantage; thus, within the last few months serious riots have broken out in philadelphia and in new york. disturbances of this kind are unknown in the rest of the country, which is nowise alarmed by them, because the population of the cities has hitherto exercised neither power nor influence over the rural districts. nevertheless, i look upon the size of certain american cities, and especially on the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic republics of the new world: and i venture to predict that they will perish from this circumstance, unless the government succeed in creating an armed force, which, while it remains under the control of the majority of the nation, will be independent of the town population, and able to repress its excesses. [ ] in new england the estates are exceedingly small, but they are rarely subjected to farther division. [ ] the new york spectator of august , , relates the fact in the following terms: "the court of common pleas of chester county (new york), a few days since rejected a witness who declared his disbelief in the existence of god. the presiding judge remarked, that he had not before been aware that there was a man living who did not believe in the existence of god; that this belief constituted the sanction of all testimony in a court of justice; and that he knew of no cause in a christian country, where a witness had been permitted to testify without such belief." [the instance given by the author, of a person offered as a witness having been rejected on the ground that he did not believe in the existence of a god, seems to be adduced to prove either his assertion that the americans hold religion to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions--or his assertion, that if a man attacks all the sects together, every one abandons him and he remains alone. but it is questionable how far the fact quoted proves either of these positions. the rule which prescribes as a qualification for a witness the belief in a supreme being who will punish falsehood, without which he is deemed wholly incompetent to testify, is established for the protection of personal rights, and not to compel the adoption of any system of religious belief. it came with all our fundamental principles from england as a part of the common law which the colonists brought with them. it is supposed to prevail in every country in christendom, whatever may be the form of its government; and the only doubt that arises respecting its existence in france, is created by our author's apparent surprise at finding such a rule in america.--_american editor_.] [ ] unless this term be applied to the functions which many of them fill in the schools. almost all education is intrusted to the clergy. [ ] see the constitution of new york, art. , § :--"and whereas, the ministers of the gospel are, by their profession, dedicated to the service of god and the care of souls, and ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their functions; therefore no minister of the gospel, or priest of any denomination whatsoever, shall, at any time hereafter, under any pretence or description whatever, be eligible to, or capable of holding any civil or military office or place within this state." see also the constitutions of north carolina, art. . virginia. south carolina, art. , § . kentucky, art. , § . tennessee, art s, § . louisiana, art. , § . [ ] i travelled along a portion of the frontier of the united states in a sort of cart which was termed the mail. we passed, day and night, with great rapidity along roads which were scarcely marked out, through immense forests: when the gloom of the woods became impenetrable, the coachman lighted branches of fir and we journied along by the light they cast. from time to time we came to a hut in the midst of the forest, which was a postoffice. the mail dropped an enormous bundle of letters at the door of this isolated dwelling, and we pursued our way at full gallop, leaving the inhabitants of the neighboring log-houses to send for their share of the treasure. [ ] in , each inhabitant of michigan paid a sum equivalent to franc, centimes (french money) to the postoffice revenue; and each inhabitant of the floridas paid fr. cent (see national calendar, , p. .) in the same year each inhabitant of the department du nord, paid fr. cent, to the revenue of the french postoffice. (see the compte rendu de l'administration des finances, , p. .) now the state of michigan only contained at that time inhabitants per square league; and florida only ; the instruction and the commercial activity of these districts are inferior to those of most of the states in the union; while the department du nord, which contains , inhabitants per square league, is one of the most enlightened and manufacturing parts of france. [ ] i remind the reader of the general signification which i give to the word _manners_, namely, the moral and intellectual characteristics of social man taken collectively. chapter xviii. the present and probable future condition of the three races which inhabit the territory of the united states. the principal part of the task which i had imposed upon myself is now performed: i have shown, as far as i was able, the laws and manners of the american democracy. here i might stop; but the reader would perhaps feel that i had not satisfied his expectations. the absolute supremacy of democracy is not all that we meet with in america; the inhabitants of the new world may be considered from more than one point of view. in the course of this work, my subject has often led me to speak of the indians and the negroes; but i have never been able to stop in order to show what places these two races occupy, in the midst of the democratic people whom i was engaged in describing. i have mentioned in what spirit, and according to what laws, the anglo-american union was formed; but i could only glance at the dangers which menace that confederation, while it was equally impossible for me to give a detailed account of its chances of duration, independently of its laws and manners. when speaking of the united republican states, i hazarded no conjectures upon the permanence of republican forms in the new world; and when making frequent allusion to the commercial activity which reigns in the union, i was unable to inquire into the future condition of the americans as a commercial people. these topics are collaterally connected with my subject, without forming a part of it; they are american, without being democratic; and to portray democracy has been my principal aim. it was therefore necessary to postpone these questions, which i now take up as the proper termination of my work. the territory now occupied or claimed by the american union, spreads from the shores of the atlantic to those of the pacific ocean. on the east and west its limits are those of the continent itself. on the south it advances nearly to the tropic, and it extends upward to the icy regions of the north.[ ] the human beings who are scattered over this space do not form, as in europe, so many branches of the same stock. three races naturally distinct, and i might almost say hostile to each other, are discoverable among them at the first glance. almost insurmountable barriers had been raised between them by education and by law, as well as by their origin and outward characteristics; but fortune has brought them together on the same soil, where, although they are mixed, they do not amalgamate, and each race fulfils its destiny apart. among these widely differing families of men, the first which attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white or european, the man pre-eminent; and in subordinate grades, the negro and the indian. these two unhappy races have nothing in common; neither birth, nor features, nor language, nor habits. their only resemblance lies in their misfortunes. both of them occupy an inferior rank in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate at any rate with the same authors. if we reasoned from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the european is to the other races of mankind, what man is to the lower animals;--he makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them. oppression has at one stroke deprived the descendants of the africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. the negro of the united states has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to africa, without acquiring any claim to european privileges. but he remains half-way between the two communities; sold by the one, repulsed by the other; finding not a spot in the universe to call by the name of country, except the faint image of a home which the shelter of his master's roof affords. the negro has no family; woman is merely the temporary companion of his pleasures, and his children are upon an equality with himself from the moment of their birth. am i to call it a proof of god's mercy, or a visitation of his wrath, that man in certain states appears to be insensible to his extreme wretchedness, and almost affects with a depraved taste the cause of his misfortunes? the negro, who is plunged in this abyss of evils, scarcely feels his own calamitous situation. violence made him a slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him: his understanding is degraded to the level of his soul. the negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born; nay, he may have been purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery before he began his existence. equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to himself, he learns, with his first notions of existence, that he is the property of another who has an interest in preserving his life, and that the care of it does not devolve upon himself; even the power of thought appears to him a useless gift of providence, and he quietly enjoys the privileges of his debasement. if he becomes free, independence is often felt by him to be a heavier burden than slavery; for having learned, in the course of his life, to submit to everything except reason, he is too much unacquainted with her dictates to obey them. a thousand new desires beset him, and he is destitute of the knowledge and energy necessary to resist them: these are masters which it is necessary to contend with, and he has learned only to submit and obey. in short, he sinks to such a depth of wretchedness, that while servitude brutalizes, liberty destroys him. oppression has been no less fatal to the indian than to the negro race, but its effects are different. before the arrival of the white men in the new world, the inhabitants of north america lived quietly in their woods, enduring the vicissitudes, and practising the virtues and vices common to savage nations. the europeans, having dispersed the indian tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering life full of inexpressible sufferings. savage nations are only controlled by opinion and by custom. when the north american indians had lost their sentiment of attachment to their country; when their families were dispersed, their traditions obscured, and the chain of their recollections broken; when all their habits were changed, and their wants increased beyond measure, european tyranny rendered them more disorderly and less civilized than they were before. the moral and physical condition of these tribes continually grew worse, and they became more barbarous as they became more wretched. nevertheless the europeans have not been able to metamorphose the character of the indians; and though they have had power to destroy them, they have never been able to make them submit to the rules of civilized society. the lot of the negro is placed on the extreme limit of servitude, while that of the indian lies on the utmost verge of liberty; and slavery does not produce more fatal effects upon the first, than independence upon the second. the negro has lost all property in his own person, and he cannot dispose of his existence without committing a sort of fraud: but the savage is his own master as soon as he is able to act; parental authority is scarcely known to him; he has never bent his will to that of any of his kind, or learned the difference between voluntary obedience and a shameful subjection; and the very name of law is unknown to him. to be free, with him, signifies to escape from all the shackles of society. as he delights in this barbarous independence, and would rather perish than sacrifice the least part of it, civilisation has little power over him. the negro makes a thousand fruitless efforts to insinuate himself among men who repulse him; he conforms to the taste of his oppressors, adopts their opinions, and hopes by imitating them to form a part of their community. having been told from infancy that his race is naturally inferior to that of the whites, he assents to the proposition, and is ashamed of his own nature. in each of his features he discovers a trace of slavery, and, if it were in his power, he would willingly rid himself of everything that makes him what he is. the indian, on the contrary, has his imagination inflated with the pretended nobility of his origin, and lives and dies in the midst of these dreams of pride. far from desiring to conform his habits to ours, he loves his savage life as the distinguishing mark of his race, and he repels every advance to civilisation, less perhaps from the hatred which he entertains for it, than from a dread of resembling the europeans.[ ] while he has nothing to oppose to our perfection in the arts but the resources of the desert, to our tactics nothing but undisciplined courage; while our well-digested plans are met by the spontaneous instincts of savage life, who can wonder if he fails in this unequal contest? the negro who earnestly desires to mingle his race with that of the european, cannot effect it; while the indian, who might succeed to a certain extent, disdains to make the attempt. the servility of the one dooms him to slavery, the pride of the other to death. i remember that while i was travelling through the forests which still cover the state of alabama, i arrived one day at the log house of a pioneer. i did not wish to penetrate into the dwelling of the american, but retired to rest myself for a while on the margin of a spring, which was not far off, in the woods. while i was in this place (which was in the neighborhood of the creek territory), an indian woman appeared, followed by a negress, and holding by the hand a little white girl of five or six years old, whom i took to be the daughter of the pioneer. a sort of barbarous luxury set off the costume of the indian; rings of metal were hanging from her nostrils and ears; her hair, which was adorned with glass beads, fell loosely upon her shoulders; and i saw that she was not married, for she still wore the necklace of shells which the bride always deposits on the nuptial couch. the negress was clad in squalid european garments. they all three came and seated themselves upon the banks of the fountain; and the young indian, taking the child in her arms, lavished upon her such fond caresses as mothers give; while the negress endeavored by various little artifices to attract the attention of the young creole. the child displayed in her slightest gestures a consciousness of superiority which formed a strange contrast with her infantine weakness; as if she received the attentions of her companions with a sort of condescension. the negress was seated on the ground before her mistress, watching her smallest desires, and apparently divided between strong affection for the child and servile fear; while the savage displayed, in the midst of her tenderness, an air of freedom and of pride which was almost ferocious. i had approached the group, and i contemplated them in silence; but my curiosity was probably displeasing to the indian woman, for she suddenly rose, pushed the child roughly from her, and giving me an angry look, plunged into the thicket. i had often chanced to see individuals met together in the same place, who belonged to the three races of men which people north america. i had perceived from many different results the preponderance of the whites. but in the picture which i have just been describing there was something peculiarly touching; a bond of affection here united the oppressors with the oppressed, and the effort of nature to bring them together rendered still more striking the immense distance placed between them by prejudice and by law. * * * * * the present and probable future condition of the indian tribes which inhabit the territory possessed by the union. gradual disappearance of the native tribes.--manner in which it takes place.--miseries accompanying the forced migrations of the indians.--the savages of north america had only two ways of escaping destruction; war or civilisation.--they are no longer able to make war.--reasons why they refused to become civilized when it was in their power, and why they cannot become so now that they desire it.--instance of the creek and cherokees.--policy of the particular states toward these indians.--policy of the federal government. none of the indian tribes which formerly inhabited the territory of new england--the narragansets, the mohicans, the pequots--have any existence but in the recollection of man. the lenapes, who received william penn a hundred and fifty years ago upon the banks of the delaware, have disappeared; and i myself met with the last of the iroquois, who were begging alms. the nations i have mentioned formerly covered the country to the seacoast; but a traveller at the present day must penetrate more than a hundred leagues into the interior of the continent to find an indian. not only have these wild tribes receded, but they are destroyed;[ ] and as they give way or perish, an immense and increasing people fills their place. there is no instance on record of so prodigious a growth, or so rapid a destruction; the manner in which the latter change takes place is not difficult to describe. when the indians were the sole inhabitants of the wilds whence they have been expelled, their wants were few. their arms were of their own manufacture, their only drink was the water of the brook, and their clothes consisted of the skin of animals, whose flesh furnished them with food. the europeans introduced among the savages of north america firearms, ardent spirits, and iron: they taught them to exchange for manufactured stuffs the rough garments which had previously satisfied their untutored simplicity. having acquired new tastes, without the arts by which they could be gratified, the indians were obliged to have recourse to the workmanship of the whites; but in return for their productions, the savage had nothing to offer except the rich furs which still abounded in his woods. hence the chase became necessary, not merely to provide for his subsistence, but in order to procure the only objects of barter which he could furnish to europe.[ ] while the wants of the natives were thus increasing, their resources continued to diminish. from the moment when a european settlement is formed in the neighborhood of the territory occupied by the indians, the beasts of chase take the alarm.[ ] thousands of savages, wandering in the forest and destitute of any fixed dwelling, did not disturb them; but as soon as the continuous sounds of european labor are heard in the neighborhood, they begin to flee away, and retire to the west, where their instinct teaches them that they will find deserts of immeasurable extent. "the buffalo is constantly receding", say messrs. clarke and cass in their report of the year ; "a few years since they approached the base of the allegany; and a few years hence they may even be rare upon the immense plains which extend to the base of the rocky mountains." i have been assured that this effect of the approach of the whites is often felt at two hundred leagues' distance from the frontier. their influence is thus exerted over tribes whose name is unknown to them, and who suffer the evils of usurpation long before they are acquainted with the authors of their distress.[ ] bold adventurers soon penetrate into the country the indians have deserted, and when they have advanced about fifteen or twenty leagues from the extreme frontiers of the whites, they begin to build habitations for civilized beings in the midst of the wilderness. this is done without difficulty, as the territory of a hunting nation is ill defined; it is the common property of the tribe, and belongs to no one in particular, so that individual interests are not concerned in the protection of any part of it. a few european families, settled in different situations at a considerable distance from each other, soon drive away the wild animals which remain between their places of abode. the indians, who had previously lived in a sort of abundance, then find it difficult to subsist, and still more difficult to procure the articles of barter which they stand in need of. to drive away their game is to deprive them of the means of existence, as effectually as if the fields of our agriculturists were stricken with barrenness; and they are reduced, like famished wolves, to prowl through the forsaken woods in quest of prey. their instinctive love of their country attaches them to the soil which gave them birth,[ ] even after it has ceased to yield anything but misery and death. at length they are compelled to acquiesce, and to depart: they follow the traces of the elk, the buffalo, and the beaver, and are guided by those wild animals in the choice of their future country. properly speaking, therefore, it is not the europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of america; it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction, which had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted to modern discovery. it is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which attend these forced emigrations. they are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the new-comers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which receive them with jealous hostility. hunger is in the rear; war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. in the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each individual endeavors to procure the means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of the desert like an outcast in civilized society. the social tie, which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they have lost their country, and their people soon deserts them; their very families are obliterated; the names they bore in common are forgotten, their language perishes, and all the traces of their origin disappear. their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection of the antiquaries of america and a few of the learned of europe. i should be sorry to have my reader suppose that i am coloring the picture too highly: i saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which i have been describing; and i was the witness of sufferings which i have not the power to portray. at the end of the year , while i was on the left bank of the mississippi, at a place named by europeans memphis, there arrived a numerous band of choctaws (or chactas, as they are called by the french in louisiana). these savages had left their country, and were endeavoring to gain the right bank of the mississippi, where they hoped to find an asylum which had been promised them by the american government. it was then in the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice. the indians had their families with them; and they brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born, and old men upon the verge of death. they possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. i saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. no cry, no sob was heard among the assembled crowd: all were silent. their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. the indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. as soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and plunging all together into the icy waters of the mississippi, they swam after the boat. the ejectment of the indians very often takes place at the present day, in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. when the european population begins to approach the limit of the desert inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the united states usually despatches envoys to them, who assemble the indians in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner: "what have you to do in the land of your fathers? before long you must dig up their bones in order to live. in what respect is the country you inhabit better than another? are there no woods, marshes, or prairies, except where you dwell? and can you live nowhere but under your own sun? beyond those mountains which you see at the horizon, beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the west, there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found in great abundance; sell your land to us, and go to live happily in those solitudes." after holding this language, they spread before the eyes of the indians fire-arms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, ear-rings, and looking-glasses.[ ] if, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights. what are they to do? half convinced and half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not let them remain ten years in tranquillity. in this manner do the americans obtain at a very low price whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of europe could not purchase.[ ] these are great evils, and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable. i believe that the indian nations of north america are doomed to perish: and that whenever the europeans shall be established on the shores of the pacific ocean, that race of men will be no more.[ ] the indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the europeans or become their equals. at the first settlement of the colonies they might have found it possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the small bodies of strangers who landed on their continent.[ ] they several times attempted to do it, and were on the point of succeeding; but the disproportion of their resources, at the present day, when compared with those of the whites, is too great to allow such an enterprise to be thought of. nevertheless, there do arise from time to time among the indians men of penetration, who foresee the final destiny which awaits the native population, and who exert themselves to unite all the tribes in common hostility to the europeans; but their efforts are unavailing. those tribes which are in the neighborhood of the whites are too much weakened to offer an effectual resistance; while the others, giving way to that childish carelessness of the morrow which characterizes savage life, wait for the near approach of danger before they prepare to meet it: some are unable, the others are unwilling to exert themselves. it is easy to foresee that the indians will never conform to civilisation; or that it will be too late, whenever they may be inclined to make the experiment. civilisation is the result of long social process which takes place in the same spot, and is handed down from one generation to another, each one profiting by the experience of the last. of all nations, those submit to civilisation with the most difficulty, which habitually live by the chase. pastoral tribes, indeed, often change their place of abode; but they follow in regular order in their migrations, and often return again to their old stations, while the dwelling of the hunter varies with that of the animals he pursues. several attempts have been made to diffuse knowledge among the indians, without controlling their wandering propensities; by the jesuits in canada, and by the puritans in new england;[ ] but none of these endeavors were crowned by any lasting success. civilisation began in the cabin, but it soon retired to expire in the woods; the great error of these legislators of the indians was their not understanding, that in order to succeed in civilizing a people, it is first necessary to fix it; which cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil: the indians ought in the first place to have been accustomed to agriculture. but not only are they destitute of this indispensable preliminary to civilisation, they would even have great difficulty in acquiring it. men who have once abandoned themselves to the restless and adventurous life of the hunter, feel an insurmountable disgust for the constant and regular labor which tillage requires. we see this proved in the bosom of our own society; but it is far more visible among peoples whose partiality for the chase is a part of their natural character. independently of this general difficulty, there is another, which applies peculiarly to the indians; they consider labor not merely as an evil, but as a disgrace; so that their pride prevents them from becoming civilized, as much as their indolence.[ ] there is no indian so wretched as not to retain, under his hut of bark, a lofty idea of his personal worth; he considers the cares of industry and labor as degrading occupations, he compares the husbandman to the ox which traces the furrow; and even in our most ingenious handicraft, he can see nothing but the labor of slaves. not that he is devoid of admiration for the power and intellectual greatness of the whites; but although the result of our efforts surprises him, he contemns the means by which we obtain it; and while he acknowledges our ascendency, he still believes in his superiority. war and hunting are the only pursuits which appear to him worthy to be the occupations of a man.[ ] the indian, in the dreary solitude of his woods, cherishes the same ideas, the same opinions, as the noble of the middle ages in his castle, and he only requires to become a conqueror to complete the resemblance; thus, however strange it may seem, it is in the forests of the new world, and not among the europeans who people its coasts, that the ancient prejudices of europe are still in existence. more than once, in the course of this work, i have endeavored to explain the prodigious influence which the social condition appears to exercise upon the laws and the manners of men; and i beg to add a few words on the same subject. when i perceive the resemblance which exists between the political institutions of our ancestors, the germans, and of the wandering tribes of north america: between the customs described by tacitus, and those of which i have sometimes been a witness, i cannot help thinking that the same cause has brought about the same results in both hemispheres; and that in the midst of the apparent diversity of human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be discovered, from which all the others are derived. in what we usually call the german institutions, then, i am inclined only to perceive barbarian habits; and the opinions of savages, in what we style feudal principles. however strongly the vices and prejudices of the north american indians may be opposed to their becoming agricultural and civilized, necessity sometimes obliges them to it. several of the southern nations, and among them the cherokees and the creeks,[ ] were surrounded by europeans, who had landed on the shores of the atlantic, and who, either descending the ohio or proceeding up the mississippi, arrived simultaneously upon their borders. these tribes have not been driven from place to place, like their northern brethren; but they have been gradually enclosed within narrow limits, like the game within the thicket before the huntsmen plunge into the interior. the indians, who were thus placed between civilisation and death, found themselves obliged to live by ignominious labor like the whites. they took to agriculture, and without entirely forsaking their old habits or manners, sacrificed only as much as was necessary to their existence. the cherokees went further; they created a written language; established a permanent form of government; and as everything proceeds rapidly in the new world, before they had all of them clothes, they set up a newspaper.[ ] the growth of european habits has been remarkably accelerated among these indians by the mixed race which has sprung up[ ]: deriving intelligence from the father's side, without entirely losing the savage customs of the mother, the half-blood forms the natural link between civilisation and barbarism. wherever this race has multiplied, the savage state has become modified, and a great change has taken place in the manners of the people.[ ] the success of the cherokees proves that the indians are capable of civilisation, but it does not prove that they will succeed in it. the difficulty which the indians find in submitting to civilisation proceeds from the influence of a general cause, which it is almost impossible for them to escape. an attentive survey of history demonstrates that, in general, barbarous nations have raised themselves to civilisation by degrees, and by their own efforts. whenever they derived knowledge from a foreign people, they stood toward it in the relation of conquerors, not of a conquered nation. when the conquered nation is enlightened, and the conquerors are half savage, as in the case of the invasion of rome by the northern nations, or that of china by the moguls, the power which victory bestows upon the barbarian is sufficient to keep up his importance among civilized men, and permit him to rank as their equal, until he becomes their rival: the one has might on his side, the other has intelligence; the former admires the knowledge and the arts of the conquered, the latter envies the power of the conquerors. the barbarians at length admit civilized man into their palaces, and he in turn opens his schools to the barbarians. but when the side on which the physical force lies, also possesses an intellectual preponderance, the conquered party seldom becomes civilized; it retreats, or is destroyed. it may therefore be said, in a general way, that savages go forth in arms to seek knowledge, but that they do not receive it when it comes to them. if the indian tribes which now inhabit the heart of the continent could summon up energy enough to attempt to civilize themselves, they might possibly succeed. superior already to the barbarous nations which surround them, they would gradually gain strength and experience; and when the europeans should appear upon their borders, they would be in a state, if not to maintain their independence, at least to assert their right to the soil, and to incorporate themselves with the conquerors. but it is the misfortune of indians to be brought into contact with a civilized people, which is also (it may be owned) the most avaricious nation on the globe, while they are still semi-barbarian: to find despots in their instructors, and to receive knowledge from the hand of oppression. living in the freedom of the woods, the north american indian was destitute, but he had no feeling of inferiority toward any one; as soon, however, as he desires to penetrate into the social scale of the whites, he takes the lowest rank in society, for he enters ignorant and poor within the pale of science and wealth. after having led a life of agitation, beset with evils and dangers, but at the same time filled with proud emotions,[ ] he is obliged to submit to a wearisome, obscure, and degraded state, and to gain the bread which nourishes him by hard and ignoble labor; such are in his eyes the only results of which civilisation can boast: and even this much he is not sure to obtain. when the indians undertake to imitate their european neighbors, and to till the earth like the settlers, they are immediately exposed to a very formidable competition. the white man is skilled in the craft of agriculture; the indian is a rough beginner in an art with which he is unacquainted. the former reaps abundant crops without difficulty, the latter meets with a thousand obstacles in raising the fruits of the earth. the european is placed among a population whose wants he knows and partakes. the savage is isolated in the midst of a hostile people, with whose manners, language and laws, he is imperfectly acquainted, but without whose assistance he cannot live. he can only procure the materials of comfort by bartering his commodities against the goods of the european, for the assistance of his countrymen is wholly insufficient to supply his wants. when the indian wishes to sell the produce of his labor, he cannot always meet with a purchaser, while the european readily finds a market; and the former can only produce at a considerable cost, that which the latter vends at a very low rate. thus the indian has no sooner escaped those evils to which barbarous nations are exposed, than he is subjected to the still greater miseries of civilized communities; and he finds it scarcely less difficult to live in the midst of our abundance, than in the depth of his own wilderness. he has not yet lost the habits of his erratic life; the traditions of his fathers and his passion for the chase are still alive within him. the wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his former perils less appalling. he contrasts the independence which he possessed among his equals with the servile position which he occupies in civilized society. on the other hand, the solitudes which were so long his free home are still at hand; a few hours' march will bring him back to them once more. the whites offer him a sum, which seems to him to be considerable, for the ground which he has begun to clear. this money of the europeans may possibly furnish him with the means of a happy and peaceful subsistence in remote regions; and he quits the plough, resumes his native arms, and returns to the wilderness for ever.[ ] the condition of the creeks and cherokees, to which i have already alluded, sufficiently corroborates the truth of this deplorable picture. the indians, in the little which they have done, have unquestionably displayed as much natural genius as the peoples of europe in their most important designs; but nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence and their zeal. while the savages were engaged in the work of civilisation, the europeans continued to surround them on every side, and to confine them within narrower limits; the two races gradually met, and they are now in immediate juxtaposition to each other. the indian is already superior to his barbarous parent, but he is still very far below his white neighbor. with their resources and acquired knowledge, the europeans soon appropriated to themselves most of the advantages which the natives might have derived from the possession of the soil: they have settled in the country, they have purchased land at a very low rate or have occupied it by force, and the indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of resisting. they were isolated in their own country, and their race only constituted a colony of troublesome aliens in the midst of a numerous and domineering people.[ ] washington said in one of his messages to congress, "we are more enlightened and powerful than the indian nations, we are therefore bound in honor to treat them with kindness and even with generosity." but this virtuous and high-minded policy has not been followed. the rapacity of the settlers is usually backed by the tyranny of the government. although the cherokees and the creeks are established upon the territory which they inhabited before the settlement of the europeans, and although the americans have frequently treated with them as with foreign nations, the surrounding states have not consented to acknowledge them as an independent people, and attempts have been made to subject these children of the woods to anglo-american magistrates, laws, and customs.[ ] destitution had driven these unfortunate indians to civilisation, and oppression now drives them back to their former condition; many of them abandon the soil which they had begun to clear, and return to their savage course of life. if we consider the tyrannical measures which have been adopted by the legislatures of the southern states, the conduct of their governors, and the decrees of their courts of justice, we shall be convinced that the entire expulsion of the indians is the final result to which the efforts of their policy are directed. the americans of that part of the union look with jealousy upon the aborigines,[ ] they are aware that these tribes have not yet lost the traditions of savage life, and before civilisation has permanently fixed them to the soil, it is intended to force them to recede by reducing them to despair. the creeks and cherokees, oppressed by the several states, have appealed to the central government, which is by no means insensible to their misfortunes, and is sincerely desirous of saving the remnant of the natives, and of maintaining them in the free possession of that territory which the union is pledged to respect.[ ] but the several states oppose so formidable a resistance to the execution of this design, that the government is obliged to consent to the extirpation of a few barbarous tribes in order not to endanger the safety of the american union. but the federal government, which is not able to protect the indians, would fain mitigate the hardships of their lot; and, with this intention, proposals have been made to transport them into more remote regions at the public cost. between the d and th degrees of north latitude, a vast tract of country lies, which has taken the name of arkansas, from the principal river that waters its extent. it is bounded on the one side by the confines of mexico, on the other by the mississippi. numberless streams cross it in every direction; the climate is mild, and the soil productive, but it is only inhabited by a few wandering hordes of savages. the government of the union wishes to transport the broken remnants of the indigenous population of the south, to the portion of this country which is nearest to mexico, and at a great distance from the american settlements. we were assured, toward the end of the year , that , indians had already gone to the shores of the arkansas; and fresh detachments were constantly following them; but congress has been unable to excite a unanimous determination in those whom it is disposed to protect. some, indeed, are willing to quit the seat of oppression, but the most enlightened members of the community refuse to abandon their recent dwellings and the springing crops; they are of opinion that the work of civilisation, once interrupted, will never be resumed; they fear that those domestic habits which have been so recently contracted, may be irrecoverably lost in the midst of a country which is still barbarous, and where nothing is prepared for the subsistence of an agricultural people; they know that their entrance into those wilds will be opposed by inimical hordes, and that they have lost the energy of barbarians, without acquiring the resources of civilisation to resist their attacks. moreover the indians readily discover that the settlement which is proposed to them is merely a temporary expedient. who can assure them that they will at length be allowed to dwell in peace in their new retreat? the united states pledge themselves to the observance of the obligation; but the territory which they at present occupy was formerly secured to them by the most solemn oaths of anglo-american faith.[ ] the american government does not indeed rob them of their lands, but it allows perpetual incursions to be made on them. in a few years the same white population which now flocks around them, will track them to the solitudes of the arkansas, they will then be exposed to the same evils without the same remedies; and as the limits of the earth will at last fail them, their only refuge is the grave. the union treats the indians with less cupidity and rigor than the policy of the several states, but the two governments are alike destitute of good faith. the states extend what they are pleased to term the benefits of their laws to the indians, with a belief that the tribes will recede rather than submit; and the central government, which promises a permanent refuge to these unhappy beings, is well aware of its inability to secure it to them.[ ] thus the tyranny of the states obliges the savages to retire, the union, by its promises and resources facilitates their retreat; and these measures tend to precisely the same end.[ ] "by the will of our father in heaven, the governor of the whole world," said the cherokees in their petition to congress,[ ] "the red man of america has become small, and the white man great and renowned. when the ancestors of the people of these united states first came to the shores of america, they found the red man strong: though he was ignorant and savage, yet he received them kindly, and gave them dry land to rest their weary feet. they met in peace, and shook hands in token of friendship. whatever the white man wanted and asked of the indian, the latter willingly gave. at that time the indian was the lord, and the white man the suppliant. but now the scene has changed. the strength of the red man has become weakness. as his neighbors increased in numbers, his power became less and less, and now, of the many and powerful tribes who once covered the united states, only a few are to be seen--a few whom a sweeping pestilence had left. the northern tribes, who were once so numerous and powerful, are now nearly extinct. thus it has happened to the red man of america. shall we, who are remnants, share the same fate? "the land on which we stand we have received as an inheritance from our fathers who possessed it from time immemorial, as a gift from our common father in heaven. they bequeathed it to us as their children, and we have sacredly kept it, as containing their remains. this right of inheritance we have never ceded, nor ever forfeited. permit us to ask what better right can the people have to a country than the right of inheritance and immemorial peaceable possession? we know it is said of late by the state of georgia and by the executive of the united states, that we have forfeited this right; but we think it is said gratuitously. at what time have we made the forfeit? what great crime have we committed, whereby we must for ever be divested of our country and rights? was it when we were hostile to the united states, and took part with the king of great britain, during the struggle for independence? if so, why was not this forfeiture declared in the first treaty which followed that war? why was not such an article as the following inserted in the treaty: 'the united states give peace to the cherokees, but for the part they took in the last war, declare them to be but tenants at will, to be removed when the convenience of the states, within whose chartered limits they live, shall require it?' that was the proper time to assume such a possession. but it was not thought of, nor would our forefathers have agreed to any treaty, whose tendency was to deprive them of their rights and their country." such is the language of the indians: their assertions are true, their forebodings inevitable. from whichever side we consider the destinies of the aborigines of north america, their calamities appear to be irremediable: if they continue barbarous, they are forced to retire: if they attempt to civilize their manners, the contact of a more civilized community subjects them to oppression and destitution. they perish if they continue to wander from waste to waste, and if they attempt to settle, they still must perish; the assistance of europeans is necessary to instruct them, but the approach of europeans corrupts and repels them into savage life; they refuse to change their habits as long as their solitudes are their own, and it is too late to change them when they are constrained to submit. the spaniards pursued the indians with blood-hounds, like wild beasts; and they sacked the new world with no more temper or compassion than a city taken by storm: but destruction must cease, and phrensy be stayed; the remnant of the indian population, which had escaped the massacre, mixed with its conquerors and adopted their religion and manners.[ ] the conduct of the americans of the united states towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. provided that the indians retain their barbarous condition, the americans take no part in their affairs: they treat them as independent nations, and do not possess themselves of their hunting grounds without a treaty of purchase; and if an indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon its territory, they afford it brotherly assistance in transporting it to a grave sufficiently remote from the land of its fathers. the spaniards were unable to exterminate the indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the americans of the united states have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.[ ] it is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity. * * * * * situation of the black population in the united states, and dangers with which its presence threatens the whites. why it is more difficult to abolish slavery, and to efface all vestiges of it among the moderns, than it was among the ancients.--in the united states the prejudices of the whites against the blacks seem to increase in proportion as slavery is abolished.--situation of the negroes in the northern and southern states.--why the americans abolish slavery.--servitude, which debases the slave, impoverishes the master.--contrast between the left and the right bank of the ohio.--to what attributable.--the black race, as well as slavery, recedes toward the south.--explanation of this fact.--difficulties attendant upon the abolition of slavery in the south.--dangers to come.--general anxiety.--foundation of a black colony in africa.--why the americans of the south increase the hardships of slavery, while they are distressed at its continuance. the indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived; but the destiny of the negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the europeans. these two races are attached to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable entirely to separate or to combine. the most formidable of all the ills which threaten the future existence of the united states, arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the causes of the present embarrassments or of the future dangers of the united states, the observer is invariably led to consider this as a primary fact. the permanent evils to which mankind is subjected are usually produced by the vehement or the increasing efforts of men; but there is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely distinguishable amid the ordinary abuses of power: it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved; it was wafted like some accursed germ upon a portion of the soil, but it afterward nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spreads naturally with the society to which it belongs. i need scarcely add that this calamity is slavery. christianity suppressed slavery, but the christians of the sixteenth century re-established it--as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, was at the same time rendered far more difficult of cure. it is important to make an accurate distinction between slavery itself and its consequences. the immediate evils which are produced by slavery were very nearly the same in antiquity as they are among the moderns; but the consequences of these evils were different. the slave, among the ancients, belonged to the same race as his master, and he was often the superior of the two in education[ ] and instruction. freedom was the only distinction between them; and when freedom was conferred, they were easily confounded together. the ancients, then, had a very simple means of avoiding slavery and its evil consequences, which was that of enfranchisement; and they succeeded as soon as they adopted this measure generally. not but, in ancient states, the vestiges of servitude subsisted for some time after servitude was abolished. there is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior, long after he has become their equal; and the real inequality which is produced by fortune or by law, is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality which is implanted in the manners of the people. nevertheless, this secondary consequence of slavery was limited to a certain term among the ancients; for the freedman bore so entire a resemblance to those born free, that it soon became impossible to distinguish him from among them. the greatest difficulty in antiquity was that of altering the law; among the moderns it is of altering the manners; and, as far as we are concerned, the real obstacles begin where those of the ancients left off. this arises from the circumstance that, among the moderns, the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united to the physical and permanent fact of color. the tradition of slavery dishonors the race, and the peculiarity of the race perpetuates the tradition of slavery. no african has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the new world; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen. thus the negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, god alone can obliterate the traces of its existence. the modern slave differs from his master not only in his condition, but in his origin. you may set the negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the european. nor is this all; we scarcely acknowledge the common features of mankind in this child of debasement whom slavery has brought among us. his physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes.[ ] the moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack, and far less easy to conquer, than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color. it is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born among men like ourselves by nature, and equal to ourselves by law, to conceive the irreconcilable differences which separate the negro from the european in america. but we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. france was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority; nothing more contrary to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions which had been established between beings evidently similar. nevertheless these divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and on all sides they have left imaginary vestiges, which time alone can efface. if it be so difficult to root out an inequality which solely originates in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which seem to be founded upon the immutable laws of nature herself? when i remember the extreme difficulty with which aristocratic bodies, of whatever nature they may be, are commingled with the mass of the people; and the exceeding care which they take to preserve the ideal boundaries of their caste inviolate, i despair of seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs. those who hope that the europeans will ever mix with the negroes, appear to me to delude themselves; and i am not led to any such conclusion by my own reason, or by the evidence of facts. hitherto, wherever the whites have been the most powerful, they have maintained the blacks in a subordinate or a servile position; wherever the negroes have been strongest, they have destroyed the whites; such has been the only course of events which has ever taken place between the two races. i see that in a certain portion of the territory of the united states at the present day, the legal barrier which separated the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country; slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. whosoever has inhabited the united states, must have perceived, that in those parts of the union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in nowise drawn nearer to the whites. on the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the states which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known. it is true, that in the north of the union, marriages may be legally contracted between negroes and whites, but public opinion would stigmatize a man who should connect himself with a negress as infamous, and it would be difficult to meet with a single instance of such a union. the electoral franchise has been conferred upon the negroes in almost all the states in which slavery has been abolished; but if they come forward to vote, their lives are in danger. if oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites among their judges; and although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repulses them from that office. the same schools do not receive the child of the black and of the european. in the theatres, gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and although they are allowed to invoke the same divinity as the whites, it must be at a different altar, and in their own churches, with their own clergy. the gates of heaven are not closed against these unhappy beings; but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of the other world. when the negro is defunct, his bones are cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death. the negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasure, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death. in the south, where slavery still exists, the negroes are less carefully kept apart; they sometimes share the labor and the recreations of the whites; the whites consent to intermix with them to a certain extent, and although the legislation treats them more harshly, the habits of the people are more tolerant and compassionate. in the south the master is not afraid to raise his slave to his own standing, because he knows that he can in a moment reduce him to the dust at pleasure. in the north, the white no longer distinctly perceives the barrier which separates him from the degraded race, and he shuns the negro with the more pertinacity, because he fears lest they should be some day confounded together. among the americans of the south, nature sometimes reasserts her rights, and restores a transient equality between the blacks and the whites; but in the north, pride restrains the most imperious of human passions. the american of the northern states would perhaps allow the negress to share his licentious pleasures, if the laws of his country did not declare that she may aspire to be the legitimate partner of his bed; but he recoils with horror from her who might become his wife. thus it is, in the united states, that the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and inequality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the laws of the country. but if the relative position of the two races which inhabit the united states, is such as i have described, it may be asked why the americans have abolished slavery in the north of the union, why they maintain it in the south, and why they aggravate its hardships there? the answer is easily given. it is not for the good of the negroes, but for that of the whites, that measures are taken to abolish slavery in the united states. the first negroes were imported into virginia about the year .[ ] in america, therefore, as well as in the rest of the globe, slavery originated in the south. thence it spread from one settlement to another; but the number of slaves diminished toward the northern states, and the negro population was always very limited in new england.[ ] a century had scarcely elapsed since the foundation of the colonies, when the attention of the planters was struck by the extraordinary fact, that the provinces which were comparatively destitute of slaves, increased in population, in wealth, and in prosperity, more rapidly than those which contained the greatest number of negroes. in the former, however, the inhabitants were obliged to cultivate the soil themselves, or by hired laborers; in the latter, they were furnished with hands for which they paid no wages; yet, although labor and expense were on the one side, and ease with economy on the other, the former were in possession of the most advantageous system. this consequence seemed to be the more difficult to explain, since the settlers, who all belonged to the same european race, had the same habits, the same civilisation, the same laws, and their shades of difference were extremely slight. time, however, continued to advance; and the anglo americans, spreading beyond the coasts of the atlantic ocean, penetrated farther and farther into the solitudes of the west; they met with a new soil and an unwonted climate; the obstacles which opposed them were of the most various character; their races intermingled, the inhabitants of the south went up toward the north, those of the north descended to the south; but in the midst of all these causes, the same result recurred at every step; and in general, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more rich than those in which slavery flourished. the more progress was made, the more was it shown that slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master. but this truth was most satisfactorily demonstrated when civilisation reached the banks of the ohio. the stream which the indians had distinguished by the name of ohio, or beautiful river, waters one of the most magnificent valleys which have ever been made the abode of man. undulating lands extend upon both shores of the ohio, whose soil affords inexhaustible treasures to the laborer; on either bank the air is wholesome and the climate mild; and each of them forms the extreme frontier of a vast state: that which follows the numerous windings of the ohio upon the left is called kentucky; that upon the right bears the name of the river. these two states only differ in a single respect; kentucky has admitted slavery, but the state of ohio has prohibited the existence of slaves within its borders.[ ] thus the traveller who floats down the current of the ohio, to the spot where that river falls into the mississippi, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude; and a transient inspection of the surrounding objects will convince him which of the two is most favorable to mankind. upon the left bank of the stream the population is rare; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. from the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard, which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests; the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborer; and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which are the reward of labor.[ ] the state of kentucky was founded in , the state of ohio only twelve years later; but twelve years are more in america than half a century in europe, and, at the present day, the population of ohio exceeds that of kentucky by , souls.[ ] these opposite consequences of slavery and freedom may readily be understood; and they suffice to explain many of the differences which we remark between the civilisation of antiquity and that of our own time. upon the left bank of the ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored; on the former territory no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm; while those who are active and enlightened either do nothing, or pass over into the state of ohio, where they may work without dishonor. it is true that in kentucky the planters are not obliged to pay wages to the slaves whom they employ; but they derive small profits from their labor, while the wages paid to free workmen would be returned with interest in the value of their services. the free workman is paid, but he does his work quicker than the slave; and rapidity of execution is one of the great elements of economy. the white sells his services, but they are only purchased at the times at which they may be useful; the black can claim no remuneration for his toil, but the expense of his maintenance is perpetual; he must be supported in his old age as well as in the prime of manhood, in his profitless infancy as well as in the productive years of youth. payment must equally be made in order to obtain the services of either class of men; the free workman receives his wages in money; the slave in education, in food, in care, and in clothing. the money which a master spends in the maintenance of his slaves, goes gradually and in detail, so that it is scarcely perceived; the salary of the free workman is paid in a round sum, which appears only to enrich the individual who receives it; but in the end the slave has cost more than the free servant, and his labor is less productive.[ ] the influence of slavery extends still farther; it affects the character of the master, and imparts a peculiar tendency to his ideas and his tastes. upon both banks of the ohio, the character of the inhabitants is enterprising and energetic; but this vigor is very differently exercised in the two states. the white inhabitant of ohio, who is obliged to subsist by his own exertions, regards temporal prosperity as the principal aim of his existence; and as the country which he occupies presents inexhaustible resources to his industry, and ever-varying lures to his activity, his acquisitive ardor surpasses the ordinary limits of human cupidity: he is tormented by the desire of wealth, and he boldly enters upon every path which fortune opens to him; he becomes a sailor, pioneer, an artisan, or a laborer, with the same indifference, and he supports, with equal constancy, the fatigues and the dangers incidental to these various professions; the resources of his intelligence are astonishing, and his avidity in the pursuit of gain amounts to a species of heroism. but the kentuckian scorns not only labor, but all the undertakings which labor promotes; as he lives in an idle independence, his tastes are those of an idle man; money loses a portion of its value in his eyes; he covets wealth much less than pleasure and excitement; and the energy which his neighbor devotes to gain, turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat. thus slavery not only prevents the whites from becoming opulent, but even from desiring to become so. as the same causes have been continually producing opposite effects for the last two centuries in the british colonies of north america, they have established a very striking difference between the commercial capacity of the inhabitants of the south and that of the north. at the present day, it is only the northern states which are in possession of shipping, manufactures, railroads, and canals. this difference is perceptible not only in comparing the north with the south, but in comparing the several southern states. almost all the individuals who carry on commercial operations, or who endeavor to turn slave-labor to account in the most southern districts of the union, have emigrated from the north. the natives of the northern states are constantly spreading over that portion of the american territory, where they have less to fear from competition; they discover resources there, which escaped the notice of the inhabitants; and, as they comply with a system which they do not approve, they succeed in turning it to better advantage than those who first founded, and who still maintain it. were i inclined to continue this parallel, i could easily prove that almost all the differences, which may be remarked between the characters of the americans in the southern and in the northern states, have originated in slavery; but this would divert me from my subject, and my present intention is not to point out all the consequences of servitude, but those effects which it has produced upon the prosperity of the countries which have admitted it. the influence of slavery upon the production of wealth must have been very imperfectly known in antiquity, as slavery then obtained throughout the civilized world, and the nations which were unacquainted with it were barbarous. and indeed christianity only abolished slavery by advocating the claims of the slave; at the present time it may be attacked in the name of the master; and, upon this point, interest is reconciled with morality. as these truths became apparent in the united states, slavery receded before the progress of experience. servitude had begun in the south, and had thence spread toward the north; but it now retires again. freedom, which started from the north, now descends uninterruptedly toward the south. among the great states, pennsylvania now constitutes the extreme limit of slavery to the north; but even within those limits the slave-system is shaken; maryland, which is immediately below pennsylvania, is preparing for its abolition; and virginia, which comes next to maryland, is already discussing its utility and its dangers.[ ] no great change takes place in human institutions, without involving among its causes the law of inheritance. when the law of primogeniture obtained in the south, each family was represented by a wealthy individual, who was neither compelled nor induced to labor; and he was surrounded, as by parasitic plants, by the other members of his family, who were then excluded by law from sharing the common inheritance, and who led the same kind of life as himself. the very same thing then occurred in all the families of the south that still happens in the wealthy families of some countries in europe, namely, that the younger sons remain in the same state of idleness as their elder brother, without being as rich as he is. this identical result seems to be produced in europe and in america by wholly analogous causes. in the south of the united states, the whole race of whites formed an aristocratic body, which was headed by a certain number of privileged individuals, whose wealth was permanent, and whose leisure was hereditary. these leaders of the american nobility kept alive the traditional prejudices of the white race in the body of which they were the representatives, and maintained the honor of inactive life. this aristocracy contained many who were poor, but none who would work; its members preferred want to labor; consequently no competition was set on foot against negro laborers and slaves, and whatever opinion might be entertained as to the utility of their efforts, it was indispensable to employ them, since there was no one else to work. no sooner was the law of primogeniture abolished than fortunes began to diminish, and all the families of the country were simultaneously reduced to a state in which labor became necessary to procure the means of subsistence: several of them have since entirely disappeared; and all of them learned to look forward to the time at which it would be necessary for every one to provide for his own wants. wealthy individuals are still to be met with, but they no longer constitute a compact and hereditary body, nor have they been able to adopt a line of conduct in which they could persevere, and which they could infuse into all ranks of society. the prejudice which stigmatized labor was in the first place abandoned by common consent; the number of needy men was increased, and the needy were allowed to gain a laborious subsistence without blushing for their exertions. thus one of the most immediate consequences of the partible quality of estates has been to create a class of free laborers. as soon as a competition was set on foot between the free laborer and the slave, the inferiority of the latter became manifest, and slavery was attacked in its fundamental principles, which is, the interest of the master. as slavery recedes, the black population follows its retrograde course, and returns with it to those tropical regions from which it originally came. however singular this fact may at first appear to be, it may readily be explained. although the americans abolish the principle of slavery, they do not set their slaves free. to illustrate this remark i will quote the example of the state of new york. in , the state of new york prohibited the sale of slaves within its limits; which was an indirect method of prohibiting the importation of blacks. thenceforward the number of negroes could only increase according to the ratio of the natural increase of population. but eight years later a more decisive measure was taken, and it was enacted that all children born of slave parents after the th of july, , should be free. no increase could then take place, and although slaves still existed, slavery might be said to be abolished. from the time at which a northern state prohibited the importation of slaves, no slaves were brought from the south to be sold in its markets. on the other hand, as the sale of slaves was forbidden in that state, an owner was no longer able to get rid of his slaves (who thus became a burdensome possession) otherwise than by transporting him to the south. but when a northern state declared that the son of the slave should be born free, the slave lost a large portion of his market value, since his posterity was no longer included in the bargain, and the owner had then a strong interest in transporting him to the south. thus the same law prevents the slaves of the south from coming to the northern states, and drives those of the north to the south. the want of free hands is felt in a state in proportion as the number of slaves decreases. but in proportion as labor is performed by free hands, slave-labor becomes less productive; and the slave is then a useless or an onerous possession, whom it is important to export to those southern states where the same competition is not to be feared. thus the abolition of slavery does not set the slave free, but it merely transfers him from one master to another, and from the north to the south. the emancipated negroes, and those born after the abolition of slavery, do not, indeed, migrate from the north to the south; but their situation with regard to the europeans is not unlike that of the aborigines of america; they remain half civilized, and deprived of their rights in the midst of a population which is far superior to them in wealth and in knowledge; where they are exposed to the tyranny of the laws,[ ] and the intolerance of the people. on some accounts they are still more to be pitied than the indians, since they are haunted by the reminiscence of slavery, and they cannot claim possession of a single portion of the soil: many of them perish miserably,[ ] and the rest congregate in the great towns, where they perform the meanest offices, and lead a wretched and precarious existence. but even if the number of negroes continued to increase as rapidly as when they were still in a state of slavery, as the number of whites augments with twofold rapidity since the abolition of slavery, the blacks would soon be, as it were, lost in the midst of a strange population. a district which is cultivated by slaves is in general more scantily peopled than a district cultivated by free labor: moreover, america is still a new country, and a state is therefore not half peopled at the time when it abolished slavery. no sooner is an end put to slavery, than the want of free labor is felt, and a crowd of enterprising adventurers immediately arrive from all parts of the country, who hasten to profit by the fresh resources which are then opened to industry. the soil is soon divided among them, and a family of white settlers takes possession of each tract of country. besides which, european emigration is exclusively directed to the free states; for what would be the fate of a poor emigrant who crosses the atlantic in search of ease and happiness, if he were to land in a country where labor is stigmatized as degrading? thus the white population grows by its natural increase, and at the same time by the immense influx of emigrants; while the black population receives no emigrants, and is upon its decline. the proportion which existed between the two races is soon inverted. the negroes constitute a scanty remnant, a poor tribe of vagrants, which is lost in the midst of an immense people in full possession of the land; and the presence of the blacks is only marked by the injustice and the hardships of which they are the unhappy victims. in several of the western states the negro race never made its appearance; and in all the northern states it is rapidly declining. thus the great question of its future condition is confined within a narrow circle, where it becomes less formidable, though not more easy of solution. the more we descend toward the south, the more difficult does it become to abolish slavery with advantage: and this arises from several physical causes, which it is important to point out. the first of these causes is the climate: it is well known that in proportion as europeans approach the tropics, they suffer more from labor. many of the americans even assert, that within a certain latitude the exertions which a negro can make without danger are fatal to them;[ ] but i do not think that this opinion, which is so favorable to the indolence of the inhabitants of southern regions, is confirmed by experience. the southern parts of the union are not hotter than the south of italy and of spain;[ ] and it may be asked why the european cannot work as well there as in the two latter countries. if slavery has been abolished in italy and in spain without causing the destruction of the masters, why should not the same thing take place in the union? i cannot believe that nature has prohibited the europeans in georgia and the floridas, under pain of death, from raising the means of subsistence from the soil; but their labor would unquestionably be more irksome and less productive[ ] to them than the inhabitants of new england. as the free workman thus loses a portion of his superiority over the slave in the southern states, there are fewer inducements to abolish slavery. all the plants of europe grow in the northern parts of the union; the south has special productions of its own. it has been observed that slave labor is a very expensive method of cultivating corn. the farmer of corn-land in a country where slavery is unknown, habitually retains a small number of laborers in his service, and at seed-time and harvest he hires several additional hands, who only live at his cost for a short period. but the agriculturist in a slave state is obliged to keep a large number of slaves the whole year round, in order to sow his fields and to gather in his crops, although their services are only required for a few weeks; but slaves are unable to wait till they are hired, and to subsist by their own labor in the meantime like free laborers; in order to have their services, they must be bought. slavery, independently of its general disadvantages, is therefore still more inapplicable to countries in which corn is cultivated than to those which produce crops of a different kind. the cultivation of tobacco, of cotton, and especially of the sugar-cane, demands, on the other hand, unremitting attention: and women and children are employed in it, whose services are of but little use in the cultivation of wheat. thus slavery is naturally more fitted to the countries from which these productions are derived. tobacco, cotton, and the sugar-cane, are exclusively grown in the south, and they form one of the principal sources of the wealth of those states. if slavery were abolished, the inhabitants of the south would be constrained to adopt one of two alternatives: they must either change their system of cultivation, and then they would come into competition with the more active and more experienced inhabitants of the north; or, if they continued to cultivate the same produce without slave labor, they would have to support the competition of the other states of the south, which might still retain their slaves. thus, peculiar reasons for maintaining slavery exist in the south which do not operate in the north. but there is yet another motive which is more cogent than all the others; the south might indeed, rigorously speaking, abolish slavery, but how should it rid its territory of the black population? slaves and slavery are driven from the north by the same law, but this twofold result cannot be hoped for in the south. the arguments which i have adduced to show that slavery is more natural and more advantageous in the south than in the north, sufficiently prove that the number of slaves must be far greater in the former districts. it was to the southern settlements that the first africans were brought, and it is there that the greatest number of them have always been imported. as we advance toward the south, the prejudice which sanctions idleness increases in power. in the states nearest to the tropics there is not a single white laborer; the negroes are consequently much more numerous in the south than in the north. and, as i have already observed, this disproportion increases daily, since the negroes are transferred to one part of the union as soon as slavery is abolished in the other. thus the black population augments in the south, not only by its natural fecundity, but by the compulsory emigration of the negroes from the north; and the african race has causes of increase in the south very analogous to those which so powerfully accelerate the growth of the european race in the north. in the state of maine there is one negro in three hundred inhabitants; in massachusetts, one in one hundred; in new york, two in one hundred; in pennsylvania, three in the same number; in maryland, thirty-four; in virginia, forty-two; and lastly, in south carolina, fifty-five per cent.[ ] such was the proportion of the black population to the whites in the year . but this proportion is perpetually changing, as it constantly decreases in the north and augments in the south. it is evident that the most southern states of the union cannot abolish slavery without incurring very great dangers, which the north had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population. we have already shown the system by which the northern states secure the transition from slavery to freedom, by keeping the present generation in chains, and setting their descendants free; by this means the negroes are gradually introduced into society; and while the men who might abuse their freedom are kept in a state of servitude, those who are emancipated may learn the art of being free before they become their own masters. but it would be difficult to apply this method in the south. to declare that all the negroes born after a certain period shall be free, is to introduce the principle and the notion of liberty into the heart of slavery; the blacks, whom the law thus maintains in a state of slavery from which their children are delivered, are astonished at so unequal a fate, and their astonishment is only the prelude to their impatience and irritation. thenceforward slavery loses in their eyes that kind of moral power which it derived from time and habit; it is reduced to a mere palpable abuse of force. the northern states had nothing to fear from the contrast, because in them the blacks were few in number, and the white population was very considerable. but if this faint dawn of freedom were to show two millions of men their true position, the oppressors would have reason to tremble. after having enfranchised the children of their slaves, the europeans of the southern states would very shortly be obliged to extend the same benefit to the whole black population. in the north, as i have already remarked, a two-fold migration ensues upon the abolition of slavery, or even precedes that event when circumstances have rendered it probable; the slaves quit the country to be transported southward; and the whites of the northern states as well as the emigrants from europe hasten to fill up their place. but these two causes cannot operate in the same manner in the southern states. on the one hand, the mass of slaves is too great for any expectation of their ever being removed from the country to be entertained; and on the other hand, the europeans and the anglo-americans of the north are afraid to come to inhabit a country, in which labor has not yet been reinstated in its rightful honors. besides, they very justly look upon the states in which the proportion of the negroes equals or exceeds that of the whites, as exposed to very great dangers; and they refrain from turning their activity in that direction. thus the inhabitants if the south would not be able, like their northern countrymen, to initiate the slaves gradually into a state of freedom, by abolishing slavery; they have no means of perceptibly diminishing the black population, and they would remain unsupported to repress its excesses. so that in the course of a few years, a great people of free negroes would exist in the heart of a white nation of equal size. the same abuses of power which still maintain slavery, would then become the source of the most alarming perils, which the white population of the south might have to apprehend. at the present time the descendants of the europeans are the sole owners of the land; the absolute masters of all labor; and the only persons who are possessed of wealth, knowledge, and arms. the black is destitute of all these advantages, but he subsists without them because he is a slave. if he were free, and obliged to provide for his own subsistence, would it be possible for him to remain without these things and to support life? or would not the very instruments of the present superiority of the white, while slavery exists, expose him to a thousand dangers if it were abolished? as long as the negro remains a slave, he may be kept in a condition not very far removed from that of the brutes; but, with his liberty, he cannot but acquire a degree of instruction which will enable him to appreciate his misfortunes, and to discern a remedy for them. moreover, there exists a singular principle of relative justice which is very firmly implanted in the human heart. men are much more forcibly struck by those inequalities which exist within the circles of the same class, than with those which may be remarked between different classes. it is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness. in the north, the population of freed negroes feels these hardships and resents these indignities; but its members and its powers are small, while in the south it would be numerous and strong. as soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two alien communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. i have already expressed the conviction which i entertain as to the latter event.[ ] i do not imagine that the white and the black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. but i believe the difficulty to be still greater in the united states than elsewhere. an isolated individual may surmount the prejudices of religion, of his country, or of his race, and if this individual is a king he may effect surprising changes in society; but a whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. a despot who should subject the americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as the american democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the united states becomes, the more isolated will it remain.[ ] i have previously observed that the mixed race is the true bond of union between the europeans and the indians; just so the mulattoes are the true means of transition between the white and the negro; so that wherever mulattoes abound, the intermixture of the two races is not impossible. in some parts of america the european and the negro races are so crossed by one another, that it is rare to meet with a man who is entirely black or entirely white: when they are arrived at this point, the two races may really be said to be combined; or rather to have been absorbed in a third race, which is connected with both, without being identical with either. of all the europeans the english are those who have mixed least with the negroes. more mulattoes are to be seen in the south of the union than in the north, but still they are infinitely more scarce than in any other european colony: mulattoes are by no means numerous in the united states; they have no force peculiar to themselves, and when quarrels originating in differences of color take place, they generally side with the whites, just as the lacqueys of the great in europe assume the contemptuous airs of nobility to the lower orders. the pride of origin, which is natural to the english, is singularly augmented by the personal pride which democratic liberty fosters among the americans: the white citizen of the united states is proud of his race, and proud of himself. but if the whites and the negroes do not intermingle in the north of the union, how should they mix in the south? can it be supposed for an instant, that an american of the southern states, placed, as he must for ever be, between the white man with all his physical and moral superiority, and the negro, will ever think of preferring the latter? the americans of the southern states have two powerful passions, which will always keep them aloof; the first is the fear of being assimilated to the negroes, their former slaves; and the second, the dread of sinking below the whites, their neighbors. if i were called upon to predict what will probably occur at some future time, i should say, that the abolition of slavery in the south, will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white population for the men of color. i found this opinion upon the analogous observation which i already had occasion to make in the north. i there remarked, that the white inhabitants of the north avoid the negroes with increasing care, in proportion as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the legislature; and why should not the same result take place in the south? in the north, the whites are deterred from intermingling with the blacks by the fear of an imaginary danger; in the south, where the danger would be real, i cannot imagine that the fear would be less general. if, on the one hand, it be admitted (and the fact is unquestionable), that the colored population perpetually accumulates in the extreme south, and that it increases more rapidly than that of the whites; and if, on the other hand, it be allowed that it is impossible to foresee a time at which the whites and the blacks will be so intermingled as to derive the same benefits from society; must it not be inferred, that the blacks and the whites will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the southern states of the union? but if it be asked what the issue of the struggle is likely to be, it will readily be understood, that we are here left to form a very vague surmise of the truth. the human mind may succeed in tracing a wide circle, as it were, which includes the course of future events; but within that circle a thousand various chances and circumstances may direct it in as many different ways; and in every picture of the future there is a dim spot, which the eye of the understanding cannot penetrate. it appears, however, to be extremely probable, that, in the west india islands the white race is destined to be subdued, and the black population to share the same fate upon the continent. in the west india islands the white planters are surrounded by an immense black population; on the continent, the blacks are placed between the ocean and an innumerable people, which already extends over them in a dense mass from the icy confines of canada to the frontiers of virginia, and from the banks of the missouri to the shores of the atlantic. if the white citizens of north america remain united, it cannot be supposed that the negroes will escape the destruction with which they are menaced; they must be subdued by want or by the sword. but the black population which is accumulating along the coast of the gulf of mexico, has a chance of success, if the american union is dissolved when the struggle between the two races begins. if the federal tie were broken, the citizens of the south would be wrong to rely upon any lasting succor from their northern countrymen. the latter are well aware that the danger can never reach them; and unless they are constrained to march to the assistance of the south by a positive obligation, it may be foreseen that the sympathy of color will be insufficient to stimulate their exertions. yet, at whatever period the strife may break out, the whites of the south, even if they are abandoned to their own resources, will enter the lists with an immense superiority of knowledge and of the means of warfare: but the blacks will have numerical strength and the energy of despair upon their side; and these are powerful resources to men who have taken up arms. the fate of the white population of the southern states will, perhaps, be similar to that of the moors in spain. after having occupied the land for centuries, it will perhaps be forced to retire to the country whence its ancestors came, and to abandon to the negroes the possession of a territory, which providence seems to have more peculiarly destined for them, since they can subsist and labor in it more easily than the whites. the danger of a conflict between the white and the black inhabitants of the southern states of the union--a danger which, however remote it may be, is inevitable--perpetually haunts the imagination of the americans. the inhabitants of the north make it a common topic of conversation, although they have no direct injury to fear from the struggle; but they vainly endeavor to devise some means of obviating the misfortunes which they foresee. in the southern states the subject is not discussed: the planter does not allude to the future in conversing with strangers; the citizen does not communicate his apprehensions to his friends: he seeks to conceal them from himself: but there is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the south, than in the clamorous fears of the northern states. this all-pervading disquietude has given birth to an undertaking which is but little known, but which may have the effect of changing the fate of a portion of the human race. from apprehension of the dangers which i have just been describing, a certain number of american citizens have formed a society for the purpose of exporting to the coast of guinea, at their own expense, such free negroes as may be willing to escape from the oppression to which they are subject.[ ] in , the society to which i allude formed a settlement in africa, upon the th degree of north latitude, which bears the name of liberia. the most recent intelligence informs us that two thousand five hundred negroes are collected there; they have introduced the democratic institutions of america into the country of their forefathers; and liberia has a representative system of government, negro-jurymen, negro-magistrates, and negro-priests; churches have been built, newspapers established, and, by a singular change in the vicissitudes of the world, white men are prohibited from sojourning within the settlement.[ ] this is indeed a strange caprice of fortune. two hundred years have now elapsed since the inhabitants of europe undertook to tear the negro from his family and his home, in order to transport him to the shores of north america; at the present day, the european settlers are engaged in sending back the descendants of those very negroes to the continent from which they were originally taken; and the barbarous africans have been brought into contact with civilisation in the midst of bondage, and have become acquainted with free political institutions in slavery. up to the present time africa has been closed against the arts and sciences of the whites; but the inventions of europe will perhaps penetrate into those regions, now that they are introduced by africans themselves. the settlement of liberia is founded upon a lofty and a most fruitful idea; but whatever may be its results with regard to the continent of africa, it can afford no remedy to the new world. in twelve years the colonization society has transported two thousand five hundred negroes to africa; in the same space of time about seven hundred thousand blacks were born in the united states. if the colony of liberia were so situated as to be able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the negroes were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the union were to supply the society with annual subsidies,[ ] and to transport the negroes to liberia, there is little chance that the negro population of the united states would change. in the south, however, this leaves two choices: either for the whites to remain in communities with the negroes, and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. all intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or other of the two races. such is the view which the americans of the south take of the question, and they act consistently with it. as they are determined not to mingle with the negroes, they refuse to emancipate them. not that the inhabitants of the south regard slavery as necessary to the wealth of the planter; for on this point many of them agree with their northern countrymen in freely admitting that slavery is prejudicial to their interests; but they are convinced that, however prejudicial it may be, they hold their lives upon no other tenure. the instruction which is now diffused in the south has convinced the inhabitants that slavery is injurious to the slave-owner, but it has also shown them, more clearly than before, that no means exist of getting rid of its bad consequences. hence arises a singular contrast; the more the utility of slavery is contested, the more firmly is it established in the laws; and while the principle of servitude is gradually abolished in the north, that self-same principle gives rise to more and more rigorous consequences in the south. the legislation of the southern states, with regard to slaves, presents at the present day such unparalleled atrocities, as suffice to show how radically the laws of humanity have been perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated. the americans of this portion of the union have not, indeed, augmented the hardships of slavery; they have, on the contrary, bettered the physical condition of the slaves. the only means by which the ancients maintained slavery were fetters and death; the americans of the south of the union have discovered more intellectual securities for the duration of their power. they have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind. in antiquity, precautions were taken to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; at the present day measures are adopted to deprive him even of the desire of freedom. the ancients kept the bodies of their slaves in bondage, but they placed no restraint upon the mind and no check upon education; and they acted consistently with their established principle, since a natural termination of slavery then existed, and one day or other the slave might be set free, and become the equal of his master. but the americans of the south, who do not admit that the negroes can ever be commingled with themselves, have forbidden them to be taught to read or to write, under severe penalties; and as they will not raise them to their own level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that of the brutes. the hope of liberty had always been allowed to the slave to cheer the hardships of his condition. but the americans of the south are well aware that emancipation cannot but be dangerous, when the freed man can never be assimilated to his former master. to give a man his freedom, and to leave him in wretchedness and ignominy, is nothing less than to prepare a future chief for a revolt of the slaves. moreover, it has long been remarked, that the presence of a free negro vaguely agitates the minds of his less fortunate brethren, and conveys to them a dim notion of their rights. the americans of the south have consequently taken measures to prevent slave-owners from emancipating their slaves in most cases; not indeed by a positive prohibition, but by subjecting that step to various forms which it is difficult to comply with. i happened to meet with an old man, in the south of the union, who had lived in illicit intercourse with one of his negresses, and had had several children by her, who were born the slaves of their father. he had indeed frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their liberty; but years had elapsed without his being able to surmount the legal obstacles to their emancipation, and in the meanwhile his old age was come, and he was about to die. he pictured to himself his sons dragged from market to market, and passing from the authority of a parent to the rod of the stranger, until these horrid anticipations worked his expiring imagination into phrensy. when i saw him he was a prey to all the anguish of despair, and he made me feel how awful is the retribution of nature upon those who have broken her laws. these evils are unquestionably great; but they are the necessary and foreseen consequences of the very principle of modern slavery. when the europeans chose their slaves from a race differing from their own, which many of them considered as inferior to the other races of mankind, and which they all repelled with horror from any notion of intimate connexion, they must have believed that slavery would last for ever; since there is no intermediate state which can be durable, between the excessive inequality produced by servitude, and the complete equality which originates in independence. the europeans did imperfectly feel this truth, but without acknowledging it even to themselves. whenever they have had to do with negroes, their conduct has either been dictated by their interest and their pride, or by their compassion. they first violated every right of humanity by their treatment of the negro; and they afterward informed him that those rights were precious and inviolable. they affected to open their ranks to the slave, but the negroes who attempted to penetrate into the community were driven back with scorn; and they have incautiously and involuntarily been led to admit of freedom instead of slavery, without having the courage to be wholly iniquitous, or wholly just.[ ] if it be impossible to anticipate a period at which the americans of the south will mingle their blood with that of the negroes, can they allow their slaves to become free without compromising their own security? and if they are obliged to keep that race in bondage, in order to save their own families, may they not be excused for availing themselves of the means best adapted to that end? the events which are taking place in the southern states of the union, appear to be at once the most horrible and the most natural results of slavery. when i see the order of nature overthrown, and when i hear the cry of humanity in its vain struggle against the laws, my indignation does not light upon the men of our own time who were the instruments of these outrages; but i reserve my execration for those who, after a thousand years of freedom, brought back slavery into the world once more. whatever may be the efforts of the americans of the south to maintain slavery, they will not always succeed. slavery, which is now confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, which is attacked by christianity as unjust, and by political economy as prejudicial, and which is now contrasted with democratic liberties and the information of our age, cannot survive. by the choice of the master or the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue. if liberty be refused to the negroes of the south, they will in the end seize it for themselves by force; if it be given, they will abuse it ere long. * * * * * what are the chances in favor of the duration of the american union, and what dangers threaten it. reasons why the preponderating force lies in the states rather than in the union.--the union will only last as long as all the states choose to belong to it.--causes which tend to keep them united.--utility of the union to resist foreign enemies, and to prevent the existence of foreigners in america.--no natural barriers between the several states.--no conflicting interests to divide them.--reciprocal interests of the northern, southern, and western states.--intellectual ties of union.--uniformity of opinions.--dangers of the union resulting from the different characters and the passions of its citizens.--character of the citizens in the south and in the north.--the rapid growth of the union one of its greatest dangers.--progress of the population to the northwest.--power gravitates in the same direction.--passions originating from sudden turns of fortune.--whether the existing government of the union tends to gain strength, or to lose it.--various signs of its decrease.--internal improvement.--waste lands.--indians.--the bank.--the tariff.--general jackson. the maintenance of the existing institutions of the several states depends in some measure upon the maintenance of the union itself. it is therefore important in the first instance to inquire into the probable fate of the union. one point may indeed be assumed at once; if the present confederation were dissolved, it appears to me to be incontestable that the states of which it is now composed would not return to their original isolated condition; but that several unions would then be formed in the place of one. it is not my intention to inquire into the principles upon which these new unions would probably be established, but merely to show what the causes are which may effect the dismemberment of the existing confederation. with this object i shall be obliged to retrace some of the steps which i have already taken, and to revert to topics which i have before discussed. i am aware that the reader may accuse me of repetition, but the importance of the matter which still remains to be treated is my excuse; i had rather say too much, than say too little to be thoroughly understood, and i prefer injuring the author to slighting the subject. the legislators who formed the constitution of endeavored to confer a distinct and preponderating authority upon the federal power. but they were confined by the conditions of the task which they had undertaken to perform. they were not appointed to constitute the government of a single people, but to regulate the association of several states; and, whatever their inclinations might be, they could not but divide the exercise of sovereignty in the end. in order to understand the consequences of this division, it is necessary to make a short distinction between the affairs of government. there are some objects which are national by their very nature, that is to say, which affect the nation as a body, and can only be intrusted to the man or the assembly of men who most completely represent the entire nation. among these may be reckoned war and diplomacy. there are other objects which are provincial by their very nature, that is to say, which only affect certain localities, and which can only be properly treated in that locality. such, for instance, is the budget of municipality. lastly, there are certain objects of a mixed nature, which are national inasmuch as they affect all the citizens who compose the nation, and which are provincial inasmuch as it is not necessary that the nation itself should provide for them all. such are the rights which regulate the civil and political condition of the citizens. no society can exist without civil and political rights. these rights therefore interest all the citizens alike; but it is not always necessary to the existence and the prosperity of the nation that these rights should be uniform, nor consequently, that they should be regulated by the central authority. there are, then, two distinct categories of objects which are submitted to the direction of the sovereign power; and these categories occur in all well-constituted communities, whatever the basis of the political constitution may otherwise be. between these two extremes, the objects which i have termed mixed may be considered to lie. as these objects are neither exclusively national nor entirely provincial, they may be attained by a national or a provincial government, according to the agreement of the contracting parties, without in any way impairing the contract of association. the sovereign power is usually formed by the union of separate individuals, who compose a people; and individual powers or collective forces, each representing a very small portion of the sovereign authority, are the sole elements which are subjected to the general government of their choice. in this case the general government is more naturally called upon to regulate, not only those affairs which are of essential national importance, but those which are of a more local interest; and the local governments are reduced to that small share of sovereign authority which is indispensable to their prosperity. but sometimes the sovereign authority is composed of preorganized political bodies, by virtue of circumstances anterior to their union; and in this case the provincial governments assume the control, not only of those affairs which more peculiarly belong to their province, but of all, or of a part of the mixed affairs to which allusion has been made. for the confederate nations which were independent sovereign states before their union, and which still represent a very considerable share of the sovereign power, have only consented to cede to the general government the exercise of those rights which are indispensable to the union. when the national government, independently of the prerogative inherent in its nature, is invested with the right of regulating the affairs which relate partly to the general and partly to the local interest, it possesses a preponderating influence. not only are its own rights extensive, but all the rights which it does not possess exist by its sufferance, and it may be apprehended that the provincial governments may be deprived of their natural and necessary prerogatives by its influence. when, on the other hand, the provincial governments are invested with the power of regulating those same affairs of mixed interest, an opposite tendency prevails in society. the preponderating force resides in the province, not in the nation; and it may be apprehended that the national government may in the end be stripped of the privileges which are necessary to its existence. independent nations have therefore a natural tendency to centralization, and confederations to dismemberment. it now only remains for us to apply these general principles to the american union. the several states were necessarily possessed of the right of regulating all exclusively provincial affairs. moreover these same states retained the right of determining the civil and political competency of the citizens, of regulating the reciprocal relations of the members of the community, and of dispensing justice; rights which are of a general nature, but which do not necessarily appertain to the national government. we have shown that the government of the union is invested with the power of acting in the name of the whole nation, in those cases in which the nation has to appear as a single and undivided power; as, for instance, in foreign relations, and in offering a common resistance to a common enemy; in short, in conducting those affairs which i have styled exclusively national. in this division of the rights of sovereignty, the share of the union seems at first sight to be more considerable than that of the states; but a more attentive investigation shows it to be less so. the undertakings of the government of the union are more vast, but their influence is more rarely felt. those of the provincial government are comparatively small, but they are incessant, and they serve to keep alive the authority which they represent. the government of the union watches the general interests of the country; but the general interests of a people have a very questionable influence upon individual happiness; while provincial interests produce a most immediate effect upon the welfare of the inhabitants. the union secures the independence and the greatness of the nation, which do not immediately affect private citizens; but the several states maintain the liberty, regulate the rights, protect the fortune, and secure the life and the whole future prosperity of every citizen. the federal government is very far removed from its subjects, while the provincial governments are within the reach of them all, and are ready to attend to the smallest appeal. the central government has upon its side the passions of a few superior men who aspire to conduct it; but upon the side of the provincial governments are the interests of all those second-rate individuals who can only hope to obtain power within their own state, and who nevertheless exercise the largest share of authority over the people because they are placed nearest to its level. the americans have therefore much more to hope and to fear from the states than from the union; and, in conformity with the natural tendency of the human mind, they are more likely to attach themselves to the former than to the latter. in this respect their habits and feelings harmonize with their interests. when a compact nation divides its sovereignty, and adopts a confederate form of government, the traditions, the customs, and the manners of the people are for a long time at variance with their legislation; and the former tend to give a degree of influence to the central government which the latter forbids. when a number of confederate states unite to form a single nation, the same causes operate in an opposite direction. i have no doubt that if france were to become a confederate republic like that of the united states, the government would at first display more energy than that of the union; and if the union were to alter its constitution to a monarchy like that of france, i think that the american government would be a long time in acquiring the force which now rules the latter nation. when the national existence of the anglo-americans began, their provincial existence was already of long standing; necessary relations were established between the townships and the individual citizens of the same states; and they were accustomed to consider some objects as common to them all, and to conduct other affairs as exclusively relating to their own special interests. the union is a vast body, which presents no definite object to patriotic feeling. the forms and limits of the state are distinct and circumscribed, since it represents a certain number of objects which are familiar to the citizens and beloved by all. it is identified with the very soil, with the right of property and the domestic affections, with the recollections of the past, the labors of the present, and the hopes of the future. patriotism, then, which is frequently a mere extension of individual egotism, is still directed to the state, and is not excited by the union. thus the tendency of the interests, the habits, and the feelings of the people, is to centre political activity in the states, in preference to the union. it is easy to estimate the different forces of the two governments, by remarking the manner in which they fulfil their respective functions. whenever the government of a state has occasion to address an individual, or an assembly of individuals, its language is clear and imperative; and such is also the tone of the federal government in its intercourse with individuals, but no sooner has it anything to do with a state, than it begins to parley, to explain its motives, and to justify its conduct, to argue, to advise, and in short, anything but to command. if doubts are raised as to the limits of the constitutional powers of each government, the provincial government prefers its claims with boldness, and takes prompt and energetic steps to support it. in the meanwhile the government of the union reasons, it appeals to the interests, to the good sense, to the glory of the nation; it temporizes, it negotiates, and does not consent to act until it is reduced to the last extremity. at first sight it might readily be imagined that it is the provincial government which is armed with the authority of the nation, and that congress represents a single state. the federal government is, therefore, notwithstanding the precautions of those who founded it, naturally so weak, that it more peculiarly requires the free consent of the governed to enable it to subsist. it is easy to perceive that its object is to enable the states to realize with facility their determination of remaining united; and, as long as this preliminary consideration exists, its authority is great, temperate, and effective. the constitution fits the government to control individuals, and easily to surmount such obstacles as they may be inclined to offer, but it was by no means established with a view to the possible separation of one or more of the states from the union. if the sovereignty of the union were to engage in a struggle with that of the states at the present day, its defeat may be confidently predicted; and it is not probable that such a struggle would be seriously undertaken. as often as steady resistance is offered to the federal government, it will be found to yield. experience has hitherto shown that whenever a state has demanded anything with perseverance and resolution, it has invariably succeeded; and that if a separate government has distinctly refused to act, it was left to do as it thought fit.[ ] but even if the government of the union had any strength inherent in itself, the physical situation of the country would render the exercise of that strength very difficult.[ ] the united states cover an immense territory; they are separated from each other by great distances; and the population is disseminated over the surface of a country which is still half a wilderness. if the union were to undertake to enforce the allegiance of the confederate states by military means, it would be in a position very analogous to that of england at the time of the war of independence. however strong a government may be, it cannot easily escape from the consequences of a principle which it has once admitted as the foundation of its constitution. the union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and, in uniting together, they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. if one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the compact, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so; and the federal government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly, either by force or by right. in order to enable the federal government easily to conquer the resistance which may be offered to it by any one of its subjects, it would be necessary that one or more of them should be especially interested in the existence of the union, as has frequently been the case in the history of confederations. if it be supposed that among the states which are united by the federal tie, there are some which exclusively enjoy the principal advantages of union, or whose prosperity depends on the duration of that union, it is unquestionable that they will always be ready to support the central government in enforcing the obedience of the others. but the government would then be exerting a force not derived from itself, but from a principle contrary to its nature. states form confederations in order to derive equal advantages from their union; and in the case just alluded to, the federal government would derive its power from the unequal distribution of those benefits among the states. if one of the confederated states have acquired a preponderance sufficiently great to enable it to take exclusive possession of the central authority, it will consider the other states as subject provinces, and will cause its own supremacy to be respected under the borrowed name of the sovereignty of the union. great things may then be done in the name of the federal government, but in reality that government will have ceased to exist.[ ] in both these cases, the power which acts in the name of the confederation becomes stronger, the more it abandons the natural state and the acknowledged principles of confederations. in america the existing union is advantageous to all the states, but it is not indispensable to any one of them. several of them might break the federal tie without compromising the welfare of the others, although their own prosperity would be lessened. as the existence and the happiness of none of the states are wholly dependent on the present constitution, they would none of them be disposed to make great personal sacrifices to maintain it. on the other hand, there is no state which seems, hitherto, to have its ambition much interested in the maintenance of the existing union. they certainly do not all exercise the same influence in the federal councils, but no one of them can hope to domineer over the rest, or to treat them as its inferiors or as its subjects. it appears to me unquestionable, that if any portion of the union seriously desired to separate itself from the other states, they would not be able, nor indeed would they attempt, to prevent it; and that the present union will only last as long as the states which compose it choose to continue members of the confederation. if this point be admitted, the question becomes less difficult; and our object is not to inquire whether the states of the existing union are capable of separating, but whether they will choose to remain united. [the remarks respecting the inability of the federal government to retain within the union any state that may choose "to withdraw its name from the contract," ought not to pass through an american edition of this work, without the expression of a dissent by the editor from the opinion of the author. the laws of the united states must remain in force in a revolted state, until repealed by congress; the customs and postages must be collected; the courts of the united states must sit, and must decide the causes submitted to them; as has been very happily explained by the author, the courts act upon individuals. if their judgments are resisted, the executive arm must interpose, and if the state authorities aid in the resistance, the military power of the whole union must be invoked to overcome it. so long as the laws affecting the citizens of such a state remain, and so long as there remain any officers of a general government to enforce them, these results must follow not only theoretically but actually. the author probably formed the opinions which are the subject of these remarks, at the commencement of the controversy with south carolina respecting the tariff. and when they were written and published, he had not learned the result of that controversy, in which the supremacy of the union and its laws was triumphant. there was doubtless great reluctance in adopting the necessary measures to collect the customs, and to bring every legal question that could possibly arise out of the controversy, before the judiciary of the united states, but they were finally adopted, and were not the less successful for being the result of deliberation and of necessity. out of that controversy have arisen some advantages of a permanent character, produced by the legislation which it required. there were defects in the laws regulating the manner of bringing from the state courts into those of the united states, a cause involving the constitutionality of acts of congress or of the states, through which the federal authority might be evaded. those defects were remedied by the legislation referred to; and it is now more emphatically and universally true, than when the author wrote, that the acts of the general government operate through the judiciary, upon individual citizens, and not upon the states.--_american editor._] among the various reasons which tend to render the existing union useful to the americans, two principal causes are peculiarly evident to the observer. although the americans are, as it were, alone upon their continent, their commerce makes them the neighbors of all the nations with which they trade. notwithstanding their apparent isolation, the americans require a certain degree of strength, which they cannot retain otherwise than by remaining united to each other. if the states were to split, they would not only diminish the strength which they are now able to display toward foreign nations, but they would soon create foreign powers upon their own territory. a system of inland custom-houses would then be established; the valleys would be divided by imaginary boundary lines; the courses of the rivers would be confined by territorial distinctions and a multitude of hindrances would prevent the americans from exploring the whole of that vast continent which providence has allotted to them for a dominion. at present they have no invasion to fear, and consequently no standing armies to maintain, no taxes to levy. if the union were dissolved, all these burdensome measures might ere long be required. the americans are then very powerfully interested in the maintenance of their union. on the other hand, it is almost impossible to discover any sort of material interest which might at present tempt a portion of the union to separate from the other states. when we cast our eyes upon the map of the united states, we perceive the chain of the allegany mountains, running from the northeast to the southwest, and crossing nearly one thousand miles of country; and we are led to imagine that the design of providence was to raise, between the valley of the mississippi and the coasts of the atlantic ocean, one of those natural barriers which break the mutual intercourse of men, and form the necessary limits of different states. but the average height of the alleganies does not exceed , feet; their greatest elevation is not above , feet; their rounded summits, and the spacious valleys which they conceal within their passes, are of easy access from several sides. beside which, the principal rivers that fall into the atlantic ocean, the hudson, the susquehannah, and the potomac, take their rise beyond the alleganies, in an open district, which borders upon the valley of the mississippi. these streams quit this tract of country,[ ] make their way through the barrier which would seem to turn them westward, and as they wind through the mountains, they open an easy and natural passage to man. no natural barrier exists in the regions which are now inhabited by the anglo-americans; the alleganies are so far from serving as a boundary to separate nations, that they do not even serve as a frontier to the states. new york, pennsylvania, and virginia, comprise them within their borders and extend as much to the west as to the east of the line. the territory now occupied by the twenty-four states of the union, and the three great districts which have not yet acquired the rank of states, although they already contain inhabitants, covers a surface of , , square miles,[ ] which is about equal to five times the extent of france. within these limits the qualities of the soil, the temperature, and the produce of the country, are extremely various. the vast extent of territory occupied by the anglo-american republics has given rise to doubts as to the maintenance of the union. here a distinction must be made; contrary interests sometimes arise in the different provinces of a vast empire, which often terminate in open dissensions; and the extent of the country is then most prejudicial to the power of the state. but if the inhabitants of these vast regions are not divided by contrary interests, the extent of the territory may be favorable to their prosperity; for the unity of the government promotes the interchange of the different productions of the soil, and increases their value by facilitating their consumption. it is indeed easy to discover different interests in the different parts of the union, but i am unacquainted with any which are hostile to each other. the southern states are almost exclusively agricultural; the northern states are more peculiarly commercial and manufacturing; the states of the west are at the same time agricultural and manufacturing. in the south the crops consist of tobacco, of rice, of cotton, and of sugar; in the north and the west, of wheat and maize; these are different sources of wealth; but union is the means by which these sources are opened to all, and rendered equally advantageous to the several districts. the north, which ships the produce of the anglo-americans to all parts of the world, and brings back the produce of the globe to the union, is evidently interested in maintaining the confederation in its present condition, in order that the number of american producers and consumers may remain as large as possible. the north is the most natural agent of communication between the south and the west of the union on the one hand, and the rest of the world upon the other; the north is therefore interested in the union and prosperity of the south and the west, in order that they may continue to furnish raw materials for its manufactures, and cargoes for its shipping. the south and the west, on their side, are still more directly interested in the preservation of the union, and the prosperity of the north. the produce of the south is for the most part exported beyond seas; the south and the west consequently stand in need of the commercial resources of the north. they are likewise interested in the maintenance of a powerful fleet by the union, to protect them efficaciously. the south and the west have no vessels, but they cannot refuse a willing subsidy to defray the expenses of the navy; for if the fleets of europe were to blockade the ports of the south and the delta of the mississippi, what would become of the rice of the carolinas, the tobacco of virginia, and the sugar and cotton which grow in the valley of the mississippi? every portion of the federal budget does therefore contribute to the maintenance of material interests which are common to all the confederate states. independently of this commercial utility, the south and the west of the union derive great political advantages from their connexion with the north. the south contains an enormous slave population; a population which is already alarming, and still more formidable for the future. the states of the west lie in the remoter part of a single valley; and all the rivers which intersect their territory rise in the rocky mountains or in the alleganies, and fall into the mississippi, which bears them onward to the gulf of mexico. the western states are consequently entirely cut off, by their position, from the traditions of europe and the civilisation of the old world. the inhabitants of the south, then, are induced to support the union in order to avail themselves of its protection against the blacks; and the inhabitants of the west, in order not to be excluded from a free communication with the rest of the globe, and shut up in the wilds of central america. the north cannot but desire the maintenance of the union, in order to remain, as it now is, the connecting link between that vast body and the other parts of the world. the temporal interests of all the several parts of the union are, then, intimately connected; and the same assertion holds true respecting those opinions and sentiments which may be termed the immaterial interests of men. the inhabitants of the united states talk a great deal of their attachment to their country; but i confess that i do not rely upon that calculating patriotism which is founded upon interest, and which a change in the interest at stake may obliterate. nor do i attach much importance to the language of the americans, when they manifest in their daily conversation, the intention of maintaining the federal system adopted by their forefathers. a government retains its sway over a great number of citizens, far less by the voluntary and rational consent of the multitude, than by that instinctive and, to a certain extent, involuntary agreement, which results from similarity of feelings and resemblances of opinion. i will never admit that men constitute a social body, simply because they obey the same head and the same laws. society can only exist when a great number of men consider a great number of things in the same point of view; when they hold the same opinions upon many subjects, and when the same occurrences suggest the same thoughts and impressions to their minds. the observer who examines the present condition of the united states upon this principle, will readily discover, that although the citizens are divided into twenty-four distinct sovereignties, they nevertheless constitute a single people; and he may perhaps be led to think that the state of the anglo-american union is more truly a state of society, than that of certain nations of europe which live under the same legislation and the same prince. although the anglo-americans have several religious sects, they all regard religion in the same manner. they are not always agreed upon the measures which are most conducive to good government, and they vary upon some of the forms of government which it is expedient to adopt; but they are unanimous upon the general principles which ought to rule human society. from maine to the floridas, and from missouri to the atlantic ocean, the people is held to be the legitimate source of all power. the same notions are entertained respecting liberty and equality, the liberty of the press, the right of association, the jury, and the responsibility of the agents of government. if we turn from their political and religious opinions to the moral and philosophical principles which regulate the daily actions of life, and govern their conduct, we shall still find the same uniformity. the anglo-americans[ ] acknowledge the absolute moral authority of the reason of the community, as they acknowledge the political authority of the mass of citizens; and they hold that public opinion is the surest arbiter of what is lawful or forbidden, true or false. the majority of them believe that a man will be led to do what is just and good by following his own interests, rightly understood. they hold that every man is born in possession of the right of self-government, and that no one has the right of constraining his fellow-creatures to be happy. they have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man; they are of opinion that the effects of the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better to-morrow. i do not give all these opinions as true, but i quote them as characteristic of the americans. the anglo-americans are not only united together by those common opinions, but they are separated from all other nations by a common feeling of pride. for the last fifty years, no pains have been spared to convince the inhabitants of the united states that they constitute the only religious, enlightened, and free people. they perceive that, for the present, their own democratic institutions succeed, while those of other countries fail; hence they conceive an overweening opinion of their superiority, and they are not very remote from believing themselves to belong to a distinct race of mankind. the dangers which threaten the american union do not originate in the diversity of interests or opinions; but in the various characters and passions of the americans. the men who inhabit the vast territory of the united states are almost all the issue of a common stock; but the effects of the climate, and more especially of slavery, have gradually introduced very striking differences between the british settler of the southern states, and the british settler of the north. in europe it is generally believed that slavery has rendered the interests of one part of the union contrary to those of another part; but i by no means remarked this to be the case; slavery has not created interests in the south contrary to those of the north, but it has modified the character and changed the habits of the natives of the south. i have already explained the influence which slavery has exerted upon the commercial ability of the americans in the south; and this same influence equally extends to their manners. the slave is a servant who never remonstrates, and who submits to everything without complaint. he may sometimes assassinate, but he never withstands, his master. in the south there are no families so poor as not to have slaves. the citizen of the southern states of the union is invested with a sort of domestic dictatorship from his earliest years; the first notion he acquires in life is, that he is born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of being obeyed without resistance. his education tends, then, to give him the character of a supercilious and a hasty man; irascible, violent, and ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt. the american of the northern states is surrounded by no slaves in his childhood; he is even unattended by free servants; and is usually obliged to provide for his own wants. no sooner does he enter the world than the idea of necessity assails him on every side; he soon learns to know exactly the natural limits of his authority; he never expects to subdue those who withstand him, by force; and he knows that the surest means of obtaining the support of his fellow-creatures, is to win their favor. he therefore becomes patient, reflecting, tolerant, slow to act, and persevering in his designs. in the southern states the more immediate wants of life are always supplied; the inhabitants of those parts are not busied in the material cares of life, which are always provided for by others; and their imagination is diverted to more captivating and less definite objects. the american of the south is fond of grandeur, luxury, and renown, of gaiety, of pleasure, and above all, of idleness; nothing obliges him to exert himself in order to subsist; and as he has no necessary occupations, he gives way to indolence, and does not even attempt what would be useful. but the equality of fortunes, and the absence of slavery in the north, plunge the inhabitants in those same cares of daily life which are disdained by the white population of the south. they are taught from infancy to combat want, and to place comfort above all the pleasures of the intellect or the heart. the imagination is extinguished by the trivial details of life; and the ideas become less numerous and less general, but far more practical and more precise. as prosperity is the sole aim of exertion, it is excellently well attained; nature and mankind are turned to the best pecuniary advantage; and society is dexterously made to contribute to the welfare of each of its members, while individual egotism is the source of general happiness. the citizen of the north has not only experience, but knowledge: nevertheless, he sets but little value upon the pleasures of knowledge; he esteems it as the means of obtaining a certain end, and he is only anxious to seize its more lucrative applications. the citizen of the south is more given to act upon impulse; he is more clever, more frank, more generous, more intellectual, and more brilliant. the former, with a greater degree of activity, of common sense, of information, and of general aptitude, has the characteristic good and evil qualities of the middle classes. the latter has the tastes, the prejudices, the weaknesses, and the magnanimity of all aristocracies. if two men are united in society, who have the same interests, and to a certain extent the same opinions, but different characters, different acquirements, and a different style of civilisation, it is probable that these men will not agree. the same remark is applicable to a society of nations. slavery then does not attack the american union directly in its interests, but indirectly in its manners. the states which gave their assent to the federal contract in were thirteen in number; the union now consists of twenty-four members. the population which amounted to nearly four millions in , had more than tripled in the space of forty years; and in it amounted to nearly thirteen millions.[ ] changes of such magnitude cannot take place without some danger. a society of nations, as well as a society of individuals, derive its principal chances of duration from the wisdom of its members, their individual weakness, and their limited number. the americans who quit the coasts of the atlantic ocean to plunge into the western wilderness, are adventurers impatient of restraint, greedy of wealth, and frequently men expelled from the states in which they were born. when they arrive in the deserts, they are unknown to each other; and they have neither traditions, family feeling, nor the force of example to check their excesses. the empire of the laws is feeble among them; that of morality is still more powerless. the settlers who are constantly peopling the valley of the mississippi are, then, in every respect inferior to the americans who inhabit the older parts of the union. nevertheless, they already exercise a great influence in its councils; and they arrive at the government of the commonwealth before they have learned to govern themselves.[ ] the greater the individual weakness of each of the contracting parties, the greater are the chances of the duration of the contract; for their safety is then dependant upon their union. when, in , the most populous of the american republics did not contain , inhabitants,[ ] each of them felt its own insignificance as an independent people, and this feeling rendered compliance with the federal authority more easy. but when one of the confederate states reckons, like the state of new york, two millions of inhabitants, and covers an extent of territory equal in surface to a quarter of france,[ ] it feels its own strength; and although it may continue to support the union as advantageous to its prosperity, it no longer regards that body as necessary to its existence; and, as it continues to belong to the federal compact, it soon aims at preponderance in the federal assemblies. the probable unanimity of the states is diminished as their number increases. at present the interests of the different parts of the union are not at variance; but who is able to foresee the multifarious changes of the future, in a country in which towns are founded from day to day, and states almost from year to year? since the first settlement of the british colonies, the number of inhabitants has about doubled every twenty-two years. i perceive no causes which are likely to check this progressive increase of the anglo-american population for the next hundred years; and before that space of time has elapsed, i believe that the territories and dependencies of the united states will be covered by more than a hundred millions of inhabitants, and divided into forty states.[ ] i admit that these hundred millions of men have no hostile interests; i suppose, on the contrary, that they are all equally interested in the maintenance of the union; but i am still of opinion, that where there are a hundred millions of men, and forty distinct nations unequally strong, the continuance of the federal government can only be a fortunate accident. whatever faith i may have in the perfectibility of man until human nature is altered, and men wholly transformed, i shall refuse to believe in the duration of a government which is called upon to hold together forty different peoples, disseminated over a territory equal to one-half of europe in extent; to avoid all rivalry, ambition, and struggles, between them; and to direct their independent activity to the accomplishment of the same designs. but the greatest peril to which the union is exposed by its increase, arises from the continual changes which take place in the position of its internal strength. the distance from lake superior to the gulf of mexico extends from the th to the th degree of latitude, a distance of more than twelve hundred miles, as the bird flies. the frontier of the united states winds along the whole of this immense line; sometimes falling within its limits, but more frequently extending far beyond it, into the waste. it has been calculated that the whites advance a mean distance of seventeen miles along the whole of this vast boundary.[ ] obstacles, such as an unproductive district, a lake, or an indian nation unexpectedly encountered, are sometimes met with. the advancing column then halts for a while; its two extremities fall back upon themselves, and as soon as they are reunited they proceed onward. this gradual and continuous progress of the european race toward the rocky mountains, has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onward by the hand of god. within this first line of conquering settlers, towns are built, and vast states founded. in there were only a few thousand pioneers sprinkled along the valleys of the mississippi; and at the present day these valleys contain as many inhabitants as were to be found in the whole union in . their population amounts to nearly four millions.[ ] the city of washington was founded in , in the very centre of the union; but such are the changes which have taken place, that it now stands at one of the extremities; and the delegates of the most remote western states are already obliged to perform a journey as long as that from vienna to paris.[ ] all the states are borne onward at the same time in the path of fortune, but of course they do not all increase and prosper in the same proportion. in the north of the union detached branches of the allegany chain, extending as far as the atlantic ocean, form spacious roads and ports, which are constantly accessible to vessels of the greatest burden. but from the potomac to the mouth of the mississippi, the coast is sandy and flat. in this part of the union the mouths of almost all the rivers are obstructed; and the few harbors which exist among these lagunes, afford much shallower water to vessels, and much fewer commercial advantages than those of the north. this first natural cause of inferiority is united to another cause proceeding from the laws. we have already seen that slavery, which is abolished in the north, still exists in the south; and i have pointed out its fatal consequences upon the prosperity of the planter himself. the north is therefore superior to the south both in commerce[ ] and manufacture; the natural consequence of which is the more rapid increase of population and of wealth within its borders. the states situated upon the shores of the atlantic ocean are already half-peopled. most of the land is held by an owner; and these districts cannot therefore receive so many emigrants as the western states, where a boundless field is still open to their exertions. the valley of the mississippi is far more fertile than the coast of the atlantic ocean. this reason, added to all the others, contributes to drive the europeans westward--a fact which may be rigorously demonstrated by figures. it is found that the sum total of the population of all the united states has about tripled in the course of forty years. but in the recent states adjacent to the mississippi, the population has increased thirty-one fold within the same space of time.[ ] the relative position of the central federal power is continually displaced. forty years ago the majority of the citizens of the union was established upon the coast of the atlantic, in the environs of the spot upon which washington now stands; but the great body of the people is now advancing inland and to the north, so that in twenty years the majority will unquestionably be on the western side of the alleganies. if the union goes on to subsist, the basin of the mississippi is evidently marked out, by its fertility and its extent, as the future centre of the federal government. in thirty or forty years, that tract of country will have assumed the rank which naturally belongs to it. it is easy to calculate that its population, compared to that of the coast of the atlantic, will be, in round numbers, as to . in a few years the states which founded the union will lose the direction of its policy, and the population of the valleys of the mississippi will preponderate in the federal assemblies. this constant gravitation of the federal power and influence toward the northwest, is shown every ten years, when a general census of the population is made, and the number of delegates which each state sends to congress is settled afresh.[ ] in virginia had nineteen representatives in congress. this number continued to increase until the year , when it reached to twenty-three: from that time it began to decrease, and in , virginia elected only twenty-one representatives.[ ] during the same period the state of new york advanced in the contrary direction; in , it had ten representatives in congress; in , twenty-seven; in , thirty-four; and in , forty. the state of ohio had only one representative in , and in , it had already nineteen. it is difficult to imagine a durable union of a people which is rich and strong, with one which is poor and weak, and if it were proved that the strength and wealth of the one are not the causes of the weakness and poverty of the other. but union is still move difficult to maintain at a time at which one party is losing strength, and the other is gaining it. this rapid and disproportionate increase of certain states threatens the independence of the others. new york might, perhaps, succeed with its two millions of inhabitants and its forty representatives, in dictating to the other states in congress. but even if the more powerful states make no attempt to bear down the lesser ones, the danger still exists; for there is almost as much in the possibility of the act as in the act itself. the weak generally mistrusts the justice and the reason of the strong. the states which increase less rapidily than the others, look upon those which are more favored by fortune, with envy and suspicion. hence arise the deep-seated uneasiness and ill-defined agitation which are observable in the south, and which form so striking a contrast to the confidence and prosperity which are common to other parts of the union. i am inclined to think that the hostile measures taken by the southern provinces upon a recent occasion, are attributable to no other cause. the inhabitants of the southern states are, of all the americans, those who are most interested in the maintenance of the union; they would assuredly suffer most from being left to themselves; and yet they are the only citizens who threaten to break the tie of confederation. but it is easy to perceive that the south, which has given four presidents, washington, jefferson, madison, and monroe, to the union; which perceives that it is losing its federal influence, and that the number of its representatives in congress is diminishing from year to year while those of the northern and western states are increasing; the south, which is peopled with ardent and irascible beings, is becoming more and more irritated and alarmed. the citizens reflect upon their present position and remember their past influence, with the melancholy uneasiness of men who suspect oppression: if they discover a law of the union which is not unequivocally favorable to their interests, they protest against it as an abuse of force; and if their ardent remonstrances are not listened to, they threaten to quit an association which loads them with burdens while it deprives them of their due profits. "the tariff," said the inhabitants of carolina in , "enriches the north, and ruins the south; for if this were not the case, to what can we attribute the continually increasing power and wealth of the north, with its inclement skies and arid soil; while the south, which may be styled the garden of america, is rapidly declining."[ ] if the changes which i have described were gradual, so that each generation at least might have time to disappear with the order of things under which it had lived, the danger would be less: but the progress of society in america is precipitate, and almost revolutionary. the same citizen may have lived to see his state take the lead in the union, and afterward become powerless in the federal assemblies; and an anglo-american republic has been known to grow as rapidly as a man, passing from birth and infancy to maturity in the course of thirty years. it must not be imagined, however, that the states which lose their preponderance, also lose their population or their riches; no stop is put to their prosperity, and they even go on to increase more rapidly than any kingdom in europe.[ ] but they believe themselves to be impoverished because their wealth does not augment as rapidly as that of their neighbors; and they think that their power is lost, because they suddenly come into collision with a power greater than their own.[ ] thus they are more hurt in their feelings and their passions, than in their interests. but this is amply sufficient to endanger the maintenance of the union. if kings and peoples had only had their true interests in view, ever since the beginning of the world, the name of war would scarcely be known among mankind. thus the prosperity of the united states is the source of the most serious dangers that threaten them, since it tends to create in some of the confederate states that over-excitement which accompanies a rapid increase of fortune; and to awaken in others those feelings of envy, mistrust, and regret, which usually attend upon the loss of it. the americans contemplate this extraordinary and hasty progress with exultation; but they would be wiser to consider it with sorrow and alarm. the americans of the united states must inevitably become one of the greatest nations in the world; their offset will cover almost the whole of north america; the continent which they inhabit is their dominion, and it cannot escape them. what urges them to take possession of it so soon? riches, power, and renown, cannot fail to be theirs at some future time; but they rush upon their fortune as if but a moment remained for them to make it their own. i think i have demonstrated, that the existence of the present confederation depends entirely on the continued assent of all the confederates; and, starting from this principle, i have inquired into the causes which may induce any of the states to separate from the others. the union may, however, perish in two different ways: one of the confederate states may choose to retire from the compact, and so forcibly sever the federal tie; and it is to this supposition that most of the remarks which i have made apply: or the authority of the federal government may be progressively intrenched on by the simultaneous tendency of the united republics to resume their independence. the central power, successively stripped of all its prerogatives, and reduced to impotence by tacit consent, would become incompetent to fulfil its purpose; and the second union would perish, like the first, by a sort of senile inaptitude. the gradual weakening of the federal tie, which may finally lead to the dissolution of the union, is a distinct circumstance, that may produce a variety of minor consequences before it operates so violent a change. the confederation might still subsist, although its government were reduced to such a degree of inanition as to paralyze the nation, to cause internal anarchy, and to check the general prosperity of the country. after having investigated the causes which may induce the anglo-americans to disunite, it is important to inquire whether, if the union continues to subsist, their government will extend or contract its sphere of action, and whether it will become more energetic or more weak. the americans are evidently disposed to look upon their future condition with alarm. they perceive that in most of the nations of the world, the exercise of the rights of sovereignty tends to fall under the control of a few individuals, and they are dismayed by the idea that such will also be the case in their own country. even the statesmen feel, or affect to feel, these fears; for, in america, centralization is by no means popular, and there is no surer means of courting the majority, than by inveighing against the encroachments of the central power. the americans do not perceive that the countries in which this alarming tendency to centralization exists, are inhabited by a single people; while the fact of the union being composed of different confederate communities, is sufficient to baffle all the inferences which might be drawn from analogous circumstances. i confess that i am inclined to consider the fears of a great number of americans as purely imaginary; and far from participating in their dread of the consolidation of power in the hands of the union, i think that the federal government is visibly losing strength. to prove this assertion i shall not have recourse to any remote occurrences, but to circumstances which i have myself observed, and which belong to our own time. an attentive examination of what is going on in the united states, will easily convince us that two opposite tendencies exist in that country, like two distinct currents flowing in contrary directions in the same channel. the union has now existed for forty-five years, and in the course of that time a vast number of provincial prejudices, which were at first hostile to its power, have died away. the patriotic feeling which attached each of the americans to his own native state is become less exclusive; and the different parts of the union have become more intimately connected the better they have become acquainted with each other. the post,[ ] that great instrument of intellectual intercourse, now reaches into the backwoods; and steamboats have established daily means of communication between the different points of the coast. an inland navigation of unexampled rapidity conveys commodities up and down the rivers of the country.[ ] and to these facilities of nature and art may be added those restless cravings, that busymindedness, and love of self, which are constantly urging the american into active life, and bringing him into contact with his fellow-citizens. he crosses the country in every direction; he visits all the various populations of the land; and there is not a province in france, in which the natives are so well known to each other as the thirteen millions of men who cover the territory of the united states. but while the americans intermingle, they grow in resemblance of each other; the differences resulting from their climate, their origin, and their institutions diminish; and they all draw nearer and nearer to the common type. every year, thousands of men leave the north to settle in different parts of the union; they bring with them their faith, their opinions, and their manners; and as they are more enlightened than the men among whom they are about to dwell, they soon rise to the head of affairs and they adapt society to their own advantage. this continual emigration of the north to the south is peculiarly favorable to the fusion of all the different provincial characters into one national character. the civilisation of the north appears to be the common standard, to which the whole nation will one day be assimilated. the commercial ties which unite the confederate states are strengthened by the increasing manufactures of the americans; and the union which began to exist in their opinions, gradually forms a part of their habits: the course of time has swept away the bugbear thoughts which haunted the imaginations of the citizens in . the federal power is not become oppressive; it has not destroyed the independence of the states; it has not subjected the confederates to monarchical institutions; and the union has not rendered the lesser states dependant upon the larger ones; but the confederation has continued to increase in population, in wealth, and in power. i am therefore convinced that the natural obstacles to the continuance of the american union are not so powerful at the present time as they were in ; and that the enemies of the union are not so numerous. nevertheless, a careful examination of the history of the united states for the last forty-five years, will readily convince us that the federal power is declining; nor is it difficult to explain the causes of this phenomenon. when the constitution of was promulgated, the nation was a prey to anarchy; the union, which succeeded this confusion, excited much dread and much animosity; but it was warmly supported because it satisfied an imperious want. thus, although it was more attacked than it is now, the federal power soon reached the maximum of its authority, as is usually the case with a government which triumphs after having braced its strength by the struggle. at that time the interpretation of the constitution seemed to extend rather than to repress, the federal sovereignty; and the union offered, in several respects, the appearance of a single and undivided people, directed in its foreign and internal policy by a single government. but to attain this point the people had risen, to a certain extent, above itself. the constitution had not destroyed the distinct sovereignty of the states; and all communities, of whatever nature they may be, are impelled by a secret propensity to assert their independence. this propensity is still more decided in a country like america, in which every village forms a sort of republic accustomed to conduct its own affairs. it therefore cost the states an effort to submit to the federal supremacy; and all efforts, however successful they may be, necessarily subside with the causes in which they originated. as the federal government consolidated its authority, america resumed its rank among the nations, peace returned to its frontiers, and public credit was restored; confusion was succeeded by a fixed state of things which was favorable to the full and free exercise of industrious enterprise. it was this very prosperity which made the americans forget the cause to which it was attributable; and when once the danger was passed, the energy and the patriotism which had enabled them to brave it, disappeared from among them. no sooner were they delivered from the cares which oppressed them, than they easily returned to their ordinary habits, and gave themselves up without resistance to their natural inclinations. when a powerful government no longer appeared to be necessary, they once more began to think it irksome. the union encouraged a general prosperity, and the states were not inclined to abandon the union; but they desired to render the action of the power which represented that body as light as possible. the general principle of union was adopted, but in every minor detail there was an actual tendency to independence. the principle of confederation was every day more easily admitted and more rarely applied; so that the federal government brought about its own decline, while it was creating order and peace. as soon as this tendency of public opinion began to be manifested externally, the leaders of parties, who live by the passions of the people, began to work it to their own advantage. the position of the federal government then became exceedingly critical. its enemies were in possession of the popular favor; and they obtained the right of conducting its policy by pledging themselves to lessen its influence. from that time forward, the government of the union has invariably been obliged to recede, as often as it has attempted to enter the lists with the government of the states. and whenever an interpretation of the terms of the federal constitution has been called for, that interpretation has most frequently been opposed to the union, and favorable to the states. the constitution invested the federal government with the right of providing for the interests of the nation; and it has been held that no other authority was so fit to superintend the "internal improvements" which affected the prosperity of the whole union; such, for instance, as the cutting of canals. but the states were alarmed at a power, distinct from their own, which could thus dispose of a portion of their territory, and they were afraid that the central government would, by this means, acquire a formidable extent of patronage within their own confines, and exercise a degree of influence which they intended to reserve exclusively to their own agents. the democratic party, which has constantly been opposed to the increase of the federal authority, then accused the congress of usurpation, and the chief magistrate of ambition. the central government was intimidated by the opposition; and it soon acknowledged its error, promising exactly to confine its influence, for the future, within the circle which was prescribed to it. the constitution confers upon the union the right of treating with foreign nations. the indian tribes, which border upon the frontiers of the united states, have usually been regarded in this light. as long as these savages consented to retire before the civilized settlers, the federal right was not contested; but as soon as an indian tribe attempted to fix its dwelling upon a given spot, the adjacent states claimed possession of the lands and the rights of sovereignty over the natives. the central government soon recognized both these claims; and after it had concluded treaties with the indians as independent nations, it gave them up as subjects to the legislative tyranny of the states.[ ] some of the states which had been founded upon the coast of the atlantic, extended indefinitely to the west, into wild regions, where no european had ever penetrated. the states whose confines were irrevocably fixed, looked with a jealous eye upon the unbounded regions which the future would enable their neighbors to explore. the latter then agreed, with a view to conciliate the others, and to facilitate the act of union, to lay down their own boundaries, and to abandon all the territory which lay beyond those limits to the confederation at large.[ ] thenceforward the federal government became the owner of all the uncultivated lands which lie beyond the borders of the thirteen states first confederated. it was invested with the right of parcelling and selling them, and the sums derived from this source were exclusively reserved to the public treasury of the union, in order to furnish supplies for purchasing tracts of country from the indians, for opening roads to the remote settlements, and for accelerating the increase of civilisation as much as possible. new states have, however, been formed in the course of time, in the midst of those wilds which were formerly ceded by the inhabitants of the shores of the atlantic. congress has gone on to sell, for the profit of the nation at large, the uncultivated lands which those new states contained. but the latter at length asserted that, as they were now fully constituted, they ought to enjoy the exclusive right of converting the produce of these sales to their own use. as their remonstrances became more and more threatening, congress thought fit to deprive the union of a portion of the privileges which it had hitherto enjoyed; and at the end of it passed a law by which the greatest part of the revenue derived from the sale of lands was made over to the new western republics, although the lands themselves were not ceded to them.[ ] [the remark of the author, that "whenever an interpretation of the terms of the federal constitution has been called for, that interpretation has most frequently been opposed to the union, and favorable to the states" requires considerable qualification. the instances which the author cites, are those of _legislative_ interpretations, not those made by the judiciary. it may be questioned whether any of those cited by him are fair instances of _interpretation_. although the then president and many of his friends doubted or denied the power of congress over many of the subjects mentioned by the author, yet the omission to exercise the power thus questioned, did not proceed wholly from doubts of the constitutional authority. it must be remembered that all these questions affected local interests of the states or districts represented in congress, and the author has elsewhere shown the tendency of the local feeling to overcome all regard for the abstract interest of the union. hence many members have voted on these questions without reference to the constitutional question, and indeed without entertaining any doubt of their power. these instances may afford proof that the federal power is declining, as the author contends, but they do not prove any actual interpretation of the constitution. and so numerous and various are the circumstances to influence the decision of a legislative body like the congress of the united states, that the people do not regard them as sound and authoritative expositions of the true sense of the constitution, except perhaps in those very few cases, where there has been a constant and uninterrupted practice from the organization of the government. the judiciary is looked to as the only authentic expounder of the constitution, and until a law of congress has passed that ordeal, its constitutionality is open to question: of which our history furnishes many examples ... there are errors in some of the instances given by our author, which would materially mislead, if not corrected. that in relation to the indians proceeds upon the assumption that the united states claimed some rights over indians or the territory occupied by them, inconsistent with the claims of the states. but this is a mistake. as to their lands, the united states never pretended to any right in them, except such as was granted by the cessions of the states. the principle universally acknowledged in the courts of the united states and of the several states, is, that by the treaty with great britain in which the independence of the colonies was acknowledged, the states became severally and individually independent, and as such succeeded to the rights of the crown of england to and over the lands within the boundaries of the respective states. the right of the crown in these lands was the absolute ownership, subject only to the rights of occupancy by the indians so long as they remained a tribe. this right devolved to each state by the treaty which established their independence, and the united states have never questioned it. see th cranch, ; th wheaton, , ; th johnson's reports, . on the other hand, the right of holding treaties with the indians has universally been conceded to the united states. the right of a state to the lands occupied by the indians, within the boundaries of such state, does not in the least conflict with the right of holding treaties on national subjects by the united states with those indians. with respect to indians residing in any territory _without_ the boundaries of any state, or on lands ceded to the united states, the case is different; the united states are in such cases the proprietors of the soil, subject to the indian right of occupancy, and when that right is extinguished the proprietorship becomes absolute. it will be seen, then, that in relation to the indians and their lands, no question could arise respecting the interpretation of the constitution. the observation that "as soon as an indian tribe attempted to fix its dwelling upon a given spot, the adjacent states claimed possession of the lands, and the rights of sovereignty over the natives"--is a strange compound of error and of truth. as above remarked, the indian right of occupancy has ever been recognized by the states, with the exception of the case referred to by the author, in which georgia claimed the right to possess certain lands occupied by the cherokees. this was anomalous, and grew out of treaties and cessions, the details of which are too numerous and complicated for the limits of a note. but in no other cases have the states ever claimed the possession of lands occupied by indians, without having previously extinguished their right by purchase. as to the rights of sovereignty over the natives, the principle admitted in the united states is that all persons within the territorial limits of a state are and of necessity must be, subject to the jurisdiction of its laws. while the indian tribes were numerous, distinct, and separate from the whites, and possessed a government of their own, the state authorities, from considerations of policy, abstained from the exercise of criminal jurisdiction for offences committed by the indians among themselves, although for offences against the whites they were subjected to the operation of the state laws. but as these tribes diminished in numbers, as those who remained among them became enervated by bad habits, and ceased to exercise any effectual government, humanity demanded that the power of the states should be interposed to protect the miserable remnants from the violence and outrage of each other. the first recorded instance of interposition in such a case was in , when an indian of the seneca tribe in the state of new york was tried and convicted of murder on a squaw of the tribe. the courts declared their competency to take cognizance of such offences, and the legislature confirmed the declaration by a law.--another instance of what the author calls interpretation of the constitution against the general government, is given by him in the proposed act of , which passed both houses of congress, but was vetoed by the president, by which, as he says, "the greatest part of the revenue derived from the sale of lands, was made over to the new western republics." but this act was not founded on any doubt of the title of the united states to the lands in question, or of its constitutional power over them, and cannot be cited as any evidence of the interpretation of the constitution. an error of fact in this statement ought to be corrected. the bill to which the author refers, is doubtless that usually called mr. clay's land bill. instead of making over the greatest part of the revenue to the new states, it appropriated twelve and a half per cent. to them, in addition to five per cent. which had been originally granted for the purpose of making roads. see niles's register, vol. , p. .--_american editor._] the slightest observation in the united states enables one to appreciate the advantages which the country derives from the bank. these advantages are of several kinds, but one of them is peculiarly striking to the stranger. the bank-notes of the united states are taken upon the borders of the desert for the same value as at philadelphia, where the bank conducts its operations.[ ] the bank of the united states is nevertheless an object of great animosity. its directors have proclaimed their hostility to the president; and they are accused, not without some show of probability, of having abused their influence to thwart his election. the president therefore attacks the establishment which they represent, with all the warmth of personal enmity; and he is encouraged in the pursuit of his revenge by the conviction that he is supported by the secret propensities of the majority. the bank may be regarded as the great monetary tie of the union, just as congress is the great legislative tie; and the same passions which tend to render the states independent of the central power, contribute to the overthrow of the bank. the bank of the united states always holds a great number of the notes issued by the provincial banks, which it can at any time oblige them to convert into cash. it has itself nothing to fear from a similar demand, as the extent of its resources enables it to meet all claims. but the existence of the provincial banks is thus threatened, and their operations are restricted, since they are only able to issue a quantity of notes duly proportioned to their capital. they submit with impatience to this salutary control. the newspapers which they have bought over, and the president, whose interest renders him their instrument, attack the bank with the greatest vehemence. they rouse the local passions, and the blind democratic instinct of the country to aid their cause; and they assert that the bank-directors form a permanent aristocratic body, whose influence must ultimately be felt in the government, and must affect those principles of equality upon which society rests in america. the contest between the bank and its opponents is only an incident in the great struggle which is going on in america between the provinces and the central power; between the spirit of democratic independence, and the spirit of gradation and subordination. i do not mean that the enemies of the bank are identically the same individuals, who, on other points, attack the federal government; but i assert that the attacks directed against the bank of the united states originate in the propensities which militate against the federal government; and that the very numerous opponents of the former afford a deplorable symptom of the decreasing support of the latter. the union has never displayed so much weakness as in the celebrated question of the tariff.[ ] the wars of the french revolution and of had created manufacturing establishments in the north of the union, by cutting off all free communication between america and europe. when peace was concluded, and the channel of intercourse reopened by which the produce of europe was transmitted to the new world, the americans thought fit to establish a system of import duties, for the twofold purpose of protecting their incipient manufactures, and of paying off the amount of the debt contracted during the war. the southern states, which have no manufactures to encourage, and which are exclusively agricultural, soon complained of this measure. such were the simple facts, and i do not pretend to examine in this place whether their complaints were well founded or unjust. as early as the year , south carolina declared, in a petition to congress, that the tariff was "unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust." and the states of georgia, virginia, north carolina, alabama, and mississippi, subsequently remonstrated against it with more or less vigor. but congress, far from lending an ear to these complaints, raised the scale of tariff duties in the years and , and recognized anew the principle on which it was founded. a doctrine was then proclaimed, or rather revived, in the south, which took the name of nullification. i have shown in the proper place that the object of the federal constitution was not to form a league, but to create a national government. the americans of the united states form a sole and undivided people, in all the cases which are specified by that constitution; and upon these points the will of the nation is expressed, as it is in all constitutional nations, by the voice of the majority. when the majority has pronounced its decision, it is the duty of the minority to submit. such is the sound legal doctrine, and the only one which agrees with the text of the constitution, and the known intention of those who framed it. the partisans of nullification in the south maintain, on the contrary, that the intention of the americans in uniting was not to reduce themselves to the condition of one and the same people; that they meant to constitute a league of independent states; and that each state, consequently, retains its entire sovereignty, if not _de facto_, at least _de jure_; and has the right of putting its own construction upon the laws of congress, and of suspending their execution within the limits of its own territory, if they are held to be unconstitutional or unjust. the entire doctrine of nullification is comprised in a sentence uttered by vice-president calhoun, the head of that party in the south, before the senate of the united states, in the year : "the constitution is a compact to which the states were parties in their sovereign capacity; now, whenever a contract is entered into by parties which acknowledge no tribunal above their authority to decide in the last resort, each of them has a right to judge for himself in relation to the nature, extent, and obligations of the instrument." it is evident that a similar doctrine destroys the very basis of the federal constitution, and brings back all the evils of the old confederation, from which the americans were supposed to have had a safe deliverance. when south carolina perceived that congress turned a deaf ear to its remonstrances, it threatened to apply the doctrine of nullification to the federal tariff bill. congress persisted in its former system; and at length the storm broke out. in the course of the citizens of south carolina[ ] named a national [state] convention, to consult upon the extraordinary measures which they were called upon to take; and on the th november of the same year, this convention promulgated a law, under the form of a decree, which annulled the federal law of the tariff, forbade the levy of the imposts which that law commands, and refused to recognize the appeal which might be made to the federal courts of law.[ ] this decree was only to be put into execution in the ensuing month of february, and it was intimated, that if congress modified the tariff before that period, south carolina might be induced to proceed no farther with her menaces; and a vague desire was afterward expressed of submitting the question to an extraordinary assembly of all the confederate states. in the meantime south carolina armed her militia, and prepared for war. but congress, which had slighted its suppliant subjects, listened to their complaints as soon as they were found to have taken up arms.[ ] a law was passed, by which the tariff duties were to be progressively reduced for ten years, until they were brought so low as not to exceed the amount of supplies necessary to the government.[ ] thus congress completely abandoned the principle of the tariff; and substituted a mere fiscal impost for a system of protective duties.[ ] the government of the union, in order to conceal its defeat, had recourse to an expedient which is very much in vogue with feeble governments. it yielded the point _de facto_, but it remained inflexible upon the principles in question; and while congress was altering the tariff law, it passed another bill, by which the president was invested with extraordinary powers, enabling him to overcome by force a resistance which was then no longer to be apprehended. but south carolina did not consent to leave the union in the enjoyment of these scanty trophies of success: the same national [state] convention which annulled the tariff bill, met again, and accepted the proffered concession: but at the same time it declared its unabated perseverance in the doctrine of nullification; and to prove what it said, it annulled the law investing the president with extraordinary powers, although it was very certain that the clauses of that law would never be carried into effect. almost all the controversies of which i have been speaking have taken place under the presidency of general jackson; and it cannot be denied that in the question of the tariff he has supported the claims of the union with vigor and with skill. i am however of opinion that the conduct of the individual who now represents the federal government, may be reckoned as one of the dangers which threaten its continuance. some persons in europe have formed an opinion of the possible influence of general jackson upon the affairs of his country, which appears highly extravagant to those who have seen more of the subject. we have been told that general jackson has won sundry battles, that he is an energetic man, prone by nature and by habit to the use of force, covetous of power, and a despot by taste. all this may perhaps be true; but the inferences which have been drawn from these truths are exceedingly erroneous. it has been imagined that general jackson is bent on establishing a dictatorship in america, on introducing a military spirit, and on giving a degree of influence to the central authority which cannot but be dangerous to provincial liberties. but in america, the time for similar undertakings, and the age for men of this kind, is not yet come; if general jackson had entertained a hope of exercising his authority in this manner, he would infallibly have forfeited his political station, and compromised his life; accordingly he has not been so imprudent as to make any such attempt. far from wishing to extend the federal power, the president belongs to the party which is desirous of limiting that power to the bare and precise letter of the constitution, and which never puts a construction upon that act, favorable to the government of the union; far from standing forth as the champion of centralization, general jackson is the agent of all the jealousies of the states; and he was placed in the lofty station he occupies, by the passions of the people which are most opposed to the central government. it is by perpetually flattering these passions, that he maintains his station and his popularity. general jackson is the slave of the majority: he yields to its wishes, its propensities, and its demands; say rather, that he anticipates and forestalls them. whenever the governments of the states come into collision with that of the union, the president is generally the first to question his own rights: he almost always outstrips the legislature; and when the extent of the federal power is controverted he takes part, as it were, against himself; he conceals his official interests, and extinguishes his own natural inclinations. not indeed that he is naturally weak or hostile to the union; for when the majority decided against the claims of the partisans of nullification, he put himself at its head, asserted the doctrines which the nation held, distinctly and energetically, and was the first to recommend forcible measures; but general jackson appears to me, if i may use the american expressions, to be a federalist by taste, and a republican by calculation. general jackson stoops to gain the favor of the majority but when he feels that his popularity is secure, he overthrows all obstacles in the pursuit of the objects which the community approves, or of those which it does not look upon with a jealous eye. he is supported by a power with which his predecessors were unacquainted; and he tramples on his personal enemies wherever they cross his path, with a facility which no former president ever enjoyed; he takes upon himself the responsibility of measures which no one, before him, would have ventured to attempt; he even treats the national representatives with disdain approaching to insult; he puts his veto upon the laws of congress, and frequently neglects to reply to that powerful body. he is a favorite who sometimes treats his master roughly. the power of general jackson perpetually increases; but that of the president declines: in his hands the federal government is strong, but it will pass enfeebled into the hands of his successor. i am strangely mistaken if the federal government of the united states be not constantly losing strength, retiring gradually from public affairs, and narrowing its circle of action more and more. it is naturally feeble, but it now abandons even its pretensions to strength. on the other hand, i thought that i remarked a more lively sense of independence, and a more decided attachment to provincial government, in the states. the union is to subsist, but to subsist as a shadow; it is to be strong in certain cases, and weak in all others; in time of warfare, it is to be able to concentrate all the forces of the nation and all the resources of the country in its hands; and in time of peace its existence is to be scarcely perceptible: as if this alternate debility and vigor were natural or possible. i do not foresee anything for the present which may be able to check this general impulse of public opinion: the causes in which it originated do not cease to operate with the same effect. the change will therefore go on, and it may be predicted that, unless some extraordinary event occurs, the government of the union will grow weaker and weaker every day. i think, however, that the period is still remote, at which the federal power will be entirely extinguished by its inability to protect itself and to maintain peace in the country. the union is sanctioned by the manners and desires of the people; its results are palpable, its benefits visible. when it is perceived that the weakness of the federal government compromises the existence of the union, i do not doubt that a reaction will take place with a view to increase its strength. the government of the united states is, of all the federal governments which have hitherto been established, the one which is most naturally destined to act. as long as it is only indirectly assailed by the interpretation of its laws, and as long as its substance is not seriously altered, a change of opinion, an internal crisis, or a war, may restore all the vigor which it requires. the point which i have been most anxious to put in a clear light is simply this; many people, especially in france, imagine that a change of opinion is going on in the united states, which is favorable to a centralization of power in the hands of the president and the congress. i hold that a contrary tendency may be distinctly observed. so far is the federal government from acquiring strength, and from threatening the sovereignty of the states, as it grows older, that i maintain it to be growing weaker and weaker, and that the sovereignty of the union alone is in danger. such are the facts which the present time discloses. the future conceals the final result of this tendency, and the events which may check, retard, or accelerate, the changes i have described; but i do not affect to be able to remove the veil which hides them from our sight. * * * * * of the republican institutions of the united states, and what their chances of duration are. the union is accidental.--the republican institutions have more prospect of permanence.--a republic for the present the natural state of the anglo-americans.--reason of this.--in order to destroy it, all laws must be changed at the same time, and a great alteration take place in manners.--difficulties experienced by the americans in creating an aristocracy. the dismemberment of the union, by the introduction of war into the heart of those states which are now confederate, with standing armies, a dictatorship, and a heavy taxation, might eventually compromise the fate of the republican institutions. but we ought not to confound the future prospects of the republic with those of the union. the union is an accident, which will last only so long as circumstances are favorable to its existence; but a republican form of government seems to me to be the natural state of the americans; which nothing but the continued action of hostile causes, always acting in the same direction, could change into a monarchy. the union exists principally in the law which formed it; one revolution, one change in public opinion, might destroy it for ever; but the republic has a much deeper foundation to rest upon. what is understood by republican government in the united states, is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself. it is a regular state of things really founded upon the enlightened will of the people. it is a conciliatory government under which resolutions are allowed time to ripen, and in which they are deliberately discussed, and executed with mature judgment. the republicans in the united states set a high value upon morality, respect religious belief, and acknowledge the existence of rights. they profess to think that a people ought to be moral, religious, and temperate, in proportion as it is free. what is called the republic in the united states, is the tranquil rule of the majority, which, after having had time to examine itself, and to give proof of its existence, is the common source of all the powers of the state. but the power of the majority is not of itself unlimited. in the moral world humanity, justice, and reason, enjoy an undisputed supremacy; in the political world vested rights are treated with no less deference. the majority recognizes these two barriers; and if it now and then overstep them, it is because, like individuals, it has passions, and like them, it is prone to do what is wrong, while it discerns what is right. but the demagogues of europe have made strange discoveries. a republic is not, according to them, the rule of the majority, as has hitherto been taught, but the rule of those who are strenuous partisans of the majority. it is not the people who preponderates in this kind of government, but those who best know what is for the good of the people. a happy distinction, which allows men to act in the name of nations without consulting them, and to claim their gratitude while their rights are spurned. a republican government, moreover, is the only one which claims the right of doing whatever it chooses, and despising what men have hitherto respected, from the highest moral obligations to the vulgar rules of common sense. it had been supposed, until our time, that despotism was odious, under whatever form it appeared. but it is a discovery of modern days that there are such things as legitimate tyranny and holy injustice, provided they are exercised in the name of the people. the ideas which the americans have adopted respecting the republican form of government, render it easy for them to live under it, and ensure its duration. if, in their country, this form be often practically bad, at least it is theoretically good; and, in the end, the people always acts in conformity with it. it was impossible, at the foundation of the states, and it would still be difficult, to establish a central administration in america. the inhabitants are dispersed over too great a space, and separated by too many natural obstacles, for one man to undertake to direct the details of their existence. america is therefore pre-eminently the country of provincial and municipal government. to this cause, which was plainly felt by all the europeans of the new world, the anglo-americans added several others peculiar to themselves. at the time of the settlement of the north american colonies, municipal liberty had already penetrated into the laws as well as the manners of the english, and the emigrants adopted it, not only as a necessary thing, but as a benefit which they knew how to appreciate. we have already seen the manner in which the colonies were founded: every province, and almost every district, was peopled separately by men who were strangers to each other, or who associated with very different purposes. the english settlers in the united states, therefore, early perceived that they were divided into a great number of small and distinct communities which belonged to no common centre; and that it was needful for each of these little communities to take care of its own affairs, since there did not appear to be any central authority which was naturally bound and easily enabled to provide for them. thus, the nature of the country, the manner in which the british colonies were founded, the habits of the first emigrants, in short everything, united to promote, in an extra-ordinary degree, municipal and provincial liberties. in the united states, therefore, the mass of the institutions of the country is essentially republican; and in order permanently to destroy the laws which form the basis of the republic, it would be necessary to abolish all the laws at once. at the present day, it would be even more difficult for a party to succeed in founding a monarchy in the united states, than for a set of men to proclaim that france should henceforward be a republic. royalty would not find a system of legislation prepared for it beforehand; and a monarchy would then exist, really surrounded by republican institutions. the monarchical principle would likewise have great difficulty in penetrating into the manners of the americans. in the united states, the sovereignty of the people is not an isolated doctrine bearing no relation to the prevailing manners and ideas of the people: it may, on the contrary, be regarded as the last link of a chain of opinions which binds the whole anglo-american world. that providence has given to every human being the degree of reason necessary to direct himself in the affairs which interest him exclusively; such is the grand maxim upon which civil and political society rests in the united states. the father of a family applies it to his children; the master to his servants; the township to its officers; the province to its townships; the state to the provinces; the union to the states; and when extended to the nation, it becomes the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. thus, in the united states, the fundamental principle of the republic is the same which governs the greater part of human actions; republican notions insinuate themselves into all the ideas, opinions, and habits of the americans, while they are formally recognized by the legislation: and before this legislation can be altered, the whole community must undergo very serious changes. in the united states, even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment: as in politics the care of its temporal interests is abandoned to the good sense of the people. thus every man is allowed freely to take that road which he thinks will lead him to heaven; just as the law permits every citizen to have the right of choosing his government. it is evident that nothing but a long series of events, all having the same tendency, can substitute for this combination of laws, opinions, and manners, a mass of opposite opinions, manners and laws. if republican principles are to perish in america, they can only yield after a laborious social process, often interrupted, and as often resumed; they will have many apparent revivals, and will not become totally extinct until an entirely new people shall have succeeded to that which now exists. now, it must be admitted that there is no symptom or presage of the approach of such a revolution. there is nothing more striking to a person newly arrived in the united states, than the kind of tumultuous agitation in which he finds political society. the laws are incessantly changing, and at first sight it seems impossible that a people so variable in its desires should avoid adopting, within a short space of time, a completely new form of government. such apprehensions are, however, premature; the instability which affects political institutions is of two kinds, which ought not to be confounded: the first, which modifies secondary laws, is not incompatible with a very settled state of society; the other shakes the very foundations of the constitution, and attacks the fundamental principles of legislation; this species of instability is always followed by troubles and revolutions, and the nation which suffers under it, is in a state of violent transition. experience shows that these two kinds of legislative instability have no necessary connexion; for they have been found united or separate, according to times and circumstances. the first is common in the united states, but not the second: the americans often change their laws, but the foundation of the constitution is respected. in our days the republican principle rules in america, as the monarchical principle did in france under louis xiv. the french of that period were not only friends of the monarchy, but they thought it impossible to put anything in its place; they received it as we receive the rays of the sun and the return of the seasons. among them the royal power had neither advocates nor opponents. in like manner does the republican government exist in america, without contention or opposition; without proofs and arguments, by a tacit agreement, a sort of _consensus universalis_. it is, however, my opinion, that, by changing their administrative forms as often as they do, the inhabitants of the united states compromise the future stability of their government. it may be apprehended that men, perpetually thwarted in their designs by the mutability of legislation, will learn to look upon republican institutions as an inconvenient form of society; the evil resulting from the instability of the secondary enactments, might then raise a doubt as to the nature of the fundamental principles of the constitution, and indirectly bring about a revolution; but this epoch is still very remote. [it has been objected by an american review, that our author is mistaken in charging our laws with instability, and in answer to the charge, the permanence of our fundamental political institutions has been contrasted with the revolutions in france. but the objection proceeds upon a mistake of the author's meaning, which at this page is very clearly expressed. he refers to the instability which modifies _secondary laws_, and not to that which shakes the foundations of the constitution. the distinction is equally sound and philosophic, and those in the least acquainted with the history of our legislation, must bear witness to the truth of the author's remarks. the frequent revisions of the statutes of the states rendered necessary by the multitude, variety, and often the contradiction of the enactments, furnish abundant evidence of this instability.--_american editor_.] it may, however, be foreseen, even now, that when the americans lose their republican institutions, they will speedily arrive at a despotic government, without a long interval of limited monarchy. montesquieu remarked, that nothing is more absolute than the authority of a prince who immediately succeeds a republic, since the powers which had fearlessly been intrusted to an elected magistrate are then transferred to an hereditary sovereign. this is true in general, but it is more peculiarly applicable to a democratic republic. in the united states, the magistrates are not elected by a particular class of citizens, but by the majority of the nation; they are the immediate representatives of the passions of the multitude; and as they are wholly dependent upon its pleasure, they excite neither hatred nor fear: hence, as i have already shown, very little care has been taken to limit their influence, and they are left in possession of a vast deal of arbitrary power. this state of things has engendered habits which would outlive itself; the american magistrate would retain his power, but he would cease to be responsible for the exercise of it; and it is impossible to say what bounds could then be set to tyranny. some of our european politicians expect to see an aristocracy arise in america, and they already predict the exact period at which it will be able to assume the reins of government. i have previously observed, and i repeat my assertion, that the present tendency of american society appears to me to become more and more democratic. nevertheless, i do not assert that the americans will not, at some future time, restrict the circle of political rights in their country, or confiscate those rights to the advantage of a single individual; but i cannot imagine that they will ever bestow the exclusive exercise of them upon a privileged class of citizens, or, in other words, that they will ever found an aristocracy. an aristocratic body is composed of a certain number of citizens, who, without being very far removed from the mass of the people, are, nevertheless, permanently stationed above it: a body which it is easy to touch, and difficult to strike; with which the people are in daily contact, but with which they can never combine. nothing can be imagined more contrary to nature and to the secret propensities of the human heart, than a subjection of this kind; and men, who are left to follow their own bent, will always prefer the arbitrary power of a king to the regular administration of an aristocracy. aristocratic institutions cannot subsist without laying down the inequality of men as a fundamental principle, as a part and parcel of the legislation, affecting the condition of the human family as much as it affects that of society; but these things are so repugnant to natural equity that they can only be extorted from men by constraint. i do not think a single people can be quoted, since human society began to exist, which has, by its own free will and by its own exertions, created an aristocracy within its own bosom. all the aristocracies of the middle ages were founded by military conquest: the conqueror was the noble, the vanquished became the serf. inequality was then imposed by force; and after it had been introduced into the manners of the country, it maintained its own authority, and was sanctioned by the legislation. communities have existed which were aristocratic from their earliest origin, owing to circumstances anterior to that event, and which became more democratic in each succeeding age. such was the destiny of the romans, and of the barbarians after them. but a people, having taken its rise in civilisation and democracy, which should gradually establish an inequality of conditions until it arrived at inviolable privileges and exclusive castes, would be a novelty in the world; and nothing intimates that america is likely to furnish so singular an example. * * * * * reflections on the causes of the commercial prosperity of the united states. the americans destined by nature to be a great maritime people.--extent of their coasts.--depth of their ports.--size of their rivers.--the commercial superiority of the anglo-saxons less attributable, however, to physical circumstances than to moral and intellectual causes.--reason of this opinion.--future destiny of the anglo-americans as a commercial nation.--the dissolution of the union would not check the maritime vigor of the states.--reason of this.--anglo-americans will naturally supply the wants of the inhabitants of south america.--they will become, like the english, the factors of a great portion of the world. the coast of the united states, from the bay of fundy to the sabine river in the gulf of mexico, is more than two thousand miles in extent. these shores form an unbroken line, and they are all subject to the same government. no nation in the world possesses vaster, deeper, or more secure ports for shipping than the americans. the inhabitants of the united states constitute a great civilized people, which fortune has placed in the midst of an uncultivated country, at a distance of three thousand miles from the central point of civilisation. america consequently stands in daily need of european trade. the americans will, no doubt, ultimately succeed in producing or manufacturing at home most of the articles which they require; but the two continents can never be independent of each other, so numerous are the natural ties which exist between their wants, their ideas, their habits, and their manners. the union produces peculiar commodities which are now become necessary to us, but which cannot be cultivated, or can only be raised at an enormous expense, upon the soil of europe. the americans only consume a small portion of this produce, and they are willing to sell us the rest. europe is therefore the market of america, as america is the market of europe; and maritime commerce is no less necessary to enable the inhabitants of the united states to transport their raw materials to the ports of europe, than it is to enable us to supply them with our manufactured produce. the united states were therefore necessarily reduced to the alternative of increasing the business of other maritime nations to a great extent, if they had themselves declined to enter into commerce, as the spaniards of mexico have hitherto done; or, in the second place, of becoming one of the first trading powers of the globe. the anglo-americans have always displayed a very decided taste for the sea. the declaration of independence broke the commercial restrictions which united them to england, and gave a fresh and powerful stimulus to their maritime genius. ever since that time, the shipping of the union has increased in almost the same rapid proportion as the number of its inhabitants. the americans themselves now transport to their own shores nine-tenths of the european produce which they consume.[ ] and they also bring three-quarters of the exports of the new world to the european consumer.[ ] the ships of the united states fill the docks of havre and of liverpool; while the number of english and french vessels which are to be seen at new york is comparatively small.[ ] thus, not only does the american merchant face competition in his own country, but he even supports that of foreign nations in their own ports with success. this is readily explained by the fact that the vessels of the united states can cross the seas at a cheaper rate than any other vessels in the world. as long as the mercantile shipping of the united states preserves this superiority, it will not only retain what it has acquired, but it will constantly increase in prosperity. it is difficult to say for what reason the americans can trade at a lower rate than other nations; and one is at first led to attribute this circumstance to the physical or natural advantages which are within their reach; but this supposition is erroneous. the american vessels cost almost as much to build as our own[ ]; they are not better built, and they generally last for a shorter time. the pay of the american sailor is more considerable than the pay on board european ships; which is proved by the great number of europeans who are to be met with in the merchant vessels of the united states. but i am of opinion that the true cause of their superiority must not be sought for in physical advantages, but that it is wholly attributable to their moral and intellectual qualities. the following comparison will illustrate my meaning. during the campaigns of the revolution the french introduced a new system of tactics into the art of war, which perplexed the oldest generals, and very nearly destroyed the most ancient monarchies in europe. they undertook (what had never been before attempted) to make shift without a number of things which had always been held to be indispensable in warfare; they required novel exertions on the part of their troops, which no civilized nations had ever thought of; they achieved great actions in an incredibly short space of time: and they risked human life without hesitation, to obtain the object in view. the french had less money and fewer men than their enemies; their resources were infinitely inferior; nevertheless they were constantly victorious, until their adversaries chose to imitate their example. the americans have introduced a similar system into their commercial speculations; and they do for cheapness what the french did for conquest. the european sailor navigates with prudence; he only sets sail when the weather is favorable; if an unforeseen accident befalls him, he puts into port; at night he furls a portion of his canvass; and when the whitening billows intimate the vicinity of land, he checks his way, and takes an observation of the sun. but the american neglects these precautions and braves these dangers. he weighs anchor in the midst of tempestuous gales; by night and by day he spreads his sheets to the wind; he repairs as he goes along such damage as his vessel may have sustained from the storm; and when he at last approaches the term of his voyage, he darts onward to the shore as if he already descried a port. the americans are often shipwrecked, but no trader crosses the seas so rapidly. and as they perform the same distance in a shorter time, they can perform it at a cheaper rate. the european touches several times at different ports in the course of a long voyage; he loses a good deal of precious time in making the harbor, or in waiting for a favorable wind to leave it; and he pays daily dues to be allowed to remain there. the american starts from boston to go to purchase tea in china: he arrives at canton, stays there a few days and then returns. in less than two years he has sailed as far as the entire circumference of the globe, and he has seen land but once. it is true that during a voyage of eight or ten months he has drunk brackish water, and lived upon salt meat; that he has been in a continual contest with the sea, with disease, and with the tedium of monotony; but, upon his return, he can sell a pound of his tea for a halfpenny less than the english merchant, and his purpose is accomplished. i cannot better explain my meaning than by saying that the americans affect a sort of heroism in their manner of trading. but the european merchant will always find it very difficult to imitate his american competitor, who, in adopting the system which i have just described, follows not only a calculation of his gain, but an impulse of his nature. the inhabitants of the united states are subject to all the wants and all the desires which result from an advanced stage of civilisation; but as they are not surrounded by a community admirably adapted, like that of europe, to satisfy their wants, they are often obliged to procure for themselves the various articles which education and habit have rendered necessaries. in america it sometimes happens that the same individual tills his field, builds his dwelling, contrives his tools, makes his shoes, and weaves the coarse stuff of which his dress is composed. this circumstance is prejudicial to the excellence of the work: but it powerfully contributes to awaken the intelligence of the workman. nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labor. in a country like america, where men devoted to special occupations are rare, a long apprenticeship cannot be required from any one who embraces a profession. the americans therefore change their means of gaining a livelihood very readily; and they suit their occupations to the exigencies of the moment, in the manner most profitable to themselves. men are to be met with who have successively been barristers, farmers, merchants, ministers of the gospel, and physicians. if the american be less perfect in each craft than the european, at least there is scarcely any trade with which he is utterly unacquainted. his capacity is more general, and the circle of his intelligence is enlarged. the inhabitants of the united states are never fettered by the axioms of their profession; they escape from all the prejudices of their present station; they are not more attached to one line of operation than to another; they are not more prone to employ an old method than a new one; they have no rooted habits, and they easily shake off the influence which the habits of other nations might exercise upon their minds, from a conviction that their country is unlike any other, and that its situation is without a precedent in the world. america is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion, and every movement seems an improvement. the idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of melioration. no natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do. this perpetual change which goes on in the united states, these frequent vicissitudes of fortune, accompanied by such unforeseen fluctuations in private and in public wealth, serve to keep the minds of the citizens in a perpetual state of feverish agitation, which admirably invigorates their exertions, and keeps them in a state of excitement above the ordinary level of mankind. the whole life of an american is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis or a battle. as the same causes are continually in operation throughout the country, they ultimately impart an irresistible impulse to the national character. the american, taken as a chance specimen of his countrymen, must then be a man of singular warmth in his desires, enterprising, fond of adventure, and above all of innovation. the same bent is manifest in all that he does; he introduces it into his political laws, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, and his domestic occupations; he bears it with him in the depth of the backwoods, as well as in the business of the city. it is the same passion, applied to maritime commerce, which makes him the cheapest and the quickest trader in the world. as long as the sailors of the united states retain these inspiriting advantages, and the practical superiority which they derive from them, they will not only continue to supply the wants of the producers and consumers of their own country, but they will tend more and more to become, like the english, the factors of all other peoples.[ ] this prediction has already begun to be realized; we perceive that the american traders are introducing themselves as intermediate agents in the commerce of several european nations;[ ] and america will offer a still wider field to their enterprise. the great colonies which were founded in south america by the spaniards and the portuguese have since become empires. civil war and oppression now lay waste those extensive regions. population does not increase, and the thinly-scattered inhabitants are too much absorbed in the cares of self-defence even to attempt any melioration of their condition. such, however, will not always be the case. europe has succeeded by her own efforts in piercing the gloom of the middle ages; south america has the same christian laws and christian manners as we have; she contains all the germs of civilisation which have grown amid the nations of europe or their offsets, added to the advantages to be derived from our example; why then should she always remain uncivilized? it is clear that the question is simply one of time; at some future period, which may be more or less remote, the inhabitants of south america will constitute flourishing and enlightened nations. but when the spaniards and portuguese of south america begin to feel the wants common to all civilized nations, they will still be unable to satisfy those wants for themselves; as the youngest children of civilisation, they must perforce admit the superiority of their elder brethren. they will be agriculturists long before they succeed in manufactures or commerce, and they will require the mediation of strangers to exchange their produce beyond seas for those articles for which a demand will begin to be felt. it is unquestionable that the americans of the north will one day supply the wants of the americans of the south. nature has placed them in contiguity; and has furnished the former with every means of knowing and appreciating those demands, of establishing a permanent connexion with those states, and of gradually filling their markets. the merchant of the united states could only forfeit these natural advantages if he were very inferior to the merchant of europe; to whom he is, on the contrary, superior in several respects. the americans of the united states already exercise a very considerable moral influence upon all the people of the new world. they are the source of intelligence, and all the nations which inhabit the same continent are already accustomed to consider them as the most enlightened, the most powerful, and the most wealthy members of the great american family. all eyes are therefore turned toward the union; and the states of which that body is composed are the models which the other communities try to imitate to the best of their power: it is from the united states that they borrow their political principles and their laws. the americans of the united states stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of south america as their fathers, the english, occupy with regard to the italians, the spaniards, the portuguese, and all those nations of europe, which receive their articles of daily consumption from england, because they are less advanced in civilisation and trade. england is at this time the natural emporium of almost all the nations which are within its reach; the american union will perform the same part in the other hemisphere; and every community which is founded, or which prospers in the new world, is founded and prospers to the advantage of the anglo-americans. if the union were to be dissolved, the commerce of the states which now compose it, would undoubtedly be checked for a time; but this consequence would be less perceptible than is generally supposed. it is evident that whatever may happen, the commercial states will remain united. they are all contiguous to each other; they have identically the same opinions, interests, and manners, and they are alone competent to form a very great maritime power. even if the south of the union were to become independent of the north, it would still require the service of those states. i have already observed that the south is not a commercial country, and nothing intimates that it is likely to become so. the americans of the south of the united states will therefore be obliged, for a long time to come, to have recourse to strangers to export their produce, and to supply them with the commodities which are requisite to satisfy their wants. but the northern states are undoubtedly able to act as their intermediate agents cheaper than any other merchants. they will therefore retain that employment, for cheapness is the sovereign law of commerce. national claims and national prejudices cannot resist the influence of cheapness. nothing can be more virulent than the hatred which exists between the americans of the united states and the english. but, notwithstanding these inimical feelings, the americans derive the greater part of their manufactured commodities from england, because england supplies them at a cheaper rate than any other nation. thus the increasing prosperity of america turns, notwithstanding the grudges of the americans, to the advantage of british manufactures. reason shows and experience proves that no commercial prosperity can be durable if it cannot be united, in case of need, to naval force. this truth is as well understood in the united states as it can be anywhere else: the americans are already able to make their flag respected: in a few years they will be able to make it feared. i am convinced that the dismemberment of the union would not have the effect of diminishing the naval power of the americans, but that it would powerfully contribute to increase it. at the present time the commercial states are connected with others which have not the same interests, and which frequently yield an unwilling consent to the increase of a maritime power by which they are only indirectly benefited. if, on the contrary, the commercial states of the union formed one independent nation, commerce would become the foremost of their national interests; they would consequently be willing to make very great sacrifices to protect their shipping, and nothing would prevent them from pursuing their designs upon this point. nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years. when i contemplate the ardor with which the anglo-americans prosecute commercial enterprise, the advantages which befriend them, and the success of their undertakings, i cannot refrain from believing that they will one day become the first maritime power of the globe. they are born to rule the seas, as the romans were to conquer the world. * * * * * notes: [ ] see the map. [transcriber's note: map of north america.] [ ] the native of north america retains his opinions and the most insignificant of his habits with a degree of tenacity which has no parallel in history. for more than two hundred years the wandering tribes of north america have had daily intercourse with the whites, and they have never derived from them either a custom or an idea. yet the european have exercised a powerful influence over the savages: they have made them more licentious, but not more european. in the summer of , i happened to be beyond lake michigan, at a place called green bay, which serves as the extreme frontier between the united states and the indians on the northwestern side. here i became acquainted with an american officer, major h., who, after talking to me at length on the inflexibility of the indian character, related the following fact: "i formerly knew a young indian," said he, "who had been educated at a college in new england, where he had greatly distinguished himself, and had acquired the external appearance of a member of civilized society. when the war broke out between ourselves and the english, in , i saw this young man again; he was serving in our army at the head of the warriors of his tribe; for the indians were admitted among the ranks of the americans, upon condition that they would abstain from their horrible custom of scalping their victims. on the evening of the battle of ----, c. came and sat himself down by the fire of our bivouac. i asked him what had been his fortune that day: he related his exploits; and growing warm and animated by the recollection of them, he concluded by suddenly opening the breast of his coat, saying, 'you must not betray me--see here!' and i actually beheld," said the major, "between his body and his shirt, the skin and hair of an english head still dripping with gore." [ ] in the thirteen original states, there are only , indians remaining. (see legislative documents, th congress, no. , p. .) [ ] messrs. clarke and cass, in their report to congress, the th february, , p. , expressed themselves thus: "the time when the indians generally could supply themselves with food and clothing, without any of the articles of civilized life, has long since passed away. the more remote tribes, beyond the mississippi, who live where immense herds of buffalo are yet to be found, and who follow those animals in their periodical migrations, could more easily than any others recur to the habits of their ancestors, and live without the white man or any of his manufactures. but the buffalo is constantly receding. the smaller animals--the bear, the deer, the beaver, the otter, the muskrat, &c., principally minister to the comfort and support of the indians; and these cannot be taken without guns, ammunition, and traps. "among the northwestern indians particularly, the labor of supplying a family with food is excessive. day after day is spent by the hunter without success, and during this interval his family must subsist upon bark or roots, or perish. want and misery are around them and among them. many die every winter from actual starvation." the indians will not live as europeans live; and yet they can neither subsist without them, nor exactly after the fashion of their fathers. this is demonstrated by a fact which i likewise give upon official authority. some indians of a tribe on the banks of lake superior had killed a european; the american government interdicted all traffic with the tribe to which the guilty parties belonged, until they were delivered up to justice. this measure had the desired effect. [ ] "five years ago," says volney in his tableaux des etats unis, p. , "in going from vincennes to kaskaskia, a territory which now forms part of the state of illinois, but which at the time i mention was completely wild ( ), you could not cross a prairie without seeing herds of from four to five hundred buffaloes. there are now none remaining; they swam across the mississippi to escape from the hunters, and more particularly from the bells of the american cows." [ ] the truth of what i here advance may be easily proved by consulting the tabular statement of indian tribes inhabiting the united states, and their territories. (legislative documents, th congress, no. , pp. - .) it is there shown that the tribes of america are rapidly decreasing, although the europeans are at a considerable distance from them. [ ] "the indians," says messrs. clarke and cass in their report to congress, p. , "are attached to their country by the same feelings which bind us to ours; and, besides, there are certain superstitious notions connected with the alienation of what the great spirit gave to their ancestors, which operate strongly upon the tribes who have made few or no cessions, but which are gradually weakened as our intercourse with them is extended. 'we will not sell the spot which contains the bones of our fathers,' is almost always the first answer to a proposition for a sale." [ ] see in the legislative documents of congress (doc. ), the narrative of what takes place on these occasions. this curious passage is from the abovementioned report, made to congress by messrs. clarke and cass, in february, . mr. cass is now secretary of war. "the indians," says the report, "reach the treaty-ground poor, and almost naked. large quantities of goods are taken there by the traders, and are seen and examined by the indians. the women and children become importunate to have their wants supplied, and their influence is soon exerted to induce a sale. their improvidence is habitual and unconquerable. the gratification of his immediate wants and desires is the ruling passion of an indian: the expectation of future advantages seldom produces much effect. the experience of the past is lost, and the prospects of the future disregarded. it would be utterly hopeless to demand a cession of land unless the means were at hand of gratifying their immediate wants; and when their condition and circumstances are fairly considered, it ought not to surprise us that they are so anxious to relieve themselves." [ ] on the th of may, , mr. edward everett affirmed before the house of representatives, that the americans had already acquired by _treaty_, to the east and west of the mississippi, , , of acres. in , the osages gave up , , acres for an annual payment of , dollars. in , the quapaws yielded up , , acres for , dollars. they reserved for themselves a territory of , , acres for a hunting-ground. a solemn oath was taken that it should be respected: but before long it was invaded like the rest. mr. bell, in his "report of the committee on indian affairs," february th, , has these words: "to pay an indian tribe what their ancient hunting-grounds are worth to them, after the game is fled or destroyed, as a mode of appropriating wild lands claimed by indians, has been found more convenient, and certainly it is more agreeable to the forms of justice, as well as more merciful, than to assert the possession of them by the sword. thus the practice of buying indian titles is but the substitute which humanity and expediency have imposed, in place of the sword, in arriving at the actual enjoyment of property claimed by the right of discovery, and sanctioned by the natural superiority allowed to the claims of civilized communities over those of savage tribes. up to the present time, so invariable has been the operation of certain causes, first in diminishing the value of forest lands to the indians, and secondly in disposing them to sell readily, that the plan of buying their right of occupancy has never threatened to retard, in any perceptible degree, the prosperity of any of the states." (legislative documents, st congress, no. , p. .) [ ] this seems, indeed, to be the opinion of almost all the american statesmen. "judging of the future by the past," says mr. cass, "we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their numbers, and their eventual extinction, unless our border should become stationary, and they be removed beyond it, or unless some radical change should take place in the principles of our intercourse with them, which it is easier to hope for than to expect." [ ] among other warlike enterprises, there was one of the wampanoags, and other confederate tribes, under metacom in , against the colonists of new england; the english were also engaged in war in virginia in . [ ] see the "histoire de la nouvelle france," by charlevoix, and the work entitled "lettres edifiantes." [ ] "in all the tribes," says volney, in his "tableau des etats unis," p. , "there still exists a generation of old warriors, who cannot forbear, when they see their countrymen using the hoe, from exclaiming against the degradation of ancient manners, and asserting that the savages owe their decline to these innovations: adding, that they have only to return to their primitive habits, in order to recover their power and their glory." [ ] the following description occurs in an official document: "until a young man has been engaged with an enemy, and has performed some acts of valor, he gains no consideration, but is regarded nearly as a woman. in their great war-dances all the warriors in succession strike the post, as it is called, and recount their exploits. on these occasions their auditory consists of the kinsmen, friends, and comrades of the narrator. the profound impression which his discourse produces on them is manifested by the silent attention it receives, and by the loud shouts which hail its termination. the young man who finds himself at such a meeting without anything to recount, is very unhappy; and instances have sometimes occurred of young warriors whose passions had been thus inflamed, quitting the war-dance suddenly, and going off alone to seek for trophies which they might exhibit, and adventures which they might be allowed to relate." [ ] these nations are now swallowed up in the states of georgia, tennessee, alabama, and mississippi. there were formerly in the south four great nations (remnants of which still exist), the choctaws, the chickasaws, the creeks, and the cherokees. the remnants of these four nations amounted, in , to about , individuals. it is computed that there are now remaining in the territory occupied or claimed by the anglo-american union about , indians. (see proceedings of the indian board in the city of new york.) the official documents supplied to congress make the number amount to , . the reader who is curious to know the names and numerical strength of all the tribes which inhabit the anglo-american territory, should consult the documents i refer to. (legislative documents, th congress, no. , pp. - .) [ ] i brought back with me to france, one or two copies of this singular publication. [ ] see in the report of the committee on indian affairs, st congress, no. , p. , the reasons for the multiplication of indians of mixed blood among the cherokees. the principal cause dates from the war of independence. many anglo-americans of georgia, having taken the side of england, were obliged to retreat among the indians where they married. [ ] unhappily the mixed race has been less numerous and less influential in north america than in any other country. the american continent was peopled by two great nations of europe, the french and the english. the former were not slow in connecting themselves with the daughters of the natives; but there was an unfortunate affinity between the indian character and their own: instead of giving the tastes and habits of civilized life to the savages, the french too often grew passionately fond of the state of wild freedom they found them in. they became the most dangerous of the inhabitants of the desert, and won the friendship of the indian by exaggerating his vices and his virtues. m. de senonville, the governor of canada, wrote thus to louis xiv., in : "it has long been believed that in order to civilize the savages we ought to draw them nearer to us, but there is every reason to suppose we have been mistaken. those which have been brought into contact with us have not become french, and the french who have lived among them are changed into savages, affecting to live and dress like them." (history of new france, by charlevoix, vol. ii., p. .) the englishman, on the contrary, continuing obstinately attached to the customs and the most insignificant habits of his forefathers, has remained in the midst of the american solitudes just what he was in the bosom of european cities; he would not allow of any communication with savages whom he despised, and avoided with care the union of his race with theirs. thus, while the french exercised no salutary influence over the indians, the english have always remained alien from them. [ ] there is in the adventurous life of the hunter a certain irresistible charm which seizes the heart of man, and carries him away in spite of reason and experience. this is plainly shown by the memoirs of tanner. tanner is a european who was carried away at the age of six by the indians, and has remained thirty years with them in the woods. nothing can be conceived more appalling than the miseries which he describes. he tells us of tribes without a chief, families without a nation to call their own, men in a state of isolation, wrecks of powerful tribes wandering at random amid the ice and snow and desolate solitudes of canada. hunger and cold pursue them; every day their life is in jeopardy. among these men manners have lost their empire, traditions are without power. they become more and more savage. tanner shared in all these miseries; he was aware of his european origin; he was not kept away from the whites by force; on the contrary, he came every year to trade with them, entered their dwellings, and saw their enjoyments; he knew that whenever he chose to return to civilized life, he was perfectly able to do so--and he remained thirty years in the deserts. when he came to civilized society, he declared that the rude existence which he described had a secret charm for him which he was unable to define: he returned to it again and again: at length he abandoned it with poignant regret; and when he was at length fixed among the whites, several of his children refused to share his tranquil and easy situation. i saw tanner myself at the lower end of lake superior; he seemed to be more like a savage than a civilized being. his book is written without either taste or order; but he gives, even unconsciously, a lively picture of the prejudices, the passions, vices, and, above all, of the destitution in which he lived. [ ] the destructive influence of highly civilized nations upon others which are less so, has been exemplified by the europeans themselves. about a century ago the french founded the town of vincennes upon the wabash, in the middle of the desert; and they lived there in great plenty, until the arrival of the american settlers, who first ruined the previous inhabitants by their competition, and afterward purchased their lands at a very low rate. at the time when m. de volney, from whom i borrow these details, passed through vincennes, the number of the french was reduced to a hundred individuals, most of whom were about to pass over to louisiana or to canada. these french settlers were worthy people, but idle and uninstructed: they had contracted many of the habits of the savages. the americans, who were perhaps their inferiors in a moral point of view, were immeasurably superior to them in intelligence: they were industrious, well-informed, rich, and accustomed to govern their own community. i myself saw in canada, where the intellectual difference between the two races is less striking, that the english are the masters of commerce and manufacture in the canadian country, that they spread on all sides, and confine the french within limits which scarcely suffice to contain them. in like manner, in louisiana, almost all activity in commerce and manufacture centres in the hands of the anglo-americans. but the case of texas is still more striking: the state of texas is a part of mexico, and lies upon the frontier between that country and the united states. in the course of the last few years the anglo-americans have penetrated into this province, which is still thinly peopled; they purchase land, they produce the commodities of the country, and supplant the original population. it may easily be foreseen that if mexico takes no steps to check this change, the province of texas will very shortly cease to belong to that government. if the different degrees, comparatively so light, which exist in european civilisation, produce results of such magnitude, the consequences which must ensue from the collision of the most perfect european civilisation with indian savages may readily be conceived. [ ] see in the legislative documents ( st congress, no. ), instances of excesses of every kind committed by the whites upon the territory of the indians, either in taking possession of a part of their lands, until compelled to retire by the troops of congress, or carrying off their cattle, burning their houses, cutting down their corn, and doing violence to their persons. it appears, nevertheless, from all these documents, that the claims of the natives are constantly protected by the government from the abuse of force. the union has a representative agent continually employed to reside among the indians; and the report of the cherokee agent, which is among the documents i have referred to, is almost always favorable to the indians. "the intrusion of whites," he says, "upon the lands of the cherokees would cause ruin to the poor, helpless, and inoffensive inhabitants." and he farther remarks upon the attempt of the state of georgia to establish a division line for the purpose of limiting the boundaries of the cherokees, that the line drawn having been made by the whites, and entirely upon _exparte_ evidence of their several rights, was of no validity whatever. [ ] in the state of alabama divided the creek territory into counties, and subjected the indian population to the power of european magistrates. in the state of mississippi assimilated the choctaws and chickasaws to the white population, and declared that any of them that should take the title of chief would be punished by a fine of , dollars and year's imprisonment. when these laws were enforced upon the choctaws who inhabited that district, the tribes assembled, their chief communicated to them the intentions of the whites, and read to them some of the laws to which it was intended that they should submit; and they unanimously declared that it was better at once to retreat again into the wilds. [ ] the georgians, who are so much annoyed by the proximity of the indians, inhabit a territory which does not at present contain more than seven inhabitants to the square mile. in france there are one hundred and sixty-two inhabitants to the same extent of country. [ ] in congress appointed commissioners to visit the arkansas territory accompanied by a deputation of creeks, choctaws, and chickasaws. this expedition was commanded by messrs. kennerly, m'coy, wash hood, and john bell. see the different reports of the commissioners, and their journal, in the documents of congress, no. house of representatives. [ ] the fifth article of the treaty made with the creeks in august, , is in the following words: "the united states solemnly guaranty to the creek nation all their land within the limits of the united states." the seventh article of the treaty concluded in with the cherokees says: "the united states solemnly guaranty to the cherokee nation all their lands not hereby ceded." the following article declared that if any citizen of the united states or other settler not of the indian race, should establish himself upon the territory of the cherokees, the united states would withdraw their protection from that individual, and give him up to be punished as the cherokee nation should think fit. [ ] this does not prevent them from promising in the most solemn manner to do so. see the letter of the president addressed to the creek indians, d march, . ("proceedings of the indian board, in the city of new york," p. .) "beyond the great river mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. there your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. _it will be yours for ever_." the secretary of war, in a letter written to the cherokees, april th, (see the same work, page ), declares to them that they cannot expect to retain possession of the land, at the time occupied by them, but gives them the most positive assurance of uninterrupted peace if they would remove beyond the mississippi: as if the power which could not grant them protection then, would be able to afford it them hereafter! [ ] to obtain a correct idea of the policy pursued by the several states and the union with respect to the indians, it is necessary to consult, st, "the laws of the colonial and state governments relating to the indian inhabitants." (see the legislative documents, st congress, no. .) d, "the laws of the union on the same subject, and especially that of march th, ." (see story's laws of the united states.) d, "the report of mr. cass, secretary of war, relative to indian affairs, november th, ". [ ] december th, . [ ] the honor of this result is, however, by no means due to the spaniards. if the indian tribes had not been tillers of the ground at the time of the arrival of the europeans, they would unquestionably have been destroyed in south as well as in north america. [ ] see among other documents, the report made by mr. bell in the name of the committee on indian affairs, feb. th, , in which it is most logically established and most learnedly proved, that "the fundamental principle, that the indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of will or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication." in perusing this report, which is evidently drawn up by an able hand, one is astonished at the facility with which the author gets rid of all arguments founded upon reason and natural right, which he designates as abstract and theoretical principles. the more i contemplate the difference between civilized and uncivilized man with regard to the principles of justice, the more i observe that the former contests the justice of those rights, which the latter simply violates. [ ] it is well known that several of the most distinguished authors of antiquity, and among them �sop and terence, were or had been slaves. slaves were not always taken from barbarous nations, and the chances of war reduced highly civilized men to servitude. [ ] to induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have conceived of the moral and intellectual inferiority of their former slaves, the negroes must change; but as long as this opinion subsists, to change is impossible. [ ] see beverley's history of virginia. see also in jefferson's memoirs some curious details concerning the introduction of negroes into virginia, and the first act which prohibited the importation of them in . [ ] the number of slaves was less considerable in the north, but the advantages resulting from slavery were not more contested there than in the south. in , the legislature of the state of new york declared that the direct importation of slaves ought to be encouraged as much as possible, and smuggling severely punished, in order not to discourage the fair trader. (kent's commentaries, vol. ii., p. .) curious researches, by belknap, upon slavery in new england, are to be found in the historical collections of massachusetts, vol. iv., p. . it appears that negroes were introduced there in , but that the legislation and manners of the people were opposed to slavery from the first; see also, in the same work, the manner in which public opinion, and afterward the laws, finally put an end to slavery. [ ] not only is slavery prohibited in ohio, but no free negroes are allowed to enter the territory of that state, or to hold property in it. see the statutes of ohio. [ ] the activity of ohio is not confined to individuals, but the undertakings of the state are surprisingly great: a canal has been established between lake erie and the ohio, by means of which the valley of the mississippi communicates with the river of the north, and the european commodities with arrive at new york, may be forwarded by water to new orleans across five hundred leagues of continent. [ ] the exact numbers given by the census of were: kentucky, , ; ohio, , . [in the census gave, kentucky , ; ohio , , .] [ ] independently of these causes which, wherever free workmen abound, render their labor more productive and more economical than that of slaves, another cause may be pointed out which is peculiar to the united states: the sugar-cane has hitherto been cultivated with success only upon the banks of the mississippi, near the mouth of that river in the gulf of mexico. in louisiana the cultivation of the sugar-cane is exceedingly lucrative; nowhere does a laborer earn so much by his work: and, as there is always a certain relation between the cost of production and the value of the produce, the price of slaves is very high in louisiana. but louisiana is one of the confederate states, and slaves may be carried thither from all parts of the union; the price given for slaves in new orleans consequently raises the value of slaves in all the other markets. the consequence of this is, that in the countries where the land is less productive, the cost of slave labor is still very considerable, which gives an additional advantage to the competition of free labor. [ ] a peculiar reason contributes to detach the two last-mentioned states from the cause of slavery. the former wealth of this part of the union was principally derived from the cultivation of tobacco. this cultivation is specially carried on by slaves; but within the last few years the market-price of tobacco has diminished, while the value of the slaves remains the same. thus the ratio between the cost of production and the value of the produce is changed. the natives of maryland and virginia are therefore more disposed than they were thirty years ago, to give up slave labor in the cultivation of tobacco, or to give up slavery and tobacco at the same time. [ ] the states in which slavery is abolished usually do what they can to render their territory disagreeable to the negroes as a place of residence; and as a kind of emulation exists between the different states in this respect, the unhappy blacks can only choose the least of the evils which beset them. [ ] there is a very great difference between the mortality of the blacks and of the whites in the states in which slavery is abolished; from to only one out of forty-two individuals of the white population died in philadelphia; but one negro out of twenty-one individuals of the black population died in the same space of time. the mortality is by no means so great among the negroes who are still slaves. (see emmerson's medical statistics, p. .) [ ] this is true of the spots in which rice is cultivated; rice-grounds, which are unwholesome in all countries, are particularly dangerous in those regions which are exposed to the beams of a tropical sun. europeans would not find it easy to cultivate the soil in that part of the new world if it must necessarily be made to produce rice: but may they not subsist without rice-grounds? [ ] these states are nearer to the equator than italy and spain, but the temperature of the continent of america is very much lower than that of europe. [ ] the spanish government formerly caused a certain number of peasants from the azores to be transported into a district of louisiana called attakapas, by way of experiment. these settlers still cultivate the soil without the assistance of slaves, but their industry is so languid as scarcely to supply their most necessary wants. [ ] we find it asserted in an american work, entitled, "letters on the colonization society," by mr. carey, , that "for the last forty years the black race has increased more rapidly than the white race in the state of south carolina; and that if we take the average population of the five states of the south into which slaves were first introduced, viz., maryland, virginia, south carolina, north carolina, and georgia, we shall find that from to , the whites have augmented in the proportion of to , and the blacks in that of to ." in the united states, , the population of the two races stood as follows:-- states where slavery is abolished, , , whites; , blacks. slave states, , , whites; , , blacks. [by the census of , the population of the two races was as follows: states where slavery is abolished, , , whites; , blacks. slave states, , , whites; , , blacks.] [ ] this opinion is sanctioned by authorities infinitely weightier than anything that i can say; thus, for instance, it is stated in the memoirs of jefferson (as collected by m. conseil), "nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions, have established between them." [ ] if the british west india planters had governed themselves, they would assuredly not have passed the slave emancipation bill which the mother country has recently imposed upon them. [ ] this society assumed the name "the society for the colonization of the blacks." see its annual reports; and more particularly the fifteenth. see also the pamphlet, to which allusion has already been made, entitled "letters on the colonization society, and on its probable results," by mr. carey, philadelphia, april, . [ ] this last regulation was laid down by the founders of the settlement; they apprehended that a state of things might arise in africa, similar to that which exists on the frontiers of the united states, and that if the negroes, like the indians, were brought into collision with a people more enlightened than themselves, they would be destroyed before they could be civilized. [ ] nor would these be the only difficulties attendant upon the undertaking; if the union undertook to buy up the negroes now in america, in order to transport them to africa, the price of slaves, increasing with their scarcity, would soon become enormous. [ ] in the original, "voulant la servitude, il se sont laissé entrainer, malgré eux ou à leur insu, vers la liberté." "desiring servitude, they have suffered themselves, involuntarily or ignorantly, to be drawn toward liberty."--_reviser_. [ ] see the conduct of the northern states in the war of . "during that war," said jefferson, in a letter to general lafayette, "four of the eastern states were only attached to the union, like so many inanimate bodies to living men." [ ] the profound peace of the union affords no pretext for a standing army; and without a standing army a government is not prepared to profit by a favorable opportunity to conquer resistance, and take the sovereign power by surprise. [ ] thus the province of holland in the republic of the low countries, and the emperor in the germanic confederation, have sometimes put themselves in the place of the union, and have employed the federal authority to their own advantage. [ ] see darby's view of the united states, pp. , . [ ] see darby's view of the united states, p. . [in carey & lea's geography of america, the united states are said to form an area of , , square miles.--_translator's note._] [the discrepancy between darby's estimate of the area of the united states given by the author, and that stated by the translator, is not easily accounted for. in bradford's comprehensive atlas, a work generally of great accuracy, it is said that "as claimed by this country, the territory of the united states extends from ° to ° north latitude, and from ° ' to ° west longitude, over an area of about , , square miles."--_american editor._] [ ] it is scarcely necessary for me to observe that by the expression _anglo-americans_, i only mean to designate the great majority of the nation; for a certain number of isolated individuals are of course to be met with holding very different opinions. [ ] census of ........ , , . do ........ , , . [do. ........ , , .] [ ] this indeed is only a temporary danger. i have no doubt that in time society will assume as much stability and regularity in the west, as it has already done upon the coast of the atlantic ocean. [ ] pennsylvania contained , inhabitants in . [ ] the area of the state of new york is about , square miles. see carey & lea's american geography, p. . [ ] if the population continues to double every twenty-two years, as it has done for the last two hundred years, the number of inhabitants in the united states in , will be twenty millions: in , forty-eight millions; and in , ninety-six millions. this may still be the case even if the lands on the western slope of the rocky mountains should be found to be unfit for cultivation. the territory which is already occupied can easily contain this number of inhabitants. one hundred millions of men disseminated over the surface of the twenty-four states, and the three dependencies, which constitute the union, would give only inhabitants to the square league: this would be far below the mean population of france, which is , to the square league; or of england, which is , ; and it would even be below the population of switzerland, for that country, notwithstanding its lakes and mountains, contains inhabitants to the square league. (see maltebrun, vol. vi., p. .) [ ] see legislative documents, th congress, no. , p. . [ ] , , ; census . [ ] the distance of jefferson, the capital of the state of missouri, to washington, is , miles. (american almanac, , p. .) [ ] the following statements will suffice to show the difference which exists between the commerce of the south and that of the north:-- in , the tonnage of all the merchant-vessels belonging to virginia, the two carolinas, and georgia (the four great southern states), amounted to only , tons. in the same year the tonnage of the vessels of the state of massachusetts alone amounted to , tons. (see legislative documents, st congress, d session, no. , p. .) thus the state of massachusetts has three times as much shipping as the four abovementioned states. nevertheless the area of the state of massachusetts is only , square miles, and its population amounts to , inhabitants; while the area of the four other states i have quoted is , square miles, and their population , , . thus the area of the state of massachusetts forms only one thirtieth part of the area of the four states; and its population is five times smaller than theirs. (see darby's view of the united states.) slavery is prejudicial to the commercial prosperity of the south in several different ways; by diminishing the spirit of enterprise among the whites, and by preventing them from meeting with as numerous a class of sailors as they require. sailors are generally taken from the lowest ranks of the population. but in the southern states these lowest ranks are composed of slaves, and it is very difficult to employ them at sea. they are unable to serve as well as a white crew, and apprehensions would always be entertained of their mutinying in the middle of the ocean, or of their escaping in the foreign countries at which they might touch. [ ] darby's view of the united states, p. . [ ] it may be seen that in the course of the last ten years ( -' ) the population of one district, as for instance, the state of delaware, has increased in the proportion of per cent.; while that of another, as the territory of michigan, has increased per cent. thus the population of virginia has augmented per cent., and that of the border state of ohio per cent., in the same space of time. the general table of these changes, which is given in the national calendar, displays a striking picture of the unequal fortunes of the different states. [ ] it has just been said that in the course of the last term the population of virginia has increased per cent.; and it is necessary to explain how the number of representatives of a state may decrease, when the population of that state, far from diminishing, is actually upon the increase. i take the state of virginia, to which i have already alluded, as my term of comparison. the number of representatives of virginia in was proportionate to the total number of the representatives of the union, and to the relation which its population bore to that of the whole union; in , the number of representatives of virginia was likewise proportionate to the total number of the representatives of the union, and to the relation which its population, augmented in the course of ten years, bore to the augmented population of the union in the same space of time. the new number of virginian representatives will then be to the old number, on the one hand, as the new number of all the representatives is to the old number; and, on the other hand, as the augmentation of the population of virginia is to that of the whole population of the country. thus, if the increase of the population of the lesser country be to that of the greater in an exact inverse ratio of the proportion between the new and the old numbers of all the representatives, the number of representatives of virginia will remain stationary; and if the increase of the virginian population be to that of the whole union in a feebler ratio than the new number of representatives of the union to the old number, the number of the representatives of virginia must decrease. [ ] see the report of its committees to the convention, which proclaimed the nullification of the tariff in south carolina. [ ] the population of a country assuredly constitutes the first element of its wealth. in the ten years ( -' ) during which virginia lost two of its representatives in congress, its population increased in the proportion of - per cent.; that of carolina in the proportion of per cent.; and that of georgia - per cent. (see the american almanac, , p. .) but the population of russia, which increases more rapidly than that of any other european country, only augments in ten years at the rate of - per cent.; of france at the rate of per cent.; and of europe in general at the rate of - per cent. (see maltebrun, vol. vi., p. .) [ ] it must be admitted, however, that the depreciation which has taken place in the value of tobacco, during the last fifty years, has notably diminished the opulence of the southern planters; but this circumstance is as independent of the will of their northern brethren, as it is of their own. [ ] in , the district of michigan, which only contains , inhabitants, and is still an almost unexplored wilderness, possessed miles of mail-roads. the territory of arkansas, which is still more uncultivated, was already intersected by , miles of mail-roads. (see report of the general post-office, th november, .) the postage of newspapers alone in the whole union amounted to $ , . [ ] in the course of ten years, from to , steamboats have been launched upon the rivers which water the valley of the mississippi alone. in , steamboats existed in the united states. (see legislative documents, no. , p. .) [ ] see in the legislative documents already quoted in speaking of the indians, the letter of the president of the united states to the cherokees, his correspondence on this subject with his agents, and his messages to congress. [ ] the first act of cession was made by the state of new york in ; virginia, massachusetts, connecticut, south and north carolina, followed this example at different times, and lastly, the act of cession of georgia was made as recently as . [ ] it is true that the president refused his assent to this law; but he completely adopted it in principle. see message of th december, . [ ] the present bank of the united states was established in , with a capital of , , dollars; its charter expires in . last year congress passed a law to renew it, but the president put his veto upon the bill. the struggle is still going on with great violence on either side, and the speedy fall of the bank may easily be foreseen. [ ] see principally for the details of this affair, the legislative documents, d congress, d session, no . [ ] that is to say, the majority of the people; for the opposite party, called the union party, always formed a very strong and active minority. carolina may contain about , electors; , were in favor of nullification, and , opposed to it. [ ] this decree was preceded by a report of the committee by which it was framed, containing the explanation of the motives and object of the law. the following passage occurs in it, p. : "when the rights reserved by the constitution to the different states are deliberately violated, it is the duty and the right of those states to interfere, in order to check the progress of the evil, to resist usurpation, and to maintain, within their respective limits, those powers and privileges which belong to them as _independent sovereign states_. if they were destitute of this right, they would not be sovereign. south carolina declares that she acknowledges no tribunal upon earth above her authority. she has indeed entered into a solemn compact of union with the other states: but she demands, and will exercise, the right of putting her own construction upon it; and when this compact is violated by her sister states, and by the government which they have created, she is determined to avail herself of the unquestionable right of judging what is the extent of the infraction, and what are the measures best fitted to obtain justice." [ ] congress was finally decided to take this step by the conduct of the powerful state of virginia, whose legislature offered to serve as a mediator between the union and south carolina. hitherto the latter state had appeared to be entirely abandoned even by the states which had joined her in her remonstrances. [ ] this law was passed on the d march, . [ ] this bill was brought in by mr. clay, and it passed in four days through both houses of congress, by an immense majority. [ ] the total value of goods imported during the year which ended on the th september, , was , , dollars. the value of the cargoes of foreign vessels did not amount to , , dollars, or about one-tenth of the entire sum. [ ] the value of goods exported during the same year amounted to , , dollars; the value of goods exported by foreign vessels amounted to , , dollars, or about one quarter of the whole sum. (williams's register, , p. .) [ ] the tonnage of the vessels which entered all the ports of the union in the years , , and , amounted to , , tons, of which , tons were foreign vessels; they stood therefore to the american vessels in a ratio of about to . (national calendar, , p. .) the tonnage of the english vessels which entered the ports of london, liverpool and hull, in the years , , and , amounted to , tons. the foreign vessels which entered the same ports during the same years, amounted to , tons. the ratio between them was therefore about to . (companion to the almanac, , p. .) in the year the ratio between the foreign and british ships which entered the ports of great britain was to . [ ] materials are, generally speaking, less expensive in america than in europe, but the price of labor is much higher. [ ] it must not be supposed that english vessels are exclusively employed in transporting foreign produce into england, or british produce to foreign countries; at the present day the merchant shipping of england may be regarded in the light of a vast system of public conveyances ready to serve all the producers of the world, and to open communications between all peoples. the maritime genius of the americans prompts them to enter into competition with the english. [ ] part of the commerce of the mediterranean is already carried on by american vessels. conclusion. i have now nearly reached the close of my inquiry. hitherto, in speaking of the future destiny of the united states, i have endeavored to divide my subject into distinct portions, in order to study each of them with more attention. my present object is to embrace the whole from one single point; the remarks i shall make will be less detailed, but they will be more sure. i shall perceive each object less distinctly, but i shall descry the principal facts with more certainty. a traveller, who has just left the walls of an immense city, climbs the neighboring hill; as he goes farther off, he loses sight of the men whom he has so recently quitted; their dwellings are confused in a dense mass; he can no longer distinguish the public squares, and he can scarcely trace out the great thoroughfares; but his eye has less difficulty in following the boundaries of the city, and for the first time he sees the shape of the vast whole. such is the future destiny of the british race in north america to my eye; the details of the stupendous picture are overhung with shade, but i conceive a clear idea of the entire subject. the territory now occupied or possessed by the united states of america, forms about one-twentieth part of the habitable earth. but extensive as these confines are, it must not be supposed that the anglo-american race will always remain within them; indeed, it has already far overstepped them. there was once a time at which we also might have created a great french nation in the american wilds, to counter-balance the influence of the english upon the destinies of the new world. france formerly possessed a territory in north america, scarcely less extensive than the whole of europe. the three greatest rivers of that continent then flowed within her dominions. the indian tribes which dwelt between the mouth of the st. lawrence and the delta of the mississippi were unaccustomed to any tongue but ours; and all the european settlements scattered over that immense region recalled the traditions of our country. louisburg, montmorency, duquesne, saint-louis, vincennes, new orleans (for such were the names they bore), are words dear to france and familiar to our ears. but a concourse of circumstances, which it would be tedious to enumerate,[ ] have deprived us of this magnificent inheritance. wherever the french settlers were numerically weak and partially established, they have disappeared; those who remain are collected on a small extent of country, and are now subject to other laws. the , french inhabitants of lower canada constitute, at the present time, the remnant of an old nation lost in the midst of a new people. a foreign population is increasing around them unceasingly, and on all sides, which already penetrates among the ancient masters of the country, predominates in their cities, and corrupts their language. this population is identical with that of the united states; it is therefore with truth that i asserted that the british race is not confined within the frontiers of the union, since it already extends to the northeast. to the northwest nothing is to be met with but a few insignificant russian settlements; but to the southwest, mexico presents a barrier to the anglo-americans. thus, the spaniards and the anglo-americans are, properly speaking, the only two races which divide the possession of the new world. the limits of separation between them have been settled by a treaty; but although the conditions of that treaty are exceedingly favorable to the anglo-americans, i do not doubt that they will shortly infringe this arrangement. vast provinces, extending beyond the frontiers of the union toward mexico, are still destitute of inhabitants. the natives of the united states will forestall the rightful occupants of these solitary regions. they will take possession of the soil, and establish social institutions, so that when the legal owner arrives at length, he will find the wilderness under cultivation, and strangers quietly settled in the midst of his inheritance. the lands of the new world belong to the first occupants and they are the natural reward of the swiftest pioneer. even the countries which are already peopled will have some difficulty in securing themselves from this invasion. i have already alluded to what is taking place in the province of texas. the inhabitants of the united states are perpetually migrating to texas, where they purchase land, and although they conform to the laws of the country, they are gradually founding the empire of their own language and their own manners. the province of texas is still part of the mexican dominions, but it will soon contain no mexicans: the same thing has occurred whenever the anglo-americans have come into contact with populations of a different origin. [the prophetic accuracy of the author, in relation to the present actual condition of texas, exhibits the sound and clear perception with which he surveyed our institutions and character.--_american editor_.] it cannot be denied that the british race has acquired an amazing preponderance over all the other european races in the new world; and that it is very superior to them in civilisation, in industry, and in power. as long as it is only surrounded by desert or thinly-peopled countries, as long as it encounters no dense populations upon its route, through which it cannot work its way, it will assuredly continue to spread. the lines marked out by treaties will not stop it; but it will everywhere transgress these imaginary barriers. the geographical position of the british race in the new world is peculiarly favorable to its rapid increase. above its northern frontiers the icy regions of the pole extend; and a few degrees below its southern confines lies the burning climate of the equator. the anglo-americans are therefore placed in the most temperate and habitable zone of the continent. it is generally supposed that the prodigious increase of population in the united states is posterior to their declaration of independence. but this is an error: the population increased as rapidly under the colonial system as it does at the present day; that is to say, it doubled in about twenty-two years. but this proportion, which is now applied to millions, was then applied to thousands, of inhabitants; and the same fact which was scarcely noticeable a century ago, is now evident to every observer. the british subjects in canada, who are dependent on a king, augment and spread almost as rapidly as the british settlers of the united states, who live under a republican government. during the war of independence, which lasted eight years, the population continued to increase without intermission in the same ratio. although powerful indian nations allied with the english existed, at that time, upon the western frontiers, the emigration westward was never checked. while the enemy laid waste the shores of the atlantic, kentucky, the western parts of pennsylvania, and the states of vermont and of maine were filling with inhabitants. nor did the unsettled state of the constitution, which succeeded the war, prevent the increase of the population, or stop its progress across the wilds. thus, the difference of laws, the various conditions of peace and war, of order and of anarchy, have exercised no perceptible influence upon the gradual development of the anglo-americans. this may be readily understood: for the fact is, that no causes are sufficiently general to exercise a simultaneous influence over the whole of so extensive a territory. one portion of the country always offers a sure retreat from the calamities which afflict another part; and however great may be the evil, the remedy which is at hand is greater still. it must not, then, be imagined that the impulse of the british race in the new world can be arrested. the dismemberment of the union, and the hostilities which might ensue, the abolition of republican institutions, and the tyrannical government which might succeed it, may retard this impulse, but they cannot prevent it from ultimately fulfilling the destinies to which that race is reserved. no power upon earth can close upon the emigrants that fertile wilderness which offers resources to all industry and a refuge from all want. future events, of whatever nature they may be, will not deprive the americans of their climate or of their inland seas, of their great rivers or of their exuberant soil. nor will bad laws, revolutions, and anarchy, be able to obliterate that love of prosperity and that spirit of enterprise which seem to be the distinctive characteristics of their race, or to extinguish that knowledge which guides them on their way. thus, in the midst of the uncertain future, one event at least is sure. at a period which may be said to be near (for we are speaking of the life of a nation), the anglo-americans will alone cover the immense space contained between the polar regions and the tropics, extending from the coasts of the atlantic to the shores of the pacific ocean. the territory which will probably be occupied by the anglo-americans at some future time, may be computed to equal three-quarters of europe in extent.[ ] the climate of the union is upon the whole preferable to that of europe, and its natural advantages are not less great; it is therefore evident that its population will at some future time be proportionate to our own. europe, divided as it is between so many different nations, and torn as it has been by incessant wars and the barbarous manners of the middle ages, has notwithstanding attained a population of inhabitants to the square league.[ ] what cause can prevent the united states from having as numerous a population in time? many ages must elapse before the divers offsets of the british race in america cease to present the same homogeneous characteristics; and the time cannot be foreseen at which a permanent inequality of conditions will be established in the new world. whatever differences may arise, from peace or from war, from freedom or oppression, from prosperity or want, between the destinies of the different descendants of the great anglo-american family, they will at least preserve an analogous social condition, and they will hold in common the customs and the opinions to which that social condition has given birth. in the middle ages, the tie of religion was sufficiently powerful to imbue all the different populations of europe with the same civilisation. the british of the new world have a thousand other reciprocal ties; and they live at a time when the tendency to equality is general among mankind. the middle ages were a period when everything was broken up; when each people, each province, each city, and each family, had a strong tendency to maintain its distinct individuality. at the present time an opposite tendency seems to prevail, and the nations seem to be advancing to unity. our means of intellectual intercourse unite the most remote parts of the earth; and it is impossible for men to remain strangers to each other, or to be ignorant of the events which are taking place in any corner of the globe. the consequence is, that there is less difference, at the present day, between the europeans and their descendants in the new world, than there was between certain towns in the thirteenth century, which were only separated by a river. if this tendency to assimilation brings foreign nations closer to each other, it must _a fortiori_ prevent the descendants of the same people from becoming aliens to each other. the time will therefore come when one hundred and fifty millions of men will be living in north america,[ ] equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilisation, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms. the rest is uncertain, but this is certain; and it is a fact new to the world--a fact fraught with such portentous consequences as to baffle the efforts even of the imagination. there are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started from different points; i allude to the russians and the americans. both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed a most prominent place among the nations; and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time. all other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and only to be charged with the maintenance of their power; but these are still in the act of growth;[ ] all the others are stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these are proceeding with ease and with celerity along a path to which the human eye can assign no term. the american struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the russian are men; the former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilisation with all its weapons and its arts; the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the other, by the sword. the anglo-american relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common sense of the citizens; the russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm; the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. * * * * * notes: [ ] the foremost of these circumstances is, that nations which are accustomed to free institutions and municipal government are better able than any others to found prosperous colonies. the habit of thinking and governing for oneself is indispensable in a new country, where success necessarily depends, in a great measure, upon the individual exertions of the settlers. [ ] the united states already extend over a territory equal to one half of europe. the area of europe is , square leagues, and its population , , of inhabitants. (maltebrun, liv. , vol., vi., p. .) [ ] see maltebrun, liv. , vol. vi., p. . [ ] this would be a population proportionate to that of europe, taken at a mean rate of inhabitants to the square league. [ ] russia is the country in the old world in which population increases most rapidly in proportion. appendices appendix a.--page . for information concerning all the countries of the west which have not been visited by europeans, consult the account of two expeditions undertaken at the expense of congress by major long. this traveller particularly mentions, on the subject of the great american desert, that a line may be drawn nearly parallel to the th degree of longitude[ ] (meridian of washington), beginning from the red river and ending at the river platte. from this imaginary line to the rocky mountains, which bound the valley of the mississippi on the west, lie immense plains, which are almost entirely covered with sand, incapable of cultivation, or scattered over with masses of granite. in summer, these plains are quite destitute of water, and nothing is to be seen on them but herds of buffaloes and wild horses. some hordes of indians are also found there, but in no great number. major long was told, that in travelling northward from the river platte, you find the same desert constantly on the left; but he was unable to ascertain the truth of this report. (long's expedition, vol. ii., p. .) however worthy of confidence may be the narrative of major long, it must be remembered that he only passed through the country of which he speaks, without deviating widely from the line which he had traced out for his journey. [ ] the th degree of longitude according to the meridian of washington, agrees very nearly with the th degree on the meridian of greenwich. appendix b.--page . south america, in the regions between the tropics, produces an incredible profusion of climbing-plants, of which the flora of the antilles alone presents us with forty different species. among the most graceful of these shrubs is the passion-flower, which, according to descourtiz, grows with such luxuriance in the antilles, as to climb trees by means of the tendrils with which it is provided, and form moving bowers of rich and elegant festoons, decorated with blue and purple flowers, and fragrant with perfume. (vol. i., p. .) the _mimosa scandens_ (acacia à grandes gousses) is a creeper of enormous and rapid growth, which climbs from tree to tree, and sometimes covers more than half a league. (vol. iii., p. .) appendix c.--page . the languages which are spoken by the indians of america, from the pole to cape horn, are said to be all formed upon the same model, and subject to the same grammatical rules; whence it may fairly be concluded that all the indian nations sprang from the same stock. each tribe of the american continent speaks a different dialect; but the number of languages, properly so called, is very small, a fact which tends to prove that the nations of the new world had not a very remote origin. moreover, the languages of america have a great degree of regularity; from which it seems probable that the tribes which employ them had not undergone any great revolutions, or been incorporated, voluntarily, or by constraint, with foreign nations. for it is generally the union of several languages into one which produces grammatical irregularities. it is not long since the american languages, especially those of the north, first attracted the serious attention of philologists, when the discovery was made that this idiom of a barbarous people was the product of a complicated system of ideas and very learned combinations. these languages were found to be very rich, and great pains had been taken at their formation to render them agreeable to the ear. the grammatical system of the americans differs from all others in several points, but especially in the following:-- some nations in europe, among others the germans, have the power of combining at pleasure different expressions, and thus giving a complex sense to certain words. the indians have given a most surprising extension to this power, so as to arrive at the means of connecting a great number of ideas with a single term. this will be easily understood with the help of an example quoted by mr. duponceau, in the memoirs of the philosophical society of america. "a delaware woman, playing with a cat or a young dog," says this writer, "is heard to pronounce the word _kuligatschis_; which is thus composed; _k_ is the sign of the second person, and signifies 'thou' or 'thy;' _uli_ is a part of the word _wulit_, which signifies 'beautiful,' 'pretty;' _gat_ is another fragment of the word _wichgat_, which means 'paw;' and lastly, _schis_ is a diminutive giving the idea of smallness. thus in one word the indian woman has expressed, 'thy pretty little paw.'" take another example of the felicity with which the savages of america have composed their words. a young man of delaware is called _pilape_. this word is formed from _pilsit_, chaste, innocent; and _lenape_, man; viz., man in his purity and innocence. this facility of combining words is most remarkable in the strange formation of their verbs. the most complex action is often expressed by a single verb, which serves to convey all the shades of an idea by the modification of its construction. those who may wish to examine more in detail this subject, which i have only glanced at superficially, should read:-- . the correspondence of mr. duponceau and the rev. mr. hecwelder relative to the indian languages; which is to be found in the first volume of the memoirs of the philosophical society of america, published at philadelphia, , by abraham small, vol i., pp - . . the grammar of the delaware or lenape language by geiberger, the preface of mr. duponceau. all these are in the same collection, vol. iii. . an excellent account of these works, which is at the end of the th volume of the american encyclopaedia. appendix d.--page . see in charlevoix, vol i., p. , the history of the first war which the french inhabitants of canada carried on, in , against the iroquois. the latter, armed with bows and arrows, offered a desperate resistance to the french and their allies. charlevoix is not a great painter, yet he exhibits clearly enough, in this narrative, the contrast between the european manners and those of savages, as well as the different way in which the two races of men understood the sense of honor. when the french, says he, seized upon the beaver-skins which covered the indians who had fallen, the hurons, their allies, were greatly offended at this proceeding; but without hesitation they set to work in their usual manner, inflicting horrid cruelties upon the prisoners, and devouring one of those who had been killed, which made the frenchmen shudder. the barbarians prided themselves upon a scrupulousness which they were surprised at not finding in our nation; and could not understand that there was less to reprehend in the stripping of dead bodies, than in the devouring of their flesh like wild beasts. charlevoix, in another place (vol. i., p. ), thus describes the first torture of which champlain was an eyewitness, and the return of the hurons into their own village. "having proceeded about eight leagues," says he, "our allies halted: and having singled out one of their captives, they reproached him with all the cruelties which he had practised upon the warriors of their nation who had fallen into his hands, and told him that he might expect to be treated in like manner; adding, that if he had any spirit, he would prove it by singing. he immediately chanted forth his death-song, and then his war-song, and all the songs he knew, 'but in a very mournful strain,' says champlain, who was not then aware that all savage music has a melancholy character. the tortures which succeeded, accompanied by all the horrors which we shall mention hereafter, terrified the french, who made every effort to put a stop to them, but in vain. the following night one of the hurons having dreamed that they were pursued, the retreat was changed to a real flight, and the savages never stopped until they were out of the reach of danger." the moment they perceived the cabins of their own village, they cut themselves long sticks, to which they fastened the scalps which had fallen to their share, and carried them in triumph. at this sight, the women swam to the canoes, where they received the bloody scalps from the hands of their husbands, and tied them round their necks. the warriors offered one of these horrible trophies to champlain; they also presented him with some bows and arrows--the only spoils of the iroquois which they had ventured to seize--entreating him to show them to the king of france. champlain lived a whole winter quite alone among these barbarians, without being under any alarm for his person or property. appendix e.--page . although the puritanical strictness which presided over the establishment of the english colonies in america is now much relaxed, remarkable traces of it are still found in their habits and their laws. in , at the very time when the anti-christian republic of france began its ephemeral existence, the legislative body of massachusetts promulgated the following law, to compel the citizens to observe the sabbath. we give the preamble, and the principal articles of this law, which is worthy of the reader's attention. "whereas," says the legislator, "the observation of the sunday is an affair of public interest; inasmuch as it produces a necessary suspension of labor, leads men to reflect upon the duties of life and the errors to which human nature is liable, and provides for the public and private worship of god the creator and governor of the universe, and for the performance of such acts of charity as are the ornament and comfort of christian societies:-- "whereas, irreligious or light-minded persons, forgetting the duties which the sabbath imposes, and the benefits which these duties confer on society, are known to profane its sanctity, by following their pleasures or their affairs; this way of acting being contrary to their own interest as christians, and calculated to annoy those who do not follow their example; being also of great injury to society at large, by spreading a taste for dissipation and dissolute manners;-- "be it enacted and ordained by the governor, council, and representatives convened in general court of assembly, that all and every person and persons shall, on that day, carefully apply themselves to the duties of religion and piety; that no tradesman or laborer shall exercise his ordinary calling, and that no game or recreation shall be used on the lord's day, upon pain of forfeiting ten shillings;-- "that no one shall travel on that day, or any part thereof, under pain of forfeiting twenty shillings; that no vessel shall leave a harbor of the colony; that no person shall keep outside the meetinghouse during the time of public worship, or profane the time by playing or talking, on penalty of five shillings. "public-houses shall not entertain any other than strangers or lodgers, under a penalty of five shillings for every person found drinking or abiding therein. "any person in health who, without sufficient reason, shall omit to worship god in public during three months, shall be condemned to a fine of ten shillings. "any person guilty of misbehavior in a place of public worship shall be fined from five to forty shillings. "these laws are to be enforced by the tithing-men of each township, who have authority to visit public-houses on the sunday. the innkeeper who shall refuse them admittance shall be fined forty shillings for such offence. "the tithing-men are to stop travellers, and to require of them their reason for being on the road on sunday: any one refusing to answer shall be sentenced to pay a fine not exceeding five pounds sterling. if the reason given by the traveller be not deemed by the tithing-men sufficient, he may bring the traveller before the justice of the peace of the district." (_law of the th march, : general laws of massachusetts_, vol. i., p. .) on the th march, , a new law increased the amount of fines, half of which was to be given to the informer. (_same collection_, vol. ii., p. .) on the th february, , a new law confirmed these measures. (_same collection_, vol. ii., p. .) similar enactments exist in the laws of the state of new york, revised in and . (see _revised statutes_, part i., chapter , p. .) in these it is declared that no one is allowed on the sabbath to sport, to fish, play at games, or to frequent houses where liquor is sold. _no one_ can travel except in case of necessity. and this is not the only trace which the religious strictness and austere manners of the first emigrants have left behind them in the american laws. in the revised statutes of the state of new york, vol. i., p. , is the following clause:-- "whoever shall win or lose in the space of twenty-four hours, by gaming or betting, the sum of twenty-five dollars, shall be found guilty of a misdemeanor, and, upon conviction, shall be condemned to pay a fine equal to at least five times the value of the sum lost or won; which will be paid to the inspector of the poor of the township. he that loses twenty-five dollars or more, may bring an action to recover them; and if he neglects to do so, the inspector of the poor may prosecute the winner, and oblige him to pay into the poor box both the sum he has gained and three times as much beside." the laws we quote from are of recent date; but they are unintelligible without going back to the very origin of the colonies. i have no doubt that in our days the penal part of these laws is very rarely applied. laws preserve their inflexibility long after the manners of a nation have yielded to the influence of time. it is still true, however, that nothing strikes a foreigner on his arrival in america more forcibly than the regard to the sabbath. there is one, in particular, of the large american cities, in which all social movements begin to be suspended even on saturday evening. you traverse its streets at the hour at which you expect men in the middle of life to be engaged in business, and young people in pleasure; and you meet with solitude and silence. not only have all ceased to work, but they appear to have ceased to exist. neither the movements of industry are heard, nor the accents of joy, nor even the confused murmur which arises from the midst of a great city. chains are hung across the streets in the neighborhood of the churches; the half closed shutters of the houses scarcely admit a ray of sun into the dwellings of the citizens. now and then you perceive a solitary individual, who glides silently along the deserted streets and lanes. next day, at early dawn, the rolling of carriages, the noise of hammers, the cries of the population, begin to make themselves heard again. the city is awake. an eager crowd hastens toward the resort of commerce and industry; everything around you bespeaks motion, bustle, hurry. a feverish activity succeeds to the lethargic stupor of yesterday: you might almost suppose that they had but one day to acquire wealth and to enjoy it. appendix f.--page . it is unnecessary for me to say, that in the chapter which has just been read, i have not had the intention of giving a history of america. my only object was to enable the reader to appreciate the influence which the opinions and manners of the first emigrants had exercised upon the fate of the different colonies and of the union in general. i have therefore confined myself to the quotation of a few detached fragments. i do not know whether i am deceived, but it appears to me that by pursuing the path which i have merely pointed out, it would be easy to present such pictures of the american republics as would not be unworthy the attention of the public, and could not fail to suggest to the statesman matter for reflection. not being able to devote myself to this labor, i am anxious to render it easy to others; and for this purpose, i subjoin a short catalogue and analysis of the works which seem to me the most important to consult. at the head of the general documents, which it would be advantageous to examine, i place the work entitled an historical collection of state papers, and other authentic documents, intended as materials for a history of the united states of america, by ebenezer hasard. the first volume of this compilation, which was printed at philadelphia in , contains a literal copy of all the charters granted by the crown of england to the emigrants, as well as the principal acts of the colonial governments, during the commencement of their existence. among other authentic documents, we here find a great many relating to the affairs of new england and virginia during this period. the second volume is almost entirely devoted to the acts of the confederation of . this federal compact, which was entered into by the colonies of new england with the view of resisting the indians, was the first instance of union afforded by the anglo-americans. there were besides many other confederations of the same nature, before the famous one of , which brought about the independence of the colonies. each colony has, besides, its own historic monuments, some of which are extremely curious; beginning with virginia, the state which was first peopled. the earliest historian of virginia was its founder, capt. john smith. capt. smith has left us an octavo volume, entitled, the generall historic of virginia and new england, by captain john smith, sometymes governour in those countryes, and admirall of new england; printed at london in . the work is adorned with curious maps and engravings of the time when it appeared; the narrative extends from the year to . smith's work is highly and deservedly esteemed. the author was one of the most celebrated adventurers of a period of remarkable adventure; his book breathes that ardor for discovery, that spirit of enterprise which characterized the men of his time, when the manners of chivalry were united to zeal for commerce, and made subservient to the acquisition of wealth. but capt. smith is remarkable for uniting, to the virtues which characterized his contemporaries, several qualities to which they were generally strangers: his style is simple and concise, his narratives bear the stamp of truth, and his descriptions are free from false ornament. this author throws most valuable light upon the state and condition of the indians at the time when north america was first discovered. the second historian to consult is beverley, who commences his narrative with the year , and ends it with . the first part of his book contains historical documents, properly so called, relative to the infancy of the colonies. the second affords a most curious picture of the indians at this remote period. the third conveys very clear ideas concerning the manners, social condition, laws, and political customs of the virginians in the author's lifetime. beverley was a native of virginia, which occasions him to say at the beginning of his book that he entreats his readers not to exercise their critical severity upon it, since, having been born in the indies, he does not aspire to purity of language. notwithstanding this colonial modesty, the author shows throughout his book the impatience with which he endures the supremacy of the mother-country. in this work of beverley are also found numerous traces of that spirit of civil liberty which animated the english colonies of america at the time when he wrote. he also shows the dissensions which existed among them and retarded their independence. beverley detests his catholic neighbors of maryland, even more than he hates the english government; his style is simple, his narrative interesting and apparently trustworthy. i saw in america another work which ought to be consulted, entitled, the _history of virginia_, by william stith. this book affords some curious details, but _i_ thought it long and diffuse. the most ancient as well as the best document to be consulted on the history of carolina is a work in a small quarto, entitled, the history of carolina, by john lawson, printed at london in . this work contains, in the first part, a journey of discovery in the west of carolina; the account of which, given in the form of a journal, is in general confused and superficial; but it contains a very striking description of the mortality caused among the savages of that time, both by the small-pox and the immoderate use of brandy; and with a curious picture of the corruption of manners prevalent among them, which was increased by the presence of europeans. the second part of lawson's book is taken up with a description of the physical condition of carolina, and its productions. in the third part, the author gives an interesting account of the manners, customs, and government of the indians at that period. there is a good deal of talent and originality in this part of the work. lawson concludes his history with a copy of the charter granted to the carolinas in the reign of charles ii. the general tone of this work is light, and often licentious, forming a perfect contrast to the solemn style of the works published at the same period in new england. lawson's history is extremely scarce in america, and cannot be procured in europe. there is, however, a copy of it in the royal library at paris. from the southern extremity of the united states i pass at once to the northern limit; as the intermediate space was not peopled till a later period. i must first point out a very curious compilation, entitled, collection of the massachusetts historical society, printed for the first time at boston in , and reprinted in . the collection of which i speak, and which is continued to the present day, contains a great number of very valuable documents relating to the history of the different states of new england. among them are letters which have never been published, and authentic pieces which have been buried in provincial archives. the whole work of gookin concerning the indians is inserted there. i have mentioned several times, in the chapter to which this note relates, the work of nathaniel norton, entitled new england's memorial; sufficiently perhaps to prove that it deserves the attention of those who would be conversant with the history of new england. this book is in vo. and was reprinted at boston in . the most valuable and important authority which exists upon the history of new england is the work of the rev. cotton mather, entitled magnalia christi americana, or the ecclesiastical history of new england, - , vols. vo, reprinted at hartford, united states, in . (a folio edition of this work was published in london in .) the author divided his work into seven books. the first presents the history of the events which prepared and brought about the establishment of new england. the second contains the lives of the first governors and chief magistrates who presided over the country. the third is devoted to the lives and labors of the evangelical ministers who during the same period had the care of souls. in the fourth the author relates the institution and progress of the university of cambridge (massachusetts). in the fifth he describes the principles and the discipline of the church of new england. the sixth is taken up in retracing certain facts, which, in the opinion of mather, prove the merciful interposition of providence in behalf of the inhabitants of new england. lastly, in the seventh, the author gives an account of the heresies and the troubles to which the church of new england was exposed. cotton mather was an evangelical minister who was born at boston, and passed his life there. his narratives are distinguished by the same ardor and religious zeal which led to the foundation of the colonies of new england. traces of bad taste sometimes occur in his manner of writing; but he interests, because he is full of enthusiasm. he is often intolerant, still oftener credulous, but he never betrays an intention to deceive. sometimes his book contains fine passages, and true and profound reflections, such as the following:-- "before the arrival of the puritans," says he (vol. i., chap, iv.), "there were more than a few attempts of the english to people and improve the parts of new england which were to the northward of new plymouth; but the design of those attempts being aimed no higher than the advancement of some worldly interests, a constant series of disasters has confounded them, until there was a plantation erected upon the nobler designs of christianity: and that plantation, though it has had more adversaries than perhaps any one upon earth, yet, having obtained help from god, it continues to this day." mather occasionally relieves the austerity of his descriptions with images full of tender feeling: after having spoken of an english lady whose religious ardor had brought her to america with her husband, and who soon after sank under the fatigues and privations of exile, he adds, "as for her virtuous husband, isaac johnson, "he tried to live without her, liked it not, and died."--(vol. i.) mather's work gives an admirable picture of the time and country which he describes. in his account of the motives which led the puritans to seek an asylum beyond seas, he says:-- "the god of heaven served, as it were, a summons upon the spirits of his people in the english nation, stirring up the spirits of thousands which never saw the faces of each other, with a most unanimous inclination to leave the pleasant accommodations of their native country, and go over a terrible ocean, into a more terrible desert, for the pure enjoyment of all his ordinances. it is now reasonable that, before we pass any farther, the reasons of this undertaking should be more exactly made known unto posterity, especially unto the posterity of those that were the undertakers, lest they come at length to forget and neglect the true interest of new england. wherefore i shall now transcribe some of them from a manuscript wherein they were then tendered unto consideration. "_general considerations for the plantation of new england_. "first, it will be a service unto the church of great consequence, to carry the gospel unto those parts of the world, and raise a bulwark against the kingdom of antichrist, which the jesuits labor to rear up in all parts of the world. "secondly, all other churches of europe have been brought under desolations; and it may be feared that the like judgments are coming upon us; and who knows but god hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general destruction! "thirdly, the land grows weary of her inhabitants, inasmuch that man, which is the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth he treads upon; children, neighbors, and friends, especially the poor, are counted the greatest burdens, which, if things were right, would be the chiefest of earthly blessings. "fourthly, we are grown to that intemperance in all excess of riot, as no mean estate almost will suffice a man to keep sail with his equals, and he that fails in it must live in scorn and contempt; hence it comes to pass, that all arts and trades are carried in that deceitful manner and unrighteous course, as it is almost impossible for a good upright man to maintain his constant charge and live comfortably in them. "fifthly, the schools of learning and religion are so corrupted, as (beside the unsupportable charge of education) most children, even the best, wittiest, and of the fairest hopes, are prevented, corrupted, and utterly overthrown by the multitude of evil examples and licentious behaviors in these seminaries. "sixthly, the whole earth is the lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of adam, to be tilled and improved by them: why then should we stand starving here for places of habitation, and in the mean time suffer whole countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement? "seventhly, what can be a better or a nobler work, and more worthy of a christian, than to erect and support a reformed particular church in its infancy, and unite our forces with such a company of faithful people, as by timely assistance may grow stronger and prosper; but for want of it, may be put to great hazards, if not be wholly ruined. "eighthly, if any such as are known to be godly, and live in wealth and prosperity here, shall forsake all this to join with this reformed church, and with it run the hazard of a hard and mean condition, it will be an example of great use, both for the removing of scandal, and to give more life unto the faith of god's people in their prayers for the plantation, and also to encourage others to join the more willingly in it." farther on, when he declares the principles of the church of new england with respect to morals, mather inveighs with violence against the custom of drinking healths at table, which he denounces as a pagan and abominable practice. he proscribes with the same rigor all ornaments for the hair used by the female sex, as well as their custom of having the arms and neck uncovered. in another part of his work he relates several instances of witchcraft which had alarmed new england. it is plain that the visible action of the devil in the affairs of this world appeared to him an incontestible and evident fact. this work of cotton mather displays in many places, the spirit of civil liberty and political independence which characterized the times in which he lived. their principles respecting government are discoverable at every page. thus, for instance, the inhabitants of massachusetts, in the year , ten years after the foundation of plymouth, are found to have devoted _l_. sterling to the establishment of the university of cambridge. in passing from the general documents relative to the history of new england, to those which describe the several states comprised within its limits, i ought first to notice the history of the colony of massachusetts, by hutchinson, lieutenant-governor of the massachusetts province, vols., vo. the history of hutchinson, which i have several times quoted in the chapter to which this note relates, commences in the year and ends in . throughout the work there is a striking air of truth and the greatest simplicity of style; it is full of minute details. the best history to consult concerning connecticut is that of benjamin trumbull, entitled, a complete history of connecticut, civil and ecclesiastical, - ; vols., vo., printed in , at new haven. this history contains a clear and calm account of all the events which happened in connecticut during the period given in the title. the author drew from the best sources; and his narrative bears the stamp of truth. all that he says of the early days of connecticut is extremely curious. see especially the constitution of , vol. i., ch. vi., p. ; and also the penal laws of connecticut, vol. i., ch. vii., p. . the history of new hampshire, by jeremy belknap, is a work held in merited estimation. it was printed at boston in , in vols., vo. the third chapter of the first volume is particularly worthy of attention for the valuable details it affords on the political and religious principles of the puritans, on the causes of their emigration, and on their laws. the following curious quotation is given from a sermon delivered in : "it concerneth new england always to remember that they are a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade. the profession of the purity of doctrine, worship, and discipline, is written on her forehead. let merchants, and such as are increasing cent per cent, remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of new england, but religion. and if any man among us make religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, such an one hath not the true spirit of a true new englishman." the reader of belknap will find in his work more general ideas, and more strength of thought, than are to be met with in the american historians even to the present day. among the central states which deserve our attention for their remote origin, new york and pennsylvania are the foremost. the best history we have of the former is entitled a history of new york, by william smith, printed in london in . smith gives us important details of the wars between the french and english in america. his is the best account of the famous confederation of the iroquois. with respect to pennsylvania, i cannot do better than point out the work of proud, entitled the history of pennsylvania, from the original institution and settlement of that province, under the first proprietor and governor, william penn, in , till after the year ; by robert proud; vols., vo., printed at philadelphia in . this work is deserving of the especial attention of the reader; it contains a mass of curious documents concerning penn, the doctrine of the quakers, and the character, manners, and customs of the first inhabitants of pennsylvania. appendix g.--page . we read in jefferson's memoirs as follows:-- "at the time of the first settlement of the english in virginia, when land was had for little or nothing, some provident persons having obtained large grants of it, and being desirous of maintaining the splendor of their families, entailed their property upon their descendants. the transmission of these estates from generation to generation, to men who bore the same name, had the effect of raising up a distinct class of families, who, possessing by law the privilege of perpetuating their wealth, formed by these means a sort of patrician order, distinguished by the grandeur and luxury of their establishments. from this order it was that the king usually chose his counsellor of state." (this passage is extracted and translated from m. conseil's work upon the life of jefferson, entitled, "_mélanges politiques et philosophiques de jefferson_.") in the united states, the principal clauses of the english law respecting descent have been universally rejected. the first rule that we follow, says mr. kent, touching inheritance, is the following: if a man dies intestate, his property goes to his heirs in a direct line. if he has but one heir or heiress, he or she succeeds to the whole. if there are several heirs of the same degree, they divide the inheritance equally among them, without distinction of sex. this rule was prescribed for the first time in the state of new york by a statute of the d of february, . (see revised statutes, vol. iii., appendix, p. .) it has since then been adopted in the revised statutes of the same state. at the present day this law holds good throughout the whole of the united states, with the exception of the state of vermont, where the male heir inherits a double portion: kent's commentaries, vol. iv., p. . mr. kent, in the same work, vol. iv., p. - , gives an historical account of american legislation on the subject of entail; by this we learn that previous to the revolution the colonies followed the english law of entail. estates tail were abolished in virginia in , on a motion of mr. jefferson. they were suppressed in new york in ; and have since been abolished in north carolina, kentucky, tennessee, georgia, and missouri. in vermont, indiana, illinois, south carolina, and louisiana, entail was never introduced. those states which thought proper to preserve the english law of entail, modified it in such a way as to deprive it of its most aristocratic tendencies. "our general principles on the subject of government," says mr. kent, "tend to favor the free circulation of property." it cannot fail to strike the french reader who studies the law of inheritance, that on these questions the french legislation is infinitely more democratic even than the american. the american law makes an equal division of the father's property, but only in the case of his will not being known; "for every man," says the law, "in the state of new york (revised statutes, vol. iii., appendix, p. ), has entire liberty, power, and authority, to dispose of his property by will, to leave it entire, or divided in favor of any persons he chooses as his heirs, provided he do not leave it to a political body or any corporation." the french law obliges the testator to divide his property equally, or nearly so, among his heirs. most of the american republics still admit of entails, under certain restrictions; but the french law prohibits entail in all cases. if the social condition of the americans is more democratic than that of the french, the laws of the latter are the most democratic of the two. this may be explained more easily than at first appears to be the case. in france, democracy is still occupied in the work of destruction; in america it reigns quietly over the ruins it has made. appendix h.--page . summary of the qualifications of voters in the united states. all the states agree in granting the right of voting at the age of twenty-one. in all of them it is necessary to have resided for a certain time in the district where the vote is given. this period varies from three months to two years. as to the qualification; in the state of massachusetts it is necessary to have an income of three pounds sterling or a capital of sixty pounds. in rhode island a man must possess landed property to the amount of dollars. in connecticut he must have a property which gives an income of seventeen dollars. a year of service in the militia also gives the elective privilege. in new jersey, an elector must have a property of fifty pounds a year. in south carolina and maryland, the elector must possess fifty acres of land. in tennessee, he must possess some property. in the states of mississippi, ohio, georgia, virginia, pennsylvania, delaware, new york, the only necessary qualification for voting is that of paying the taxes; and in most of the states, to serve in the militia is equivalent to the payment of taxes. in maine and new hampshire any man can vote who is not on the pauper list. lastly, in the states of missouri, alabama, illinois, louisiana, indiana, kentucky, and vermont, the conditions of voting have no reference to the property of the elector. i believe there is no other state beside that of north carolina in which different conditions are applied to the voting for the senate and the electing the house of representatives. the electors of the former, in this case, should possess in property fifty acres of land; to vote for the latter, nothing more is required than to pay taxes. appendix i.--page . the small number of custom-house officers employed in the united states compared with the extent of the coast renders smuggling very easy; notwithstanding which it is less practised than elsewhere, because everybody endeavors to suppress it. in america there is no police for the prevention of fires, and such accidents are more frequent than in europe, but in general they are more speedily extinguished, because the surrounding population is prompt in lending assistance. appendix k--page . it is incorrect to assert that centralization was produced by the french revolution: the revolution brought it to perfection, but did not create it. the mania for centralization and government regulations dates from the time when jurists began to take a share in the government, in the time of philippe-le-bel; ever since which period they have been on the increase. in the year , m. de malesherbes, speaking in the name of the cour des aides, said to louis xiv. (see "mèmoires pour servir à l'histoire du droit public de la france eft matiere d'lmpots," p. , printed at brussels in ): "every corporation and every community of citizens retained the right of administering its own affairs; a right which not only forms part of the primitive constitution of the kingdom, but has a still higher origin; for it is the right of nature and of reason. nevertheless, your subjects, sire, have been deprived of it; and we cannot refrain from saying that in this respect your government has fallen into puerile extremes. from the time when powerful ministers made it a political principle to prevent the convocation of a national assembly, one consequence has succeeded another, until the deliberations of the inhabitants of a village are declared null when they have not been authorized by the intendant. of course, if the community have an expensive undertaking to carry through, it must remain under the control of the sub-delegate of the intendant, and consequently follow the plan he proposes, employ his favorite workmen, pay them according to his pleasure; and if an action at law is deemed necessary, the intendant's permission must be obtained. the cause must be pleaded before this first tribunal, previous to its being carried into a public court; and if the opinion of the intendant is opposed to that of the inhabitants, or if their adversary enjoys his favor, the community is deprived of the power of defending its rights. such are the means, sire, which have been exerted to extinguish the municipal spirit in france; and to stifle, if possible, the opinions of the citizens. the nation may be said to lie under an interdict, and to be in wardship under guardians." what could be said more to the purpose at the present day, when the revolution has achieved what are called its victories in centralization? in , jefferson wrote from paris to one of his friends: "there is no country where the mania for over-governing has taken deeper root than in france, or been the source of greater mischief." letter to madison, th august, . the fact is that for several centuries past the central power of france has done everything it could to extend central administration; it has acknowledged no other limits than its own strength. the central power to which the revolution gave birth made more rapid advances than any of its predecessors, because it was stronger and wiser than they had been; louis xiv. committed the welfare of such communities to the caprice of an intendant; napoleon left them to that of the minister. the same principle governed both, though its consequences were more or less remote. appendix l.--page . this immutability of the constitution of france is a necessary consequence of the laws of that country. to begin with the most important of all the laws, that which decides the order of succession to the throne; what can be more immutable in its principle than a political order founded upon the natural succession of father to son? in louis xviii. had established the perpetual law of hereditary succession in favor of his own family. the individuals who regulated the consequences of the revolution of followed his example; they merely established the perpetuity of the law in favor of another family. in this respect they imitated the chancellor maurepas, who, when he erected the new parliament upon the ruins of the old, took care to declare in the same ordinance that the rights of the new magistrates should be as inalienable as those of their predecessors had been. the laws of , like those of , point out no way of changing the constitution; and it is evident that the ordinary means of legislation are insufficient for this purpose. as the king, peers, and deputies, all derive their authority from the constitution, these three powers united cannot alter a law by virtue of which alone they govern. out of the pale of the constitution, they are nothing; where, then, could they take their stand to effect a change in its provisions? the alternative is clear; either their efforts are powerless against the charter, which continues to exist in spite of them, in which case they only reign in the name of the charter; or, they succeed in changing the charter, and then the law by which they existed being annulled, they themselves cease to exist. by destroying the charter, they destroy themselves. this is much more evident in the laws of than in those of . in , the royal prerogative took its stand above and beyond the constitution; but in , it was avowedly created by, and dependant on, the constitution. a part therefore of the french constitution is immutable, because it is united to the destiny of a family; and the body of the constitution is equally immutable, because there appear to be no legal means of changing it. these remarks are not applicable to england. that country having no written constitution, who can assert when its constitution is changed. appendix m.--page . the most esteemed authors who have written upon the english constitution agree with each other in establishing the omnipotence of the parliament. delolme says: "it is a fundamental principle with the english lawyers, that parliament can do everything except making a woman a man, or a man a woman." blackstone expresses himself more in detail if not more energetically than delolme, in the following terms:-- "the power and jurisdiction of parliament," says sir edward coke ( inst. ), "is so transcendant and absolute, that it cannot be confined, either for causes or persons, within any bounds. and of this high court," he adds, "may be truly said, 'si antiquitatem spectes, est vetustissima; si dignitatem, est honoratissima; si jurisdictionem, est capacissima.' it hath sovereign and uncontrollable authority in making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving and expounding of laws, concerning matters of all possible denominations; ecclesiastical or temporal; civil, military, maritime, or criminal; this being the place where that absolute despotic power which must, in all governments, reside somewhere, is intrusted by the constitution of these kingdoms. all mischiefs and grievances, operations and remedies, that transcend the ordinary course of the laws, are within the reach of this extraordinary tribunal. it can regulate or new model the succession to the crown; as was done in the reigns of henry viii. and william iii. it can alter the established religion of the land; as was done in a variety of instances in the reigns of king henry viii. and his three children. it can change and create afresh even the constitution of the kingdom, and of the parliaments themselves; as was done by the act of union and the several statutes for triennial and septennial elections. it can, in short, do everything that is not naturally impossible to be done; and, therefore, some have not scrupled to call its power, by a figure rather too bold, the omnipotence of parliament." appendix n.--page . there is no question upon which the american constitutions agree more fully than upon that of political jurisdiction. all the constitutions which take cognizance of this matter, give to the house of delegates the exclusive right of impeachment; excepting only the constitution of north carolina which grants the same privilege to grand-juries. (article .) almost all the constitutions give the exclusive right of pronouncing sentence to the senate, or to the assembly which occupies its place. the only punishments which the political tribunals can inflict are removal and interdiction of public functions for the future. there is no other constitution but that of virginia ( ), which enables them to inflict every kind of punishment. the crimes which are subject to political jurisdiction, are, in the federal constitution (section , art. ); in that of indiana (art. , paragraphs and ); of new york (art. ); of delaware (art. ); high treason, bribery, and other high crimes or offences. in the constitution of massachusetts (chap. , section ); that of north carolina (art. ); of virginia (p. ), misconduct and mal-administration. in the constitution of new hampshire (p. ) corruption, intrigue and mal-administration. in vermont (chap, ii., art ), mal-administration. in south carolina (art. ); kentucky (art. ); tennessee (art. ); ohio (art. , § , ); louisiana (art. ); mississippi (art. ); alabama (art. ); pennsylvania (art. ); crimes committed in the non-performance of official duties. in the states of illinois, georgia, maine, and connecticut, no particular offences are specified. appendix o.--page . it is true that the powers of europe may carry on maritime wars with the union; but there is always greater facility and less danger in supporting a maritime than a continental war. maritime warfare only requires one species of effort. a commercial people which consents to furnish its government with the necessary funds, is sure to possess a fleet. and it is far easier to induce a nation to part with its money, almost unconsciously, than to reconcile it to sacrifices of men and personal efforts. moreover, defeat by sea rarely compromises the existence or independence of the people which endures it. as for continental wars, it is evident that the nations of europe cannot be formidable in this way to the american union. it would be very difficult to transport and maintain in america more than , soldiers; an army which maybe considered to represent a nation of , , of men. the most populous nation of europe contending in this way against the union, is in the position of a nation of , , of inhabitants at war with one of , , . add to this, that america has all its resources within reach, while the european is at , miles distance from his; and that the immensity of the american continent would of itself present an insurmountable obstacle to its conquest. appendix p.--page . the first american journal appeared in april, , and was published at boston. see collection of the historical society of massachusetts, vol. vi., p. . it would be a mistake to suppose that the periodical press has always been entirely free in the american colonies: an attempt was made to establish something analogous to a censorship and preliminary security. consult the legislative documents of massachusetts of the th of january, . the committee appointed by the general assembly (the legislative body of the province), for the purpose of examining into circumstances connected with a paper entitled "the new england courier," expresses its opinion that "the tendency of the said journal is to turn religion into derision, and bring it into contempt; that it mentions the sacred writings in a profane and irreligious manner; that it puts malicious interpretations upon the conduct of the ministers of the gospel; and that the government of his majesty is insulted, and the peace and tranquillity of the province disturbed by the said journal. the committee is consequently of opinion that the printer and publisher, james franklin, should be forbidden to print and publish the said journal or any other work in future, without having previously submitted it to the secretary of the province; and that the justices of the peace for the county of suffolk should be commissioned to require bail of the said james franklin for his good conduct during the ensuing year." the suggestion of the committee was adopted and passed into a law, but the effect of it was null, for the journal eluded the prohibition by putting the name of benjamin franklin instead of james franklin at the bottom of its columns, and this manoeuvre was supported by public opinion. appendix q.--page . the federal constitution has introduced the jury into the tribunals of the union in the same way as the states had introduced it into their own several courts: but as it has not established any fixed rules for the choice of jurors, the federal courts select them from the ordinary jury-list which each state makes for itself. the laws of the states must therefore be examined for the theory of the formation of juries. see story's commentaries on the constitution, b. iii., chap. , pp. - ; sergeant's constitutional law, p. . see also the federal laws, of the years , , and , upon the subject. for the purpose of thoroughly understanding the american principles with respect to the formation of juries, i examined the laws of states at a distance from one another, and the following observations were the result of my inquiries. in america all the citizens who exercise the elective franchise have the right of serving upon a jury. the great state of new york, however, has made a slight difference between the two privileges, but in a spirit contrary to that of the laws of france; for in the state of new york there are fewer persons eligible as jurymen than there are electors. it may be said in general that the right of forming part of a jury, like that of electing representatives, is open to all the citizens; the exercise of this right, however, is not put indiscriminately into any hands. every year a body of municipal or county magistrates--called _selectmen_ in new england, _supervisors_ in new york, _trustees_ in ohio, and _sheriffs of the parish_ in louisiana--choose for each county a certain number of citizens who have the right of serving as jurymen, and who we supposed to be capable of exercising their functions. these magistrates, being themselves elective, excite no distrust: their powers, like those of most republican magistrates, are very extensive and very arbitrary, and they frequently make use of them to remove unworthy or incompetent jurymen. the names of the jurymen thus chosen are transmitted to the county court; and the jury who have to decide any affair are drawn by lot from the whole list of names. the americans have contrived in every way to make the common people eligible to the jury, and to render the service as little onerous as possible. the sessions are held in the chief town of every county; and the jury are indemnified for their attendance either by the state or the parties concerned. they receive in general a dollar per day, beside their travelling expenses. in america the being placed upon the jury is looked upon as a burden, but it is a burden which is very supportable. see brevard's digest of the public statute law of south carolina, vol. i, pp. and , vol. ii., pp. and ; the general laws of massachusetts, revised and published by authority of the legislature, v. ii., pp. and ; the revised statutes of the state of new york, vol. ii., pp. , , , ; the statute law of the state of tennessee, vol. i., p. ; acts of the state of ohio, pp. and ; and digeste genéral des actes de la législature de la louisiana. appendix r.--page . if we attentively examine the constitution of the jury as introduced into civil proceedings in england, we shall readily perceive that the jurors are under the immediate control of the judge. it is true that the verdict of the jury, in civil as well as in criminal cases, comprises the question of fact and the question of right in the same reply; thus, a house is claimed by peter as having been purchased by him: this is the fact to be decided. the defendant puts in a plea of incompetency on the part of the vendor: this is the legal question to be resolved. but the jury do not enjoy the same character of infallibility in civil cases, according to the practice of the english courts, as they do in criminal cases. the judge may refuse to receive the verdict; and even after the first trial has taken place, a second or new trial may be awarded by the court. see blackstone's commentaries, book iii., ch. . democracy in america by alexis de tocqueville translated by henry reeve book one introduction special introduction by hon. john t. morgan in the eleven years that separated the declaration of the independence of the united states from the completion of that act in the ordination of our written constitution, the great minds of america were bent upon the study of the principles of government that were essential to the preservation of the liberties which had been won at great cost and with heroic labors and sacrifices. their studies were conducted in view of the imperfections that experience had developed in the government of the confederation, and they were, therefore, practical and thorough. when the constitution was thus perfected and established, a new form of government was created, but it was neither speculative nor experimental as to the principles on which it was based. if they were true principles, as they were, the government founded upon them was destined to a life and an influence that would continue while the liberties it was intended to preserve should be valued by the human family. those liberties had been wrung from reluctant monarchs in many contests, in many countries, and were grouped into creeds and established in ordinances sealed with blood, in many great struggles of the people. they were not new to the people. they were consecrated theories, but no government had been previously established for the great purpose of their preservation and enforcement. that which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of repressing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of a single despot. when, in , alexis de tocqueville came to study democracy in america, the trial of nearly a half-century of the working of our system had been made, and it had been proved, by many crucial tests, to be a government of "liberty regulated by law," with such results in the development of strength, in population, wealth, and military and commercial power, as no age had ever witnessed. [see alexis de tocqueville] de tocqueville had a special inquiry to prosecute, in his visit to america, in which his generous and faithful soul and the powers of his great intellect were engaged in the patriotic effort to secure to the people of france the blessings that democracy in america had ordained and established throughout nearly the entire western hemisphere. he had read the story of the french revolution, much of which had been recently written in the blood of men and women of great distinction who were his progenitors; and had witnessed the agitations and terrors of the restoration and of the second republic, fruitful in crime and sacrifice, and barren of any good to mankind. he had just witnessed the spread of republican government through all the vast continental possessions of spain in america, and the loss of her great colonies. he had seen that these revolutions were accomplished almost without the shedding of blood, and he was filled with anxiety to learn the causes that had placed republican government, in france, in such contrast with democracy in america. de tocqueville was scarcely thirty years old when he began his studies of democracy in america. it was a bold effort for one who had no special training in government, or in the study of political economy, but he had the example of lafayette in establishing the military foundation of these liberties, and of washington, jefferson, madison, and hamilton, all of whom were young men, in building upon the independence of the united states that wisest and best plan of general government that was ever devised for a free people. he found that the american people, through their chosen representatives who were instructed by their wisdom and experience and were supported by their virtues--cultivated, purified and ennobled by self-reliance and the love of god--had matured, in the excellent wisdom of their counsels, a new plan of government, which embraced every security for their liberties and equal rights and privileges to all in the pursuit of happiness. he came as an honest and impartial student and his great commentary, like those of paul, was written for the benefit of all nations and people and in vindication of truths that will stand for their deliverance from monarchical rule, while time shall last. a french aristocrat of the purest strain of blood and of the most honorable lineage, whose family influence was coveted by crowned heads; who had no quarrel with the rulers of the nation, and was secure against want by his inherited estates; was moved by the agitations that compelled france to attempt to grasp suddenly the liberties and happiness we had gained in our revolution and, by his devout love of france, to search out and subject to the test of reason the basic principles of free government that had been embodied in our constitution. this was the mission of de tocqueville, and no mission was ever more honorably or justly conducted, or concluded with greater eclat, or better results for the welfare of mankind. his researches were logical and exhaustive. they included every phase of every question that then seemed to be apposite to the great inquiry he was making. the judgment of all who have studied his commentaries seems to have been unanimous, that his talents and learning were fully equal to his task. he began with the physical geography of this country, and examined the characteristics of the people, of all races and conditions, their social and religious sentiments, their education and tastes; their industries, their commerce, their local governments, their passions and prejudices, and their ethics and literature; leaving nothing unnoticed that might afford an argument to prove that our plan and form of government was or was not adapted especially to a peculiar people, or that it would be impracticable in any different country, or among any different people. the pride and comfort that the american people enjoy in the great commentaries of de tocqueville are far removed from the selfish adulation that comes from a great and singular success. it is the consciousness of victory over a false theory of government which has afflicted mankind for many ages, that gives joy to the true american, as it did to de tocqueville in his great triumph. when de tocqueville wrote, we had lived less than fifty years under our constitution. in that time no great national commotion had occurred that tested its strength, or its power of resistance to internal strife, such as had converted his beloved france into fields of slaughter torn by tempests of wrath. he had a strong conviction that no government could be ordained that could resist these internal forces, when, they are directed to its destruction by bad men, or unreasoning mobs, and many then believed, as some yet believe, that our government is unequal to such pressure, when the assault is thoroughly desperate. had de tocqueville lived to examine the history of the united states from to , his misgivings as to this power of self-preservation would, probably, have been cleared off. he would have seen that, at the end of the most destructive civil war that ever occurred, when animosities of the bitterest sort had banished all good feeling from the hearts of our people, the states of the american union, still in complete organization and equipped with all their official entourage, aligned themselves in their places and took up the powers and duties of local government in perfect order and without embarrassment. this would have dispelled his apprehensions, if he had any, about the power of the united states to withstand the severest shocks of civil war. could he have traced the further course of events until they open the portals of the twentieth century, he would have cast away his fears of our ability to restore peace, order, and prosperity, in the face of any difficulties, and would have rejoiced to find in the constitution of the united states the remedy that is provided for the healing of the nation. de tocqueville examined, with the care that is worthy the importance of the subject, the nature and value of the system of "local self-government," as we style this most important feature of our plan, and (as has often happened) when this or any subject has become a matter of anxious concern, his treatment of the questions is found to have been masterly and his preconceptions almost prophetic. we are frequently indebted to him for able expositions and true doctrines relating to subjects that have slumbered in the minds of the people until they were suddenly forced on our attention by unexpected events. in his introductory chapter, m. de tocqueville says: "amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the united states, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions." he referred, doubtless, to social and political conditions among the people of the white race, who are described as "we, the people," in the opening sentence of the constitution. the last three amendments of the constitution have so changed this, that those who were then negro slaves are clothed with the rights of citizenship, including the right of suffrage. this was a political party movement, intended to be radical and revolutionary, but it will, ultimately, react because it has not the sanction of public opinion. if m. de tocqueville could now search for a law that would negative this provision in its effect upon social equality, he would fail to find it. but he would find it in the unwritten law of the natural aversion of the races. he would find it in public opinion, which is the vital force in every law in a free government. this is a subject that our constitution failed to regulate, because it was not contemplated by its authors. it is a question that will settle itself, without serious difficulty. the equality in the suffrage, thus guaranteed to the negro race, alone--for it was not intended to include other colored races--creates a new phase of political conditions that m. de tocqueville could not foresee. yet, in his commendation of the local town and county governments, he applauds and sustains that elementary feature of our political organization which, in the end, will render harmless this wide departure from the original plan and purpose of american democracy. "local self-government," independent of general control, except for general purposes, is the root and origin of all free republican government, and is the antagonist of all great political combinations that threaten the rights of minorities. it is the public opinion formed in the independent expressions of towns and other small civil districts that is the real conservatism of free government. it is equally the enemy of that dangerous evil, the corruption of the ballot-box, from which it is now apprehended that one of our greatest troubles is to arise. the voter is selected, under our laws, because he has certain physical qualifications--age and sex. his disqualifications, when any are imposed, relate to his education or property, and to the fact that he has not been convicted of crime. of all men he should be most directly amenable to public opinion. the test of moral character and devotion to the duties of good citizenship are ignored in the laws, because the courts can seldom deal with such questions in a uniform and satisfactory way, under rules that apply alike to all. thus the voter, selected by law to represent himself and four other non-voting citizens, is often a person who is unfit for any public duty or trust. in a town government, having a small area of jurisdiction, where the voice of the majority of qualified voters is conclusive, the fitness of the person who is to exercise that high representative privilege can be determined by his neighbors and acquaintances, and, in the great majority of cases, it will be decided honestly and for the good of the country. in such meetings, there is always a spirit of loyalty to the state, because that is loyalty to the people, and a reverence for god that gives weight to the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. m. de tocqueville found in these minor local jurisdictions the theoretical conservatism which, in the aggregate, is the safest reliance of the state. so we have found them, in practice, the true protectors of the purity of the ballot, without which all free government will degenerate into absolutism. in the future of the republic, we must encounter many difficult and dangerous situations, but the principles established in the constitution and the check upon hasty or inconsiderate legislation, and upon executive action, and the supreme arbitrament of the courts, will be found sufficient for the safety of personal rights, and for the safety of the government, and the prophetic outlook of m. de tocqueville will be fully realized through the influence of democracy in america. each succeeding generation of americans will find in the pure and impartial reflections of de tocqueville a new source of pride in our institutions of government, and sound reasons for patriotic effort to preserve them and to inculcate their teachings. they have mastered the power of monarchical rule in the american hemisphere, freeing religion from all shackles, and will spread, by a quiet but resistless influence, through the islands of the seas to other lands, where the appeals of de tocqueville for human rights and liberties have already inspired the souls of the people. hon. john t. morgan special introduction by hon. john j. ingalls nearly two-thirds of a century has elapsed since the appearance of "democracy in america," by alexis charles henri clerel de tocqueville, a french nobleman, born at paris, july , . bred to the law, he exhibited an early predilection for philosophy and political economy, and at twenty-two was appointed judge-auditor at the tribunal of versailles. in , commissioned ostensibly to investigate the penitentiary system of the united states, he visited this country, with his friend, gustave de beaumont, travelling extensively through those parts of the republic then subdued to settlement, studying the methods of local, state, and national administration, and observing the manners and habits, the daily life, the business, the industries and occupations of the people. "democracy in america," the first of four volumes upon "american institutions and their influence," was published in . it was received at once by the scholars and thinkers of europe as a profound, impartial, and entertaining exposition of the principles of popular, representative self-government. napoleon, "the mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream," had abolished feudalism and absolutism, made monarchs and dynasties obsolete, and substituted for the divine right of kings the sovereignty of the people. although by birth and sympathies an aristocrat, m. de tocqueville saw that the reign of tradition and privilege at last was ended. he perceived that civilization, after many bloody centuries, had entered a new epoch. he beheld, and deplored, the excesses that had attended the genesis of the democratic spirit in france, and while he loved liberty, he detested the crimes that had been committed in its name. belonging neither to the class which regarded the social revolution as an innovation to be resisted, nor to that which considered political equality the universal panacea for the evils of humanity, he resolved by personal observation of the results of democracy in the new world to ascertain its natural consequences, and to learn what the nations of europe had to hope or fear from its final supremacy. that a youth of twenty-six should entertain a design so broad and bold implies singular intellectual intrepidity. he had neither model nor precedent. the vastness and novelty of the undertaking increase admiration for the remarkable ability with which the task was performed. were literary excellence the sole claim of "democracy in america" to distinction, the splendor of its composition alone would entitle it to high place among the masterpieces of the century. the first chapter, upon the exterior form of north america, as the theatre upon which the great drama is to be enacted, for graphic and picturesque description of the physical characteristics of the continent is not surpassed in literature: nor is there any subdivision of the work in which the severest philosophy is not invested with the grace of poetry, and the driest statistics with the charm of romance. western emigration seemed commonplace and prosaic till m. de tocqueville said, "this gradual and continuous progress of the european race toward the rocky mountains has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onward by the hand of god!" the mind of m. de tocqueville had the candor of the photographic camera. it recorded impressions with the impartiality of nature. the image was sometimes distorted, and the perspective was not always true, but he was neither a panegyrist, nor an advocate, nor a critic. he observed american phenomena as illustrations, not as proof nor arguments; and although it is apparent that the tendency of his mind was not wholly favorable to the democratic principle, yet those who dissent from his conclusions must commend the ability and courage with which they are expressed. though not originally written for americans, "democracy in america" must always remain a work of engrossing and constantly increasing interest to citizens of the united states as the first philosophic and comprehensive view of our society, institutions, and destiny. no one can rise even from the most cursory perusal without clearer insight and more patriotic appreciation of the blessings of liberty protected by law, nor without encouragement for the stability and perpetuity of the republic. the causes which appeared to m. de tocqueville to menace both, have gone. the despotism of public opinion, the tyranny of majorities, the absence of intellectual freedom which seemed to him to degrade administration and bring statesmanship, learning, and literature to the level of the lowest, are no longer considered. the violence of party spirit has been mitigated, and the judgment of the wise is not subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant. other dangers have come. equality of conditions no longer exists. prophets of evil predict the downfall of democracy, but the student of m. de tocqueville will find consolation and encouragement in the reflection that the same spirit which has vanquished the perils of the past, which he foresaw, will be equally prepared for the responsibilities of the present and the future. the last of the four volumes of m. de tocqueville's work upon american institutions appeared in . in he was chosen member of the academy of moral and political sciences. in he was elected to the chamber of deputies. he became a member of the french academy in . in he was in the assembly, and from june nd to october st he was minister of foreign affairs. the coup d'etat of december , drove him from the public service. in he published "the old regime and the revolution." he died at cannes, april , , at the age of fifty-four. hon. john j. ingalls introductory chapter amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the united states, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions. i readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society, by giving a certain direction to public opinion, and a certain tenor to the laws; by imparting new maxims to the governing powers, and peculiar habits to the governed. i speedily perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less empire over civil society than over the government; it creates opinions, engenders sentiments, suggests the ordinary practices of life, and modifies whatever it does not produce. the more i advanced in the study of american society, the more i perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated. i then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, where i imagined that i discerned something analogous to the spectacle which the new world presented to me. i observed that the equality of conditions is daily progressing towards those extreme limits which it seems to have reached in the united states, and that the democracy which governs the american communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in europe. i hence conceived the idea of the book which is now before the reader. it is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on amongst us; but there are two opinions as to its nature and consequences. to some it appears to be a novel accident, which as such may still be checked; to others it seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history. let us recollect the situation of france seven hundred years ago, when the territory was divided amongst a small number of families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the inhabitants; the right of governing descended with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which man could act on man, and landed property was the sole source of power. soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded, and began to exert itself: the clergy opened its ranks to all classes, to the poor and the rich, the villein and the lord; equality penetrated into the government through the church, and the being who as a serf must have vegetated in perpetual bondage took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and not infrequently above the heads of kings. the different relations of men became more complicated and more numerous as society gradually became more stable and more civilized. thence the want of civil laws was felt; and the order of legal functionaries soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of the feudal barons in their ermine and their mail. whilst the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce. the influence of money began to be perceptible in state affairs. the transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised. gradually the spread of mental acquirements, and the increasing taste for literature and art, opened chances of success to talent; science became a means of government, intelligence led to social power, and the man of letters took a part in the affairs of the state. the value attached to the privileges of birth decreased in the exact proportion in which new paths were struck out to advancement. in the eleventh century nobility was beyond all price; in the thirteenth it might be purchased; it was conferred for the first time in ; and equality was thus introduced into the government by the aristocracy itself. in the course of these seven hundred years it sometimes happened that in order to resist the authority of the crown, or to diminish the power of their rivals, the nobles granted a certain share of political rights to the people. or, more frequently, the king permitted the lower orders to enjoy a degree of power, with the intention of repressing the aristocracy. in france the kings have always been the most active and the most constant of levellers. when they were strong and ambitious they spared no pains to raise the people to the level of the nobles; when they were temperate or weak they allowed the people to rise above themselves. some assisted the democracy by their talents, others by their vices. louis xi and louis xiv reduced every rank beneath the throne to the same subjection; louis xv descended, himself and all his court, into the dust. as soon as land was held on any other than a feudal tenure, and personal property began in its turn to confer influence and power, every improvement which was introduced in commerce or manufacture was a fresh element of the equality of conditions. henceforward every new discovery, every new want which it engendered, and every new desire which craved satisfaction, was a step towards the universal level. the taste for luxury, the love of war, the sway of fashion, and the most superficial as well as the deepest passions of the human heart, co-operated to enrich the poor and to impoverish the rich. from the time when the exercise of the intellect became the source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by providence with an equal hand, turned to the advantage of the democracy; and even when they were in the possession of its adversaries they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge, and literature became an arsenal where the poorest and the weakest could always find weapons to their hand. in perusing the pages of our history, we shall scarcely meet with a single great event, in the lapse of seven hundred years, which has not turned to the advantage of equality. the crusades and the wars of the english decimated the nobles and divided their possessions; the erection of communities introduced an element of democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the villein and the noble on the field of battle; printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post was organized so as to bring the same information to the door of the poor man's cottage and to the gate of the palace; and protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. the discovery of america offered a thousand new paths to fortune, and placed riches and power within the reach of the adventurous and the obscure. if we examine what has happened in france at intervals of fifty years, beginning with the eleventh century, we shall invariably perceive that a twofold revolution has taken place in the state of society. the noble has gone down on the social ladder, and the roturier has gone up; the one descends as the other rises. every half century brings them nearer to each other, and they will very shortly meet. nor is this phenomenon at all peculiar to france. whithersoever we turn our eyes we shall witness the same continual revolution throughout the whole of christendom. the various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy; all men have aided it by their exertions: those who have intentionally labored in its cause, and those who have served it unwittingly; those who have fought for it and those who have declared themselves its opponents, have all been driven along in the same track, have all labored to one end, some ignorantly and some unwillingly; all have been blind instruments in the hands of god. the gradual development of the equality of conditions is therefore a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree: it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress. would it, then, be wise to imagine that a social impulse which dates from so far back can be checked by the efforts of a generation? is it credible that the democracy which has annihilated the feudal system and vanquished kings will respect the citizen and the capitalist? will it stop now that it has grown so strong and its adversaries so weak? none can say which way we are going, for all terms of comparison are wanting: the equality of conditions is more complete in the christian countries of the present day than it has been at any time or in any part of the world; so that the extent of what already exists prevents us from foreseeing what may be yet to come. the whole book which is here offered to the public has been written under the impression of a kind of religious dread produced in the author's mind by the contemplation of so irresistible a revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of such amazing obstacles, and which is still proceeding in the midst of the ruins it has made. it is not necessary that god himself should speak in order to disclose to us the unquestionable signs of his will; we can discern them in the habitual course of nature, and in the invariable tendency of events: i know, without a special revelation, that the planets move in the orbits traced by the creator's finger. if the men of our time were led by attentive observation and by sincere reflection to acknowledge that the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and future of their history, this solitary truth would confer the sacred character of a divine decree upon the change. to attempt to check democracy would be in that case to resist the will of god; and the nations would then be constrained to make the best of the social lot awarded to them by providence. the christian nations of our age seem to me to present a most alarming spectacle; the impulse which is bearing them along is so strong that it cannot be stopped, but it is not yet so rapid that it cannot be guided: their fate is in their hands; yet a little while and it may be so no longer. the first duty which is at this time imposed upon those who direct our affairs is to educate the democracy; to warm its faith, if that be possible; to purify its morals; to direct its energies; to substitute a knowledge of business for its inexperience, and an acquaintance with its true interests for its blind propensities; to adapt its government to time and place, and to modify it in compliance with the occurrences and the actors of the age. a new science of politics is indispensable to a new world. this, however, is what we think of least; launched in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins which may still be described upon the shore we have left, whilst the current sweeps us along, and drives us backwards towards the gulf. in no country in europe has the great social revolution which i have been describing made such rapid progress as in france; but it has always been borne on by chance. the heads of the state have never had any forethought for its exigencies, and its victories have been obtained without their consent or without their knowledge. the most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most moral classes of the nation have never attempted to connect themselves with it in order to guide it. the people has consequently been abandoned to its wild propensities, and it has grown up like those outcasts who receive their education in the public streets, and who are unacquainted with aught but the vices and wretchedness of society. the existence of a democracy was seemingly unknown, when on a sudden it took possession of the supreme power. everything was then submitted to its caprices; it was worshipped as the idol of strength; until, when it was enfeebled by its own excesses, the legislator conceived the rash project of annihilating its power, instead of instructing it and correcting its vices; no attempt was made to fit it to govern, but all were bent on excluding it from the government. the consequence of this has been that the democratic revolution has been effected only in the material parts of society, without that concomitant change in laws, ideas, customs, and manners which was necessary to render such a revolution beneficial. we have gotten a democracy, but without the conditions which lessen its vices and render its natural advantages more prominent; and although we already perceive the evils it brings, we are ignorant of the benefits it may confer. while the power of the crown, supported by the aristocracy, peaceably governed the nations of europe, society possessed, in the midst of its wretchedness, several different advantages which can now scarcely be appreciated or conceived. the power of a part of his subjects was an insurmountable barrier to the tyranny of the prince; and the monarch, who felt the almost divine character which he enjoyed in the eyes of the multitude, derived a motive for the just use of his power from the respect which he inspired. high as they were placed above the people, the nobles could not but take that calm and benevolent interest in its fate which the shepherd feels towards his flock; and without acknowledging the poor as their equals, they watched over the destiny of those whose welfare providence had entrusted to their care. the people never having conceived the idea of a social condition different from its own, and entertaining no expectation of ever ranking with its chiefs, received benefits from them without discussing their rights. it grew attached to them when they were clement and just, and it submitted without resistance or servility to their exactions, as to the inevitable visitations of the arm of god. custom, and the manners of the time, had moreover created a species of law in the midst of violence, and established certain limits to oppression. as the noble never suspected that anyone would attempt to deprive him of the privileges which he believed to be legitimate, and as the serf looked upon his own inferiority as a consequence of the immutable order of nature, it is easy to imagine that a mutual exchange of good-will took place between two classes so differently gifted by fate. inequality and wretchedness were then to be found in society; but the souls of neither rank of men were degraded. men are not corrupted by the exercise of power or debased by the habit of obedience, but by the exercise of a power which they believe to be illegal and by obedience to a rule which they consider to be usurped and oppressive. on one side was wealth, strength, and leisure, accompanied by the refinements of luxury, the elegance of taste, the pleasures of wit, and the religion of art. on the other was labor and a rude ignorance; but in the midst of this coarse and ignorant multitude it was not uncommon to meet with energetic passions, generous sentiments, profound religious convictions, and independent virtues. the body of a state thus organized might boast of its stability, its power, and, above all, of its glory. but the scene is now changed, and gradually the two ranks mingle; the divisions which once severed mankind are lowered, property is divided, power is held in common, the light of intelligence spreads, and the capacities of all classes are equally cultivated; the state becomes democratic, and the empire of democracy is slowly and peaceably introduced into the institutions and the manners of the nation. i can conceive a society in which all men would profess an equal attachment and respect for the laws of which they are the common authors; in which the authority of the state would be respected as necessary, though not as divine; and the loyalty of the subject to its chief magistrate would not be a passion, but a quiet and rational persuasion. every individual being in the possession of rights which he is sure to retain, a kind of manly reliance and reciprocal courtesy would arise between all classes, alike removed from pride and meanness. the people, well acquainted with its true interests, would allow that in order to profit by the advantages of society it is necessary to satisfy its demands. in this state of things the voluntary association of the citizens might supply the individual exertions of the nobles, and the community would be alike protected from anarchy and from oppression. i admit that, in a democratic state thus constituted, society will not be stationary; but the impulses of the social body may be regulated and directed forwards; if there be less splendor than in the halls of an aristocracy, the contrast of misery will be less frequent also; the pleasures of enjoyment may be less excessive, but those of comfort will be more general; the sciences may be less perfectly cultivated, but ignorance will be less common; the impetuosity of the feelings will be repressed, and the habits of the nation softened; there will be more vices and fewer crimes. in the absence of enthusiasm and of an ardent faith, great sacrifices may be obtained from the members of a commonwealth by an appeal to their understandings and their experience; each individual will feel the same necessity for uniting with his fellow-citizens to protect his own weakness; and as he knows that if they are to assist he must co-operate, he will readily perceive that his personal interest is identified with the interest of the community. the nation, taken as a whole, will be less brilliant, less glorious, and perhaps less strong; but the majority of the citizens will enjoy a greater degree of prosperity, and the people will remain quiet, not because it despairs of amelioration, but because it is conscious of the advantages of its condition. if all the consequences of this state of things were not good or useful, society would at least have appropriated all such as were useful and good; and having once and for ever renounced the social advantages of aristocracy, mankind would enter into possession of all the benefits which democracy can afford. but here it may be asked what we have adopted in the place of those institutions, those ideas, and those customs of our forefathers which we have abandoned. the spell of royalty is broken, but it has not been succeeded by the majesty of the laws; the people has learned to despise all authority, but fear now extorts a larger tribute of obedience than that which was formerly paid by reverence and by love. i perceive that we have destroyed those independent beings which were able to cope with tyranny single-handed; but it is the government that has inherited the privileges of which families, corporations, and individuals have been deprived; the weakness of the whole community has therefore succeeded that influence of a small body of citizens, which, if it was sometimes oppressive, was often conservative. the division of property has lessened the distance which separated the rich from the poor; but it would seem that the nearer they draw to each other, the greater is their mutual hatred, and the more vehement the envy and the dread with which they resist each other's claims to power; the notion of right is alike insensible to both classes, and force affords to both the only argument for the present, and the only guarantee for the future. the poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which controls it, and his egotism is no less blind than his devotedness was formerly. if society is tranquil, it is not because it relies upon its strength and its well-being, but because it knows its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life; everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure; the desires, the regret, the sorrows, and the joys of the time produce nothing that is visible or permanent, like the passions of old men which terminate in impotence. we have, then, abandoned whatever advantages the old state of things afforded, without receiving any compensation from our present condition; we have destroyed an aristocracy, and we seem inclined to survey its ruins with complacency, and to fix our abode in the midst of them. the phenomena which the intellectual world presents are not less deplorable. the democracy of france, checked in its course or abandoned to its lawless passions, has overthrown whatever crossed its path, and has shaken all that it has not destroyed. its empire on society has not been gradually introduced or peaceably established, but it has constantly advanced in the midst of disorder and the agitation of a conflict. in the heat of the struggle each partisan is hurried beyond the limits of his opinions by the opinions and the excesses of his opponents, until he loses sight of the end of his exertions, and holds a language which disguises his real sentiments or secret instincts. hence arises the strange confusion which we are witnessing. i cannot recall to my mind a passage in history more worthy of sorrow and of pity than the scenes which are happening under our eyes; it is as if the natural bond which unites the opinions of man to his tastes and his actions to his principles was now broken; the sympathy which has always been acknowledged between the feelings and the ideas of mankind appears to be dissolved, and all the laws of moral analogy to be abolished. zealous christians may be found amongst us whose minds are nurtured in the love and knowledge of a future life, and who readily espouse the cause of human liberty as the source of all moral greatness. christianity, which has declared that all men are equal in the sight of god, will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eye of the law. but, by a singular concourse of events, religion is entangled in those institutions which democracy assails, and it is not unfrequently brought to reject the equality it loves, and to curse that cause of liberty as a foe which it might hallow by its alliance. by the side of these religious men i discern others whose looks are turned to the earth more than to heaven; they are the partisans of liberty, not only as the source of the noblest virtues, but more especially as the root of all solid advantages; and they sincerely desire to extend its sway, and to impart its blessings to mankind. it is natural that they should hasten to invoke the assistance of religion, for they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith; but they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and they inquire no further; some of them attack it openly, and the remainder are afraid to defend it. in former ages slavery has been advocated by the venal and slavish-minded, whilst the independent and the warm-hearted were struggling without hope to save the liberties of mankind. but men of high and generous characters are now to be met with, whose opinions are at variance with their inclinations, and who praise that servility which they have themselves never known. others, on the contrary, speak in the name of liberty, as if they were able to feel its sanctity and its majesty, and loudly claim for humanity those rights which they have always disowned. there are virtuous and peaceful individuals whose pure morality, quiet habits, affluence, and talents fit them to be the leaders of the surrounding population; their love of their country is sincere, and they are prepared to make the greatest sacrifices to its welfare, but they confound the abuses of civilization with its benefits, and the idea of evil is inseparable in their minds from that of novelty. not far from this class is another party, whose object is to materialize mankind, to hit upon what is expedient without heeding what is just, to acquire knowledge without faith, and prosperity apart from virtue; assuming the title of the champions of modern civilization, and placing themselves in a station which they usurp with insolence, and from which they are driven by their own unworthiness. where are we then? the religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and of intelligence. has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a contempt of law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? i cannot, however, believe that the creator made man to leave him in an endless struggle with the intellectual miseries which surround us: god destines a calmer and a more certain future to the communities of europe; i am unacquainted with his designs, but i shall not cease to believe in them because i cannot fathom them, and i had rather mistrust my own capacity than his justice. there is a country in the world where the great revolution which i am speaking of seems nearly to have reached its natural limits; it has been effected with ease and simplicity, say rather that this country has attained the consequences of the democratic revolution which we are undergoing without having experienced the revolution itself. the emigrants who fixed themselves on the shores of america in the beginning of the seventeenth century severed the democratic principle from all the principles which repressed it in the old communities of europe, and transplanted it unalloyed to the new world. it has there been allowed to spread in perfect freedom, and to put forth its consequences in the laws by influencing the manners of the country. it appears to me beyond a doubt that sooner or later we shall arrive, like the americans, at an almost complete equality of conditions. but i do not conclude from this that we shall ever be necessarily led to draw the same political consequences which the americans have derived from a similar social organization. i am far from supposing that they have chosen the only form of government which a democracy may adopt; but the identity of the efficient cause of laws and manners in the two countries is sufficient to account for the immense interest we have in becoming acquainted with its effects in each of them. it is not, then, merely to satisfy a legitimate curiosity that i have examined america; my wish has been to find instruction by which we may ourselves profit. whoever should imagine that i have intended to write a panegyric will perceive that such was not my design; nor has it been my object to advocate any form of government in particular, for i am of opinion that absolute excellence is rarely to be found in any legislation; i have not even affected to discuss whether the social revolution, which i believe to be irresistible, is advantageous or prejudicial to mankind; i have acknowledged this revolution as a fact already accomplished or on the eve of its accomplishment; and i have selected the nation, from amongst those which have undergone it, in which its development has been the most peaceful and the most complete, in order to discern its natural consequences, and, if it be possible, to distinguish the means by which it may be rendered profitable. i confess that in america i saw more than america; i sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress. in the first part of this work i have attempted to show the tendency given to the laws by the democracy of america, which is abandoned almost without restraint to its instinctive propensities, and to exhibit the course it prescribes to the government and the influence it exercises on affairs. i have sought to discover the evils and the advantages which it produces. i have examined the precautions used by the americans to direct it, as well as those which they have not adopted, and i have undertaken to point out the causes which enable it to govern society. i do not know whether i have succeeded in making known what i saw in america, but i am certain that such has been my sincere desire, and that i have never, knowingly, moulded facts to ideas, instead of ideas to facts. whenever a point could be established by the aid of written documents, i have had recourse to the original text, and to the most authentic and approved works. i have cited my authorities in the notes, and anyone may refer to them. whenever an opinion, a political custom, or a remark on the manners of the country was concerned, i endeavored to consult the most enlightened men i met with. if the point in question was important or doubtful, i was not satisfied with one testimony, but i formed my opinion on the evidence of several witnesses. here the reader must necessarily believe me upon my word. i could frequently have quoted names which are either known to him, or which deserve to be so, in proof of what i advance; but i have carefully abstained from this practice. a stranger frequently hears important truths at the fire-side of his host, which the latter would perhaps conceal from the ear of friendship; he consoles himself with his guest for the silence to which he is restricted, and the shortness of the traveller's stay takes away all fear of his indiscretion. i carefully noted every conversation of this nature as soon as it occurred, but these notes will never leave my writing-case; i had rather injure the success of my statements than add my name to the list of those strangers who repay the generous hospitality they have received by subsequent chagrin and annoyance. i am aware that, notwithstanding my care, nothing will be easier than to criticise this book, if anyone ever chooses to criticise it. those readers who may examine it closely will discover the fundamental idea which connects the several parts together. but the diversity of the subjects i have had to treat is exceedingly great, and it will not be difficult to oppose an isolated fact to the body of facts which i quote, or an isolated idea to the body of ideas i put forth. i hope to be read in the spirit which has guided my labors, and that my book may be judged by the general impression it leaves, as i have formed my own judgment not on any single reason, but upon the mass of evidence. it must not be forgotten that the author who wishes to be understood is obliged to push all his ideas to their utmost theoretical consequences, and often to the verge of what is false or impracticable; for if it be necessary sometimes to quit the rules of logic in active life, such is not the case in discourse, and a man finds that almost as many difficulties spring from inconsistency of language as usually arise from inconsistency of conduct. i conclude by pointing out myself what many readers will consider the principal defect of the work. this book is written to favor no particular views, and in composing it i have entertained no designs of serving or attacking any party; i have undertaken not to see differently, but to look further than parties, and whilst they are busied for the morrow i have turned my thoughts to the future. chapter i: exterior form of north america chapter summary north america divided into two vast regions, one inclining towards the pole, the other towards the equator--valley of the mississippi--traces of the revolutions of the globe--shore of the atlantic ocean where the english colonies were founded--difference in the appearance of north and of south america at the time of their discovery--forests of north america--prairies--wandering tribes of natives--their outward appearance, manners, and language--traces of an unknown people. exterior form of north america north america presents in its external form certain general features which it is easy to discriminate at the first glance. a sort of methodical order seems to have regulated the separation of land and water, mountains and valleys. a simple, but grand, arrangement is discoverable amidst the confusion of objects and the prodigious variety of scenes. this continent is divided, almost equally, into two vast regions, one of which is bounded on the north by the arctic pole, and by the two great oceans on the east and west. it stretches towards the south, forming a triangle whose irregular sides meet at length below the great lakes of canada. the second region begins where the other terminates, and includes all the remainder of the continent. the one slopes gently towards the pole, the other towards the equator. the territory comprehended in the first region descends towards the north with so imperceptible a slope that it may almost be said to form a level plain. within the bounds of this immense tract of country there are neither high mountains nor deep valleys. streams meander through it irregularly: great rivers mix their currents, separate and meet again, disperse and form vast marshes, losing all trace of their channels in the labyrinth of waters they have themselves created; and thus, at length, after innumerable windings, fall into the polar seas. the great lakes which bound this first region are not walled in, like most of those in the old world, between hills and rocks. their banks are flat, and rise but a few feet above the level of their waters; each of them thus forming a vast bowl filled to the brim. the slightest change in the structure of the globe would cause their waters to rush either towards the pole or to the tropical sea. the second region is more varied on its surface, and better suited for the habitation of man. two long chains of mountains divide it from one extreme to the other; the alleghany ridge takes the form of the shores of the atlantic ocean; the other is parallel with the pacific. the space which lies between these two chains of mountains contains , , square miles. *a its surface is therefore about six times as great as that of france. this vast territory, however, forms a single valley, one side of which descends gradually from the rounded summits of the alleghanies, while the other rises in an uninterrupted course towards the tops of the rocky mountains. at the bottom of the valley flows an immense river, into which the various streams issuing from the mountains fall from all parts. in memory of their native land, the french formerly called this river the st. louis. the indians, in their pompous language, have named it the father of waters, or the mississippi. [footnote a: darby's "view of the united states."] the mississippi takes its source above the limit of the two great regions of which i have spoken, not far from the highest point of the table-land where they unite. near the same spot rises another river, *b which empties itself into the polar seas. the course of the mississippi is at first dubious: it winds several times towards the north, from whence it rose; and at length, after having been delayed in lakes and marshes, it flows slowly onwards to the south. sometimes quietly gliding along the argillaceous bed which nature has assigned to it, sometimes swollen by storms, the mississippi waters , miles in its course. *c at the distance of , miles from its mouth this river attains an average depth of fifteen feet; and it is navigated by vessels of tons burden for a course of nearly miles. fifty-seven large navigable rivers contribute to swell the waters of the mississippi; amongst others, the missouri, which traverses a space of , miles; the arkansas of , miles, the red river , miles, four whose course is from to , miles in length, viz., the illinois, the st. peter's, the st. francis, and the moingona; besides a countless multitude of rivulets which unite from all parts their tributary streams. [footnote b: the red river.] [footnote c: warden's "description of the united states."] the valley which is watered by the mississippi seems formed to be the bed of this mighty river, which, like a god of antiquity, dispenses both good and evil in its course. on the shores of the stream nature displays an inexhaustible fertility; in proportion as you recede from its banks, the powers of vegetation languish, the soil becomes poor, and the plants that survive have a sickly growth. nowhere have the great convulsions of the globe left more evident traces than in the valley of the mississippi; the whole aspect of the country shows the powerful effects of water, both by its fertility and by its barrenness. the waters of the primeval ocean accumulated enormous beds of vegetable mould in the valley, which they levelled as they retired. upon the right shore of the river are seen immense plains, as smooth as if the husbandman had passed over them with his roller. as you approach the mountains the soil becomes more and more unequal and sterile; the ground is, as it were, pierced in a thousand places by primitive rocks, which appear like the bones of a skeleton whose flesh is partly consumed. the surface of the earth is covered with a granite sand and huge irregular masses of stone, among which a few plants force their growth, and give the appearance of a green field covered with the ruins of a vast edifice. these stones and this sand discover, on examination, a perfect analogy with those which compose the arid and broken summits of the rocky mountains. the flood of waters which washed the soil to the bottom of the valley afterwards carried away portions of the rocks themselves; and these, dashed and bruised against the neighboring cliffs, were left scattered like wrecks at their feet. *d the valley of the mississippi is, upon the whole, the most magnificent dwelling-place prepared by god for man's abode; and yet it may be said that at present it is but a mighty desert. [footnote d: see appendix, a.] on the eastern side of the alleghanies, between the base of these mountains and the atlantic ocean, there lies a long ridge of rocks and sand, which the sea appears to have left behind as it retired. the mean breadth of this territory does not exceed one hundred miles; but it is about nine hundred miles in length. this part of the american continent has a soil which offers every obstacle to the husbandman, and its vegetation is scanty and unvaried. upon this inhospitable coast the first united efforts of human industry were made. the tongue of arid land was the cradle of those english colonies which were destined one day to become the united states of america. the centre of power still remains here; whilst in the backwoods the true elements of the great people to whom the future control of the continent belongs are gathering almost in secrecy together. when the europeans first landed on the shores of the west indies, and afterwards on the coast of south america, they thought themselves transported into those fabulous regions of which poets had sung. the sea sparkled with phosphoric light, and the extraordinary transparency of its waters discovered to the view of the navigator all that had hitherto been hidden in the deep abyss. *e here and there appeared little islands perfumed with odoriferous plants, and resembling baskets of flowers floating on the tranquil surface of the ocean. every object which met the sight, in this enchanting region, seemed prepared to satisfy the wants or contribute to the pleasures of man. almost all the trees were loaded with nourishing fruits, and those which were useless as food delighted the eye by the brilliancy and variety of their colors. in groves of fragrant lemon-trees, wild figs, flowering myrtles, acacias, and oleanders, which were hung with festoons of various climbing plants, covered with flowers, a multitude of birds unknown in europe displayed their bright plumage, glittering with purple and azure, and mingled their warbling with the harmony of a world teeming with life and motion. *f underneath this brilliant exterior death was concealed. but the air of these climates had so enervating an influence that man, absorbed by present enjoyment, was rendered regardless of the future. [footnote e: malte brun tells us (vol. v. p. ) that the water of the caribbean sea is so transparent that corals and fish are discernible at a depth of sixty fathoms. the ship seemed to float in air, the navigator became giddy as his eye penetrated through the crystal flood, and beheld submarine gardens, or beds of shells, or gilded fishes gliding among tufts and thickets of seaweed.] [footnote f: see appendix, b.] north america appeared under a very different aspect; there everything was grave, serious, and solemn: it seemed created to be the domain of intelligence, as the south was that of sensual delight. a turbulent and foggy ocean washed its shores. it was girt round by a belt of granite rocks, or by wide tracts of sand. the foliage of its woods was dark and gloomy, for they were composed of firs, larches, evergreen oaks, wild olive-trees, and laurels. beyond this outer belt lay the thick shades of the central forest, where the largest trees which are produced in the two hemispheres grow side by side. the plane, the catalpa, the sugar-maple, and the virginian poplar mingled their branches with those of the oak, the beech, and the lime. in these, as in the forests of the old world, destruction was perpetually going on. the ruins of vegetation were heaped upon each other; but there was no laboring hand to remove them, and their decay was not rapid enough to make room for the continual work of reproduction. climbing plants, grasses, and other herbs forced their way through the mass of dying trees; they crept along their bending trunks, found nourishment in their dusty cavities, and a passage beneath the lifeless bark. thus decay gave its assistance to life, and their respective productions were mingled together. the depths of these forests were gloomy and obscure, and a thousand rivulets, undirected in their course by human industry, preserved in them a constant moisture. it was rare to meet with flowers, wild fruits, or birds beneath their shades. the fall of a tree overthrown by age, the rushing torrent of a cataract, the lowing of the buffalo, and the howling of the wind were the only sounds which broke the silence of nature. to the east of the great river, the woods almost disappeared; in their stead were seen prairies of immense extent. whether nature in her infinite variety had denied the germs of trees to these fertile plains, or whether they had once been covered with forests, subsequently destroyed by the hand of man, is a question which neither tradition nor scientific research has been able to resolve. these immense deserts were not, however, devoid of human inhabitants. some wandering tribes had been for ages scattered among the forest shades or the green pastures of the prairie. from the mouth of the st. lawrence to the delta of the mississippi, and from the atlantic to the pacific ocean, these savages possessed certain points of resemblance which bore witness of their common origin; but at the same time they differed from all other known races of men: *g they were neither white like the europeans, nor yellow like most of the asiatics, nor black like the negroes. their skin was reddish brown, their hair long and shining, their lips thin, and their cheekbones very prominent. the languages spoken by the north american tribes are various as far as regarded their words, but they were subject to the same grammatical rules. these rules differed in several points from such as had been observed to govern the origin of language. the idiom of the americans seemed to be the product of new combinations, and bespoke an effort of the understanding of which the indians of our days would be incapable. *h [footnote g: with the progress of discovery some resemblance has been found to exist between the physical conformation, the language, and the habits of the indians of north america, and those of the tongous, mantchous, mongols, tartars, and other wandering tribes of asia. the land occupied by these tribes is not very distant from behring's strait, which allows of the supposition, that at a remote period they gave inhabitants to the desert continent of america. but this is a point which has not yet been clearly elucidated by science. see malte brun, vol. v.; the works of humboldt; fischer, "conjecture sur l'origine des americains"; adair, "history of the american indians."] [footnote h: see appendix, c.] the social state of these tribes differed also in many respects from all that was seen in the old world. they seemed to have multiplied freely in the midst of their deserts without coming in contact with other races more civilized than their own. accordingly, they exhibited none of those indistinct, incoherent notions of right and wrong, none of that deep corruption of manners, which is usually joined with ignorance and rudeness among nations which, after advancing to civilization, have relapsed into a state of barbarism. the indian was indebted to no one but himself; his virtues, his vices, and his prejudices were his own work; he had grown up in the wild independence of his nature. if, in polished countries, the lowest of the people are rude and uncivil, it is not merely because they are poor and ignorant, but that, being so, they are in daily contact with rich and enlightened men. the sight of their own hard lot and of their weakness, which is daily contrasted with the happiness and power of some of their fellow-creatures, excites in their hearts at the same time the sentiments of anger and of fear: the consciousness of their inferiority and of their dependence irritates while it humiliates them. this state of mind displays itself in their manners and language; they are at once insolent and servile. the truth of this is easily proved by observation; the people are more rude in aristocratic countries than elsewhere, in opulent cities than in rural districts. in those places where the rich and powerful are assembled together the weak and the indigent feel themselves oppressed by their inferior condition. unable to perceive a single chance of regaining their equality, they give up to despair, and allow themselves to fall below the dignity of human nature. this unfortunate effect of the disparity of conditions is not observable in savage life: the indians, although they are ignorant and poor, are equal and free. at the period when europeans first came among them the natives of north america were ignorant of the value of riches, and indifferent to the enjoyments which civilized man procures to himself by their means. nevertheless there was nothing coarse in their demeanor; they practised an habitual reserve and a kind of aristocratic politeness. mild and hospitable when at peace, though merciless in war beyond any known degree of human ferocity, the indian would expose himself to die of hunger in order to succor the stranger who asked admittance by night at the door of his hut; yet he could tear in pieces with his hands the still quivering limbs of his prisoner. the famous republics of antiquity never gave examples of more unshaken courage, more haughty spirits, or more intractable love of independence than were hidden in former times among the wild forests of the new world. *i the europeans produced no great impression when they landed upon the shores of north america; their presence engendered neither envy nor fear. what influence could they possess over such men as we have described? the indian could live without wants, suffer without complaint, and pour out his death-song at the stake. *j like all the other members of the great human family, these savages believed in the existence of a better world, and adored under different names, god, the creator of the universe. their notions on the great intellectual truths were in general simple and philosophical. *k [footnote i: we learn from president jefferson's "notes upon virginia," p. , that among the iroquois, when attacked by a superior force, aged men refused to fly or to survive the destruction of their country; and they braved death like the ancient romans when their capital was sacked by the gauls. further on, p. , he tells us that there is no example of an indian who, having fallen into the hands of his enemies, begged for his life; on the contrary, the captive sought to obtain death at the hands of his conquerors by the use of insult and provocation.] [footnote j: see "histoire de la louisiane," by lepage dupratz; charlevoix, "histoire de la nouvelle france"; "lettres du rev. g. hecwelder;" "transactions of the american philosophical society," v. i; jefferson's "notes on virginia," pp. - . what is said by jefferson is of especial weight, on account of the personal merit of the writer, of his peculiar position, and of the matter-of-fact age in which he lived.] [footnote k: see appendix, d.] although we have here traced the character of a primitive people, yet it cannot be doubted that another people, more civilized and more advanced in all respects, had preceded it in the same regions. an obscure tradition which prevailed among the indians to the north of the atlantic informs us that these very tribes formerly dwelt on the west side of the mississippi. along the banks of the ohio, and throughout the central valley, there are frequently found, at this day, tumuli raised by the hands of men. on exploring these heaps of earth to their centre, it is usual to meet with human bones, strange instruments, arms and utensils of all kinds, made of metal, or destined for purposes unknown to the present race. the indians of our time are unable to give any information relative to the history of this unknown people. neither did those who lived three hundred years ago, when america was first discovered, leave any accounts from which even an hypothesis could be formed. tradition--that perishable, yet ever renewed monument of the pristine world--throws no light upon the subject. it is an undoubted fact, however, that in this part of the globe thousands of our fellow-beings had lived. when they came hither, what was their origin, their destiny, their history, and how they perished, no one can tell. how strange does it appear that nations have existed, and afterwards so completely disappeared from the earth that the remembrance of their very names is effaced; their languages are lost; their glory is vanished like a sound without an echo; though perhaps there is not one which has not left behind it some tomb in memory of its passage! the most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man. although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by europeans to have formed one great desert. the indians occupied without possessing it. it is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of north america lived by the produce of the chase. their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. the ruin of these nations began from the day when europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing the completion of it. they seem to have been placed by providence amidst the riches of the new world to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them. those coasts, so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the mississippi; the whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation, yet unborn. in that land the great experiment was to be made, by civilized man, of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past. chapter ii: origin of the anglo-americans--part i chapter summary utility of knowing the origin of nations in order to understand their social condition and their laws--america the only country in which the starting-point of a great people has been clearly observable--in what respects all who emigrated to british america were similar--in what they differed--remark applicable to all europeans who established themselves on the shores of the new world--colonization of virginia--colonization of new england--original character of the first inhabitants of new england--their arrival--their first laws--their social contract--penal code borrowed from the hebrew legislation--religious fervor--republican spirit--intimate union of the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty. origin of the anglo-americans, and its importance in relation to their future condition. after the birth of a human being his early years are obscurely spent in the toils or pleasures of childhood. as he grows up the world receives him, when his manhood begins, and he enters into contact with his fellows. he is then studied for the first time, and it is imagined that the germ of the vices and the virtues of his maturer years is then formed. this, if i am not mistaken, is a great error. we must begin higher up; we must watch the infant in its mother's arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; the first occurrences which he witnesses; we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which will rule his life. the entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child. the growth of nations presents something analogous to this: they all bear some marks of their origin; and the circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their rise affect the whole term of their being. if we were able to go back to the elements of states, and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, i doubt not that we should discover the primal cause of the prejudices, the habits, the ruling passions, and, in short, of all that constitutes what is called the national character; we should then find the explanation of certain customs which now seem at variance with the prevailing manners; of such laws as conflict with established principles; and of such incoherent opinions as are here and there to be met with in society, like those fragments of broken chains which we sometimes see hanging from the vault of an edifice, and supporting nothing. this might explain the destinies of certain nations, which seem borne on by an unknown force to ends of which they themselves are ignorant. but hitherto facts have been wanting to researches of this kind: the spirit of inquiry has only come upon communities in their latter days; and when they at length contemplated their origin, time had already obscured it, or ignorance and pride adorned it with truth-concealing fables. america is the only country in which it has been possible to witness the natural and tranquil growth of society, and where the influences exercised on the future condition of states by their origin is clearly distinguishable. at the period when the peoples of europe landed in the new world their national characteristics were already completely formed; each of them had a physiognomy of its own; and as they had already attained that stage of civilization at which men are led to study themselves, they have transmitted to us a faithful picture of their opinions, their manners, and their laws. the men of the sixteenth century are almost as well known to us as our contemporaries. america, consequently, exhibits in the broad light of day the phenomena which the ignorance or rudeness of earlier ages conceals from our researches. near enough to the time when the states of america were founded, to be accurately acquainted with their elements, and sufficiently removed from that period to judge of some of their results, the men of our own day seem destined to see further than their predecessors into the series of human events. providence has given us a torch which our forefathers did not possess, and has allowed us to discern fundamental causes in the history of the world which the obscurity of the past concealed from them. if we carefully examine the social and political state of america, after having studied its history, we shall remain perfectly convinced that not an opinion, not a custom, not a law, i may even say not an event, is upon record which the origin of that people will not explain. the readers of this book will find the germ of all that is to follow in the present chapter, and the key to almost the whole work. the emigrants who came, at different periods to occupy the territory now covered by the american union differed from each other in many respects; their aim was not the same, and they governed themselves on different principles. these men had, however, certain features in common, and they were all placed in an analogous situation. the tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind. all the emigrants spoke the same tongue; they were all offsets from the same people. born in a country which had been agitated for centuries by the struggles of faction, and in which all parties had been obliged in their turn to place themselves under the protection of the laws, their political education had been perfected in this rude school, and they were more conversant with the notions of right and the principles of true freedom than the greater part of their european contemporaries. at the period of their first emigrations the parish system, that fruitful germ of free institutions, was deeply rooted in the habits of the english; and with it the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people had been introduced into the bosom of the monarchy of the house of tudor. the religious quarrels which have agitated the christian world were then rife. england had plunged into the new order of things with headlong vehemence. the character of its inhabitants, which had always been sedate and reflective, became argumentative and austere. general information had been increased by intellectual debate, and the mind had received a deeper cultivation. whilst religion was the topic of discussion, the morals of the people were reformed. all these national features are more or less discoverable in the physiognomy of those adventurers who came to seek a new home on the opposite shores of the atlantic. another remark, to which we shall hereafter have occasion to recur, is applicable not only to the english, but to the french, the spaniards, and all the europeans who successively established themselves in the new world. all these european colonies contained the elements, if not the development, of a complete democracy. two causes led to this result. it may safely be advanced, that on leaving the mother-country the emigrants had in general no notion of superiority over one another. the happy and the powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune. it happened, however, on several occasions, that persons of rank were driven to america by political and religious quarrels. laws were made to establish a gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of america was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. to bring that refractory land into cultivation, the constant and interested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was prepared, its produce was found to be insufficient to enrich a master and a farmer at the same time. the land was then naturally broken up into small portions, which the proprietor cultivated for himself. land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. a nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are territorial there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor. all the british colonies had then a great degree of similarity at the epoch of their settlement. all of them, from their first beginning, seemed destined to witness the growth, not of the aristocratic liberty of their mother-country, but of that freedom of the middle and lower orders of which the history of the world had as yet furnished no complete example. in this general uniformity several striking differences were however discernible, which it is necessary to point out. two branches may be distinguished in the anglo-american family, which have hitherto grown up without entirely commingling; the one in the south, the other in the north. virginia received the first english colony; the emigrants took possession of it in . the idea that mines of gold and silver are the sources of national wealth was at that time singularly prevalent in europe; a fatal delusion, which has done more to impoverish the nations which adopted it, and has cost more lives in america, than the united influence of war and bad laws. the men sent to virginia *a were seekers of gold, adventurers, without resources and without character, whose turbulent and restless spirit endangered the infant colony, *b and rendered its progress uncertain. the artisans and agriculturists arrived afterwards; and, although they were a more moral and orderly race of men, they were in nowise above the level of the inferior classes in england. *c no lofty conceptions, no intellectual system, directed the foundation of these new settlements. the colony was scarcely established when slavery was introduced, *d and this was the main circumstance which has exercised so prodigious an influence on the character, the laws, and all the future prospects of the south. slavery, as we shall afterwards show, dishonors labor; it introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. it enervates the powers of the mind, and benumbs the activity of man. the influence of slavery, united to the english character, explains the manners and the social condition of the southern states. [footnote a: the charter granted by the crown of england in stipulated, amongst other conditions, that the adventurers should pay to the crown a fifth of the produce of all gold and silver mines. see marshall's "life of washington," vol. i. pp. - .] [footnote b: a large portion of the adventurers, says stith ("history of virginia"), were unprincipled young men of family, whom their parents were glad to ship off, discharged servants, fraudulent bankrupts, or debauchees; and others of the same class, people more apt to pillage and destroy than to assist the settlement, were the seditious chiefs, who easily led this band into every kind of extravagance and excess. see for the history of virginia the following works:-- "history of virginia, from the first settlements in the year ," by smith. "history of virginia," by william stith. "history of virginia, from the earliest period," by beverley.] [footnote c: it was not till some time later that a certain number of rich english capitalists came to fix themselves in the colony.] [footnote d: slavery was introduced about the year by a dutch vessel which landed twenty negroes on the banks of the river james. see chalmer.] in the north, the same english foundation was modified by the most opposite shades of character; and here i may be allowed to enter into some details. the two or three main ideas which constitute the basis of the social theory of the united states were first combined in the northern english colonies, more generally denominated the states of new england. *e the principles of new england spread at first to the neighboring states; they then passed successively to the more distant ones; and at length they imbued the whole confederation. they now extend their influence beyond its limits over the whole american world. the civilization of new england has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after it has diffused its warmth around, tinges the distant horizon with its glow. [footnote e: the states of new england are those situated to the east of the hudson; they are now six in number: , connecticut; , rhode island; , massachusetts; , vermont; , new hampshire; , maine.] the foundation of new england was a novel spectacle, and all the circumstances attending it were singular and original. the large majority of colonies have been first inhabited either by men without education and without resources, driven by their poverty and their misconduct from the land which gave them birth, or by speculators and adventurers greedy of gain. some settlements cannot even boast so honorable an origin; st. domingo was founded by buccaneers; and the criminal courts of england originally supplied the population of australia. the settlers who established themselves on the shores of new england all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. their union on the soil of america at once presented the singular phenomenon of a society containing neither lords nor common people, neither rich nor poor. these men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any european nation of our own time. all, without a single exception, had received a good education, and many of them were known in europe for their talents and their acquirements. the other colonies had been founded by adventurers without family; the emigrants of new england brought with them the best elements of order and morality--they landed in the desert accompanied by their wives and children. but what most especially distinguished them was the aim of their undertaking. they had not been obliged by necessity to leave their country; the social position they abandoned was one to be regretted, and their means of subsistence were certain. nor did they cross the atlantic to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; the call which summoned them from the comforts of their homes was purely intellectual; and in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile their object was the triumph of an idea. the emigrants, or, as they deservedly styled themselves, the pilgrims, belonged to that english sect the austerity of whose principles had acquired for them the name of puritans. puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories. it was this tendency which had aroused its most dangerous adversaries. persecuted by the government of the mother-country, and disgusted by the habits of a society opposed to the rigor of their own principles, the puritans went forth to seek some rude and unfrequented part of the world, where they could live according to their own opinions, and worship god in freedom. a few quotations will throw more light upon the spirit of these pious adventures than all we can say of them. nathaniel morton, *f the historian of the first years of the settlement, thus opens his subject: [footnote f: "new england's memorial," p. ; boston, . see also "hutchinson's history," vol. ii. p. .] "gentle reader,--i have for some length of time looked upon it as a duty incumbent, especially on the immediate successors of those that have had so large experience of those many memorable and signal demonstrations of god's goodness, viz., the first beginners of this plantation in new england, to commit to writing his gracious dispensations on that behalf; having so many inducements thereunto, not onely otherwise but so plentifully in the sacred scriptures: that so, what we have seen, and what our fathers have told us (psalm lxxviii. , ), we may not hide from our children, showing to the generations to come the praises of the lord; that especially the seed of abraham his servant, and the children of jacob his chosen (psalm cv. , ), may remember his marvellous works in the beginning and progress of the planting of new england, his wonders and the judgments of his mouth; how that god brought a vine into this wilderness; that he cast out the heathen, and planted it; that he made room for it and caused it to take deep root; and it filled the land (psalm lxxx. , ). and not onely so, but also that he hath guided his people by his strength to his holy habitation and planted them in the mountain of his inheritance in respect of precious gospel enjoyments: and that as especially god may have the glory of all unto whom it is most due; so also some rays of glory may reach the names of those blessed saints that were the main instruments and the beginning of this happy enterprise." it is impossible to read this opening paragraph without an involuntary feeling of religious awe; it breathes the very savor of gospel antiquity. the sincerity of the author heightens his power of language. the band which to his eyes was a mere party of adventurers gone forth to seek their fortune beyond seas appears to the reader as the germ of a great nation wafted by providence to a predestined shore. the author thus continues his narrative of the departure of the first pilgrims:-- "so they left that goodly and pleasant city of leyden, *g which had been their resting-place for above eleven years; but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country, where god hath prepared for them a city (heb. xi. ), and therein quieted their spirits. when they came to delfs-haven they found the ship and all things ready; and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. one night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and christian discourse, and other real expressions of true christian love. the next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the dutch strangers that stood on the key as spectators could not refrain from tears. but the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loth to depart, their reverend pastor falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with most fervent prayers unto the lord and his blessing; and then, with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them." [footnote g: the emigrants were, for the most part, godly christians from the north of england, who had quitted their native country because they were "studious of reformation, and entered into covenant to walk with one another according to the primitive pattern of the word of god." they emigrated to holland, and settled in the city of leyden in , where they abode, being lovingly respected by the dutch, for many years: they left it in for several reasons, the last of which was, that their posterity would in a few generations become dutch, and so lose their interest in the english nation; they being desirous rather to enlarge his majesty's dominions, and to live under their natural prince.--translator's note.] the emigrants were about in number, including the women and the children. their object was to plant a colony on the shores of the hudson; but after having been driven about for some time in the atlantic ocean, they were forced to land on that arid coast of new england which is now the site of the town of plymouth. the rock is still shown on which the pilgrims disembarked. *h [footnote h: this rock is become an object of veneration in the united states. i have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the union. does not this sufficiently show how entirely all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic: and what is become of the gateways of a thousand palaces?] "but before we pass on," continues our historian, "let the reader with me make a pause and seriously consider this poor people's present condition, the more to be raised up to admiration of god's goodness towards them in their preservation: for being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectation, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns to repair unto to seek for succour: and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts. besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts, and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew; if they looked behind them, there was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world." it must not be imagined that the piety of the puritans was of a merely speculative kind, or that it took no cognizance of the course of worldly affairs. puritanism, as i have already remarked, was scarcely less a political than a religious doctrine. no sooner had the emigrants landed on the barren coast described by nathaniel morton than it was their first care to constitute a society, by passing the following act: "in the name of god. amen. we, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord king james, etc., etc., having undertaken for the glory of god, and advancement of the christian faith, and the honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of virginia; do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of god and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politick, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid: and by virtue hereof do enact, constitute and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony: unto which we promise all due submission and obedience," etc. *i [footnote i: the emigrants who founded the state of rhode island in , those who landed at new haven in , the first settlers in connecticut in , and the founders of providence in , began in like manner by drawing up a social contract, which was acceded to by all the interested parties. see "pitkin's history," pp. and .] this happened in , and from that time forwards the emigration went on. the religious and political passions which ravaged the british empire during the whole reign of charles i drove fresh crowds of sectarians every year to the shores of america. in england the stronghold of puritanism was in the middle classes, and it was from the middle classes that the majority of the emigrants came. the population of new england increased rapidly; and whilst the hierarchy of rank despotically classed the inhabitants of the mother-country, the colony continued to present the novel spectacle of a community homogeneous in all its parts. a democracy, more perfect than any which antiquity had dreamt of, started in full size and panoply from the midst of an ancient feudal society. chapter ii: origin of the anglo-americans--part ii the english government was not dissatisfied with an emigration which removed the elements of fresh discord and of further revolutions. on the contrary, everything was done to encourage it, and great exertions were made to mitigate the hardships of those who sought a shelter from the rigor of their country's laws on the soil of america. it seemed as if new england was a region given up to the dreams of fancy and the unrestrained experiments of innovators. the english colonies (and this is one of the main causes of their prosperity) have always enjoyed more internal freedom and more political independence than the colonies of other nations; but this principle of liberty was nowhere more extensively applied than in the states of new england. it was generally allowed at that period that the territories of the new world belonged to that european nation which had been the first to discover them. nearly the whole coast of north america thus became a british possession towards the end of the sixteenth century. the means used by the english government to people these new domains were of several kinds; the king sometimes appointed a governor of his own choice, who ruled a portion of the new world in the name and under the immediate orders of the crown; *j this is the colonial system adopted by other countries of europe. sometimes grants of certain tracts were made by the crown to an individual or to a company, *k in which case all the civil and political power fell into the hands of one or more persons, who, under the inspection and control of the crown, sold the lands and governed the inhabitants. lastly, a third system consisted in allowing a certain number of emigrants to constitute a political society under the protection of the mother-country, and to govern themselves in whatever was not contrary to her laws. this mode of colonization, so remarkably favorable to liberty, was only adopted in new england. *l [footnote j: this was the case in the state of new york.] [footnote k: maryland, the carolinas, pennsylvania, and new jersey were in this situation. see "pitkin's history," vol. i. pp. - .] [footnote l: see the work entitled "historical collection of state papers and other authentic documents intended as materials for a history of the united states of america, by ebenezer hasard. philadelphia, ," for a great number of documents relating to the commencement of the colonies, which are valuable from their contents and their authenticity: amongst them are the various charters granted by the king of england, and the first acts of the local governments. see also the analysis of all these charters given by mr. story, judge of the supreme court of the united states, in the introduction to his "commentary on the constitution of the united states." it results from these documents that the principles of representative government and the external forms of political liberty were introduced into all the colonies at their origin. these principles were more fully acted upon in the north than in the south, but they existed everywhere.] in *m a charter of this kind was granted by charles i to the emigrants who went to form the colony of massachusetts. but, in general, charters were not given to the colonies of new england till they had acquired a certain existence. plymouth, providence, new haven, the state of connecticut, and that of rhode island *n were founded without the co-operation and almost without the knowledge of the mother-country. the new settlers did not derive their incorporation from the seat of the empire, although they did not deny its supremacy; they constituted a society of their own accord, and it was not till thirty or forty years afterwards, under charles ii. that their existence was legally recognized by a royal charter. [footnote m: see "pitkin's history," p, . see the "history of the colony of massachusetts bay," by hutchinson, vol. i. p. .] [footnote n: see "pitkin's history," pp. , .] this frequently renders its it difficult to detect the link which connected the emigrants with the land of their forefathers in studying the earliest historical and legislative records of new england. they exercised the rights of sovereignty; they named their magistrates, concluded peace or declared war, made police regulations, and enacted laws as if their allegiance was due only to god. *o nothing can be more curious and, at the same time more instructive, than the legislation of that period; it is there that the solution of the great social problem which the united states now present to the world is to be found. [footnote o: the inhabitants of massachusetts had deviated from the forms which are preserved in the criminal and civil procedure of england; in the decrees of justice were not yet headed by the royal style. see hutchinson, vol. i. p. .] amongst these documents we shall notice, as especially characteristic, the code of laws promulgated by the little state of connecticut in . *p the legislators of connecticut *q begin with the penal laws, and, strange to say, they borrow their provisions from the text of holy writ. "whosoever shall worship any other god than the lord," says the preamble of the code, "shall surely be put to death." this is followed by ten or twelve enactments of the same kind, copied verbatim from the books of exodus, leviticus, and deuteronomy. blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, *r and rape were punished with death; an outrage offered by a son to his parents was to be expiated by the same penalty. the legislation of a rude and half-civilized people was thus applied to an enlightened and moral community. the consequence was that the punishment of death was never more frequently prescribed by the statute, and never more rarely enforced towards the guilty. [footnote p: code of , p. ; hartford, .] [footnote q: see also in "hutchinson's history," vol. i. pp. , , the analysis of the penal code adopted in by the colony of massachusetts: this code is drawn up on the same principles as that of connecticut.] [footnote r: adultery was also punished with death by the law of massachusetts: and hutchinson, vol. i. p. , says that several persons actually suffered for this crime. he quotes a curious anecdote on this subject, which occurred in the year . a married woman had had criminal intercourse with a young man; her husband died, and she married the lover. several years had elapsed, when the public began to suspect the previous intercourse of this couple: they were thrown into prison, put upon trial, and very narrowly escaped capital punishment.] the chief care of the legislators, in this body of penal laws, was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community: they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was not subject to magisterial censure. the reader is aware of the rigor with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. the judge was empowered to inflict a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage *s on the misdemeanants; and if the records of the old courts of new haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not unfrequent. we find a sentence bearing date the first of may, , inflicting a fine and reprimand on a young woman who was accused of using improper language, and of allowing herself to be kissed. *t the code of abounds in preventive measures. it punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity. *u innkeepers are forbidden to furnish more than a certain quantity of liquor to each consumer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious, *v is checked by a fine or a flogging. in other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself upheld in europe, renders attendance on divine service compulsory, *w and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, ** and even with death, the christians who chose to worship god according to a ritual differing from his own. *x sometimes indeed the zeal of his enactments induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same code which prohibits the use of tobacco. *y it must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and more puritanical than the laws. in a solemn association was formed in boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair. *z [footnote s: code of , p. . it seems sometimes to have happened that the judges superadded these punishments to each other, as is seen in a sentence pronounced in (p. , "new haven antiquities"), by which margaret bedford, convicted of loose conduct, was condemned to be whipped, and afterwards to marry nicholas jemmings, her accomplice.] [footnote t: "new haven antiquities," p. . see also "hutchinson's history," for several causes equally extraordinary.] [footnote u: code of , pp. , .] [footnote v: ibid., p. .] [footnote w: ibid., p. .] [footnote *: this was not peculiar to connecticut. see, for instance, the law which, on september , , banished the anabaptists from the state of massachusetts. ("historical collection of state papers," vol. i. p. .) see also the law against the quakers, passed on october , : "whereas," says the preamble, "an accursed race of heretics called quakers has sprung up," etc. the clauses of the statute inflict a heavy fine on all captains of ships who should import quakers into the country. the quakers who may be found there shall be whipped and imprisoned with hard labor. those members of the sect who should defend their opinions shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and finally driven out of the province.--"historical collection of state papers," vol. i. p. .] [footnote x: by the penal law of massachusetts, any catholic priest who should set foot in the colony after having been once driven out of it was liable to capital punishment.] [footnote y: code of , p. .] [footnote z: "new england's memorial," p. . see appendix, e.] these errors are no doubt discreditable to human reason; they attest the inferiority of our nature, which is incapable of laying firm hold upon what is true and just, and is often reduced to the alternative of two excesses. in strict connection with this penal legislation, which bears such striking marks of a narrow sectarian spirit, and of those religious passions which had been warmed by persecution and were still fermenting among the people, a body of political laws is to be found, which, though written two hundred years ago, is still ahead of the liberties of our age. the general principles which are the groundwork of modern constitutions--principles which were imperfectly known in europe, and not completely triumphant even in great britain, in the seventeenth century--were all recognized and determined by the laws of new england: the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of authorities, personal liberty, and trial by jury, were all positively established without discussion. from these fruitful principles consequences have been derived and applications have been made such as no nation in europe has yet ventured to attempt. in connecticut the electoral body consisted, from its origin, of the whole number of citizens; and this is readily to be understood, *a when we recollect that this people enjoyed an almost perfect equality of fortune, and a still greater uniformity of opinions. *b in connecticut, at this period, all the executive functionaries were elected, including the governor of the state. *c the citizens above the age of sixteen were obliged to bear arms; they formed a national militia, which appointed its own officers, and was to hold itself at all times in readiness to march for the defence of the country. *d [footnote a: constitution of , p. .] [footnote b: in the general assembly of rhode island unanimously declared that the government of the state was a democracy, and that the power was vested in the body of free citizens, who alone had the right to make the laws and to watch their execution.--code of , p. .] [footnote c: "pitkin's history," p. .] [footnote d: constitution of , p. .] in the laws of connecticut, as well as in all those of new england, we find the germ and gradual development of that township independence which is the life and mainspring of american liberty at the present day. the political existence of the majority of the nations of europe commenced in the superior ranks of society, and was gradually and imperfectly communicated to the different members of the social body. in america, on the other hand, it may be said that the township was organized before the county, the county before the state, the state before the union. in new england townships were completely and definitively constituted as early as . the independence of the township was the nucleus round which the local interests, passions, rights, and duties collected and clung. it gave scope to the activity of a real political life most thoroughly democratic and republican. the colonies still recognized the supremacy of the mother-country; monarchy was still the law of the state; but the republic was already established in every township. the towns named their own magistrates of every kind, rated themselves, and levied their own taxes. *e in the parish of new england the law of representation was not adopted, but the affairs of the community were discussed, as at athens, in the market-place, by a general assembly of the citizens. [footnote e: code of , p. .] in studying the laws which were promulgated at this first era of the american republics, it is impossible not to be struck by the remarkable acquaintance with the science of government and the advanced theory of legislation which they display. the ideas there formed of the duties of society towards its members are evidently much loftier and more comprehensive than those of the european legislators at that time: obligations were there imposed which were elsewhere slighted. in the states of new england, from the first, the condition of the poor was provided for; *f strict measures were taken for the maintenance of roads, and surveyors were appointed to attend to them; *g registers were established in every parish, in which the results of public deliberations, and the births, deaths, and marriages of the citizens were entered; *h clerks were directed to keep these registers; *i officers were charged with the administration of vacant inheritances, and with the arbitration of litigated landmarks; and many others were created whose chief functions were the maintenance of public order in the community. *j the law enters into a thousand useful provisions for a number of social wants which are at present very inadequately felt in france. [footnote f: ibid., p. .] [footnote g: ibid., p. .] [footnote h: see "hutchinson's history," vol. i. p. .] [footnote i: code of , p. .] [footnote j: ibid., p. .] but it is by the attention it pays to public education that the original character of american civilization is at once placed in the clearest light. "it being," says the law, "one chief project of satan to keep men from the knowledge of the scripture by persuading from the use of tongues, to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the lord assisting our endeavors. . . ." *k here follow clauses establishing schools in every township, and obliging the inhabitants, under pain of heavy fines, to support them. schools of a superior kind were founded in the same manner in the more populous districts. the municipal authorities were bound to enforce the sending of children to school by their parents; they were empowered to inflict fines upon all who refused compliance; and in case of continued resistance society assumed the place of the parent, took possession of the child, and deprived the father of those natural rights which he used to so bad a purpose. the reader will undoubtedly have remarked the preamble of these enactments: in america religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom. [footnote k: ibid., p. .] if, after having cast a rapid glance over the state of american society in , we turn to the condition of europe, and more especially to that of the continent, at the same period, we cannot fail to be struck with astonishment. on the continent of europe, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy had everywhere triumphed over the ruins of the oligarchical and feudal liberties of the middle ages. never were the notions of right more completely confounded than in the midst of the splendor and literature of europe; never was there less political activity among the people; never were the principles of true freedom less widely circulated; and at that very time those principles, which were scorned or unknown by the nations of europe, were proclaimed in the deserts of the new world, and were accepted as the future creed of a great people. the boldest theories of the human reason were put into practice by a community so humble that not a statesman condescended to attend to it; and a legislation without a precedent was produced offhand by the imagination of the citizens. in the bosom of this obscure democracy, which had as yet brought forth neither generals, nor philosophers, nor authors, a man might stand up in the face of a free people and pronounce the following fine definition of liberty. *l [footnote l: mather's "magnalia christi americana," vol. ii. p. . this speech was made by winthrop; he was accused of having committed arbitrary actions during his magistracy, but after having made the speech of which the above is a fragment, he was acquitted by acclamation, and from that time forwards he was always re-elected governor of the state. see marshal, vol. i. p. .] "nor would i have you to mistake in the point of your own liberty. there is a liberty of a corrupt nature which is effected both by men and beasts to do what they list, and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty 'sumus omnes deteriores': 'tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of god are bent against it. but there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good: for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives and whatsoever crosses it is not authority, but a distemper thereof. this liberty is maintained in a way of subjection to authority; and the authority set over you will, in all administrations for your good, be quietly submitted unto by all but such as have a disposition to shake off the yoke and lose their true liberty, by their murmuring at the honor and power of authority." the remarks i have made will suffice to display the character of anglo-american civilization in its true light. it is the result (and this should be constantly present to the mind of two distinct elements), which in other places have been in frequent hostility, but which in america have been admirably incorporated and combined with one another. i allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. the settlers of new england were at the same time ardent sectarians and daring innovators. narrow as the limits of some of their religious opinions were, they were entirely free from political prejudices. hence arose two tendencies, distinct but not opposite, which are constantly discernible in the manners as well as in the laws of the country. it might be imagined that men who sacrificed their friends, their family, and their native land to a religious conviction were absorbed in the pursuit of the intellectual advantages which they purchased at so dear a rate. the energy, however, with which they strove for the acquirement of wealth, moral enjoyment, and the comforts as well as liberties of the world, is scarcely inferior to that with which they devoted themselves to heaven. political principles and all human laws and institutions were moulded and altered at their pleasure; the barriers of the society in which they were born were broken down before them; the old principles which had governed the world for ages were no more; a path without a turn and a field without an horizon were opened to the exploring and ardent curiosity of man: but at the limits of the political world he checks his researches, he discreetly lays aside the use of his most formidable faculties, he no longer consents to doubt or to innovate, but carefully abstaining from raising the curtain of the sanctuary, he yields with submissive respect to truths which he will not discuss. thus, in the moral world everything is classed, adapted, decided, and foreseen; in the political world everything is agitated, uncertain, and disputed: in the one is a passive, though a voluntary, obedience; in the other an independence scornful of experience and jealous of authority. these two tendencies, apparently so discrepant, are far from conflicting; they advance together, and mutually support each other. religion perceives that civil liberty affords a noble exercise to the faculties of man, and that the political world is a field prepared by the creator for the efforts of the intelligence. contented with the freedom and the power which it enjoys in its own sphere, and with the place which it occupies, the empire of religion is never more surely established than when it reigns in the hearts of men unsupported by aught beside its native strength. religion is no less the companion of liberty in all its battles and its triumphs; the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims. the safeguard of morality is religion, and morality is the best security of law and the surest pledge of freedom. *m [footnote m: see appendix, f.] reasons of certain anomalies which the laws and customs of the anglo-americans present remains of aristocratic institutions in the midst of a complete democracy--why?--distinction carefully to be drawn between what is of puritanical and what is of english origin. the reader is cautioned not to draw too general or too absolute an inference from what has been said. the social condition, the religion, and the manners of the first emigrants undoubtedly exercised an immense influence on the destiny of their new country. nevertheless they were not in a situation to found a state of things solely dependent on themselves: no man can entirely shake off the influence of the past, and the settlers, intentionally or involuntarily, mingled habits and notions derived from their education and from the traditions of their country with those habits and notions which were exclusively their own. to form a judgment on the anglo-americans of the present day it is therefore necessary to distinguish what is of puritanical and what is of english origin. laws and customs are frequently to be met with in the united states which contrast strongly with all that surrounds them. these laws seem to be drawn up in a spirit contrary to the prevailing tenor of the american legislation; and these customs are no less opposed to the tone of society. if the english colonies had been founded in an age of darkness, or if their origin was already lost in the lapse of years, the problem would be insoluble. i shall quote a single example to illustrate what i advance. the civil and criminal procedure of the americans has only two means of action--committal and bail. the first measure taken by the magistrate is to exact security from the defendant, or, in case of refusal, to incarcerate him: the ground of the accusation and the importance of the charges against him are then discussed. it is evident that a legislation of this kind is hostile to the poor man, and favorable only to the rich. the poor man has not always a security to produce, even in a civil cause; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. the wealthy individual, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil causes; nay, more, he may readily elude the punishment which awaits him for a delinquency by breaking his bail. so that all the penalties of the law are, for him, reducible to fines. *n nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. yet in america it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest social advantages to themselves. the explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in england; the laws of which i speak are english, *o and the americans have retained them, however repugnant they may be to the tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas. next to its habits, the thing which a nation is least apt to change is its civil legislation. civil laws are only familiarly known to legal men, whose direct interest it is to maintain them as they are, whether good or bad, simply because they themselves are conversant with them. the body of the nation is scarcely acquainted with them; it merely perceives their action in particular cases; but it has some difficulty in seizing their tendency, and obeys them without premeditation. i have quoted one instance where it would have been easy to adduce a great number of others. the surface of american society is, if i may use the expression, covered with a layer of democracy, from beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep. [footnote n: crimes no doubt exist for which bail is inadmissible, but they are few in number.] [footnote o: see blackstone; and delolme, book i chap. x.] chapter iii: social conditions of the anglo-americans chapter summary a social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these two causes united; but wherever it exists, it may justly be considered as the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas which regulate the conduct of nations; whatever it does not produce it modifies. it is therefore necessary, if we would become acquainted with the legislation and the manners of a nation, to begin by the study of its social condition. the striking characteristic of the social condition of the anglo-americans in its essential democracy. the first emigrants of new england--their equality--aristocratic laws introduced in the south--period of the revolution--change in the law of descent--effects produced by this change--democracy carried to its utmost limits in the new states of the west--equality of education. many important observations suggest themselves upon the social condition of the anglo-americans, but there is one which takes precedence of all the rest. the social condition of the americans is eminently democratic; this was its character at the foundation of the colonies, and is still more strongly marked at the present day. i have stated in the preceding chapter that great equality existed among the emigrants who settled on the shores of new england. the germ of aristocracy was never planted in that part of the union. the only influence which obtained there was that of intellect; the people were used to reverence certain names as the emblems of knowledge and virtue. some of their fellow-citizens acquired a power over the rest which might truly have been called aristocratic, if it had been capable of transmission from father to son. this was the state of things to the east of the hudson: to the south-west of that river, and in the direction of the floridas, the case was different. in most of the states situated to the south-west of the hudson some great english proprietors had settled, who had imported with them aristocratic principles and the english law of descent. i have explained the reasons why it was impossible ever to establish a powerful aristocracy in america; these reasons existed with less force to the south-west of the hudson. in the south, one man, aided by slaves, could cultivate a great extent of country: it was therefore common to see rich landed proprietors. but their influence was not altogether aristocratic as that term is understood in europe, since they possessed no privileges; and the cultivation of their estates being carried on by slaves, they had no tenants depending on them, and consequently no patronage. still, the great proprietors south of the hudson constituted a superior class, having ideas and tastes of its own, and forming the centre of political action. this kind of aristocracy sympathized with the body of the people, whose passions and interests it easily embraced; but it was too weak and too short-lived to excite either love or hatred for itself. this was the class which headed the insurrection in the south, and furnished the best leaders of the american revolution. at the period of which we are now speaking society was shaken to its centre: the people, in whose name the struggle had taken place, conceived the desire of exercising the authority which it had acquired; its democratic tendencies were awakened; and having thrown off the yoke of the mother-country, it aspired to independence of every kind. the influence of individuals gradually ceased to be felt, and custom and law united together to produce the same result. but the law of descent was the last step to equality. i am surprised that ancient and modern jurists have not attributed to this law a greater influence on human affairs. *a it is true that these laws belong to civil affairs; but they ought nevertheless to be placed at the head of all political institutions; for, whilst political laws are only the symbol of a nation's condition, they exercise an incredible influence upon its social state. they have, moreover, a sure and uniform manner of operating upon society, affecting, as it were, generations yet unborn. [footnote a: i understand by the law of descent all those laws whose principal object is to regulate the distribution of property after the death of its owner. the law of entail is of this number; it certainly prevents the owner from disposing of his possessions before his death; but this is solely with the view of preserving them entire for the heir. the principal object, therefore, of the law of entail is to regulate the descent of property after the death of its owner: its other provisions are merely means to this end.] through their means man acquires a kind of preternatural power over the future lot of his fellow-creatures. when the legislator has regulated the law of inheritance, he may rest from his labor. the machine once put in motion will go on for ages, and advance, as if self-guided, towards a given point. when framed in a particular manner, this law unites, draws together, and vests property and power in a few hands: its tendency is clearly aristocratic. on opposite principles its action is still more rapid; it divides, distributes, and disperses both property and power. alarmed by the rapidity of its progress, those who despair of arresting its motion endeavor to obstruct it by difficulties and impediments; they vainly seek to counteract its effect by contrary efforts; but it gradually reduces or destroys every obstacle, until by its incessant activity the bulwarks of the influence of wealth are ground down to the fine and shifting sand which is the basis of democracy. when the law of inheritance permits, still more when it decrees, the equal division of a father's property amongst all his children, its effects are of two kinds: it is important to distinguish them from each other, although they tend to the same end. in virtue of the law of partible inheritance, the death of every proprietor brings about a kind of revolution in property; not only do his possessions change hands, but their very nature is altered, since they are parcelled into shares, which become smaller and smaller at each division. this is the direct and, as it were, the physical effect of the law. it follows, then, that in countries where equality of inheritance is established by law, property, and especially landed property, must have a tendency to perpetual diminution. the effects, however, of such legislation would only be perceptible after a lapse of time, if the law was abandoned to its own working; for supposing the family to consist of two children (and in a country people as france is the average number is not above three), these children, sharing amongst them the fortune of both parents, would not be poorer than their father or mother. but the law of equal division exercises its influence not merely upon the property itself, but it affects the minds of the heirs, and brings their passions into play. these indirect consequences tend powerfully to the destruction of large fortunes, and especially of large domains. among nations whose law of descent is founded upon the right of primogeniture landed estates often pass from generation to generation without undergoing division, the consequence of which is that family feeling is to a certain degree incorporated with the estate. the family represents the estate, the estate the family; whose name, together with its origin, its glory, its power, and its virtues, is thus perpetuated in an imperishable memorial of the past and a sure pledge of the future. when the equal partition of property is established by law, the intimate connection is destroyed between family feeling and the preservation of the paternal estate; the property ceases to represent the family; for as it must inevitably be divided after one or two generations, it has evidently a constant tendency to diminish, and must in the end be completely dispersed. the sons of the great landed proprietor, if they are few in number, or if fortune befriends them, may indeed entertain the hope of being as wealthy as their father, but not that of possessing the same property as he did; the riches must necessarily be composed of elements different from his. now, from the moment that you divest the landowner of that interest in the preservation of his estate which he derives from association, from tradition, and from family pride, you may be certain that sooner or later he will dispose of it; for there is a strong pecuniary interest in favor of selling, as floating capital produces higher interest than real property, and is more readily available to gratify the passions of the moment. great landed estates which have once been divided never come together again; for the small proprietor draws from his land a better revenue, in proportion, than the large owner does from his, and of course he sells it at a higher rate. *b the calculations of gain, therefore, which decide the rich man to sell his domain will still more powerfully influence him against buying small estates to unite them into a large one. [footnote b: i do not mean to say that the small proprietor cultivates his land better, but he cultivates it with more ardor and care; so that he makes up by his labor for his want of skill.] what is called family pride is often founded upon an illusion of self-love. a man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself, as it were, in his great-grandchildren. where the esprit de famille ceases to act individual selfishness comes into play. when the idea of family becomes vague, indeterminate, and uncertain, a man thinks of his present convenience; he provides for the establishment of his succeeding generation, and no more. either a man gives up the idea of perpetuating his family, or at any rate he seeks to accomplish it by other means than that of a landed estate. thus not only does the law of partible inheritance render it difficult for families to preserve their ancestral domains entire, but it deprives them of the inclination to attempt it, and compels them in some measure to co-operate with the law in their own extinction. the law of equal distribution proceeds by two methods: by acting upon things, it acts upon persons; by influencing persons, it affects things. by these means the law succeeds in striking at the root of landed property, and dispersing rapidly both families and fortunes. *c [footnote c: land being the most stable kind of property, we find, from time to time, rich individuals who are disposed to make great sacrifices in order to obtain it, and who willingly forfeit a considerable part of their income to make sure of the rest. but these are accidental cases. the preference for landed property is no longer found habitually in any class but among the poor. the small landowner, who has less information, less imagination, and fewer passions than the great one, is generally occupied with the desire of increasing his estate: and it often happens that by inheritance, by marriage, or by the chances of trade, he is gradually furnished with the means. thus, to balance the tendency which leads men to divide their estates, there exists another, which incites them to add to them. this tendency, which is sufficient to prevent estates from being divided ad infinitum, is not strong enough to create great territorial possessions, certainly not to keep them up in the same family.] most certainly it is not for us frenchmen of the nineteenth century, who daily witness the political and social changes which the law of partition is bringing to pass, to question its influence. it is perpetually conspicuous in our country, overthrowing the walls of our dwellings and removing the landmarks of our fields. but although it has produced great effects in france, much still remains for it to do. our recollections, opinions, and habits present powerful obstacles to its progress. in the united states it has nearly completed its work of destruction, and there we can best study its results. the english laws concerning the transmission of property were abolished in almost all the states at the time of the revolution. the law of entail was so modified as not to interrupt the free circulation of property. *d the first generation having passed away, estates began to be parcelled out, and the change became more and more rapid with the progress of time. at this moment, after a lapse of a little more than sixty years, the aspect of society is totally altered; the families of the great landed proprietors are almost all commingled with the general mass. in the state of new york, which formerly contained many of these, there are but two who still keep their heads above the stream, and they must shortly disappear. the sons of these opulent citizens are become merchants, lawyers, or physicians. most of them have lapsed into obscurity. the last trace of hereditary ranks and distinctions is destroyed--the law of partition has reduced all to one level. [footnote d: see appendix, g.] i do not mean that there is any deficiency of wealthy individuals in the united states; i know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property. but wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it. this picture, which may perhaps be thought to be overcharged, still gives a very imperfect idea of what is taking place in the new states of the west and south-west. at the end of the last century a few bold adventurers began to penetrate into the valleys of the mississippi, and the mass of the population very soon began to move in that direction: communities unheard of till then were seen to emerge from the wilds: states whose names were not in existence a few years before claimed their place in the american union; and in the western settlements we may behold democracy arrived at its utmost extreme. in these states, founded off-hand, and, as it were, by chance, the inhabitants are but of yesterday. scarcely known to one another, the nearest neighbors are ignorant of each other's history. in this part of the american continent, therefore, the population has not experienced the influence of great names and great wealth, nor even that of the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue. none are there to wield that respectable power which men willingly grant to the remembrance of a life spent in doing good before their eyes. the new states of the west are already inhabited, but society has no existence among them. *e [footnote e: this may have been true in , but is not so in , when great cities like chicago and san francisco have sprung up in the western states. but as yet the western states exert no powerful influence on american society.---translator's note.] it is not only the fortunes of men which are equal in america; even their requirements partake in some degree of the same uniformity. i do not believe that there is a country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few uninstructed and at the same time so few learned individuals. primary instruction is within the reach of everybody; superior instruction is scarcely to be obtained by any. this is not surprising; it is in fact the necessary consequence of what we have advanced above. almost all the americans are in easy circumstances, and can therefore obtain the first elements of human knowledge. in america there are comparatively few who are rich enough to live without a profession. every profession requires an apprenticeship, which limits the time of instruction to the early years of life. at fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education ends at the age when ours begins. whatever is done afterwards is with a view to some special and lucrative object; a science is taken up as a matter of business, and the only branch of it which is attended to is such as admits of an immediate practical application. in america most of the rich men were formerly poor; most of those who now enjoy leisure were absorbed in business during their youth; the consequence of which is, that when they might have had a taste for study they had no time for it, and when time is at their disposal they have no longer the inclination. there is no class, then, in america, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure, and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. accordingly there is an equal want of the desire and the power of application to these objects. a middle standard is fixed in america for human knowledge. all approach as near to it as they can; some as they rise, others as they descend. of course, an immense multitude of persons are to be found who entertain the same number of ideas on religion, history, science, political economy, legislation, and government. the gifts of intellect proceed directly from god, and man cannot prevent their unequal distribution. but in consequence of the state of things which we have here represented it happens that, although the capacities of men are widely different, as the creator has doubtless intended they should be, they are submitted to the same method of treatment. in america the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence in the course of affairs. the democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant but all-powerful. there is no family or corporate authority, and it is rare to find even the influence of individual character enjoy any durability. america, then, exhibits in her social state a most extraordinary phenomenon. men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance. political consequences of the social condition of the anglo-americans the political consequences of such a social condition as this are easily deducible. it is impossible to believe that equality will not eventually find its way into the political world as it does everywhere else. to conceive of men remaining forever unequal upon one single point, yet equal on all others, is impossible; they must come in the end to be equal upon all. now i know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one. for nations which are arrived at the same stage of social existence as the anglo-americans, it is therefore very difficult to discover a medium between the sovereignty of all and the absolute power of one man: and it would be vain to deny that the social condition which i have been describing is equally liable to each of these consequences. there is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. this passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. not that those nations whose social condition is democratic naturally despise liberty; on the contrary, they have an instinctive love of it. but liberty is not the chief and constant object of their desires; equality is their idol: they make rapid and sudden efforts to obtain liberty, and if they miss their aim resign themselves to their disappointment; but nothing can satisfy them except equality, and rather than lose it they resolve to perish. on the other hand, in a state where the citizens are nearly on an equality, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggressions of power. no one among them being strong enough to engage in the struggle with advantage, nothing but a general combination can protect their liberty. and such a union is not always to be found. from the same social position, then, nations may derive one or the other of two great political results; these results are extremely different from each other, but they may both proceed from the same cause. the anglo-americans are the first nations who, having been exposed to this formidable alternative, have been happy enough to escape the dominion of absolute power. they have been allowed by their circumstances, their origin, their intelligence, and especially by their moral feeling, to establish and maintain the sovereignty of the people. chapter iv: the principle of the sovereignty of the people in america chapter summary it predominates over the whole of society in america--application made of this principle by the americans even before their revolution--development given to it by that revolution--gradual and irresistible extension of the elective qualification. the principle of the sovereignty of the people in america whenever the political laws of the united states are to be discussed, it is with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people that we must begin. the principle of the sovereignty of the people, which is to be found, more or less, at the bottom of almost all human institutions, generally remains concealed from view. it is obeyed without being recognized, or if for a moment it be brought to light, it is hastily cast back into the gloom of the sanctuary. "the will of the nation" is one of those expressions which have been most profusely abused by the wily and the despotic of every age. to the eyes of some it has been represented by the venal suffrages of a few of the satellites of power; to others by the votes of a timid or an interested minority; and some have even discovered it in the silence of a people, on the supposition that the fact of submission established the right of command. in america the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not either barren or concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences. if there be a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be foreseen, that country is assuredly america. i have already observed that, from their origin, the sovereignty of the people was the fundamental principle of the greater number of british colonies in america. it was far, however, from then exercising as much influence on the government of society as it now does. two obstacles, the one external, the other internal, checked its invasive progress. it could not ostensibly disclose itself in the laws of colonies which were still constrained to obey the mother-country: it was therefore obliged to spread secretly, and to gain ground in the provincial assemblies, and especially in the townships. american society was not yet prepared to adopt it with all its consequences. the intelligence of new england, and the wealth of the country to the south of the hudson (as i have shown in the preceding chapter), long exercised a sort of aristocratic influence, which tended to retain the exercise of social authority in the hands of a few. the public functionaries were not universally elected, and the citizens were not all of them electors. the electoral franchise was everywhere placed within certain limits, and made dependent on a certain qualification, which was exceedingly low in the north and more considerable in the south. the american revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which had been nurtured in the townships and municipalities, took possession of the state: every class was enlisted in its cause; battles were fought, and victories obtained for it, until it became the law of laws. a no less rapid change was effected in the interior of society, where the law of descent completed the abolition of local influences. at the very time when this consequence of the laws and of the revolution was apparent to every eye, victory was irrevocably pronounced in favor of the democratic cause. all power was, in fact, in its hands, and resistance was no longer possible. the higher orders submitted without a murmur and without a struggle to an evil which was thenceforth inevitable. the ordinary fate of falling powers awaited them; each of their several members followed his own interests; and as it was impossible to wring the power from the hands of a people which they did not detest sufficiently to brave, their only aim was to secure its good-will at any price. the most democratic laws were consequently voted by the very men whose interests they impaired; and thus, although the higher classes did not excite the passions of the people against their order, they accelerated the triumph of the new state of things; so that by a singular change the democratic impulse was found to be most irresistible in the very states where the aristocracy had the firmest hold. the state of maryland, which had been founded by men of rank, was the first to proclaim universal suffrage, and to introduce the most democratic forms into the conduct of its government. when a nation modifies the elective qualification, it may easily be foreseen that sooner or later that qualification will be entirely abolished. there is no more invariable rule in the history of society: the further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of the democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength. the ambition of those who are below the appointed rate is irritated in exact proportion to the great number of those who are above it. the exception at last becomes the rule, concession follows concession, and no stop can be made short of universal suffrage. at the present day the principle of the sovereignty of the people has acquired, in the united states, all the practical development which the imagination can conceive. it is unencumbered by those fictions which have been thrown over it in other countries, and it appears in every possible form according to the exigency of the occasion. sometimes the laws are made by the people in a body, as at athens; and sometimes its representatives, chosen by universal suffrage, transact business in its name, and almost under its immediate control. in some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. in others the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. but nothing of the kind is to be seen in the united states; there society governs itself for itself. all power centres in its bosom; and scarcely an individual is to be meet with who would venture to conceive, or, still less, to express, the idea of seeking it elsewhere. the nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive government; it may almost be said to govern itself, so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they emanate. *a [footnote a: see appendix, h.] chapter v: necessity of examining the condition of the states--part i necessity of examining the condition of the states before that of the union at large. it is proposed to examine in the following chapter what is the form of government established in america on the principle of the sovereignty of the people; what are its resources, its hindrances, its advantages, and its dangers. the first difficulty which presents itself arises from the complex nature of the constitution of the united states, which consists of two distinct social structures, connected and, as it were, encased one within the other; two governments, completely separate and almost independent, the one fulfilling the ordinary duties and responding to the daily and indefinite calls of a community, the other circumscribed within certain limits, and only exercising an exceptional authority over the general interests of the country. in short, there are twenty-four small sovereign nations, whose agglomeration constitutes the body of the union. to examine the union before we have studied the states would be to adopt a method filled with obstacles. the form of the federal government of the united states was the last which was adopted; and it is in fact nothing more than a modification or a summary of those republican principles which were current in the whole community before it existed, and independently of its existence. moreover, the federal government is, as i have just observed, the exception; the government of the states is the rule. the author who should attempt to exhibit the picture as a whole before he had explained its details would necessarily fall into obscurity and repetition. the great political principles which govern american society at this day undoubtedly took their origin and their growth in the state. it is therefore necessary to become acquainted with the state in order to possess a clue to the remainder. the states which at present compose the american union all present the same features, as far as regards the external aspect of their institutions. their political or administrative existence is centred in three focuses of action, which may not inaptly be compared to the different nervous centres which convey motion to the human body. the township is the lowest in order, then the county, and lastly the state; and i propose to devote the following chapter to the examination of these three divisions. the american system of townships and municipal bodies why the author begins the examination of the political institutions with the township--its existence in all nations--difficulty of establishing and preserving municipal independence--its importance--why the author has selected the township system of new england as the main topic of his discussion. it is not undesignedly that i begin this subject with the township. the village or township is the only association which is so perfectly natural that wherever a number of men are collected it seems to constitute itself. the town, or tithing, as the smallest division of a community, must necessarily exist in all nations, whatever their laws and customs may be: if man makes monarchies and establishes republics, the first association of mankind seems constituted by the hand of god. but although the existence of the township is coeval with that of man, its liberties are not the less rarely respected and easily destroyed. a nation is always able to establish great political assemblies, because it habitually contains a certain number of individuals fitted by their talents, if not by their habits, for the direction of affairs. the township is, on the contrary, composed of coarser materials, which are less easily fashioned by the legislator. the difficulties which attend the consolidation of its independence rather augment than diminish with the increasing enlightenment of the people. a highly civilized community spurns the attempts of a local independence, is disgusted at its numerous blunders, and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is completed. again, no immunities are so ill protected from the encroachments of the supreme power as those of municipal bodies in general: they are unable to struggle, single-handed, against a strong or an enterprising government, and they cannot defend their cause with success unless it be identified with the customs of the nation and supported by public opinion. thus until the independence of townships is amalgamated with the manners of a people it is easily destroyed, and it is only after a long existence in the laws that it can be thus amalgamated. municipal freedom is not the fruit of human device; it is rarely created; but it is, as it were, secretly and spontaneously engendered in the midst of a semi-barbarous state of society. the constant action of the laws and the national habits, peculiar circumstances, and above all time, may consolidate it; but there is certainly no nation on the continent of europe which has experienced its advantages. nevertheless local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations. town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. a nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty. the transient passions and the interests of an hour, or the chance of circumstances, may have created the external forms of independence; but the despotic tendency which has been repelled will, sooner or later, inevitably reappear on the surface. in order to explain to the reader the general principles on which the political organization of the counties and townships of the united states rests, i have thought it expedient to choose one of the states of new england as an example, to examine the mechanism of its constitution, and then to cast a general glance over the country. the township and the county are not organized in the same manner in every part of the union; it is, however, easy to perceive that the same principles have guided the formation of both of them throughout the union. i am inclined to believe that these principles have been carried further in new england than elsewhere, and consequently that they offer greater facilities to the observations of a stranger. the institutions of new england form a complete and regular whole; they have received the sanction of time, they have the support of the laws, and the still stronger support of the manners of the community, over which they exercise the most prodigious influence; they consequently deserve our attention on every account. limits of the township the township of new england is a division which stands between the commune and the canton of france, and which corresponds in general to the english tithing, or town. its average population is from two to three thousand; *a so that, on the one hand, the interests of its inhabitants are not likely to conflict, and, on the other, men capable of conducting its affairs are always to be found among its citizens. [footnote a: in there were townships in the state of massachusetts, and , inhabitants, which gives an average of about , inhabitants to each township.] authorities of the township in new england the people the source of all power here as elsewhere--manages its own affairs--no corporation--the greater part of the authority vested in the hands of the selectmen--how the selectmen act--town-meeting--enumeration of the public officers of the township--obligatory and remunerated functions. in the township, as well as everywhere else, the people is the only source of power; but in no stage of government does the body of citizens exercise a more immediate influence. in america the people is a master whose exigencies demand obedience to the utmost limits of possibility. in new england the majority acts by representatives in the conduct of the public business of the state; but if such an arrangement be necessary in general affairs, in the townships, where the legislative and administrative action of the government is in more immediate contact with the subject, the system of representation is not adopted. there is no corporation; but the body of electors, after having designated its magistrates, directs them in everything that exceeds the simple and ordinary executive business of the state. *b [footnote b: the same rules are not applicable to the great towns, which generally have a mayor, and a corporation divided into two bodies; this, however, is an exception which requires the sanction of a law.--see the act of february , , for appointing the authorities of the city of boston. it frequently happens that small towns as well as cities are subject to a peculiar administration. in , townships in the state of new york were governed in this manner.--williams' register.] this state of things is so contrary to our ideas, and so different from our customs, that it is necessary for me to adduce some examples to explain it thoroughly. the public duties in the township are extremely numerous and minutely divided, as we shall see further on; but the larger proportion of administrative power is vested in the hands of a small number of individuals, called "the selectmen." *c the general laws of the state impose a certain number of obligations on the selectmen, which they may fulfil without the authorization of the body they represent, but which they can only neglect on their own responsibility. the law of the state obliges them, for instance, to draw up the list of electors in their townships; and if they omit this part of their functions, they are guilty of a misdemeanor. in all the affairs, however, which are determined by the town-meeting, the selectmen are the organs of the popular mandate, as in france the maire executes the decree of the municipal council. they usually act upon their own responsibility, and merely put in practice principles which have been previously recognized by the majority. but if any change is to be introduced in the existing state of things, or if they wish to undertake any new enterprise, they are obliged to refer to the source of their power. if, for instance, a school is to be established, the selectmen convoke the whole body of the electors on a certain day at an appointed place; they explain the urgency of the case; they give their opinion on the means of satisfying it, on the probable expense, and the site which seems to be most favorable. the meeting is consulted on these several points; it adopts the principle, marks out the site, votes the rate, and confides the execution of its resolution to the selectmen. [footnote c: three selectmen are appointed in the small townships, and nine in the large ones. see "the town-officer," p. . see also the principal laws of the state of massachusetts relative to the selectmen: act of february , , vol. i. p. ; february , , vol. i. p. ; march , , vol. ii. p. ; june , , vol. i. p. ; march , , vol. ii. p. ; february , , vol. i. p. ; june , , vol. i. p. .] the selectmen have alone the right of calling a town-meeting, but they may be requested to do so: if ten citizens are desirous of submitting a new project to the assent of the township, they may demand a general convocation of the inhabitants; the selectmen are obliged to comply, but they have only the right of presiding at the meeting. *d [footnote d: see laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. , act of march , .] the selectmen are elected every year in the month of april or of may. the town-meeting chooses at the same time a number of other municipal magistrates, who are entrusted with important administrative functions. the assessors rate the township; the collectors receive the rate. a constable is appointed to keep the peace, to watch the streets, and to forward the execution of the laws; the town-clerk records all the town votes, orders, grants, births, deaths, and marriages; the treasurer keeps the funds; the overseer of the poor performs the difficult task of superintending the action of the poor-laws; committee-men are appointed to attend to the schools and to public instruction; and the road-surveyors, who take care of the greater and lesser thoroughfares of the township, complete the list of the principal functionaries. they are, however, still further subdivided; and amongst the municipal officers are to be found parish commissioners, who audit the expenses of public worship; different classes of inspectors, some of whom are to direct the citizens in case of fire; tithing-men, listers, haywards, chimney-viewers, fence-viewers to maintain the bounds of property, timber-measurers, and sealers of weights and measures. *e [footnote e: all these magistrates actually exist; their different functions are all detailed in a book called "the town-officer," by isaac goodwin, worcester, ; and in the "collection of the general laws of massachusetts," vols., boston, .] there are nineteen principal officers in a township. every inhabitant is constrained, on the pain of being fined, to undertake these different functions; which, however, are almost all paid, in order that the poorer citizens may be able to give up their time without loss. in general the american system is not to grant a fixed salary to its functionaries. every service has its price, and they are remunerated in proportion to what they have done. existence of the township every one the best judge of his own interest--corollary of the principle of the sovereignty of the people--application of those doctrines in the townships of america--the township of new england is sovereign in all that concerns itself alone: subject to the state in all other matters--bond of the township and the state--in france the government lends its agent to the commune--in america the reverse occurs. i have already observed that the principle of the sovereignty of the people governs the whole political system of the anglo-americans. every page of this book will afford new instances of the same doctrine. in the nations by which the sovereignty of the people is recognized every individual possesses an equal share of power, and participates alike in the government of the state. every individual is, therefore, supposed to be as well informed, as virtuous, and as strong as any of his fellow-citizens. he obeys the government, not because he is inferior to the authorities which conduct it, or that he is less capable than his neighbor of governing himself, but because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow-men, and because he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force. if he be a subject in all that concerns the mutual relations of citizens, he is free and responsible to god alone for all that concerns himself. hence arises the maxim that every one is the best and the sole judge of his own private interest, and that society has no right to control a man's actions, unless they are prejudicial to the common weal, or unless the common weal demands his co-operation. this doctrine is universally admitted in the united states. i shall hereafter examine the general influence which it exercises on the ordinary actions of life; i am now speaking of the nature of municipal bodies. the township, taken as a whole, and in relation to the government of the country, may be looked upon as an individual to whom the theory i have just alluded to is applied. municipal independence is therefore a natural consequence of the principle of the sovereignty of the people in the united states: all the american republics recognize it more or less; but circumstances have peculiarly favored its growth in new england. in this part of the union the impulsion of political activity was given in the townships; and it may almost be said that each of them originally formed an independent nation. when the kings of england asserted their supremacy, they were contented to assume the central power of the state. the townships of new england remained as they were before; and although they are now subject to the state, they were at first scarcely dependent upon it. it is important to remember that they have not been invested with privileges, but that they have, on the contrary, forfeited a portion of their independence to the state. the townships are only subordinate to the state in those interests which i shall term social, as they are common to all the citizens. they are independent in all that concerns themselves; and amongst the inhabitants of new england i believe that not a man is to be found who would acknowledge that the state has any right to interfere in their local interests. the towns of new england buy and sell, sue or are sued, augment or diminish their rates, without the slightest opposition on the part of the administrative authority of the state. they are bound, however, to comply with the demands of the community. if the state is in need of money, a town can neither give nor withhold the supplies. if the state projects a road, the township cannot refuse to let it cross its territory; if a police regulation is made by the state, it must be enforced by the town. a uniform system of instruction is organized all over the country, and every town is bound to establish the schools which the law ordains. in speaking of the administration of the united states i shall have occasion to point out the means by which the townships are compelled to obey in these different cases: i here merely show the existence of the obligation. strict as this obligation is, the government of the state imposes it in principle only, and in its performance the township resumes all its independent rights. thus, taxes are voted by the state, but they are levied and collected by the township; the existence of a school is obligatory, but the township builds, pays, and superintends it. in france the state-collector receives the local imposts; in america the town-collector receives the taxes of the state. thus the french government lends its agents to the commune; in america the township is the agent of the government. this fact alone shows the extent of the differences which exist between the two nations. public spirit of the townships of new england how the township of new england wins the affections of its inhabitants--difficulty of creating local public spirit in europe--the rights and duties of the american township favorable to it--characteristics of home in the united states--manifestations of public spirit in new england--its happy effects. in america, not only do municipal bodies exist, but they are kept alive and supported by public spirit. the township of new england possesses two advantages which infallibly secure the attentive interest of mankind, namely, independence and authority. its sphere is indeed small and limited, but within that sphere its action is unrestrained; and its independence gives to it a real importance which its extent and population may not always ensure. it is to be remembered that the affections of men generally lie on the side of authority. patriotism is not durable in a conquered nation. the new englander is attached to his township, not only because he was born in it, but because it constitutes a social body of which he is a member, and whose government claims and deserves the exercise of his sagacity. in europe the absence of local public spirit is a frequent subject of regret to those who are in power; everyone agrees that there is no surer guarantee of order and tranquility, and yet nothing is more difficult to create. if the municipal bodies were made powerful and independent, the authorities of the nation might be disunited and the peace of the country endangered. yet, without power and independence, a town may contain good subjects, but it can have no active citizens. another important fact is that the township of new england is so constituted as to excite the warmest of human affections, without arousing the ambitious passions of the heart of man. the officers of the country are not elected, and their authority is very limited. even the state is only a second-rate community, whose tranquil and obscure administration offers no inducement sufficient to draw men away from the circle of their interests into the turmoil of public affairs. the federal government confers power and honor on the men who conduct it; but these individuals can never be very numerous. the high station of the presidency can only be reached at an advanced period of life, and the other federal functionaries are generally men who have been favored by fortune, or distinguished in some other career. such cannot be the permanent aim of the ambitious. but the township serves as a centre for the desire of public esteem, the want of exciting interests, and the taste for authority and popularity, in the midst of the ordinary relations of life; and the passions which commonly embroil society change their character when they find a vent so near the domestic hearth and the family circle. in the american states power has been disseminated with admirable skill for the purpose of interesting the greatest possible number of persons in the common weal. independently of the electors who are from time to time called into action, the body politic is divided into innumerable functionaries and officers, who all, in their several spheres, represent the same powerful whole in whose name they act. the local administration thus affords an unfailing source of profit and interest to a vast number of individuals. the american system, which divides the local authority among so many citizens, does not scruple to multiply the functions of the town officers. for in the united states it is believed, and with truth, that patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance. in this manner the activity of the township is continually perceptible; it is daily manifested in the fulfilment of a duty or the exercise of a right, and a constant though gentle motion is thus kept up in society which animates without disturbing it. the american attaches himself to his home as the mountaineer clings to his hills, because the characteristic features of his country are there more distinctly marked than elsewhere. the existence of the townships of new england is in general a happy one. their government is suited to their tastes, and chosen by themselves. in the midst of the profound peace and general comfort which reign in america the commotions of municipal discord are unfrequent. the conduct of local business is easy. the political education of the people has long been complete; say rather that it was complete when the people first set foot upon the soil. in new england no tradition exists of a distinction of ranks; no portion of the community is tempted to oppress the remainder; and the abuses which may injure isolated individuals are forgotten in the general contentment which prevails. if the government is defective (and it would no doubt be easy to point out its deficiencies), the fact that it really emanates from those it governs, and that it acts, either ill or well, casts the protecting spell of a parental pride over its faults. no term of comparison disturbs the satisfaction of the citizen: england formerly governed the mass of the colonies, but the people was always sovereign in the township where its rule is not only an ancient but a primitive state. the native of new england is attached to his township because it is independent and free: his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions: he takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the union or the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights. the counties of new england the division of the countries in america has considerable analogy with that of the arrondissements of france. the limits of the counties are arbitrarily laid down, and the various districts which they contain have no necessary connection, no common tradition or natural sympathy; their object is simply to facilitate the administration of justice. the extent of the township was too small to contain a system of judicial institutions; each county has, however, a court of justice, *f a sheriff to execute its decrees, and a prison for criminals. there are certain wants which are felt alike by all the townships of a county; it is therefore natural that they should be satisfied by a central authority. in the state of massachusetts this authority is vested in the hands of several magistrates, who are appointed by the governor of the state, with the advice *g of his council. *h the officers of the county have only a limited and occasional authority, which is applicable to certain predetermined cases. the state and the townships possess all the power requisite to conduct public business. the budget of the county is drawn up by its officers, and is voted by the legislature, but there is no assembly which directly or indirectly represents the county. it has, therefore, properly speaking, no political existence. [footnote f: see the act of february , , laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .] [footnote g: see the act of february , , laws of massachusetts, vol. ii. p. .] [footnote h: the council of the governor is an elective body.] a twofold tendency may be discerned in the american constitutions, which impels the legislator to centralize the legislative and to disperse the executive power. the township of new england has in itself an indestructible element of independence; and this distinct existence could only be fictitiously introduced into the county, where its utility has not been felt. but all the townships united have but one representation, which is the state, the centre of the national authority: beyond the action of the township and that of the nation, nothing can be said to exist but the influence of individual exertion. administration in new england administration not perceived in america--why?--the europeans believe that liberty is promoted by depriving the social authority of some of its rights; the americans, by dividing its exercise--almost all the administration confined to the township, and divided amongst the town-officers--no trace of an administrative body to be perceived, either in the township or above it--the reason of this--how it happens that the administration of the state is uniform--who is empowered to enforce the obedience of the township and the county to the law--the introduction of judicial power into the administration--consequence of the extension of the elective principle to all functionaries--the justice of the peace in new england--by whom appointed--county officer: ensures the administration of the townships--court of sessions--its action--right of inspection and indictment disseminated like the other administrative functions--informers encouraged by the division of fines. nothing is more striking to an european traveller in the united states than the absence of what we term the government, or the administration. written laws exist in america, and one sees that they are daily executed; but although everything is in motion, the hand which gives the impulse to the social machine can nowhere be discovered. nevertheless, as all peoples are obliged to have recourse to certain grammatical forms, which are the foundation of human language, in order to express their thoughts; so all communities are obliged to secure their existence by submitting to a certain dose of authority, without which they fall a prey to anarchy. this authority may be distributed in several ways, but it must always exist somewhere. there are two methods of diminishing the force of authority in a nation: the first is to weaken the supreme power in its very principle, by forbidding or preventing society from acting in its own defence under certain circumstances. to weaken authority in this manner is what is generally termed in europe to lay the foundations of freedom. the second manner of diminishing the influence of authority does not consist in stripping society of any of its rights, nor in paralyzing its efforts, but in distributing the exercise of its privileges in various hands, and in multiplying functionaries, to each of whom the degree of power necessary for him to perform his duty is entrusted. there may be nations whom this distribution of social powers might lead to anarchy; but in itself it is not anarchical. the action of authority is indeed thus rendered less irresistible and less perilous, but it is not totally suppressed. the revolution of the united states was the result of a mature and dignified taste for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence. it contracted no alliance with the turbulent passions of anarchy; but its course was marked, on the contrary, by an attachment to whatever was lawful and orderly. it was never assumed in the united states that the citizen of a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases; on the contrary, social obligations were there imposed upon him more various than anywhere else. no idea was ever entertained of attacking the principles or of contesting the rights of society; but the exercise of its authority was divided, to the end that the office might be powerful and the officer insignificant, and that the community should be at once regulated and free. in no country in the world does the law hold so absolute a language as in america, and in no country is the right of applying it vested in so many hands. the administrative power in the united states presents nothing either central or hierarchical in its constitution, which accounts for its passing, unperceived. the power exists, but its representative is not to be perceived. we have already seen that the independent townships of new england protect their own private interests; and the municipal magistrates are the persons to whom the execution of the laws of the state is most frequently entrusted. *i besides the general laws, the state sometimes passes general police regulations; but more commonly the townships and town officers, conjointly with justices of the peace, regulate the minor details of social life, according to the necessities of the different localities, and promulgate such enactments as concern the health of the community, and the peace as well as morality of the citizens. *j lastly, these municipal magistrates provide, of their own accord and without any delegated powers, for those unforeseen emergencies which frequently occur in society. *k [footnote i: see "the town-officer," especially at the words selectmen, assessors, collectors, schools, surveyors of highways. i take one example in a thousand: the state prohibits travelling on the sunday; the tything-men, who are town-officers, are specially charged to keep watch and to execute the law. see the laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. . the selectmen draw up the lists of electors for the election of the governor, and transmit the result of the ballot to the secretary of the state. see act of february , : id., vol. i. p. .] [footnote j: thus, for instance, the selectmen authorize the construction of drains, point out the proper sites for slaughter-houses and other trades which are a nuisance to the neighborhood. see the act of june , : id., vol. i. p. .] [footnote k: the selectmen take measures for the security of the public in case of contagious diseases, conjointly with the justices of the peace. see act of june , , vol. i. p. .] it results from what we have said that in the state of massachusetts the administrative authority is almost entirely restricted to the township, *l but that it is distributed among a great number of individuals. in the french commune there is properly but one official functionary, namely, the maire; and in new england we have seen that there are nineteen. these nineteen functionaries do not in general depend upon one another. the law carefully prescribes a circle of action to each of these magistrates; and within that circle they have an entire right to perform their functions independently of any other authority. above the township scarcely any trace of a series of official dignitaries is to be found. it sometimes happens that the county officers alter a decision of the townships or town magistrates, *m but in general the authorities of the county have no right to interfere with the authorities of the township, *n except in such matters as concern the county. [footnote l: i say almost, for there are various circumstances in the annals of a township which are regulated by the justice of the peace in his individual capacity, or by the justices of the peace assembled in the chief town of the county; thus licenses are granted by the justices. see the act of february , , vol. i. p. .] [footnote m: thus licenses are only granted to such persons as can produce a certificate of good conduct from the selectmen. if the selectmen refuse to give the certificate, the party may appeal to the justices assembled in the court of sessions, and they may grant the license. see act of march , , vol. ii. p. . the townships have the right to make by-laws, and to enforce them by fines which are fixed by law; but these by-laws must be approved by the court of sessions. see act of march , , vol. i. p. .] [footnote n: in massachusetts the county magistrates are frequently called upon to investigate the acts of the town magistrates; but it will be shown further on that this investigation is a consequence, not of their administrative, but of their judicial power.] the magistrates of the township, as well as those of the county, are bound to communicate their acts to the central government in a very small number of predetermined cases. *o but the central government is not represented by an individual whose business it is to publish police regulations and ordinances enforcing the execution of the laws; to keep up a regular communication with the officers of the township and the county; to inspect their conduct, to direct their actions, or to reprimand their faults. there is no point which serves as a centre to the radii of the administration. [footnote o: the town committees of schools are obliged to make an annual report to the secretary of the state on the condition of the school. see act of march , , vol. iii. p. .] chapter v: necessity of examining the condition of the states--part ii what, then, is the uniform plan on which the government is conducted, and how is the compliance of the counties and their magistrates or the townships and their officers enforced? in the states of new england the legislative authority embraces more subjects than it does in france; the legislator penetrates to the very core of the administration; the law descends to the most minute details; the same enactment prescribes the principle and the method of its application, and thus imposes a multitude of strict and rigorously defined obligations on the secondary functionaries of the state. the consequence of this is that if all the secondary functionaries of the administration conform to the law, society in all its branches proceeds with the greatest uniformity: the difficulty remains of compelling the secondary functionaries of the administration to conform to the law. it may be affirmed that, in general, society has only two methods of enforcing the execution of the laws at its disposal: a discretionary power may be entrusted to a superior functionary of directing all the others, and of cashiering them in case of disobedience; or the courts of justice may be authorized to inflict judicial penalties on the offender: but these two methods are not always available. the right of directing a civil officer presupposes that of cashiering him if he does not obey orders, and of rewarding him by promotion if he fulfils his duties with propriety. but an elected magistrate can neither be cashiered nor promoted. all elective functions are inalienable until their term is expired. in fact, the elected magistrate has nothing either to expect or to fear from his constituents; and when all public offices are filled by ballot there can be no series of official dignities, because the double right of commanding and of enforcing obedience can never be vested in the same individual, and because the power of issuing an order can never be joined to that of inflicting a punishment or bestowing a reward. the communities therefore in which the secondary functionaries of the government are elected are perforce obliged to make great use of judicial penalties as a means of administration. this is not evident at first sight; for those in power are apt to look upon the institution of elective functionaries as one concession, and the subjection of the elected magistrate to the judges of the land as another. they are equally averse to both these innovations; and as they are more pressingly solicited to grant the former than the latter, they accede to the election of the magistrate, and leave him independent of the judicial power. nevertheless, the second of these measures is the only thing that can possibly counterbalance the first; and it will be found that an elective authority which is not subject to judicial power will, sooner or later, either elude all control or be destroyed. the courts of justice are the only possible medium between the central power and the administrative bodies; they alone can compel the elected functionary to obey, without violating the rights of the elector. the extension of judicial power in the political world ought therefore to be in the exact ratio of the extension of elective offices: if these two institutions do not go hand in hand, the state must fall into anarchy or into subjection. it has always been remarked that habits of legal business do not render men apt to the exercise of administrative authority. the americans have borrowed from the english, their fathers, the idea of an institution which is unknown upon the continent of europe: i allude to that of the justices of the peace. the justice of the peace is a sort of mezzo termine between the magistrate and the man of the world, between the civil officer and the judge. a justice of the peace is a well-informed citizen, though he is not necessarily versed in the knowledge of the laws. his office simply obliges him to execute the police regulations of society; a task in which good sense and integrity are of more avail than legal science. the justice introduces into the administration a certain taste for established forms and publicity, which renders him a most unserviceable instrument of despotism; and, on the other hand, he is not blinded by those superstitions which render legal officers unfit members of a government. the americans have adopted the system of the english justices of the peace, but they have deprived it of that aristocratic character which is discernible in the mother-country. the governor of massachusetts *p appoints a certain number of justices of the peace in every county, whose functions last seven years. *q he further designates three individuals from amongst the whole body of justices who form in each county what is called the court of sessions. the justices take a personal share in public business; they are sometimes entrusted with administrative functions in conjunction with elected officers, *r they sometimes constitute a tribunal, before which the magistrates summarily prosecute a refractory citizen, or the citizens inform against the abuses of the magistrate. but it is in the court of sessions that they exercise their most important functions. this court meets twice a year in the county town; in massachusetts it is empowered to enforce the obedience of the greater number *s of public officers. *t it must be observed, that in the state of massachusetts the court of sessions is at the same time an administrative body, properly so called, and a political tribunal. it has been asserted that the county is a purely administrative division. the court of sessions presides over that small number of affairs which, as they concern several townships, or all the townships of the county in common, cannot be entrusted to any one of them in particular. *u in all that concerns county business the duties of the court of sessions are purely administrative; and if in its investigations it occasionally borrows the forms of judicial procedure, it is only with a view to its own information, *v or as a guarantee to the community over which it presides. but when the administration of the township is brought before it, it always acts as a judicial body, and in some few cases as an official assembly. [footnote p: we shall hereafter learn what a governor is: i shall content myself with remarking in this place that he represents the executive power of the whole state.] [footnote q: see the constitution of massachusetts, chap. ii. sect. . section ; chap. iii. section .] [footnote r: thus, for example, a stranger arrives in a township from a country where a contagious disease prevails, and he falls ill. two justices of the peace can, with the assent of the selectmen, order the sheriff of the county to remove and take care of him.--act of june , , vol. i. p. . in general the justices interfere in all the important acts of the administration, and give them a semi-judicial character.] [footnote s: i say the greater number, because certain administrative misdemeanors are brought before ordinary tribunals. if, for instance, a township refuses to make the necessary expenditure for its schools or to name a school-committee, it is liable to a heavy fine. but this penalty is pronounced by the supreme judicial court or the court of common pleas. see act of march , , laws of massachusetts, vol. iii. p. . or when a township neglects to provide the necessary war-stores.--act of february , : id., vol. ii. p. .] [footnote t: in their individual capacity the justices of the peace take a part in the business of the counties and townships.] [footnote u: these affairs may be brought under the following heads:-- . the erection of prisons and courts of justice. . the county budget, which is afterwards voted by the state. . the distribution of the taxes so voted. . grants of certain patents. . the laying down and repairs of the country roads.] [footnote v: thus, when a road is under consideration, almost all difficulties are disposed of by the aid of the jury.] the first difficulty is to procure the obedience of an authority as entirely independent of the general laws of the state as the township is. we have stated that assessors are annually named by the town-meetings to levy the taxes. if a township attempts to evade the payment of the taxes by neglecting to name its assessors, the court of sessions condemns it to a heavy penalty. *w the fine is levied on each of the inhabitants; and the sheriff of the county, who is the officer of justice, executes the mandate. thus it is that in the united states the authority of the government is mysteriously concealed under the forms of a judicial sentence; and its influence is at the same time fortified by that irresistible power with which men have invested the formalities of law. [footnote w: see act of february , , laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .] these proceedings are easy to follow and to understand. the demands made upon a township are in general plain and accurately defined; they consist in a simple fact without any complication, or in a principle without its application in detail. *x but the difficulty increases when it is not the obedience of the township, but that of the town officers which is to be enforced. all the reprehensible actions of which a public functionary may be guilty are reducible to the following heads: [footnote x: there is an indirect method of enforcing the obedience of a township. suppose that the funds which the law demands for the maintenance of the roads have not been voted, the town surveyor is then authorized, ex officio, to levy the supplies. as he is personally responsible to private individuals for the state of the roads, and indictable before the court of sessions, he is sure to employ the extraordinary right which the law gives him against the township. thus by threatening the officer the court of sessions exacts compliance from the town. see act of march , , id., vol. i. p. .] he may execute the law without energy or zeal; he may neglect to execute the law; he may do what the law enjoins him not to do. the last two violations of duty can alone come under the cognizance of a tribunal; a positive and appreciable fact is the indispensable foundation of an action at law. thus, if the selectmen omit to fulfil the legal formalities usual at town elections, they may be condemned to pay a fine; *y but when the public officer performs his duty without ability, and when he obeys the letter of the law without zeal or energy, he is at least beyond the reach of judicial interference. the court of sessions, even when it is invested with its official powers, is in this case unable to compel him to a more satisfactory obedience. the fear of removal is the only check to these quasi-offences; and as the court of sessions does not originate the town authorities, it cannot remove functionaries whom it does not appoint. moreover, a perpetual investigation would be necessary to convict the officer of negligence or lukewarmness; and the court of sessions sits but twice a year and then only judges such offences as are brought before its notice. the only security of that active and enlightened obedience which a court of justice cannot impose upon public officers lies in the possibility of their arbitrary removal. in france this security is sought for in powers exercised by the heads of the administration; in america it is sought for in the principle of election. [footnote y: laws of massachusetts, vol. ii. p. .] thus, to recapitulate in a few words what i have been showing: if a public officer in new england commits a crime in the exercise of his functions, the ordinary courts of justice are always called upon to pass sentence upon him. if he commits a fault in his official capacity, a purely administrative tribunal is empowered to punish him; and, if the affair is important or urgent, the judge supplies the omission of the functionary. *z lastly, if the same individual is guilty of one of those intangible offences of which human justice has no cognizance, he annually appears before a tribunal from which there is no appeal, which can at once reduce him to insignificance and deprive him of his charge. this system undoubtedly possesses great advantages, but its execution is attended with a practical difficulty which it is important to point out. [footnote z: if, for instance, a township persists in refusing to name its assessors, the court of sessions nominates them; and the magistrates thus appointed are invested with the same authority as elected officers. see the act quoted above, february , .] i have already observed that the administrative tribunal, which is called the court of sessions, has no right of inspection over the town officers. it can only interfere when the conduct of a magistrate is specially brought under its notice; and this is the delicate part of the system. the americans of new england are unacquainted with the office of public prosecutor in the court of sessions, *a and it may readily be perceived that it could not have been established without difficulty. if an accusing magistrate had merely been appointed in the chief town of each county, and if he had been unassisted by agents in the townships, he would not have been better acquainted with what was going on in the county than the members of the court of sessions. but to appoint agents in each township would have been to centre in his person the most formidable of powers, that of a judicial administration. moreover, laws are the children of habit, and nothing of the kind exists in the legislation of england. the americans have therefore divided the offices of inspection and of prosecution, as well as all the other functions of the administration. grand jurors are bound by the law to apprise the court to which they belong of all the misdemeanors which may have been committed in their county. *b there are certain great offences which are officially prosecuted by the states; *c but more frequently the task of punishing delinquents devolves upon the fiscal officer, whose province it is to receive the fine: thus the treasurer of the township is charged with the prosecution of such administrative offences as fall under his notice. but a more special appeal is made by american legislation to the private interest of the citizen; *d and this great principle is constantly to be met with in studying the laws of the united states. american legislators are more apt to give men credit for intelligence than for honesty, and they rely not a little on personal cupidity for the execution of the laws. when an individual is really and sensibly injured by an administrative abuse, it is natural that his personal interest should induce him to prosecute. but if a legal formality be required, which, however advantageous to the community, is of small importance to individuals, plaintiffs may be less easily found; and thus, by a tacit agreement, the laws may fall into disuse. reduced by their system to this extremity, the americans are obliged to encourage informers by bestowing on them a portion of the penalty in certain cases, *e and to insure the execution of the laws by the dangerous expedient of degrading the morals of the people. the only administrative authority above the county magistrates is, properly speaking, that of the government. [footnote a: i say the court of sessions, because in common courts there is a magistrate who exercises some of the functions of a public prosecutor.] [footnote b: the grand-jurors are, for instance, bound to inform the court of the bad state of the roads.--laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .] [footnote c: if, for instance, the treasurer of the county holds back his accounts.--laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .] [footnote d: thus, if a private individual breaks down or is wounded in consequence of the badness of a road, he can sue the township or the county for damages at the sessions.--laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .] [footnote e: in cases of invasion or insurrection, if the town-officers neglect to furnish the necessary stores and ammunition for the militia, the township may be condemned to a fine of from $ to $ . it may readily be imagined that in such a case it might happen that no one cared to prosecute; hence the law adds that all the citizens may indict offences of this kind, and that half of the fine shall belong to the plaintiff. see act of march , , vol. ii. p. . the same clause is frequently to be met with in the law of massachusetts. not only are private individuals thus incited to prosecute the public officers, but the public officers are encouraged in the same manner to bring the disobedience of private individuals to justice. if a citizen refuses to perform the work which has been assigned to him upon a road, the road surveyor may prosecute him, and he receives half the penalty for himself. see the laws above quoted, vol. i. p. .] general remarks on the administration of the united states differences of the states of the union in their system of administration--activity and perfection of the local authorities decrease towards the south--power of the magistrate increases; that of the elector diminishes--administration passes from the township to the county--states of new york, ohio, pennsylvania--principles of administration applicable to the whole union--election of public officers, and inalienability of their functions--absence of gradation of ranks--introduction of judicial resources into the administration. i have already premised that, after having examined the constitution of the township and the county of new england in detail, i should take a general view of the remainder of the union. townships and a local activity exist in every state; but in no part of the confederation is a township to be met with precisely similar to those of new england. the more we descend towards the south, the less active does the business of the township or parish become; the number of magistrates, of functions, and of rights decreases; the population exercises a less immediate influence on affairs; town meetings are less frequent, and the subjects of debate less numerous. the power of the elected magistrate is augmented and that of the elector diminished, whilst the public spirit of the local communities is less awakened and less influential. *f these differences may be perceived to a certain extent in the state of new york; they are very sensible in pennsylvania; but they become less striking as we advance to the northwest. the majority of the emigrants who settle in the northwestern states are natives of new england, and they carry the habits of their mother country with them into that which they adopt. a township in ohio is by no means dissimilar from a township in massachusetts. [footnote f: for details see the revised statutes of the state of new york, part i. chap. xi. vol. i. pp. - , entitled, "of the powers, duties, and privileges of towns." see in the digest of the laws of pennsylvania, the words assessors, collector, constables, overseer of the poor, supervisors of highways; and in the acts of a general nature of the state of ohio, the act of february , , relating to townships, p. ; besides the peculiar dispositions relating to divers town-officers, such as township's clerk, trustees, overseers of the poor, fence viewers, appraisers of property, township's treasurer, constables, supervisors of highways.] we have seen that in massachusetts the mainspring of public administration lies in the township. it forms the common centre of the interests and affections of the citizens. but this ceases to be the case as we descend to states in which knowledge is less generally diffused, and where the township consequently offers fewer guarantees of a wise and active administration. as we leave new england, therefore, we find that the importance of the town is gradually transferred to the county, which becomes the centre of administration, and the intermediate power between the government and the citizen. in massachusetts the business of the county is conducted by the court of sessions, which is composed of a quorum named by the governor and his council; but the county has no representative assembly, and its expenditure is voted by the national legislature. in the great state of new york, on the contrary, and in those of ohio and pennsylvania, the inhabitants of each county choose a certain number of representatives, who constitute the assembly of the county. *g the county assembly has the right of taxing the inhabitants to a certain extent; and in this respect it enjoys the privileges of a real legislative body: at the same time it exercises an executive power in the county, frequently directs the administration of the townships, and restricts their authority within much narrower bounds than in massachusetts. [footnote g: see the revised statutes of the state of new york, part i. chap. xi. vol. i. p. . id. chap. xii. p. ; also in the acts of the state of ohio, an act relating to county commissioners, february , , p. . see the digest of the laws of pennsylvania, at the words county-rates and levies, p. . in the state of new york each township elects a representative, who has a share in the administration of the county as well as in that of the township.] such are the principal differences which the systems of county and town administration present in the federal states. were it my intention to examine the provisions of american law minutely, i should have to point out still further differences in the executive details of the several communities. but what i have already said may suffice to show the general principles on which the administration of the united states rests. these principles are differently applied; their consequences are more or less numerous in various localities; but they are always substantially the same. the laws differ, and their outward features change, but their character does not vary. if the township and the county are not everywhere constituted in the same manner, it is at least true that in the united states the county and the township are always based upon the same principle, namely, that everyone is the best judge of what concerns himself alone, and the most proper person to supply his private wants. the township and the county are therefore bound to take care of their special interests: the state governs, but it does not interfere with their administration. exceptions to this rule may be met with, but not a contrary principle. the first consequence of this doctrine has been to cause all the magistrates to be chosen either by or at least from amongst the citizens. as the officers are everywhere elected or appointed for a certain period, it has been impossible to establish the rules of a dependent series of authorities; there are almost as many independent functionaries as there are functions, and the executive power is disseminated in a multitude of hands. hence arose the indispensable necessity of introducing the control of the courts of justice over the administration, and the system of pecuniary penalties, by which the secondary bodies and their representatives are constrained to obey the laws. this system obtains from one end of the union to the other. the power of punishing the misconduct of public officers, or of performing the part of the executive in urgent cases, has not, however, been bestowed on the same judges in all the states. the anglo-americans derived the institution of justices of the peace from a common source; but although it exists in all the states, it is not always turned to the same use. the justices of the peace everywhere participate in the administration of the townships and the counties, *h either as public officers or as the judges of public misdemeanors, but in most of the states the more important classes of public offences come under the cognizance of the ordinary tribunals. [footnote h: in some of the southern states the county courts are charged with all the details of the administration. see the statutes of the state of tennessee, arts. judiciary, taxes, etc.] the election of public officers, or the inalienability of their functions, the absence of a gradation of powers, and the introduction of a judicial control over the secondary branches of the administration, are the universal characteristics of the american system from maine to the floridas. in some states (and that of new york has advanced most in this direction) traces of a centralized administration begin to be discernible. in the state of new york the officers of the central government exercise, in certain cases, a sort of inspection or control over the secondary bodies. *i [footnote i: for instance, the direction of public instruction centres in the hands of the government. the legislature names the members of the university, who are denominated regents; the governor and lieutentant-governor of the state are necessarily of the number.--revised statutes, vol. i. p. . the regents of the university annually visit the colleges and academies, and make their report to the legislature. their superintendence is not inefficient, for several reasons: the colleges in order to become corporations stand in need of a charter, which is only granted on the recommendation of the regents; every year funds are distributed by the state for the encouragement of learning, and the regents are the distributors of this money. see chap. xv. "instruction," revised statutes, vol. i. p. . the school-commissioners are obliged to send an annual report to the superintendent of the republic.--id. p. . a similar report is annually made to the same person on the number and condition of the poor.--id. p. .] at other times they constitute a court of appeal for the decision of affairs. *j in the state of new york judicial penalties are less used than in other parts as a means of administration, and the right of prosecuting the offences of public officers is vested in fewer hands. *k the same tendency is faintly observable in some other states; *l but in general the prominent feature of the administration in the united states is its excessive local independence. [footnote j: if any one conceives himself to be wronged by the school-commissioners (who are town-officers), he can appeal to the superintendent of the primary schools, whose decision is final.--revised statutes, vol. i. p. . provisions similar to those above cited are to be met with from time to time in the laws of the state of new york; but in general these attempts at centralization are weak and unproductive. the great authorities of the state have the right of watching and controlling the subordinate agents, without that of rewarding or punishing them. the same individual is never empowered to give an order and to punish disobedience; he has therefore the right of commanding, without the means of exacting compliance. in the superintendent of schools complained in his annual report addressed to the legislature that several school-commissioners had neglected, notwithstanding his application, to furnish him with the accounts which were due. he added that if this omission continued he should be obliged to prosecute them, as the law directs, before the proper tribunals.] [footnote k: thus the district-attorney is directed to recover all fines below the sum of fifty dollars, unless such a right has been specially awarded to another magistrate.--revised statutes, vol. i. p. .] [footnote l: several traces of centralization may be discovered in massachusetts; for instance, the committees of the town-schools are directed to make an annual report to the secretary of state. see laws of massachusetts, vol. i. p. .] of the state i have described the townships and the administration; it now remains for me to speak of the state and the government. this is ground i may pass over rapidly, without fear of being misunderstood; for all i have to say is to be found in written forms of the various constitutions, which are easily to be procured. these constitutions rest upon a simple and rational theory; their forms have been adopted by all constitutional nations, and are become familiar to us. in this place, therefore, it is only necessary for me to give a short analysis; i shall endeavor afterwards to pass judgment upon what i now describe. chapter v: necessity of examining the condition of the states--part iii legislative power of the state division of the legislative body into two houses--senate--house of representatives--different functions of these two bodies. the legislative power of the state is vested in two assemblies, the first of which generally bears the name of the senate. the senate is commonly a legislative body; but it sometimes becomes an executive and judicial one. it takes a part in the government in several ways, according to the constitution of the different states; *m but it is in the nomination of public functionaries that it most commonly assumes an executive power. it partakes of judicial power in the trial of certain political offences, and sometimes also in the decision of certain civil cases. *n the number of its members is always small. the other branch of the legislature, which is usually called the house of representatives, has no share whatever in the administration, and only takes a part in the judicial power inasmuch as it impeaches public functionaries before the senate. the members of the two houses are nearly everywhere subject to the same conditions of election. they are chosen in the same manner, and by the same citizens. the only difference which exists between them is, that the term for which the senate is chosen is in general longer than that of the house of representatives. the latter seldom remain in office longer than a year; the former usually sit two or three years. by granting to the senators the privilege of being chosen for several years, and being renewed seriatim, the law takes care to preserve in the legislative body a nucleus of men already accustomed to public business, and capable of exercising a salutary influence upon the junior members. [footnote m: in massachusetts the senate is not invested with any administrative functions.] [footnote n: as in the state of new york.] the americans, plainly, did not desire, by this separation of the legislative body into two branches, to make one house hereditary and the other elective; one aristocratic and the other democratic. it was not their object to create in the one a bulwark to power, whilst the other represented the interests and passions of the people. the only advantages which result from the present constitution of the united states are the division of the legislative power and the consequent check upon political assemblies; with the creation of a tribunal of appeal for the revision of the laws. time and experience, however, have convinced the americans that if these are its only advantages, the division of the legislative power is still a principle of the greatest necessity. pennsylvania was the only one of the united states which at first attempted to establish a single house of assembly, and franklin himself was so far carried away by the necessary consequences of the principle of the sovereignty of the people as to have concurred in the measure; but the pennsylvanians were soon obliged to change the law, and to create two houses. thus the principle of the division of the legislative power was finally established, and its necessity may henceforward be regarded as a demonstrated truth. this theory, which was nearly unknown to the republics of antiquity--which was introduced into the world almost by accident, like so many other great truths--and misunderstood by several modern nations, is at length become an axiom in the political science of the present age. [see benjamin franklin] the executive power of the state office of governor in an american state--the place he occupies in relation to the legislature--his rights and his duties--his dependence on the people. the executive power of the state may with truth be said to be represented by the governor, although he enjoys but a portion of its rights. the supreme magistrate, under the title of governor, is the official moderator and counsellor of the legislature. he is armed with a veto or suspensive power, which allows him to stop, or at least to retard, its movements at pleasure. he lays the wants of the country before the legislative body, and points out the means which he thinks may be usefully employed in providing for them; he is the natural executor of its decrees in all the undertakings which interest the nation at large. *o in the absence of the legislature, the governor is bound to take all necessary steps to guard the state against violent shocks and unforeseen dangers. the whole military power of the state is at the disposal of the governor. he is the commander of the militia, and head of the armed force. when the authority, which is by general consent awarded to the laws, is disregarded, the governor puts himself at the head of the armed force of the state, to quell resistance, and to restore order. lastly, the governor takes no share in the administration of townships and counties, except it be indirectly in the nomination of justices of the peace, which nomination he has not the power to cancel. *p the governor is an elected magistrate, and is generally chosen for one or two years only; so that he always continues to be strictly dependent upon the majority who returned him. [footnote o: practically speaking, it is not always the governor who executes the plans of the legislature; it often happens that the latter, in voting a measure, names special agents to superintend the execution of it.] [footnote p: in some of the states the justices of the peace are not elected by the governor.] political effects of the system of local administration in the united states necessary distinction between the general centralization of government and the centralization of the local administration--local administration not centralized in the united states: great general centralization of the government--some bad consequences resulting to the united states from the local administration--administrative advantages attending this order of things--the power which conducts the government is less regular, less enlightened, less learned, but much greater than in europe--political advantages of this order of things--in the united states the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view--support given to the government by the community--provincial institutions more necessary in proportion as the social condition becomes more democratic--reason of this. centralization is become a word of general and daily use, without any precise meaning being attached to it. nevertheless, there exist two distinct kinds of centralization, which it is necessary to discriminate with accuracy. certain interests are common to all parts of a nation, such as the enactment of its general laws and the maintenance of its foreign relations. other interests are peculiar to certain parts of the nation; such, for instance, as the business of different townships. when the power which directs the general interests is centred in one place, or vested in the same persons, it constitutes a central government. in like manner the power of directing partial or local interests, when brought together into one place, constitutes what may be termed a central administration. upon some points these two kinds of centralization coalesce; but by classifying the objects which fall more particularly within the province of each of them, they may easily be distinguished. it is evident that a central government acquires immense power when united to administrative centralization. thus combined, it accustoms men to set their own will habitually and completely aside; to submit, not only for once, or upon one point, but in every respect, and at all times. not only, therefore, does this union of power subdue them compulsorily, but it affects them in the ordinary habits of life, and influences each individual, first separately and then collectively. these two kinds of centralization mutually assist and attract each other; but they must not be supposed to be inseparable. it is impossible to imagine a more completely central government than that which existed in france under louis xiv.; when the same individual was the author and the interpreter of the laws, and the representative of france at home and abroad, he was justified in asserting that the state was identified with his person. nevertheless, the administration was much less centralized under louis xiv. than it is at the present day. in england the centralization of the government is carried to great perfection; the state has the compact vigor of a man, and by the sole act of its will it puts immense engines in motion, and wields or collects the efforts of its authority. indeed, i cannot conceive that a nation can enjoy a secure or prosperous existence without a powerful centralization of government. but i am of opinion that a central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit. if such an administration succeeds in condensing at a given moment, on a given point, all the disposable resources of a people, it impairs at least the renewal of those resources. it may ensure a victory in the hour of strife, but it gradually relaxes the sinews of strength. it may contribute admirably to the transient greatness of a man, but it cannot ensure the durable prosperity of a nation. if we pay proper attention, we shall find that whenever it is said that a state cannot act because it has no central point, it is the centralization of the government in which it is deficient. it is frequently asserted, and we are prepared to assent to the proposition, that the german empire was never able to bring all its powers into action. but the reason was, that the state was never able to enforce obedience to its general laws, because the several members of that great body always claimed the right, or found the means, of refusing their co-operation to the representatives of the common authority, even in the affairs which concerned the mass of the people; in other words, because there was no centralization of government. the same remark is applicable to the middle ages; the cause of all the confusion of feudal society was that the control, not only of local but of general interests, was divided amongst a thousand hands, and broken up in a thousand different ways; the absence of a central government prevented the nations of europe from advancing with energy in any straightforward course. we have shown that in the united states no central administration and no dependent series of public functionaries exist. local authority has been carried to lengths which no european nation could endure without great inconvenience, and which has even produced some disadvantageous consequences in america. but in the united states the centralization of the government is complete; and it would be easy to prove that the national power is more compact than it has ever been in the old nations of europe. not only is there but one legislative body in each state; not only does there exist but one source of political authority; but district assemblies and county courts have not in general been multiplied, lest they should be tempted to exceed their administrative duties, and interfere with the government. in america the legislature of each state is supreme; nothing can impede its authority; neither privileges, nor local immunities, nor personal influence, nor even the empire of reason, since it represents that majority which claims to be the sole organ of reason. its own determination is, therefore, the only limit to this action. in juxtaposition to it, and under its immediate control, is the representative of the executive power, whose duty it is to constrain the refractory to submit by superior force. the only symptom of weakness lies in certain details of the action of the government. the american republics have no standing armies to intimidate a discontented minority; but as no minority has as yet been reduced to declare open war, the necessity of an army has not been felt. *q the state usually employs the officers of the township or the county to deal with the citizens. thus, for instance, in new england, the assessor fixes the rate of taxes; the collector receives them; the town-treasurer transmits the amount to the public treasury; and the disputes which may arise are brought before the ordinary courts of justice. this method of collecting taxes is slow as well as inconvenient, and it would prove a perpetual hindrance to a government whose pecuniary demands were large. it is desirable that, in whatever materially affects its existence, the government should be served by officers of its own, appointed by itself, removable at pleasure, and accustomed to rapid methods of proceeding. but it will always be easy for the central government, organized as it is in america, to introduce new and more efficacious modes of action, proportioned to its wants. [footnote q: [the civil war of - cruelly belied this statement, and in the course of the struggle the north alone called two millions and a half of men to arms; but to the honor of the united states it must be added that, with the cessation of the contest, this army disappeared as rapidly as it had been raised.--translator's note.]] the absence of a central government will not, then, as has often been asserted, prove the destruction of the republics of the new world; far from supposing that the american governments are not sufficiently centralized, i shall prove hereafter that they are too much so. the legislative bodies daily encroach upon the authority of the government, and their tendency, like that of the french convention, is to appropriate it entirely to themselves. under these circumstances the social power is constantly changing hands, because it is subordinate to the power of the people, which is too apt to forget the maxims of wisdom and of foresight in the consciousness of its strength: hence arises its danger; and thus its vigor, and not its impotence, will probably be the cause of its ultimate destruction. the system of local administration produces several different effects in america. the americans seem to me to have outstepped the limits of sound policy in isolating the administration of the government; for order, even in second-rate affairs, is a matter of national importance. *r as the state has no administrative functionaries of its own, stationed on different points of its territory, to whom it can give a common impulse, the consequence is that it rarely attempts to issue any general police regulations. the want of these regulations is severely felt, and is frequently observed by europeans. the appearance of disorder which prevails on the surface leads him at first to imagine that society is in a state of anarchy; nor does he perceive his mistake till he has gone deeper into the subject. certain undertakings are of importance to the whole state; but they cannot be put in execution, because there is no national administration to direct them. abandoned to the exertions of the towns or counties, under the care of elected or temporary agents, they lead to no result, or at least to no durable benefit. [footnote r: the authority which represents the state ought not, i think, to waive the right of inspecting the local administration, even when it does not interfere more actively. suppose, for instance, that an agent of the government was stationed at some appointed spot in the country, to prosecute the misdemeanors of the town and county officers, would not a more uniform order be the result, without in any way compromising the independence of the township? nothing of the kind, however, exists in america: there is nothing above the county-courts, which have, as it were, only an incidental cognizance of the offences they are meant to repress.] the partisans of centralization in europe are wont to maintain that the government directs the affairs of each locality better than the citizens could do it for themselves; this may be true when the central power is enlightened, and when the local districts are ignorant; when it is as alert as they are slow; when it is accustomed to act, and they to obey. indeed, it is evident that this double tendency must augment with the increase of centralization, and that the readiness of the one and the incapacity of the others must become more and more prominent. but i deny that such is the case when the people is as enlightened, as awake to its interests, and as accustomed to reflect on them, as the americans are. i am persuaded, on the contrary, that in this case the collective strength of the citizens will always conduce more efficaciously to the public welfare than the authority of the government. it is difficult to point out with certainty the means of arousing a sleeping population, and of giving it passions and knowledge which it does not possess; it is, i am well aware, an arduous task to persuade men to busy themselves about their own affairs; and it would frequently be easier to interest them in the punctilios of court etiquette than in the repairs of their common dwelling. but whenever a central administration affects to supersede the persons most interested, i am inclined to suppose that it is either misled or desirous to mislead. however enlightened and however skilful a central power may be, it cannot of itself embrace all the details of the existence of a great nation. such vigilance exceeds the powers of man. and when it attempts to create and set in motion so many complicated springs, it must submit to a very imperfect result, or consume itself in bootless efforts. centralization succeeds more easily, indeed, in subjecting the external actions of men to a certain uniformity, which at least commands our regard, independently of the objects to which it is applied, like those devotees who worship the statue and forget the deity it represents. centralization imparts without difficulty an admirable regularity to the routine of business; provides for the details of the social police with sagacity; represses the smallest disorder and the most petty misdemeanors; maintains society in a status quo alike secure from improvement and decline; and perpetuates a drowsy precision in the conduct of affairs, which is hailed by the heads of the administration as a sign of perfect order and public tranquillity: *s in short, it excels more in prevention than in action. its force deserts it when society is to be disturbed or accelerated in its course; and if once the co-operation of private citizens is necessary to the furtherance of its measures, the secret of its impotence is disclosed. even whilst it invokes their assistance, it is on the condition that they shall act exactly as much as the government chooses, and exactly in the manner it appoints. they are to take charge of the details, without aspiring to guide the system; they are to work in a dark and subordinate sphere, and only to judge the acts in which they have themselves cooperated by their results. these, however, are not conditions on which the alliance of the human will is to be obtained; its carriage must be free and its actions responsible, or (such is the constitution of man) the citizen had rather remain a passive spectator than a dependent actor in schemes with which he is unacquainted. [footnote s: china appears to me to present the most perfect instance of that species of well-being which a completely central administration may furnish to the nations among which it exists. travellers assure us that the chinese have peace without happiness, industry without improvement, stability without strength, and public order without public morality. the condition of society is always tolerable, never excellent. i am convinced that, when china is opened to european observation, it will be found to contain the most perfect model of a central administration which exists in the universe.] it is undeniable that the want of those uniform regulations which control the conduct of every inhabitant of france is not unfrequently felt in the united states. gross instances of social indifference and neglect are to be met with, and from time to time disgraceful blemishes are seen in complete contrast with the surrounding civilization. useful undertakings which cannot succeed without perpetual attention and rigorous exactitude are very frequently abandoned in the end; for in america, as well as in other countries, the people is subject to sudden impulses and momentary exertions. the european who is accustomed to find a functionary always at hand to interfere with all he undertakes has some difficulty in accustoming himself to the complex mechanism of the administration of the townships. in general it may be affirmed that the lesser details of the police, which render life easy and comfortable, are neglected in america; but that the essential guarantees of man in society are as strong there as elsewhere. in america the power which conducts the government is far less regular, less enlightened, and less learned, but an hundredfold more authoritative than in europe. in no country in the world do the citizens make such exertions for the common weal; and i am acquainted with no people which has established schools as numerous and as efficacious, places of public worship better suited to the wants of the inhabitants, or roads kept in better repair. uniformity or permanence of design, the minute arrangement of details, *t and the perfection of an ingenious administration, must not be sought for in the united states; but it will be easy to find, on the other hand, the symptoms of a power which, if it is somewhat barbarous, is at least robust; and of an existence which is checkered with accidents indeed, but cheered at the same time by animation and effort. [footnote t: a writer of talent, who, in the comparison which he has drawn between the finances of france and those of the united states, has proved that ingenuity cannot always supply the place of a knowledge of facts, very justly reproaches the americans for the sort of confusion which exists in the accounts of the expenditure in the townships; and after giving the model of a departmental budget in france, he adds:--"we are indebted to centralization, that admirable invention of a great man, for the uniform order and method which prevail alike in all the municipal budgets, from the largest town to the humblest commune." whatever may be my admiration of this result, when i see the communes of france, with their excellent system of accounts, plunged into the grossest ignorance of their true interests, and abandoned to so incorrigible an apathy that they seem to vegetate rather than to live; when, on the other hand, i observe the activity, the information, and the spirit of enterprise which keep society in perpetual labor, in those american townships whose budgets are drawn up with small method and with still less uniformity, i am struck by the spectacle; for to my mind the end of a good government is to ensure the welfare of a people, and not to establish order and regularity in the midst of its misery and its distress. i am therefore led to suppose that the prosperity of the american townships and the apparent confusion of their accounts, the distress of the french communes and the perfection of their budget, may be attributable to the same cause. at any rate i am suspicious of a benefit which is united to so many evils, and i am not averse to an evil which is compensated by so many benefits.] granting for an instant that the villages and counties of the united states would be more usefully governed by a remote authority which they had never seen than by functionaries taken from the midst of them--admitting, for the sake of argument, that the country would be more secure, and the resources of society better employed, if the whole administration centred in a single arm--still the political advantages which the americans derive from their system would induce me to prefer it to the contrary plan. it profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority should protect the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly avert all dangers from my path, without my care or my concern, if this same authority is the absolute mistress of my liberty and of my life, and if it so monopolizes all the energy of existence that when it languishes everything languishes around it, that when it sleeps everything must sleep, that when it dies the state itself must perish. in certain countries of europe the natives consider themselves as a kind of settlers, indifferent to the fate of the spot upon which they live. the greatest changes are effected without their concurrence and (unless chance may have apprised them of the event) without their knowledge; nay more, the citizen is unconcerned as to the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or of the parsonage; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself, and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. he has only a life-interest in these possessions, and he entertains no notions of ownership or of improvement. this want of interest in his own affairs goes so far that, if his own safety or that of his children is endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms, and wait till the nation comes to his assistance. this same individual, who has so completely sacrificed his own free will, has no natural propensity to obedience; he cowers, it is true, before the pettiest officer; but he braves the law with the spirit of a conquered foe as soon as its superior force is removed: his oscillations between servitude and license are perpetual. when a nation has arrived at this state it must either change its customs and its laws or perish: the source of public virtue is dry, and, though it may contain subjects, the race of citizens is extinct. such communities are a natural prey to foreign conquests, and if they do not disappear from the scene of life, it is because they are surrounded by other nations similar or inferior to themselves: it is because the instinctive feeling of their country's claims still exists in their hearts; and because an involuntary pride in the name it bears, or a vague reminiscence of its bygone fame, suffices to give them the impulse of self-preservation. nor can the prodigious exertions made by tribes in the defence of a country to which they did not belong be adduced in favor of such a system; for it will be found that in these cases their main incitement was religion. the permanence, the glory, or the prosperity of the nation were become parts of their faith, and in defending the country they inhabited they defended that holy city of which they were all citizens. the turkish tribes have never taken an active share in the conduct of the affairs of society, but they accomplished stupendous enterprises as long as the victories of the sultan were the triumphs of the mohammedan faith. in the present age they are in rapid decay, because their religion is departing, and despotism only remains. montesquieu, who attributed to absolute power an authority peculiar to itself, did it, as i conceive, an undeserved honor; for despotism, taken by itself, can produce no durable results. on close inspection we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of an absolute government. whatever exertions may be made, no true power can be founded among men which does not depend upon the free union of their inclinations; and patriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of a body politic to one end. laws cannot succeed in rekindling the ardor of an extinguished faith, but men may be interested in the fate of their country by the laws. by this influence the vague impulse of patriotism, which never abandons the human heart, may be directed and revived; and if it be connected with the thoughts, the passions, and the daily habits of life, it may be consolidated into a durable and rational sentiment. let it not be said that the time for the experiment is already past; for the old age of nations is not like the old age of men, and every fresh generation is a new people ready for the care of the legislator. it is not the administrative but the political effects of the local system that i most admire in america. in the united states the interests of the country are everywhere kept in view; they are an object of solicitude to the people of the whole union, and every citizen is as warmly attached to them as if they were his own. he takes pride in the glory of his nation; he boasts of its success, to which he conceives himself to have contributed, and he rejoices in the general prosperity by which he profits. the feeling he entertains towards the state is analogous to that which unites him to his family, and it is by a kind of egotism that he interests himself in the welfare of his country. the european generally submits to a public officer because he represents a superior force; but to an american he represents a right. in america it may be said that no one renders obedience to man, but to justice and to law. if the opinion which the citizen entertains of himself is exaggerated, it is at least salutary; he unhesitatingly confides in his own powers, which appear to him to be all-sufficient. when a private individual meditates an undertaking, however directly connected it may be with the welfare of society, he never thinks of soliciting the co-operation of the government, but he publishes his plan, offers to execute it himself, courts the assistance of other individuals, and struggles manfully against all obstacles. undoubtedly he is often less successful than the state might have been in his position; but in the end the sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the government could have done. as the administrative authority is within the reach of the citizens, whom it in some degree represents, it excites neither their jealousy nor their hatred; as its resources are limited, every one feels that he must not rely solely on its assistance. thus, when the administration thinks fit to interfere, it is not abandoned to itself as in europe; the duties of the private citizens are not supposed to have lapsed because the state assists in their fulfilment, but every one is ready, on the contrary, to guide and to support it. this action of individual exertions, joined to that of the public authorities, frequently performs what the most energetic central administration would be unable to execute. it would be easy to adduce several facts in proof of what i advance, but i had rather give only one, with which i am more thoroughly acquainted. *u in america the means which the authorities have at their disposal for the discovery of crimes and the arrest of criminals are few. the state police does not exist, and passports are unknown. the criminal police of the united states cannot be compared to that of france; the magistrates and public prosecutors are not numerous, and the examinations of prisoners are rapid and oral. nevertheless in no country does crime more rarely elude punishment. the reason is, that every one conceives himself to be interested in furnishing evidence of the act committed, and in stopping the delinquent. during my stay in the united states i witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime in a certain county. in europe a criminal is an unhappy being who is struggling for his life against the ministers of justice, whilst the population is merely a spectator of the conflict; in america he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him. [footnote u: see appendix, i.] i believe that provincial institutions are useful to all nations, but nowhere do they appear to me to be more indispensable than amongst a democratic people. in an aristocracy order can always be maintained in the midst of liberty, and as the rulers have a great deal to lose order is to them a first-rate consideration. in like manner an aristocracy protects the people from the excesses of despotism, because it always possesses an organized power ready to resist a despot. but a democracy without provincial institutions has no security against these evils. how can a populace, unaccustomed to freedom in small concerns, learn to use it temperately in great affairs? what resistance can be offered to tyranny in a country where every private individual is impotent, and where the citizens are united by no common tie? those who dread the license of the mob, and those who fear the rule of absolute power, ought alike to desire the progressive growth of provincial liberties. on the other hand, i am convinced that democratic nations are most exposed to fall beneath the yoke of a central administration, for several reasons, amongst which is the following. the constant tendency of these nations is to concentrate all the strength of the government in the hands of the only power which directly represents the people, because beyond the people nothing is to be perceived but a mass of equal individuals confounded together. but when the same power is already in possession of all the attributes of the government, it can scarcely refrain from penetrating into the details of the administration, and an opportunity of doing so is sure to present itself in the end, as was the case in france. in the french revolution there were two impulses in opposite directions, which must never be confounded--the one was favorable to liberty, the other to despotism. under the ancient monarchy the king was the sole author of the laws, and below the power of the sovereign certain vestiges of provincial institutions, half destroyed, were still distinguishable. these provincial institutions were incoherent, ill compacted, and frequently absurd; in the hands of the aristocracy they had sometimes been converted into instruments of oppression. the revolution declared itself the enemy of royalty and of provincial institutions at the same time; it confounded all that had preceded it--despotic power and the checks to its abuses--in indiscriminate hatred, and its tendency was at once to overthrow and to centralize. this double character of the french revolution is a fact which has been adroitly handled by the friends of absolute power. can they be accused of laboring in the cause of despotism when they are defending that central administration which was one of the great innovations of the revolution? *v in this manner popularity may be conciliated with hostility to the rights of the people, and the secret slave of tyranny may be the professed admirer of freedom. [footnote v: see appendix k.] i have visited the two nations in which the system of provincial liberty has been most perfectly established, and i have listened to the opinions of different parties in those countries. in america i met with men who secretly aspired to destroy the democratic institutions of the union; in england i found others who attacked the aristocracy openly, but i know of no one who does not regard provincial independence as a great benefit. in both countries i have heard a thousand different causes assigned for the evils of the state, but the local system was never mentioned amongst them. i have heard citizens attribute the power and prosperity of their country to a multitude of reasons, but they all placed the advantages of local institutions in the foremost rank. am i to suppose that when men who are naturally so divided on religious opinions and on political theories agree on one point (and that one of which they have daily experience), they are all in error? the only nations which deny the utility of provincial liberties are those which have fewest of them; in other words, those who are unacquainted with the institution are the only persons who pass a censure upon it. chapter vi: judicial power in the united states chapter summary the anglo-americans have retained the characteristics of judicial power which are common to all nations--they have, however, made it a powerful political organ--how--in what the judicial system of the anglo-americans differs from that of all other nations--why the american judges have the right of declaring the laws to be unconstitutional--how they use this right--precautions taken by the legislator to prevent its abuse. judicial power in the united states and its influence on political society. i have thought it essential to devote a separate chapter to the judicial authorities of the united states, lest their great political importance should be lessened in the reader's eyes by a merely incidental mention of them. confederations have existed in other countries beside america, and republics have not been established upon the shores of the new world alone; the representative system of government has been adopted in several states of europe, but i am not aware that any nation of the globe has hitherto organized a judicial power on the principle now adopted by the americans. the judicial organization of the united states is the institution which a stranger has the greatest difficulty in understanding. he hears the authority of a judge invoked in the political occurrences of every day, and he naturally concludes that in the united states the judges are important political functionaries; nevertheless, when he examines the nature of the tribunals, they offer nothing which is contrary to the usual habits and privileges of those bodies, and the magistrates seem to him to interfere in public affairs of chance, but by a chance which recurs every day. when the parliament of paris remonstrated, or refused to enregister an edict, or when it summoned a functionary accused of malversation to its bar, its political influence as a judicial body was clearly visible; but nothing of the kind is to be seen in the united states. the americans have retained all the ordinary characteristics of judicial authority, and have carefully restricted its action to the ordinary circle of its functions. the first characteristic of judicial power in all nations is the duty of arbitration. but rights must be contested in order to warrant the interference of a tribunal; and an action must be brought to obtain the decision of a judge. as long, therefore, as the law is uncontested, the judicial authority is not called upon to discuss it, and it may exist without being perceived. when a judge in a given case attacks a law relating to that case, he extends the circle of his customary duties, without however stepping beyond it; since he is in some measure obliged to decide upon the law in order to decide the case. but if he pronounces upon a law without resting upon a case, he clearly steps beyond his sphere, and invades that of the legislative authority. the second characteristic of judicial power is that it pronounces on special cases, and not upon general principles. if a judge in deciding a particular point destroys a general principle, by passing a judgment which tends to reject all the inferences from that principle, and consequently to annul it, he remains within the ordinary limits of his functions. but if he directly attacks a general principle without having a particular case in view, he leaves the circle in which all nations have agreed to confine his authority, he assumes a more important, and perhaps a more useful, influence than that of the magistrate, but he ceases to be a representative of the judicial power. the third characteristic of the judicial power is its inability to act unless it is appealed to, or until it has taken cognizance of an affair. this characteristic is less general than the other two; but, notwithstanding the exceptions, i think it may be regarded as essential. the judicial power is by its nature devoid of action; it must be put in motion in order to produce a result. when it is called upon to repress a crime, it punishes the criminal; when a wrong is to be redressed, it is ready to redress it; when an act requires interpretation, it is prepared to interpret it; but it does not pursue criminals, hunt out wrongs, or examine into evidence of its own accord. a judicial functionary who should open proceedings, and usurp the censorship of the laws, would in some measure do violence to the passive nature of his authority. the americans have retained these three distinguishing characteristics of the judicial power; an american judge can only pronounce a decision when litigation has arisen, he is only conversant with special cases, and he cannot act until the cause has been duly brought before the court. his position is therefore perfectly similar to that of the magistrate of other nations; and he is nevertheless invested with immense political power. if the sphere of his authority and his means of action are the same as those of other judges, it may be asked whence he derives a power which they do not possess. the cause of this difference lies in the simple fact that the americans have acknowledged the right of the judges to found their decisions on the constitution rather than on the laws. in other words, they have left them at liberty not to apply such laws as may appear to them to be unconstitutional. i am aware that a similar right has been claimed--but claimed in vain--by courts of justice in other countries; but in america it is recognized by all authorities; and not a party, nor so much as an individual, is found to contest it. this fact can only be explained by the principles of the american constitution. in france the constitution is (or at least is supposed to be) immutable; and the received theory is that no power has the right of changing any part of it. in england the parliament has an acknowledged right to modify the constitution; as, therefore, the constitution may undergo perpetual changes, it does not in reality exist; the parliament is at once a legislative and a constituent assembly. the political theories of america are more simple and more rational. an american constitution is not supposed to be immutable as in france, nor is it susceptible of modification by the ordinary powers of society as in england. it constitutes a detached whole, which, as it represents the determination of the whole people, is no less binding on the legislator than on the private citizen, but which may be altered by the will of the people in predetermined cases, according to established rules. in america the constitution may therefore vary, but as long as it exists it is the origin of all authority, and the sole vehicle of the predominating force. *a [footnote a: [the fifth article of the original constitution of the united states provides the mode in which amendments of the constitution may be made. amendments must be proposed by two-thirds of both houses of congress, and ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states. fifteen amendments of the constitution have been made at different times since , the most important of which are the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, framed and ratified after the civil war. the original constitution of the united states, followed by these fifteen amendments, is printed at the end of this edition. --translator's note, .]] it is easy to perceive in what manner these differences must act upon the position and the rights of the judicial bodies in the three countries i have cited. if in france the tribunals were authorized to disobey the laws on the ground of their being opposed to the constitution, the supreme power would in fact be placed in their hands, since they alone would have the right of interpreting a constitution, the clauses of which can be modified by no authority. they would therefore take the place of the nation, and exercise as absolute a sway over society as the inherent weakness of judicial power would allow them to do. undoubtedly, as the french judges are incompetent to declare a law to be unconstitutional, the power of changing the constitution is indirectly given to the legislative body, since no legal barrier would oppose the alterations which it might prescribe. but it is better to grant the power of changing the constitution of the people to men who represent (however imperfectly) the will of the people, than to men who represent no one but themselves. it would be still more unreasonable to invest the english judges with the right of resisting the decisions of the legislative body, since the parliament which makes the laws also makes the constitution; and consequently a law emanating from the three powers of the state can in no case be unconstitutional. but neither of these remarks is applicable to america. in the united states the constitution governs the legislator as much as the private citizen; as it is the first of laws it cannot be modified by a law, and it is therefore just that the tribunals should obey the constitution in preference to any law. this condition is essential to the power of the judicature, for to select that legal obligation by which he is most strictly bound is the natural right of every magistrate. in france the constitution is also the first of laws, and the judges have the same right to take it as the ground of their decisions, but were they to exercise this right they must perforce encroach on rights more sacred than their own, namely, on those of society, in whose name they are acting. in this case the state-motive clearly prevails over the motives of an individual. in america, where the nation can always reduce its magistrates to obedience by changing its constitution, no danger of this kind is to be feared. upon this point, therefore, the political and the logical reasons agree, and the people as well as the judges preserve their privileges. whenever a law which the judge holds to be unconstitutional is argued in a tribunal of the united states he may refuse to admit it as a rule; this power is the only one which is peculiar to the american magistrate, but it gives rise to immense political influence. few laws can escape the searching analysis of the judicial power for any length of time, for there are few which are not prejudicial to some private interest or other, and none which may not be brought before a court of justice by the choice of parties, or by the necessity of the case. but from the time that a judge has refused to apply any given law in a case, that law loses a portion of its moral cogency. the persons to whose interests it is prejudicial learn that means exist of evading its authority, and similar suits are multiplied, until it becomes powerless. one of two alternatives must then be resorted to: the people must alter the constitution, or the legislature must repeal the law. the political power which the americans have intrusted to their courts of justice is therefore immense, but the evils of this power are considerably diminished by the obligation which has been imposed of attacking the laws through the courts of justice alone. if the judge had been empowered to contest the laws on the ground of theoretical generalities, if he had been enabled to open an attack or to pass a censure on the legislator, he would have played a prominent part in the political sphere; and as the champion or the antagonist of a party, he would have arrayed the hostile passions of the nation in the conflict. but when a judge contests a law applied to some particular case in an obscure proceeding, the importance of his attack is concealed from the public gaze, his decision bears upon the interest of an individual, and if the law is slighted it is only collaterally. moreover, although it is censured, it is not abolished; its moral force may be diminished, but its cogency is by no means suspended, and its final destruction can only be accomplished by the reiterated attacks of judicial functionaries. it will readily be understood that by connecting the censorship of the laws with the private interests of members of the community, and by intimately uniting the prosecution of the law with the prosecution of an individual, legislation is protected from wanton assailants, and from the daily aggressions of party spirit. the errors of the legislator are exposed whenever their evil consequences are most felt, and it is always a positive and appreciable fact which serves as the basis of a prosecution. i am inclined to believe this practice of the american courts to be at once the most favorable to liberty as well as to public order. if the judge could only attack the legislator openly and directly, he would sometimes be afraid to oppose any resistance to his will; and at other moments party spirit might encourage him to brave it at every turn. the laws would consequently be attacked when the power from which they emanate is weak, and obeyed when it is strong. that is to say, when it would be useful to respect them they would be contested, and when it would be easy to convert them into an instrument of oppression they would be respected. but the american judge is brought into the political arena independently of his own will. he only judges the law because he is obliged to judge a case. the political question which he is called upon to resolve is connected with the interest of the suitors, and he cannot refuse to decide it without abdicating the duties of his post. he performs his functions as a citizen by fulfilling the precise duties which belong to his profession as a magistrate. it is true that upon this system the judicial censorship which is exercised by the courts of justice over the legislation cannot extend to all laws indiscriminately, inasmuch as some of them can never give rise to that exact species of contestation which is termed a lawsuit; and even when such a contestation is possible, it may happen that no one cares to bring it before a court of justice. the americans have often felt this disadvantage, but they have left the remedy incomplete, lest they should give it an efficacy which might in some cases prove dangerous. within these limits the power vested in the american courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional forms one of the most powerful barriers which has ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies. other powers granted to american judges the united states all the citizens have the right of indicting public functionaries before the ordinary tribunals--how they use this right--art. of the french constitution of the an viii--the americans and the english cannot understand the purport of this clause. it is perfectly natural that in a free country like america all the citizens should have the right of indicting public functionaries before the ordinary tribunals, and that all the judges should have the power of punishing public offences. the right granted to the courts of justice of judging the agents of the executive government, when they have violated the laws, is so natural a one that it cannot be looked upon as an extraordinary privilege. nor do the springs of government appear to me to be weakened in the united states by the custom which renders all public officers responsible to the judges of the land. the americans seem, on the contrary, to have increased by this means that respect which is due to the authorities, and at the same time to have rendered those who are in power more scrupulous of offending public opinion. i was struck by the small number of political trials which occur in the united states, but i had no difficulty in accounting for this circumstance. a lawsuit, of whatever nature it may be, is always a difficult and expensive undertaking. it is easy to attack a public man in a journal, but the motives which can warrant an action at law must be serious. a solid ground of complaint must therefore exist to induce an individual to prosecute a public officer, and public officers are careful not to furnish these grounds of complaint when they are afraid of being prosecuted. this does not depend upon the republican form of american institutions, for the same facts present themselves in england. these two nations do not regard the impeachment of the principal officers of state as a sufficient guarantee of their independence. but they hold that the right of minor prosecutions, which are within the reach of the whole community, is a better pledge of freedom than those great judicial actions which are rarely employed until it is too late. in the middle ages, when it was very difficult to overtake offenders, the judges inflicted the most dreadful tortures on the few who were arrested, which by no means diminished the number of crimes. it has since been discovered that when justice is more certain and more mild, it is at the same time more efficacious. the english and the americans hold that tyranny and oppression are to be treated like any other crime, by lessening the penalty and facilitating conviction. in the year viii of the french republic a constitution was drawn up in which the following clause was introduced: "art. . all the agents of the government below the rank of ministers can only be prosecuted for offences relating to their several functions by virtue of a decree of the conseil d'etat; in which the case the prosecution takes place before the ordinary tribunals." this clause survived the "constitution de l'an viii," and it is still maintained in spite of the just complaints of the nation. i have always found the utmost difficulty in explaining its meaning to englishmen or americans. they were at once led to conclude that the conseil d'etat in france was a great tribunal, established in the centre of the kingdom, which exercised a preliminary and somewhat tyrannical jurisdiction in all political causes. but when i told them that the conseil d'etat was not a judicial body, in the common sense of the term, but an administrative council composed of men dependent on the crown, so that the king, after having ordered one of his servants, called a prefect, to commit an injustice, has the power of commanding another of his servants, called a councillor of state, to prevent the former from being punished; when i demonstrated to them that the citizen who has been injured by the order of the sovereign is obliged to solicit from the sovereign permission to obtain redress, they refused to credit so flagrant an abuse, and were tempted to accuse me of falsehood or of ignorance. it frequently happened before the revolution that a parliament issued a warrant against a public officer who had committed an offence, and sometimes the proceedings were stopped by the authority of the crown, which enforced compliance with its absolute and despotic will. it is painful to perceive how much lower we are sunk than our forefathers, since we allow things to pass under the color of justice and the sanction of the law which violence alone could impose upon them. chapter vii: political jurisdiction in the united states chapter summary definition of political jurisdiction--what is understood by political jurisdiction in france, in england, and in the united states--in america the political judge can only pass sentence on public officers--he more frequently passes a sentence of removal from office than a penalty--political jurisdiction as it exists in the united states is, notwithstanding its mildness, and perhaps in consequence of that mildness, a most powerful instrument in the hands of the majority. political jurisdiction in the united states i understand, by political jurisdiction, that temporary right of pronouncing a legal decision with which a political body may be invested. in absolute governments no utility can accrue from the introduction of extraordinary forms of procedure; the prince in whose name an offender is prosecuted is as much the sovereign of the courts of justice as of everything else, and the idea which is entertained of his power is of itself a sufficient security. the only thing he has to fear is, that the external formalities of justice should be neglected, and that his authority should be dishonored from a wish to render it more absolute. but in most free countries, in which the majority can never exercise the same influence upon the tribunals as an absolute monarch, the judicial power has occasionally been vested for a time in the representatives of the nation. it has been thought better to introduce a temporary confusion between the functions of the different authorities than to violate the necessary principle of the unity of government. england, france, and the united states have established this political jurisdiction by law; and it is curious to examine the different adaptations which these three great nations have made of the principle. in england and in france the house of lords and the chambre des paris *a constitute the highest criminal court of their respective nations, and although they do not habitually try all political offences, they are competent to try them all. another political body enjoys the right of impeachment before the house of lords: the only difference which exists between the two countries in this respect is, that in england the commons may impeach whomsoever they please before the lords, whilst in france the deputies can only employ this mode of prosecution against the ministers of the crown. [footnote a: [as it existed under the constitutional monarchy down to .]] in both countries the upper house may make use of all the existing penal laws of the nation to punish the delinquents. in the united states, as well as in europe, one branch of the legislature is authorized to impeach and another to judge: the house of representatives arraigns the offender, and the senate awards his sentence. but the senate can only try such persons as are brought before it by the house of representatives, and those persons must belong to the class of public functionaries. thus the jurisdiction of the senate is less extensive than that of the peers of france, whilst the right of impeachment by the representatives is more general than that of the deputies. but the great difference which exists between europe and america is, that in europe political tribunals are empowered to inflict all the dispositions of the penal code, while in america, when they have deprived the offender of his official rank, and have declared him incapable of filling any political office for the future, their jurisdiction terminates and that of the ordinary tribunals begins. suppose, for instance, that the president of the united states has committed the crime of high treason; the house of representatives impeaches him, and the senate degrades him; he must then be tried by a jury, which alone can deprive him of his liberty or his life. this accurately illustrates the subject we are treating. the political jurisdiction which is established by the laws of europe is intended to try great offenders, whatever may be their birth, their rank, or their powers in the state; and to this end all the privileges of the courts of justice are temporarily extended to a great political assembly. the legislator is then transformed into the magistrate; he is called upon to admit, to distinguish, and to punish the offence; and as he exercises all the authority of a judge, the law restricts him to the observance of all the duties of that high office, and of all the formalities of justice. when a public functionary is impeached before an english or a french political tribunal, and is found guilty, the sentence deprives him ipso facto of his functions, and it may pronounce him to be incapable of resuming them or any others for the future. but in this case the political interdict is a consequence of the sentence, and not the sentence itself. in europe the sentence of a political tribunal is to be regarded as a judicial verdict rather than as an administrative measure. in the united states the contrary takes place; and although the decision of the senate is judicial in its form, since the senators are obliged to comply with the practices and formalities of a court of justice; although it is judicial in respect to the motives on which it is founded, since the senate is in general obliged to take an offence at common law as the basis of its sentence; nevertheless the object of the proceeding is purely administrative. if it had been the intention of the american legislator to invest a political body with great judicial authority, its action would not have been limited to the circle of public functionaries, since the most dangerous enemies of the state may be in the possession of no functions at all; and this is especially true in republics, where party influence is the first of authorities, and where the strength of many a reader is increased by his exercising no legal power. if it had been the intention of the american legislator to give society the means of repressing state offences by exemplary punishment, according to the practice of ordinary justice, the resources of the penal code would all have been placed at the disposal of the political tribunals. but the weapon with which they are intrusted is an imperfect one, and it can never reach the most dangerous offenders, since men who aim at the entire subversion of the laws are not likely to murmur at a political interdict. the main object of the political jurisdiction which obtains in the united states is, therefore, to deprive the ill-disposed citizen of an authority which he has used amiss, and to prevent him from ever acquiring it again. this is evidently an administrative measure sanctioned by the formalities of a judicial decision. in this matter the americans have created a mixed system; they have surrounded the act which removes a public functionary with the securities of a political trial; and they have deprived all political condemnations of their severest penalties. every link of the system may easily be traced from this point; we at once perceive why the american constitutions subject all the civil functionaries to the jurisdiction of the senate, whilst the military, whose crimes are nevertheless more formidable, are exempted from that tribunal. in the civil service none of the american functionaries can be said to be removable; the places which some of them occupy are inalienable, and the others are chosen for a term which cannot be shortened. it is therefore necessary to try them all in order to deprive them of their authority. but military officers are dependent on the chief magistrate of the state, who is himself a civil functionary, and the decision which condemns him is a blow upon them all. if we now compare the american and the european systems, we shall meet with differences no less striking in the different effects which each of them produces or may produce. in france and in england the jurisdiction of political bodies is looked upon as an extraordinary resource, which is only to be employed in order to rescue society from unwonted dangers. it is not to be denied that these tribunals, as they are constituted in europe, are apt to violate the conservative principle of the balance of power in the state, and to threaten incessantly the lives and liberties of the subject. the same political jurisdiction in the united states is only indirectly hostile to the balance of power; it cannot menace the lives of the citizens, and it does not hover, as in europe, over the heads of the community, since those only who have submitted to its authority on accepting office are exposed to the severity of its investigations. it is at the same time less formidable and less efficacious; indeed, it has not been considered by the legislators of the united states as a remedy for the more violent evils of society, but as an ordinary means of conducting the government. in this respect it probably exercises more real influence on the social body in america than in europe. we must not be misled by the apparent mildness of the american legislation in all that relates to political jurisdiction. it is to be observed, in the first place, that in the united states the tribunal which passes sentence is composed of the same elements, and subject to the same influences, as the body which impeaches the offender, and that this uniformity gives an almost irresistible impulse to the vindictive passions of parties. if political judges in the united states cannot inflict such heavy penalties as those of europe, there is the less chance of their acquitting a prisoner; and the conviction, if it is less formidable, is more certain. the principal object of the political tribunals of europe is to punish the offender; the purpose of those in america is to deprive him of his authority. a political condemnation in the united states may, therefore, be looked upon as a preventive measure; and there is no reason for restricting the judges to the exact definitions of criminal law. nothing can be more alarming than the excessive latitude with which political offences are described in the laws of america. article ii., section , of the constitution of the united states runs thus:--"the president, vice-president, and all civil officers of the united states shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." many of the constitutions of the states are even less explicit. "public officers," says the constitution of massachusetts, *b "shall be impeached for misconduct or maladministration;" the constitution of virginia declares that all the civil officers who shall have offended against the state, by maladministration, corruption, or other high crimes, may be impeached by the house of delegates; in some constitutions no offences are specified, in order to subject the public functionaries to an unlimited responsibility. *c but i will venture to affirm that it is precisely their mildness which renders the american laws most formidable in this respect. we have shown that in europe the removal of a functionary and his political interdiction are the consequences of the penalty he is to undergo, and that in america they constitute the penalty itself. the consequence is that in europe political tribunals are invested with rights which they are afraid to use, and that the fear of punishing too much hinders them from punishing at all. but in america no one hesitates to inflict a penalty from which humanity does not recoil. to condemn a political opponent to death, in order to deprive him of his power, is to commit what all the world would execrate as a horrible assassination; but to declare that opponent unworthy to exercise that authority, to deprive him of it, and to leave him uninjured in life and limb, may be judged to be the fair issue of the struggle. but this sentence, which it is so easy to pronounce, is not the less fatally severe to the majority of those upon whom it is inflicted. great criminals may undoubtedly brave its intangible rigor, but ordinary offenders will dread it as a condemnation which destroys their position in the world, casts a blight upon their honor, and condemns them to a shameful inactivity worse than death. the influence exercised in the united states upon the progress of society by the jurisdiction of political bodies may not appear to be formidable, but it is only the more immense. it does not directly coerce the subject, but it renders the majority more absolute over those in power; it does not confer an unbounded authority on the legislator which can be exerted at some momentous crisis, but it establishes a temperate and regular influence, which is at all times available. if the power is decreased, it can, on the other hand, be more conveniently employed and more easily abused. by preventing political tribunals from inflicting judicial punishments the americans seem to have eluded the worst consequences of legislative tyranny, rather than tyranny itself; and i am not sure that political jurisdiction, as it is constituted in the united states, is not the most formidable weapon which has ever been placed in the rude grasp of a popular majority. when the american republics begin to degenerate it will be easy to verify the truth of this observation, by remarking whether the number of political impeachments augments.*d [footnote b: chap. i. sect. ii. section .] [footnote c: see the constitutions of illinois, maine, connecticut, and georgia.] [footnote d: see appendix, n. [the impeachment of president andrew johnson in --which was resorted to by his political opponents solely as a means of turning him out of office, for it could not be contended that he had been guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and he was in fact honorably acquitted and reinstated in office--is a striking confirmation of the truth of this remark.--translator's note, .]] chapter viii: the federal constitution--part i i have hitherto considered each state as a separate whole, and i have explained the different springs which the people sets in motion, and the different means of action which it employs. but all the states which i have considered as independent are forced to submit, in certain cases, to the supreme authority of the union. the time is now come for me to examine separately the supremacy with which the union has been invested, and to cast a rapid glance over the federal constitution. chapter summary origin of the first union--its weakness--congress appeals to the constituent authority--interval of two years between this appeal and the promulgation of the new constitution. history of the federal constitution the thirteen colonies which simultaneously threw off the yoke of england towards the end of the last century professed, as i have already observed, the same religion, the same language, the same customs, and almost the same laws; they were struggling against a common enemy; and these reasons were sufficiently strong to unite them one to another, and to consolidate them into one nation. but as each of them had enjoyed a separate existence and a government within its own control, the peculiar interests and customs which resulted from this system were opposed to a compact and intimate union which would have absorbed the individual importance of each in the general importance of all. hence arose two opposite tendencies, the one prompting the anglo-americans to unite, the other to divide their strength. as long as the war with the mother-country lasted the principle of union was kept alive by necessity; and although the laws which constituted it were defective, the common tie subsisted in spite of their imperfections. *a but no sooner was peace concluded than the faults of the legislation became manifest, and the state seemed to be suddenly dissolved. each colony became an independent republic, and assumed an absolute sovereignty. the federal government, condemned to impotence by its constitution, and no longer sustained by the presence of a common danger, witnessed the outrages offered to its flag by the great nations of europe, whilst it was scarcely able to maintain its ground against the indian tribes, and to pay the interest of the debt which had been contracted during the war of independence. it was already on the verge of destruction, when it officially proclaimed its inability to conduct the government, and appealed to the constituent authority of the nation. *b if america ever approached (for however brief a time) that lofty pinnacle of glory to which the fancy of its inhabitants is wont to point, it was at the solemn moment at which the power of the nation abdicated, as it were, the empire of the land. all ages have furnished the spectacle of a people struggling with energy to win its independence; and the efforts of the americans in throwing off the english yoke have been considerably exaggerated. separated from their enemies by three thousand miles of ocean, and backed by a powerful ally, the success of the united states may be more justly attributed to their geographical position than to the valor of their armies or the patriotism of their citizens. it would be ridiculous to compare the american was to the wars of the french revolution, or the efforts of the americans to those of the french when they were attacked by the whole of europe, without credit and without allies, yet capable of opposing a twentieth part of their population to the world, and of bearing the torch of revolution beyond their frontiers whilst they stifled its devouring flame within the bosom of their country. but it is a novelty in the history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself, when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of government are stopped; to see it carefully examine the extent of the evil, and patiently wait for two whole years until a remedy was discovered, which it voluntarily adopted without having wrung a tear or a drop of blood from mankind. at the time when the inadequacy of the first constitution was discovered america possessed the double advantage of that calm which had succeeded the effervescence of the revolution, and of those great men who had led the revolution to a successful issue. the assembly which accepted the task of composing the second constitution was small; *c but george washington was its president, and it contained the choicest talents and the noblest hearts which had ever appeared in the new world. this national commission, after long and mature deliberation, offered to the acceptance of the people the body of general laws which still rules the union. all the states adopted it successively. *d the new federal government commenced its functions in , after an interregnum of two years. the revolution of america terminated when that of france began. [footnote a: see the articles of the first confederation formed in . this constitution was not adopted by all the states until . see also the analysis given of this constitution in "the federalist" from no. to no. , inclusive, and story's "commentaries on the constitution of the united states," pp. - .] [footnote b: congress made this declaration on february , .] [footnote c: it consisted of fifty-five members; washington, madison, hamilton, and the two morrises were amongst the number.] [footnote d: it was not adopted by the legislative bodies, but representatives were elected by the people for this sole purpose; and the new constitution was discussed at length in each of these assemblies.] summary of the federal constitution division of authority between the federal government and the states--the government of the states is the rule, the federal government the exception. the first question which awaited the americans was intricate, and by no means easy of solution: the object was so to divide the authority of the different states which composed the union that each of them should continue to govern itself in all that concerned its internal prosperity, whilst the entire nation, represented by the union, should continue to form a compact body, and to provide for the general exigencies of the people. it was as impossible to determine beforehand, with any degree of accuracy, the share of authority which each of two governments was to enjoy, as to foresee all the incidents in the existence of a nation. the obligations and the claims of the federal government were simple and easily definable, because the union had been formed with the express purpose of meeting the general exigencies of the people; but the claims and obligations of the states were, on the other hand, complicated and various, because those governments had penetrated into all the details of social life. the attributes of the federal government were therefore carefully enumerated and all that was not included amongst them was declared to constitute a part of the privileges of the several governments of the states. thus the government of the states remained the rule, and that of the confederation became the exception. *e [footnote e: see the amendment to the federal constitution; "federalist," no. ; story, p. ; kent's "commentaries," vol. i. p. . it is to be observed that whenever the exclusive right of regulating certain matters is not reserved to congress by the constitution, the states may take up the affair until it is brought before the national assembly. for instance, congress has the right of making a general law on bankruptcy, which, however, it neglects to do. each state is then at liberty to make a law for itself. this point has been established by discussion in the law-courts, and may be said to belong more properly to jurisprudence.] but as it was foreseen that, in practice, questions might arise as to the exact limits of this exceptional authority, and that it would be dangerous to submit these questions to the decision of the ordinary courts of justice, established in the states by the states themselves, a high federal court was created, *f which was destined, amongst other functions, to maintain the balance of power which had been established by the constitution between the two rival governments. *g [footnote f: the action of this court is indirect, as we shall hereafter show.] [footnote g: it is thus that "the federalist," no. , explains the division of supremacy between the union and the states: "the powers delegated by the constitution to the federal government are few and defined. those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite. the former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. the powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the internal order and prosperity of the state." i shall often have occasion to quote "the federalist" in this work. when the bill which has since become the constitution of the united states was submitted to the approval of the people, and the discussions were still pending, three men, who had already acquired a portion of that celebrity which they have since enjoyed--john jay, hamilton, and madison--formed an association with the intention of explaining to the nation the advantages of the measure which was proposed. with this view they published a series of articles in the shape of a journal, which now form a complete treatise. they entitled their journal "the federalist," a name which has been retained in the work. "the federalist" is an excellent book, which ought to be familiar to the statesmen of all countries, although it especially concerns america.] prerogative of the federal government power of declaring war, making peace, and levying general taxes vested in the federal government--what part of the internal policy of the country it may direct--the government of the union in some respects more central than the king's government in the old french monarchy. the external relations of a people may be compared to those of private individuals, and they cannot be advantageously maintained without the agency of a single head of a government. the exclusive right of making peace and war, of concluding treaties of commerce, of raising armies, and equipping fleets, was granted to the union. *h the necessity of a national government was less imperiously felt in the conduct of the internal policy of society; but there are certain general interests which can only be attended to with advantage by a general authority. the union was invested with the power of controlling the monetary system, of directing the post office, and of opening the great roads which were to establish a communication between the different parts of the country. *i the independence of the government of each state was formally recognized in its sphere; nevertheless, the federal government was authorized to interfere in the internal affairs of the states *j in a few predetermined cases, in which an indiscreet abuse of their independence might compromise the security of the union at large. thus, whilst the power of modifying and changing their legislation at pleasure was preserved in all the republics, they were forbidden to enact ex post facto laws, or to create a class of nobles in their community. *k lastly, as it was necessary that the federal government should be able to fulfil its engagements, it was endowed with an unlimited power of levying taxes. *l [footnote h: see constitution, sect. ; "federalist," nos. and ; kent's "commentaries," vol. i. p. ; story, pp. - ; ibid. pp. - .] [footnote i: several other privileges of the same kind exist, such as that which empowers the union to legislate on bankruptcy, to grant patents, and other matters in which its intervention is clearly necessary.] [footnote j: even in these cases its interference is indirect. the union interferes by means of the tribunals, as will be hereafter shown.] [footnote k: federal constitution, sect. , art. i.] [footnote l: constitution, sects. , , and ; "federalist," nos. - , inclusive, and - ; kent's "commentaries," vol. i. pp. and ; story, pp. and .] in examining the balance of power as established by the federal constitution; in remarking on the one hand the portion of sovereignty which has been reserved to the several states, and on the other the share of power which the union has assumed, it is evident that the federal legislators entertained the clearest and most accurate notions on the nature of the centralization of government. the united states form not only a republic, but a confederation; nevertheless the authority of the nation is more central than it was in several of the monarchies of europe when the american constitution was formed. take, for instance, the two following examples. thirteen supreme courts of justice existed in france, which, generally speaking, had the right of interpreting the law without appeal; and those provinces which were styled pays d'etats were authorized to refuse their assent to an impost which had been levied by the sovereign who represented the nation. in the union there is but one tribunal to interpret, as there is one legislature to make the laws; and an impost voted by the representatives of the nation is binding upon all the citizens. in these two essential points, therefore, the union exercises more central authority than the french monarchy possessed, although the union is only an assemblage of confederate republics. in spain certain provinces had the right of establishing a system of custom-house duties peculiar to themselves, although that privilege belongs, by its very nature, to the national sovereignty. in america the congress alone has the right of regulating the commercial relations of the states. the government of the confederation is therefore more centralized in this respect than the kingdom of spain. it is true that the power of the crown in france or in spain was always able to obtain by force whatever the constitution of the country denied, and that the ultimate result was consequently the same; but i am here discussing the theory of the constitution. federal powers after having settled the limits within which the federal government was to act, the next point was to determine the powers which it was to exert. legislative powers *m [footnote m: [in this chapter the author points out the essence of the conflict between the seceding states and the union which caused the civil war of .]] division of the legislative body into two branches--difference in the manner of forming the two houses--the principle of the independence of the states predominates in the formation of the senate--the principle of the sovereignty of the nation in the composition of the house of representatives--singular effects of the fact that a constitution can only be logical in the early stages of a nation. the plan which had been laid down beforehand for the constitutions of the several states was followed, in many points, in the organization of the powers of the union. the federal legislature of the union was composed of a senate and a house of representatives. a spirit of conciliation prescribed the observance of distinct principles in the formation of these two assemblies. i have already shown that two contrary interests were opposed to each other in the establishment of the federal constitution. these two interests had given rise to two opinions. it was the wish of one party to convert the union into a league of independent states, or a sort of congress, at which the representatives of the several peoples would meet to discuss certain points of their common interests. the other party desired to unite the inhabitants of the american colonies into one sole nation, and to establish a government which should act as the sole representative of the nation, as far as the limited sphere of its authority would permit. the practical consequences of these two theories were exceedingly different. the question was, whether a league was to be established instead of a national government; whether the majority of the state, instead of the majority of the inhabitants of the union, was to give the law: for every state, the small as well as the great, would then remain in the full enjoyment of its independence, and enter the union upon a footing of perfect equality. if, however, the inhabitants of the united states were to be considered as belonging to one and the same nation, it would be just that the majority of the citizens of the union should prescribe the law. of course the lesser states could not subscribe to the application of this doctrine without, in fact, abdicating their existence in relation to the sovereignty of the confederation; since they would have passed from the condition of a co-equal and co-legislative authority to that of an insignificant fraction of a great people. but if the former system would have invested them with an excessive authority, the latter would have annulled their influence altogether. under these circumstances the result was, that the strict rules of logic were evaded, as is usually the case when interests are opposed to arguments. a middle course was hit upon by the legislators, which brought together by force two systems theoretically irreconcilable. the principle of the independence of the states prevailed in the formation of the senate, and that of the sovereignty of the nation predominated in the composition of the house of representatives. it was decided that each state should send two senators to congress, and a number of representatives proportioned to its population. *n it results from this arrangement that the state of new york has at the present day forty representatives and only two senators; the state of delaware has two senators and only one representative; the state of delaware is therefore equal to the state of new york in the senate, whilst the latter has forty times the influence of the former in the house of representatives. thus, if the minority of the nation preponderates in the senate,. it may paralyze the decisions of the majority represented in the other house, which is contrary to the spirit of constitutional government. [footnote n: every ten years congress fixes anew the number of representatives which each state is to furnish. the total number was in , and in . (see "american almanac," , p. .) the constitution decided that there should not be more than one representative for every , persons; but no minimum was fixed on. the congress has not thought fit to augment the number of representatives in proportion to the increase of population. the first act which was passed on the subject (april , : see "laws of the united states," by story, vol. i. p. ) decided that there should be one representative for every , inhabitants. the last act, which was passed in , fixes the proportion at one for , . the population represented is composed of all the free men and of three-fifths of the slaves. [the last act of apportionment, passed february , , fixes the representation at one to , inhabitants. there are now ( ) members of the lower house of congress, and for the states at large, making in all members. the old states have of course lost the representatives which the new states have gained.--translator's note.]] these facts show how rare and how difficult it is rationally and logically to combine all the several parts of legislation. in the course of time different interests arise, and different principles are sanctioned by the same people; and when a general constitution is to be established, these interests and principles are so many natural obstacles to the rigorous application of any political system, with all its consequences. the early stages of national existence are the only periods at which it is possible to maintain the complete logic of legislation; and when we perceive a nation in the enjoyment of this advantage, before we hasten to conclude that it is wise, we should do well to remember that it is young. when the federal constitution was formed, the interests of independence for the separate states, and the interest of union for the whole people, were the only two conflicting interests which existed amongst the anglo-americans, and a compromise was necessarily made between them. it is, however, just to acknowledge that this part of the constitution has not hitherto produced those evils which might have been feared. all the states are young and contiguous; their customs, their ideas, and their exigencies are not dissimilar; and the differences which result from their size or inferiority do not suffice to set their interests at variance. the small states have consequently never been induced to league themselves together in the senate to oppose the designs of the larger ones; and indeed there is so irresistible an authority in the legitimate expression of the will of a people that the senate could offer but a feeble opposition to the vote of the majority of the house of representatives. it must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that it was not in the power of the american legislators to reduce to a single nation the people for whom they were making laws. the object of the federal constitution was not to destroy the independence of the states, but to restrain it. by acknowledging the real authority of these secondary communities (and it was impossible to deprive them of it), they disavowed beforehand the habitual use of constraint in enforcing g the decisions of the majority. upon this principle the introduction of the influence of the states into the mechanism of the federal government was by no means to be wondered at, since it only attested the existence of an acknowledged power, which was to be humored and not forcibly checked. a further difference between the senate and the house of representatives the senate named by the provincial legislators, the representatives by the people--double election of the former; single election of the latter--term of the different offices--peculiar functions of each house. the senate not only differs from the other house in the principle which it represents, but also in the mode of its election, in the term for which it is chosen, and in the nature of its functions. the house of representatives is named by the people, the senate by the legislators of each state; the former is directly elected, the latter is elected by an elected body; the term for which the representatives are chosen is only two years, that of the senators is six. the functions of the house of representatives are purely legislative, and the only share it takes in the judicial power is in the impeachment of public officers. the senate co-operates in the work of legislation, and tries those political offences which the house of representatives submits to its decision. it also acts as the great executive council of the nation; the treaties which are concluded by the president must be ratified by the senate, and the appointments he may make must be definitely approved by the same body. *o [footnote o: see "the federalist," nos. - , inclusive; story, pp. - ; constitution of the united states, sects. and .] the executive power *p [footnote p: see "the federalist," nos. - ; constitution of the united states, art. ; story, p. , pp. - ; kent's "commentaries," p. .] dependence of the president--he is elective and responsible--he is free to act in his own sphere under the inspection, but not under the direction, of the senate--his salary fixed at his entry into office--suspensive veto. the american legislators undertook a difficult task in attempting to create an executive power dependent on the majority of the people, and nevertheless sufficiently strong to act without restraint in its own sphere. it was indispensable to the maintenance of the republican form of government that the representative of the executive power should be subject to the will of the nation. the president is an elective magistrate. his honor, his property, his liberty, and his life are the securities which the people has for the temperate use of his power. but in the exercise of his authority he cannot be said to be perfectly independent; the senate takes cognizance of his relations with foreign powers, and of the distribution of public appointments, so that he can neither be bribed nor can he employ the means of corruption. the legislators of the union acknowledged that the executive power would be incompetent to fulfil its task with dignity and utility, unless it enjoyed a greater degree of stability and of strength than had been granted to it in the separate states. the president is chosen for four years, and he may be reelected; so that the chances of a prolonged administration may inspire him with hopeful undertakings for the public good, and with the means of carrying them into execution. the president was made the sole representative of the executive power of the union, and care was taken not to render his decisions subordinate to the vote of a council--a dangerous measure, which tends at the same time to clog the action of the government and to diminish its responsibility. the senate has the right of annulling g certain acts of the president; but it cannot compel him to take any steps, nor does it participate in the exercise of the executive power. the action of the legislature on the executive power may be direct; and we have just shown that the americans carefully obviated this influence; but it may, on the other hand, be indirect. public assemblies which have the power of depriving an officer of state of his salary encroach upon his independence; and as they are free to make the laws, it is to be feared lest they should gradually appropriate to themselves a portion of that authority which the constitution had vested in his hands. this dependence of the executive power is one of the defects inherent in republican constitutions. the americans have not been able to counteract the tendency which legislative assemblies have to get possession of the government, but they have rendered this propensity less irresistible. the salary of the president is fixed, at the time of his entering upon office, for the whole period of his magistracy. the president is, moreover, provided with a suspensive veto, which allows him to oppose the passing of such laws as might destroy the portion of independence which the constitution awards him. the struggle between the president and the legislature must always be an unequal one, since the latter is certain of bearing down all resistance by persevering in its plans; but the suspensive veto forces it at least to reconsider the matter, and, if the motion be persisted in, it must then be backed by a majority of two-thirds of the whole house. the veto is, in fact, a sort of appeal to the people. the executive power, which, without this security, might have been secretly oppressed, adopts this means of pleading its cause and stating its motives. but if the legislature is certain of overpowering all resistance by persevering in its plans, i reply, that in the constitutions of all nations, of whatever kind they may be, a certain point exists at which the legislator is obliged to have recourse to the good sense and the virtue of his fellow-citizens. this point is more prominent and more discoverable in republics, whilst it is more remote and more carefully concealed in monarchies, but it always exists somewhere. there is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by the laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality. differences between the position of the president of the united states and that of a constitutional king of france executive power in the northern states as limited and as partial as the supremacy which it represents--executive power in france as universal as the supremacy it represents--the king a branch of the legislature--the president the mere executor of the law--other differences resulting from the duration of the two powers--the president checked in the exercise of the executive authority--the king independent in its exercise--notwithstanding these discrepancies france is more akin to a republic than the union to a monarchy--comparison of the number of public officers depending upon the executive power in the two countries. the executive power has so important an influence on the destinies of nations that i am inclined to pause for an instant at this portion of my subject, in order more clearly to explain the part it sustains in america. in order to form an accurate idea of the position of the president of the united states, it may not be irrelevant to compare it to that of one of the constitutional kings of europe. in this comparison i shall pay but little attention to the external signs of power, which are more apt to deceive the eye of the observer than to guide his researches. when a monarchy is being gradually transformed into a republic, the executive power retains the titles, the honors, the etiquette, and even the funds of royalty long after its authority has disappeared. the english, after having cut off the head of one king and expelled another from his throne, were accustomed to accost the successor of those princes upon their knees. on the other hand, when a republic falls under the sway of a single individual, the demeanor of the sovereign is simple and unpretending, as if his authority was not yet paramount. when the emperors exercised an unlimited control over the fortunes and the lives of their fellow-citizens, it was customary to call them caesar in conversation, and they were in the habit of supping without formality at their friends' houses. it is therefore necessary to look below the surface. the sovereignty of the united states is shared between the union and the states, whilst in france it is undivided and compact: hence arises the first and the most notable difference which exists between the president of the united states and the king of france. in the united states the executive power is as limited and partial as the sovereignty of the union in whose name it acts; in france it is as universal as the authority of the state. the americans have a federal and the french a national government. chapter viii: the federal constitution--part ii this cause of inferiority results from the nature of things, but it is not the only one; the second in importance is as follows: sovereignty may be defined to be the right of making laws: in france, the king really exercises a portion of the sovereign power, since the laws have no weight till he has given his assent to them; he is, moreover, the executor of all they ordain. the president is also the executor of the laws, but he does not really co-operate in their formation, since the refusal of his assent does not annul them. he is therefore merely to be considered as the agent of the sovereign power. but not only does the king of france exercise a portion of the sovereign power, he also contributes to the nomination of the legislature, which exercises the other portion. he has the privilege of appointing the members of one chamber, and of dissolving the other at his pleasure; whereas the president of the united states has no share in the formation of the legislative body, and cannot dissolve any part of it. the king has the same right of bringing forward measures as the chambers; a right which the president does not possess. the king is represented in each assembly by his ministers, who explain his intentions, support his opinions, and maintain the principles of the government. the president and his ministers are alike excluded from congress; so that his influence and his opinions can only penetrate indirectly into that great body. the king of france is therefore on an equal footing with the legislature, which can no more act without him than he can without it. the president exercises an authority inferior to, and depending upon, that of the legislature. even in the exercise of the executive power, properly so called--the point upon which his position seems to be most analogous to that of the king of france--the president labors under several causes of inferiority. the authority of the king, in france, has, in the first place, the advantage of duration over that of the president, and durability is one of the chief elements of strength; nothing is either loved or feared but what is likely to endure. the president of the united states is a magistrate elected for four years; the king, in france, is an hereditary sovereign. in the exercise of the executive power the president of the united states is constantly subject to a jealous scrutiny. he may make, but he cannot conclude, a treaty; he may designate, but he cannot appoint, a public officer. *q the king of france is absolute within the limits of his authority. the president of the united states is responsible for his actions; but the person of the king is declared inviolable by the french charter. *r [footnote q: the constitution had left it doubtful whether the president was obliged to consult the senate in the removal as well as in the appointment of federal officers. "the federalist" (no. ) seemed to establish the affirmative; but in congress formally decided that, as the president was responsible for his actions, he ought not to be forced to employ agents who had forfeited his esteem. see kent's "commentaries", vol. i. p. .] [footnote r: [this comparison applied to the constitutional king of france and to the powers he held under the charter of , till the overthrow of the monarchy in .--translator's note.]] nevertheless, the supremacy of public opinion is no less above the head of the one than of the other. this power is less definite, less evident, and less sanctioned by the laws in france than in america, but in fact it exists. in america, it acts by elections and decrees; in france it proceeds by revolutions; but notwithstanding the different constitutions of these two countries, public opinion is the predominant authority in both of them. the fundamental principle of legislation--a principle essentially republican--is the same in both countries, although its consequences may be different, and its results more or less extensive. whence i am led to conclude that france with its king is nearer akin to a republic than the union with its president is to a monarchy. in what i have been saying i have only touched upon the main points of distinction; and if i could have entered into details, the contrast would have been rendered still more striking. i have remarked that the authority of the president in the united states is only exercised within the limits of a partial sovereignty, whilst that of the king in france is undivided. i might have gone on to show that the power of the king's government in france exceeds its natural limits, however extensive they may be, and penetrates in a thousand different ways into the administration of private interests. amongst the examples of this influence may be quoted that which results from the great number of public functionaries, who all derive their appointments from the government. this number now exceeds all previous limits; it amounts to , *s nominations, each of which may be considered as an element of power. the president of the united states has not the exclusive right of making any public appointments, and their whole number scarcely exceeds , . *t [footnote s: the sums annually paid by the state to these officers amount to , , fr. ($ , , ).] [footnote t: this number is extracted from the "national calendar" for . the "national calendar" is an american almanac which contains the names of all the federal officers. it results from this comparison that the king of france has eleven times as many places at his disposal as the president, although the population of france is not much more than double that of the union. [i have not the means of ascertaining the number of appointments now at the disposal of the president of the united states, but his patronage and the abuse of it have largely increased since .--translator's note, .]] accidental causes which may increase the influence of the executive government external security of the union--army of six thousand men--few ships--the president has no opportunity of exercising his great prerogatives--in the prerogatives he exercises he is weak. if the executive government is feebler in america than in france, the cause is more attributable to the circumstances than to the laws of the country. it is chiefly in its foreign relations that the executive power of a nation is called upon to exert its skill and its vigor. if the existence of the union were perpetually threatened, and if its chief interests were in daily connection with those of other powerful nations, the executive government would assume an increased importance in proportion to the measures expected of it, and those which it would carry into effect. the president of the united states is the commander-in-chief of the army, but of an army composed of only six thousand men; he commands the fleet, but the fleet reckons but few sail; he conducts the foreign relations of the union, but the united states are a nation without neighbors. separated from the rest of the world by the ocean, and too weak as yet to aim at the dominion of the seas, they have no enemies, and their interests rarely come into contact with those of any other nation of the globe. the practical part of a government must not be judged by the theory of its constitution. the president of the united states is in the possession of almost royal prerogatives, which he has no opportunity of exercising; and those privileges which he can at present use are very circumscribed. the laws allow him to possess a degree of influence which circumstances do not permit him to employ. on the other hand, the great strength of the royal prerogative in france arises from circumstances far more than from the laws. there the executive government is constantly struggling against prodigious obstacles, and exerting all its energies to repress them; so that it increases by the extent of its achievements, and by the importance of the events it controls, without modifying its constitution. if the laws had made it as feeble and as circumscribed as it is in the union, its influence would very soon become still more preponderant. why the president of the united states does not require the majority of the two houses in order to carry on the government it is an established axiom in europe that a constitutional king cannot persevere in a system of government which is opposed by the two other branches of the legislature. but several presidents of the united states have been known to lose the majority in the legislative body without being obliged to abandon the supreme power, and without inflicting a serious evil upon society. i have heard this fact quoted as an instance of the independence and the power of the executive government in america: a moment's reflection will convince us, on the contrary, that it is a proof of its extreme weakness. a king in europe requires the support of the legislature to enable him to perform the duties imposed upon him by the constitution, because those duties are enormous. a constitutional king in europe is not merely the executor of the law, but the execution of its provisions devolves so completely upon him that he has the power of paralyzing its influence if it opposes his designs. he requires the assistance of the legislative assemblies to make the law, but those assemblies stand in need of his aid to execute it: these two authorities cannot subsist without each other, and the mechanism of government is stopped as soon as they are at variance. in america the president cannot prevent any law from being passed, nor can he evade the obligation of enforcing it. his sincere and zealous co-operation is no doubt useful, but it is not indispensable, in the carrying on of public affairs. all his important acts are directly or indirectly submitted to the legislature, and of his own free authority he can do but little. it is therefore his weakness, and not his power, which enables him to remain in opposition to congress. in europe, harmony must reign between the crown and the other branches of the legislature, because a collision between them may prove serious; in america, this harmony is not indispensable, because such a collision is impossible. election of the president dangers of the elective system increase in proportion to the extent of the prerogative--this system possible in america because no powerful executive authority is required--what circumstances are favorable to the elective system--why the election of the president does not cause a deviation from the principles of the government--influence of the election of the president on secondary functionaries. the dangers of the system of election applied to the head of the executive government of a great people have been sufficiently exemplified by experience and by history, and the remarks i am about to make refer to america alone. these dangers may be more or less formidable in proportion to the place which the executive power occupies, and to the importance it possesses in the state; and they may vary according to the mode of election and the circumstances in which the electors are placed. the most weighty argument against the election of a chief magistrate is, that it offers so splendid a lure to private ambition, and is so apt to inflame men in the pursuit of power, that when legitimate means are wanting force may not unfrequently seize what right denied. it is clear that the greater the privileges of the executive authority are, the greater is the temptation; the more the ambition of the candidates is excited, the more warmly are their interests espoused by a throng of partisans who hope to share the power when their patron has won the prize. the dangers of the elective system increase, therefore, in the exact ratio of the influence exercised by the executive power in the affairs of state. the revolutions of poland were not solely attributable to the elective system in general, but to the fact that the elected monarch was the sovereign of a powerful kingdom. before we can discuss the absolute advantages of the elective system we must make preliminary inquiries as to whether the geographical position, the laws, the habits, the manners, and the opinions of the people amongst whom it is to be introduced will admit of the establishment of a weak and dependent executive government; for to attempt to render the representative of the state a powerful sovereign, and at the same time elective, is, in my opinion, to entertain two incompatible designs. to reduce hereditary royalty to the condition of an elective authority, the only means that i am acquainted with are to circumscribe its sphere of action beforehand, gradually to diminish its prerogatives, and to accustom the people to live without its protection. nothing, however, is further from the designs of the republicans of europe than this course: as many of them owe their hatred of tyranny to the sufferings which they have personally undergone, it is oppression, and not the extent of the executive power, which excites their hostility, and they attack the former without perceiving how nearly it is connected with the latter. hitherto no citizen has shown any disposition to expose his honor and his life in order to become the president of the united states; because the power of that office is temporary, limited, and subordinate. the prize of fortune must be great to encourage adventurers in so desperate a game. no candidate has as yet been able to arouse the dangerous enthusiasm or the passionate sympathies of the people in his favor, for the very simple reason that when he is at the head of the government he has but little power, but little wealth, and but little glory to share amongst his friends; and his influence in the state is too small for the success or the ruin of a faction to depend upon the elevation of an individual to power. the great advantage of hereditary monarchies is, that as the private interest of a family is always intimately connected with the interests of the state, the executive government is never suspended for a single instant; and if the affairs of a monarchy are not better conducted than those of a republic, at least there is always some one to conduct them, well or ill, according to his capacity. in elective states, on the contrary, the wheels of government cease to act, as it were, of their own accord at the approach of an election, and even for some time previous to that event. the laws may indeed accelerate the operation of the election, which may be conducted with such simplicity and rapidity that the seat of power will never be left vacant; but, notwithstanding these precautions, a break necessarily occurs in the minds of the people. at the approach of an election the head of the executive government is wholly occupied by the coming struggle; his future plans are doubtful; he can undertake nothing new, and the he will only prosecute with indifference those designs which another will perhaps terminate. "i am so near the time of my retirement from office," said president jefferson on the st of january, (six weeks before the election), "that i feel no passion, i take no part, i express no sentiment. it appears to me just to leave to my successor the commencement of those measures which he will have to prosecute, and for which he will be responsible." on the other hand, the eyes of the nation are centred on a single point; all are watching the gradual birth of so important an event. the wider the influence of the executive power extends, the greater and the more necessary is its constant action, the more fatal is the term of suspense; and a nation which is accustomed to the government, or, still more, one used to the administrative protection of a powerful executive authority would be infallibly convulsed by an election of this kind. in the united states the action of the government may be slackened with impunity, because it is always weak and circumscribed. *u [footnote u: [this, however, may be a great danger. the period during which mr. buchanan retained office, after the election of mr. lincoln, from november, , to march, , was that which enabled the seceding states of the south to complete their preparations for the civil war, and the executive government was paralyzed. no greater evil could befall a nation.--translator's note.]] one of the principal vices of the elective system is that it always introduces a certain degree of instability into the internal and external policy of the state. but this disadvantage is less sensibly felt if the share of power vested in the elected magistrate is small. in rome the principles of the government underwent no variation, although the consuls were changed every year, because the senate, which was an hereditary assembly, possessed the directing authority. if the elective system were adopted in europe, the condition of most of the monarchical states would be changed at every new election. in america the president exercises a certain influence on state affairs, but he does not conduct them; the preponderating power is vested in the representatives of the whole nation. the political maxims of the country depend therefore on the mass of the people, not on the president alone; and consequently in america the elective system has no very prejudicial influence on the fixed principles of the government. but the want of fixed principles is an evil so inherent in the elective system that it is still extremely perceptible in the narrow sphere to which the authority of the president extends. the americans have admitted that the head of the executive power, who has to bear the whole responsibility of the duties he is called upon to fulfil, ought to be empowered to choose his own agents, and to remove them at pleasure: the legislative bodies watch the conduct of the president more than they direct it. the consequence of this arrangement is, that at every new election the fate of all the federal public officers is in suspense. mr. quincy adams, on his entry into office, discharged the majority of the individuals who had been appointed by his predecessor: and i am not aware that general jackson allowed a single removable functionary employed in the federal service to retain his place beyond the first year which succeeded his election. it is sometimes made a subject of complaint that in the constitutional monarchies of europe the fate of the humbler servants of an administration depends upon that of the ministers. but in elective governments this evil is far greater. in a constitutional monarchy successive ministries are rapidly formed; but as the principal representative of the executive power does not change, the spirit of innovation is kept within bounds; the changes which take place are in the details rather than in the principles of the administrative system; but to substitute one system for another, as is done in america every four years, by law, is to cause a sort of revolution. as to the misfortunes which may fall upon individuals in consequence of this state of things, it must be allowed that the uncertain situation of the public officers is less fraught with evil consequences in america than elsewhere. it is so easy to acquire an independent position in the united states that the public officer who loses his place may be deprived of the comforts of life, but not of the means of subsistence. i remarked at the beginning of this chapter that the dangers of the elective system applied to the head of the state are augmented or decreased by the peculiar circumstances of the people which adopts it. however the functions of the executive power may be restricted, it must always exercise a great influence upon the foreign policy of the country, for a negotiation cannot be opened or successfully carried on otherwise than by a single agent. the more precarious and the more perilous the position of a people becomes, the more absolute is the want of a fixed and consistent external policy, and the more dangerous does the elective system of the chief magistrate become. the policy of the americans in relation to the whole world is exceedingly simple; for it may almost be said that no country stands in need of them, nor do they require the co-operation of any other people. their independence is never threatened. in their present condition, therefore, the functions of the executive power are no less limited by circumstances than by the laws; and the president may frequently change his line of policy without involving the state in difficulty or destruction. whatever the prerogatives of the executive power may be, the period which immediately precedes an election and the moment of its duration must always be considered as a national crisis, which is perilous in proportion to the internal embarrassments and the external dangers of the country. few of the nations of europe could escape the calamities of anarchy or of conquest every time they might have to elect a new sovereign. in america society is so constituted that it can stand without assistance upon its own basis; nothing is to be feared from the pressure of external dangers, and the election of the president is a cause of agitation, but not of ruin. mode of election skill of the american legislators shown in the mode of election adopted by them--creation of a special electoral body--separate votes of these electors--case in which the house of representatives is called upon to choose the president--results of the twelve elections which have taken place since the constitution has been established. besides the dangers which are inherent in the system, many other difficulties may arise from the mode of election, which may be obviated by the precaution of the legislator. when a people met in arms on some public spot to choose its head, it was exposed to all the chances of civil war resulting from so martial a mode of proceeding, besides the dangers of the elective system in itself. the polish laws, which subjected the election of the sovereign to the veto of a single individual, suggested the murder of that individual or prepared the way to anarchy. in the examination of the institutions and the political as well as social condition of the united states, we are struck by the admirable harmony of the gifts of fortune and the efforts of man. the nation possessed two of the main causes of internal peace; it was a new country, but it was inhabited by a people grown old in the exercise of freedom. america had no hostile neighbors to dread; and the american legislators, profiting by these favorable circumstances, created a weak and subordinate executive power which could without danger be made elective. it then only remained for them to choose the least dangerous of the various modes of election; and the rules which they laid down upon this point admirably correspond to the securities which the physical and political constitution of the country already afforded. their object was to find the mode of election which would best express the choice of the people with the least possible excitement and suspense. it was admitted in the first place that the simple majority should be decisive; but the difficulty was to obtain this majority without an interval of delay which it was most important to avoid. it rarely happens that an individual can at once collect the majority of the suffrages of a great people; and this difficulty is enhanced in a republic of confederate states, where local influences are apt to preponderate. the means by which it was proposed to obviate this second obstacle was to delegate the electoral powers of the nation to a body of representatives. this mode of election rendered a majority more probable; for the fewer the electors are, the greater is the chance of their coming to a final decision. it also offered an additional probability of a judicious choice. it then remained to be decided whether this right of election was to be entrusted to a legislative body, the habitual representative assembly of the nation, or whether an electoral assembly should be formed for the express purpose of proceeding to the nomination of a president. the americans chose the latter alternative, from a belief that the individuals who were returned to make the laws were incompetent to represent the wishes of the nation in the election of its chief magistrate; and that, as they are chosen for more than a year, the constituency they represent might have changed its opinion in that time. it was thought that if the legislature was empowered to elect the head of the executive power, its members would, for some time before the election, be exposed to the manoeuvres of corruption and the tricks of intrigue; whereas the special electors would, like a jury, remain mixed up with the crowd till the day of action, when they would appear for the sole purpose of giving their votes. it was therefore established that every state should name a certain number of electors, *v who in their turn should elect the president; and as it had been observed that the assemblies to which the choice of a chief magistrate had been entrusted in elective countries inevitably became the centres of passion and of cabal; that they sometimes usurped an authority which did not belong to them; and that their proceedings, or the uncertainty which resulted from them, were sometimes prolonged so much as to endanger the welfare of the state, it was determined that the electors should all vote upon the same day, without being convoked to the same place. *w this double election rendered a majority probable, though not certain; for it was possible that as many differences might exist between the electors as between their constituents. in this case it was necessary to have recourse to one of three measures; either to appoint new electors, or to consult a second time those already appointed, or to defer the election to another authority. the first two of these alternatives, independently of the uncertainty of their results, were likely to delay the final decision, and to perpetuate an agitation which must always be accompanied with danger. the third expedient was therefore adopted, and it was agreed that the votes should be transmitted sealed to the president of the senate, and that they should be opened and counted in the presence of the senate and the house of representatives. if none of the candidates has a majority, the house of representatives then proceeds immediately to elect a president, but with the condition that it must fix upon one of the three candidates who have the highest numbers. *x [footnote v: as many as it sends members to congress. the number of electors at the election of was . (see "the national calendar," .)] [footnote w: the electors of the same state assemble, but they transmit to the central government the list of their individual votes, and not the mere result of the vote of the majority.] [footnote x: in this case it is the majority of the states, and not the majority of the members, which decides the question; so that new york has not more influence in the debate than rhode island. thus the citizens of the union are first consulted as members of one and the same community; and, if they cannot agree, recourse is had to the division of the states, each of which has a separate and independent vote. this is one of the singularities of the federal constitution which can only be explained by the jar of conflicting interests.] thus it is only in case of an event which cannot often happen, and which can never be foreseen, that the election is entrusted to the ordinary representatives of the nation; and even then they are obliged to choose a citizen who has already been designated by a powerful minority of the special electors. it is by this happy expedient that the respect which is due to the popular voice is combined with the utmost celerity of execution and those precautions which the peace of the country demands. but the decision of the question by the house of representatives does not necessarily offer an immediate solution of the difficulty, for the majority of that assembly may still be doubtful, and in this case the constitution prescribes no remedy. nevertheless, by restricting the number of candidates to three, and by referring the matter to the judgment of an enlightened public body, it has smoothed all the obstacles *y which are not inherent in the elective system. [footnote y: jefferson, in , was not elected until the thirty-sixth time of balloting.] in the forty-four years which have elapsed since the promulgation of the federal constitution the united states have twelve times chosen a president. ten of these elections took place simultaneously by the votes of the special electors in the different states. the house of representatives has only twice exercised its conditional privilege of deciding in cases of uncertainty; the first time was at the election of mr. jefferson in ; the second was in , when mr. quincy adams was named. *z [footnote z: [general grant is now ( ) the eighteenth president of the united states.]] crises of the election the election may be considered as a national crisis--why?--passions of the people--anxiety of the president--calm which succeeds the agitation of the election. i have shown what the circumstances are which favored the adoption of the elective system in the united states, and what precautions were taken by the legislators to obviate its dangers. the americans are habitually accustomed to all kinds of elections, and they know by experience the utmost degree of excitement which is compatible with security. the vast extent of the country and the dissemination of the inhabitants render a collision between parties less probable and less dangerous there than elsewhere. the political circumstances under which the elections have hitherto been carried on have presented no real embarrassments to the nation. nevertheless, the epoch of the election of a president of the united states may be considered as a crisis in the affairs of the nation. the influence which he exercises on public business is no doubt feeble and indirect; but the choice of the president, which is of small importance to each individual citizen, concerns the citizens collectively; and however trifling an interest may be, it assumes a great degree of importance as soon as it becomes general. the president possesses but few means of rewarding his supporters in comparison to the kings of europe, but the places which are at his disposal are sufficiently numerous to interest, directly or indirectly, several thousand electors in his success. political parties in the united states are led to rally round an individual, in order to acquire a more tangible shape in the eyes of the crowd, and the name of the candidate for the presidency is put forward as the symbol and personification of their theories. for these reasons parties are strongly interested in gaining the election, not so much with a view to the triumph of their principles under the auspices of the president-elect as to show by the majority which returned him, the strength of the supporters of those principles. for a long while before the appointed time is at hand the election becomes the most important and the all-engrossing topic of discussion. the ardor of faction is redoubled; and all the artificial passions which the imagination can create in the bosom of a happy and peaceful land are agitated and brought to light. the president, on the other hand, is absorbed by the cares of self-defence. he no longer governs for the interest of the state, but for that of his re-election; he does homage to the majority, and instead of checking its passions, as his duty commands him to do, he frequently courts its worst caprices. as the election draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into hostile camps, each of which assumes the name of its favorite candidate; the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the public papers, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present. as soon as the choice is determined, this ardor is dispelled; and as a calmer season returns, the current of the state, which had nearly broken its banks, sinks to its usual level: *a but who can refrain from astonishment at the causes of the storm. [footnote a: [not always. the election of president lincoln was the signal of civil war.--translator's note.]] chapter viii: the federal constitution--part iii re-election of the president when the head of the executive power is re-eligible, it is the state which is the source of intrigue and corruption--the desire of being re-elected the chief aim of a president of the united states--disadvantage of the system peculiar to america--the natural evil of democracy is that it subordinates all authority to the slightest desires of the majority--the re-election of the president encourages this evil. it may be asked whether the legislators of the united states did right or wrong in allowing the re-election of the president. it seems at first sight contrary to all reason to prevent the head of the executive power from being elected a second time. the influence which the talents and the character of a single individual may exercise upon the fate of a whole people, in critical circumstances or arduous times, is well known: a law preventing the re-election of the chief magistrate would deprive the citizens of the surest pledge of the prosperity and the security of the commonwealth; and, by a singular inconsistency, a man would be excluded from the government at the very time when he had shown his ability in conducting its affairs. but if these arguments are strong, perhaps still more powerful reasons may be advanced against them. intrigue and corruption are the natural defects of elective government; but when the head of the state can be re-elected these evils rise to a great height, and compromise the very existence of the country. when a simple candidate seeks to rise by intrigue, his manoeuvres must necessarily be limited to a narrow sphere; but when the chief magistrate enters the lists, he borrows the strength of the government for his own purposes. in the former case the feeble resources of an individual are in action; in the latter, the state itself, with all its immense influence, is busied in the work of corruption and cabal. the private citizen, who employs the most immoral practices to acquire power, can only act in a manner indirectly prejudicial to the public prosperity. but if the representative of the executive descends into the combat, the cares of government dwindle into second-rate importance, and the success of his election is his first concern. all laws and all the negotiations he undertakes are to him nothing more than electioneering schemes; places become the reward of services rendered, not to the nation, but to its chief; and the influence of the government, if not injurious to the country, is at least no longer beneficial to the community for which it was created. it is impossible to consider the ordinary course of affairs in the united states without perceiving that the desire of being re-elected is the chief aim of the president; that his whole administration, and even his most indifferent measures, tend to this object; and that, as the crisis approaches, his personal interest takes the place of his interest in the public good. the principle of re-eligibility renders the corrupt influence of elective government still more extensive and pernicious. in america it exercises a peculiarly fatal influence on the sources of national existence. every government seems to be afflicted by some evil which is inherent in its nature, and the genius of the legislator is shown in eluding its attacks. a state may survive the influence of a host of bad laws, and the mischief they cause is frequently exaggerated; but a law which encourages the growth of the canker within must prove fatal in the end, although its bad consequences may not be immediately perceived. the principle of destruction in absolute monarchies lies in the excessive and unreasonable extension of the prerogative of the crown; and a measure tending to remove the constitutional provisions which counterbalance this influence would be radically bad, even if its immediate consequences were unattended with evil. by a parity of reasoning, in countries governed by a democracy, where the people is perpetually drawing all authority to itself, the laws which increase or accelerate its action are the direct assailants of the very principle of the government. the greatest proof of the ability of the american legislators is, that they clearly discerned this truth, and that they had the courage to act up to it. they conceived that a certain authority above the body of the people was necessary, which should enjoy a degree of independence, without, however, being entirely beyond the popular control; an authority which would be forced to comply with the permanent determinations of the majority, but which would be able to resist its caprices, and to refuse its most dangerous demands. to this end they centred the whole executive power of the nation in a single arm; they granted extensive prerogatives to the president, and they armed him with the veto to resist the encroachments of the legislature. but by introducing the principle of re-election they partly destroyed their work; and they rendered the president but little inclined to exert the great power they had vested in his hands. if ineligible a second time, the president would be far from independent of the people, for his responsibility would not be lessened; but the favor of the people would not be so necessary to him as to induce him to court it by humoring its desires. if re-eligible (and this is more especially true at the present day, when political morality is relaxed, and when great men are rare), the president of the united states becomes an easy tool in the hands of the majority. he adopts its likings and its animosities, he hastens to anticipate its wishes, he forestalls its complaints, he yields to its idlest cravings, and instead of guiding it, as the legislature intended that he should do, he is ever ready to follow its bidding. thus, in order not to deprive the state of the talents of an individual, those talents have been rendered almost useless; and to reserve an expedient for extraordinary perils, the country has been exposed to daily dangers. federal courts *b [footnote b: see chap. vi, entitled "judicial power in the united states." this chapter explains the general principles of the american theory of judicial institutions. see also the federal constitution, art. . see "the federalists," nos. - , inclusive; and a work entitled "constitutional law," being a view of the practice and jurisdiction of the courts of the united states, by thomas sergeant. see story, pp. , , , , , ; and the organic law of september , , in the "collection of the laws of the united states," by story, vol. i. p. .] political importance of the judiciary in the united states--difficulty of treating this subject--utility of judicial power in confederations--what tribunals could be introduced into the union--necessity of establishing federal courts of justice--organization of the national judiciary--the supreme court--in what it differs from all known tribunals. i have inquired into the legislative and executive power of the union, and the judicial power now remains to be examined; but in this place i cannot conceal my fears from the reader. their judicial institutions exercise a great influence on the condition of the anglo-americans, and they occupy a prominent place amongst what are probably called political institutions: in this respect they are peculiarly deserving of our attention. but i am at a loss to explain the political action of the american tribunals without entering into some technical details of their constitution and their forms of proceeding; and i know not how to descend to these minutiae without wearying the curiosity of the reader by the natural aridity of the subject, or without risking to fall into obscurity through a desire to be succinct. i can scarcely hope to escape these various evils; for if i appear too lengthy to a man of the world, a lawyer may on the other hand complain of my brevity. but these are the natural disadvantages of my subject, and more especially of the point which i am about to discuss. the great difficulty was, not to devise the constitution to the federal government, but to find out a method of enforcing its laws. governments have in general but two means of overcoming the opposition of the people they govern, viz., the physical force which is at their own disposal, and the moral force which they derive from the decisions of the courts of justice. a government which should have no other means of exacting obedience than open war must be very near its ruin, for one of two alternatives would then probably occur: if its authority was small and its character temperate, it would not resort to violence till the last extremity, and it would connive at a number of partial acts of insubordination, in which case the state would gradually fall into anarchy; if it was enterprising and powerful, it would perpetually have recourse to its physical strength, and would speedily degenerate into a military despotism. so that its activity would not be less prejudicial to the community than its inaction. the great end of justice is to substitute the notion of right for that of violence, and to place a legal barrier between the power of the government and the use of physical force. the authority which is awarded to the intervention of a court of justice by the general opinion of mankind is so surprisingly great that it clings to the mere formalities of justice, and gives a bodily influence to the shadow of the law. the moral force which courts of justice possess renders the introduction of physical force exceedingly rare, and is very frequently substituted for it; but if the latter proves to be indispensable, its power is doubled by the association of the idea of law. a federal government stands in greater need of the support of judicial institutions than any other, because it is naturally weak and exposed to formidable opposition. *c if it were always obliged to resort to violence in the first instance, it could not fulfil its task. the union, therefore, required a national judiciary to enforce the obedience of the citizens to the laws, and to repeal the attacks which might be directed against them. the question then remained as to what tribunals were to exercise these privileges; were they to be entrusted to the courts of justice which were already organized in every state? or was it necessary to create federal courts? it may easily be proved that the union could not adapt the judicial power of the states to its wants. the separation of the judiciary from the administrative power of the state no doubt affects the security of every citizen and the liberty of all. but it is no less important to the existence of the nation that these several powers should have the same origin, should follow the same principles, and act in the same sphere; in a word, that they should be correlative and homogeneous. no one, i presume, ever suggested the advantage of trying offences committed in france by a foreign court of justice, in order to secure the impartiality of the judges. the americans form one people in relation to their federal government; but in the bosom of this people divers political bodies have been allowed to subsist which are dependent on the national government in a few points, and independent in all the rest; which have all a distinct origin, maxims peculiar to themselves, and special means of carrying on their affairs. to entrust the execution of the laws of the union to tribunals instituted by these political bodies would be to allow foreign judges to preside over the nation. nay, more; not only is each state foreign to the union at large, but it is in perpetual opposition to the common interests, since whatever authority the union loses turns to the advantage of the states. thus to enforce the laws of the union by means of the tribunals of the states would be to allow not only foreign but partial judges to preside over the nation. [footnote c: federal laws are those which most require courts of justice, and those at the same time which have most rarely established them. the reason is that confederations have usually been formed by independent states, which entertained no real intention of obeying the central government, and which very readily ceded the right of command to the federal executive, and very prudently reserved the right of non-compliance to themselves.] but the number, still more than the mere character, of the tribunals of the states rendered them unfit for the service of the nation. when the federal constitution was formed there were already thirteen courts of justice in the united states which decided causes without appeal. that number is now increased to twenty-four. to suppose that a state can subsist when its fundamental laws may be subjected to four-and-twenty different interpretations at the same time is to advance a proposition alike contrary to reason and to experience. the american legislators therefore agreed to create a federal judiciary power to apply the laws of the union, and to determine certain questions affecting general interests, which were carefully determined beforehand. the entire judicial power of the union was centred in one tribunal, which was denominated the supreme court of the united states. but, to facilitate the expedition of business, inferior courts were appended to it, which were empowered to decide causes of small importance without appeal, and with appeal causes of more magnitude. the members of the supreme court are named neither by the people nor the legislature, but by the president of the united states, acting with the advice of the senate. in order to render them independent of the other authorities, their office was made inalienable; and it was determined that their salary, when once fixed, should not be altered by the legislature. *d it was easy to proclaim the principle of a federal judiciary, but difficulties multiplied when the extent of its jurisdiction was to be determined. [footnote d: the union was divided into districts, in each of which a resident federal judge was appointed, and the court in which he presided was termed a "district court." each of the judges of the supreme court annually visits a certain portion of the republic, in order to try the most important causes upon the spot; the court presided over by this magistrate is styled a "circuit court." lastly, all the most serious cases of litigation are brought before the supreme court, which holds a solemn session once a year, at which all the judges of the circuit courts must attend. the jury was introduced into the federal courts in the same manner, and in the same cases, as into the courts of the states. it will be observed that no analogy exists between the supreme court of the united states and the french cour de cassation, since the latter only hears appeals on questions of law. the supreme court decides upon the evidence of the fact as well as upon the law of the case, whereas the cour de cassation does not pronounce a decision of its own, but refers the cause to the arbitration of another tribunal. see the law of september , , "laws of the united states," by story, vol. i. p. .] means of determining the jurisdiction of the federal courts difficulty of determining the jurisdiction of separate courts of justice in confederations--the courts of the union obtained the right of fixing their own jurisdiction--in what respect this rule attacks the portion of sovereignty reserved to the several states--the sovereignty of these states restricted by the laws, and the interpretation of the laws--consequently, the danger of the several states is more apparent than real. as the constitution of the united states recognized two distinct powers in presence of each other, represented in a judicial point of view by two distinct classes of courts of justice, the utmost care which could be taken in defining their separate jurisdictions would have been insufficient to prevent frequent collisions between those tribunals. the question then arose to whom the right of deciding the competency of each court was to be referred. in nations which constitute a single body politic, when a question is debated between two courts relating to their mutual jurisdiction, a third tribunal is generally within reach to decide the difference; and this is effected without difficulty, because in these nations the questions of judicial competency have no connection with the privileges of the national supremacy. but it was impossible to create an arbiter between a superior court of the union and the superior court of a separate state which would not belong to one of these two classes. it was, therefore, necessary to allow one of these courts to judge its own cause, and to take or to retain cognizance of the point which was contested. to grant this privilege to the different courts of the states would have been to destroy the sovereignty of the union de facto after having established it de jure; for the interpretation of the constitution would soon have restored that portion of independence to the states of which the terms of that act deprived them. the object of the creation of a federal tribunal was to prevent the courts of the states from deciding questions affecting the national interests in their own department, and so to form a uniform body of jurisprudene for the interpretation of the laws of the union. this end would not have been accomplished if the courts of the several states had been competent to decide upon cases in their separate capacities from which they were obliged to abstain as federal tribunals. the supreme court of the united states was therefore invested with the right of determining all questions of jurisdiction. *e [footnote e: in order to diminish the number of these suits, it was decided that in a great many federal causes the courts of the states should be empowered to decide conjointly with those of the union, the losing party having then a right of appeal to the supreme court of the united states. the supreme court of virginia contested the right of the supreme court of the united states to judge an appeal from its decisions, but unsuccessfully. see "kent's commentaries," vol. i. p. , pp. et seq.; story's "commentaries," p. ; and "the organic law of the united states," vol. i. p. .] this was a severe blow upon the independence of the states, which was thus restricted not only by the laws, but by the interpretation of them; by one limit which was known, and by another which was dubious; by a rule which was certain, and a rule which was arbitrary. it is true the constitution had laid down the precise limits of the federal supremacy, but whenever this supremacy is contested by one of the states, a federal tribunal decides the question. nevertheless, the dangers with which the independence of the states was threatened by this mode of proceeding are less serious than they appeared to be. we shall see hereafter that in america the real strength of the country is vested in the provincial far more than in the federal government. the federal judges are conscious of the relative weakness of the power in whose name they act, and they are more inclined to abandon a right of jurisdiction in cases where it is justly their own than to assert a privilege to which they have no legal claim. different cases of jurisdiction the matter and the party are the first conditions of the federal jurisdiction--suits in which ambassadors are engaged--suits of the union--of a separate state--by whom tried--causes resulting from the laws of the union--why judged by the federal tribunals--causes relating to the performance of contracts tried by the federal courts--consequence of this arrangement. after having appointed the means of fixing the competency of the federal courts, the legislators of the union defined the cases which should come within their jurisdiction. it was established, on the one hand, that certain parties must always be brought before the federal courts, without any regard to the special nature of the cause; and, on the other, that certain causes must always be brought before the same courts, without any regard to the quality of the parties in the suit. these distinctions were therefore admitted to be the basis of the federal jurisdiction. ambassadors are the representatives of nations in a state of amity with the union, and whatever concerns these personages concerns in some degree the whole union. when an ambassador is a party in a suit, that suit affects the welfare of the nation, and a federal tribunal is naturally called upon to decide it. the union itself may be invoked in legal proceedings, and in this case it would be alike contrary to the customs of all nations and to common sense to appeal to a tribunal representing any other sovereignty than its own; the federal courts, therefore, take cognizance of these affairs. when two parties belonging to two different states are engaged in a suit, the case cannot with propriety be brought before a court of either state. the surest expedient is to select a tribunal like that of the union, which can excite the suspicions of neither party, and which offers the most natural as well as the most certain remedy. when the two parties are not private individuals, but states, an important political consideration is added to the same motive of equity. the quality of the parties in this case gives a national importance to all their disputes; and the most trifling litigation of the states may be said to involve the peace of the whole union. *f [footnote f: the constitution also says that the federal courts shall decide "controversies between a state and the citizens of another state." and here a most important question of a constitutional nature arose, which was, whether the jurisdiction given by the constitution in cases in which a state is a party extended to suits brought against a state as well as by it, or was exclusively confined to the latter. the question was most elaborately considered in the case of chisholm v. georgia, and was decided by the majority of the supreme court in the affirmative. the decision created general alarm among the states, and an amendment was proposed and ratified by which the power was entirely taken away, so far as it regards suits brought against a state. see story's "commentaries," p. , or in the large edition section .] the nature of the cause frequently prescribes the rule of competency. thus all the questions which concern maritime commerce evidently fall under the cognizance of the federal tribunals. *g almost all these questions are connected with the interpretation of the law of nations, and in this respect they essentially interest the union in relation to foreign powers. moreover, as the sea is not included within the limits of any peculiar jurisdiction, the national courts can only hear causes which originate in maritime affairs. [footnote g: as for instance, all cases of piracy.] the constitution comprises under one head almost all the cases which by their very nature come within the limits of the federal courts. the rule which it lays down is simple, but pregnant with an entire system of ideas, and with a vast multitude of facts. it declares that the judicial power of the supreme court shall extend to all cases in law and equity arising under the laws of the united states. two examples will put the intention of the legislator in the clearest light: the constitution prohibits the states from making laws on the value and circulation of money: if, notwithstanding this prohibition, a state passes a law of this kind, with which the interested parties refuse to comply because it is contrary to the constitution, the case must come before a federal court, because it arises under the laws of the united states. again, if difficulties arise in the levying of import duties which have been voted by congress, the federal court must decide the case, because it arises under the interpretation of a law of the united states. this rule is in perfect accordance with the fundamental principles of the federal constitution. the union, as it was established in , possesses, it is true, a limited supremacy; but it was intended that within its limits it should form one and the same people. *h within those limits the union is sovereign. when this point is established and admitted, the inference is easy; for if it be acknowledged that the united states constitute one and the same people within the bounds prescribed by their constitution, it is impossible to refuse them the rights which belong to other nations. but it has been allowed, from the origin of society, that every nation has the right of deciding by its own courts those questions which concern the execution of its own laws. to this it is answered that the union is in so singular a position that in relation to some matters it constitutes a people, and that in relation to all the rest it is a nonentity. but the inference to be drawn is, that in the laws relating to these matters the union possesses all the rights of absolute sovereignty. the difficulty is to know what these matters are; and when once it is resolved (and we have shown how it was resolved, in speaking of the means of determining the jurisdiction of the federal courts) no further doubt can arise; for as soon as it is established that a suit is federal--that is to say, that it belongs to the share of sovereignty reserved by the constitution of the union--the natural consequence is that it should come within the jurisdiction of a federal court. [footnote h: this principle was in some measure restricted by the introduction of the several states as independent powers into the senate, and by allowing them to vote separately in the house of representatives when the president is elected by that body. but these are exceptions, and the contrary principle is the rule.] whenever the laws of the united states are attacked, or whenever they are resorted to in self-defence, the federal courts must be appealed to. thus the jurisdiction of the tribunals of the union extends and narrows its limits exactly in the same ratio as the sovereignty of the union augments or decreases. we have shown that the principal aim of the legislators of was to divide the sovereign authority into two parts. in the one they placed the control of all the general interests of the union, in the other the control of the special interests of its component states. their chief solicitude was to arm the federal government with sufficient power to enable it to resist, within its sphere, the encroachments of the several states. as for these communities, the principle of independence within certain limits of their own was adopted in their behalf; and they were concealed from the inspection, and protected from the control, of the central government. in speaking of the division of authority, i observed that this latter principle had not always been held sacred, since the states are prevented from passing certain laws which apparently belong to their own particular sphere of interest. when a state of the union passes a law of this kind, the citizens who are injured by its execution can appeal to the federal courts. thus the jurisdiction of the federal courts extends not only to all the cases which arise under the laws of the union, but also to those which arise under laws made by the several states in opposition to the constitution. the states are prohibited from making ex post facto laws in criminal cases, and any person condemned by virtue of a law of this kind can appeal to the judicial power of the union. the states are likewise prohibited from making laws which may have a tendency to impair the obligations of contracts. *i if a citizen thinks that an obligation of this kind is impaired by a law passed in his state, he may refuse to obey it, and may appeal to the federal courts. *j [footnote i: it is perfectly clear, says mr. story ("commentaries," p. , or in the large edition section ), that any law which enlarges, abridges, or in any manner changes the intention of the parties, resulting from the stipulations in the contract, necessarily impairs it. he gives in the same place a very long and careful definition of what is understood by a contract in federal jurisprudence. a grant made by the state to a private individual, and accepted by him, is a contract, and cannot be revoked by any future law. a charter granted by the state to a company is a contract, and equally binding to the state as to the grantee. the clause of the constitution here referred to insures, therefore, the existence of a great part of acquired rights, but not of all. property may legally be held, though it may not have passed into the possessor's hands by means of a contract; and its possession is an acquired right, not guaranteed by the federal constitution.] [footnote j: a remarkable instance of this is given by mr. story (p. , or in the large edition section ): "dartmouth college in new hampshire had been founded by a charter granted to certain individuals before the american revolution, and its trustees formed a corporation under this charter. the legislature of new hampshire had, without the consent of this corporation, passed an act changing the organization of the original provincial charter of the college, and transferring all the rights, privileges, and franchises from the old charter trustees to new trustees appointed under the act. the constitutionality of the act was contested, and, after solemn arguments, it was deliberately held by the supreme court that the provincial charter was a contract within the meaning of the constitution (art. i. section ), and that the emendatory act was utterly void, as impairing the obligation of that charter. the college was deemed, like other colleges of private foundation, to be a private eleemosynary institution, endowed by its charter with a capacity to take property unconnected with the government. its funds were bestowed upon the faith of the charter, and those funds consisted entirely of private donations. it is true that the uses were in some sense public, that is, for the general benefit, and not for the mere benefit of the corporators; but this did not make the corporation a public corporation. it was a private institution for general charity. it was not distinguishable in principle from a private donation, vested in private trustees, for a public charity, or for a particular purpose of beneficence. and the state itself, if it had bestowed funds upon a charity of the same nature, could not resume those funds."] this provision appears to me to be the most serious attack upon the independence of the states. the rights awarded to the federal government for purposes of obvious national importance are definite and easily comprehensible; but those with which this last clause invests it are not either clearly appreciable or accurately defined. for there are vast numbers of political laws which influence the existence of obligations of contracts, which may thus furnish an easy pretext for the aggressions of the central authority. chapter viii: the federal constitution--part iv procedure of the federal courts natural weakness of the judiciary power in confederations--legislators ought to strive as much as possible to bring private individuals, and not states, before the federal courts--how the americans have succeeded in this--direct prosecution of private individuals in the federal courts--indirect prosecution of the states which violate the laws of the union--the decrees of the supreme court enervate but do not destroy the provincial laws. i have shown what the privileges of the federal courts are, and it is no less important to point out the manner in which they are exercised. the irresistible authority of justice in countries in which the sovereignty in undivided is derived from the fact that the tribunals of those countries represent the entire nation at issue with the individual against whom their decree is directed, and the idea of power is thus introduced to corroborate the idea of right. but this is not always the case in countries in which the sovereignty is divided; in them the judicial power is more frequently opposed to a fraction of the nation than to an isolated individual, and its moral authority and physical strength are consequently diminished. in federal states the power of the judge is naturally decreased, and that of the justiciable parties is augmented. the aim of the legislator in confederate states ought therefore to be to render the position of the courts of justice analogous to that which they occupy in countries where the sovereignty is undivided; in other words, his efforts ought constantly to tend to maintain the judicial power of the confederation as the representative of the nation, and the justiciable party as the representative of an individual interest. every government, whatever may be its constitution, requires the means of constraining its subjects to discharge their obligations, and of protecting its privileges from their assaults. as far as the direct action of the government on the community is concerned, the constitution of the united states contrived, by a master-stroke of policy, that the federal courts, acting in the name of the laws, should only take cognizance of parties in an individual capacity. for, as it had been declared that the union consisted of one and the same people within the limits laid down by the constitution, the inference was that the government created by this constitution, and acting within these limits, was invested with all the privileges of a national government, one of the principal of which is the right of transmitting its injunctions directly to the private citizen. when, for instance, the union votes an impost, it does not apply to the states for the levying of it, but to every american citizen in proportion to his assessment. the supreme court, which is empowered to enforce the execution of this law of the union, exerts its influence not upon a refractory state, but upon the private taxpayer; and, like the judicial power of other nations, it is opposed to the person of an individual. it is to be observed that the union chose its own antagonist; and as that antagonist is feeble, he is naturally worsted. but the difficulty increases when the proceedings are not brought forward by but against the union. the constitution recognizes the legislative power of the states; and a law so enacted may impair the privileges of the union, in which case a collision in unavoidable between that body and the state which has passed the law: and it only remains to select the least dangerous remedy, which is very clearly deducible from the general principles i have before established. *k [footnote k: see chapter vi. on "judicial power in america."] it may be conceived that, in the case under consideration, the union might have used the state before a federal court, which would have annulled the act, and by this means it would have adopted a natural course of proceeding; but the judicial power would have been placed in open hostility to the state, and it was desirable to avoid this predicament as much as possible. the americans hold that it is nearly impossible that a new law should not impair the interests of some private individual by its provisions: these private interests are assumed by the american legislators as the ground of attack against such measures as may be prejudicial to the union, and it is to these cases that the protection of the supreme court is extended. suppose a state vends a certain portion of its territory to a company, and that a year afterwards it passes a law by which the territory is otherwise disposed of, and that clause of the constitution which prohibits laws impairing the obligation of contracts violated. when the purchaser under the second act appears to take possession, the possessor under the first act brings his action before the tribunals of the union, and causes the title of the claimant to be pronounced null and void. *l thus, in point of fact, the judicial power of the union is contesting the claims of the sovereignty of a state; but it only acts indirectly and upon a special application of detail: it attacks the law in its consequences, not in its principle, and it rather weakens than destroys it. [footnote l: see kent's "commentaries," vol. i. p. .] the last hypothesis that remained was that each state formed a corporation enjoying a separate existence and distinct civil rights, and that it could therefore sue or be sued before a tribunal. thus a state could bring an action against another state. in this instance the union was not called upon to contest a provincial law, but to try a suit in which a state was a party. this suit was perfectly similar to any other cause, except that the quality of the parties was different; and here the danger pointed out at the beginning of this chapter exists with less chance of being avoided. the inherent disadvantage of the very essence of federal constitutions is that they engender parties in the bosom of the nation which present powerful obstacles to the free course of justice. high rank of the supreme court amongst the great powers of state no nation ever constituted so great a judicial power as the americans--extent of its prerogative--its political influence--the tranquillity and the very existence of the union depend on the discretion of the seven federal judges. when we have successively examined in detail the organization of the supreme court, and the entire prerogatives which it exercises, we shall readily admit that a more imposing judicial power was never constituted by any people. the supreme court is placed at the head of all known tribunals, both by the nature of its rights and the class of justiciable parties which it controls. in all the civilized countries of europe the government has always shown the greatest repugnance to allow the cases to which it was itself a party to be decided by the ordinary course of justice. this repugnance naturally attains its utmost height in an absolute government; and, on the other hand, the privileges of the courts of justice are extended with the increasing liberties of the people: but no european nation has at present held that all judicial controversies, without regard to their origin, can be decided by the judges of common law. in america this theory has been actually put in practice, and the supreme court of the united states is the sole tribunal of the nation. its power extends to all the cases arising under laws and treaties made by the executive and legislative authorities, to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, and in general to all points which affect the law of nations. it may even be affirmed that, although its constitution is essentially judicial, its prerogatives are almost entirely political. its sole object is to enforce the execution of the laws of the union; and the union only regulates the relations of the government with the citizens, and of the nation with foreign powers: the relations of citizens amongst themselves are almost exclusively regulated by the sovereignty of the states. a second and still greater cause of the preponderance of this court may be adduced. in the nations of europe the courts of justice are only called upon to try the controversies of private individuals; but the supreme court of the united states summons sovereign powers to its bar. when the clerk of the court advances on the steps of the tribunal, and simply says, "the state of new york versus the state of ohio," it is impossible not to feel that the court which he addresses is no ordinary body; and when it is recollected that one of these parties represents one million, and the other two millions of men, one is struck by the responsibility of the seven judges whose decision is about to satisfy or to disappoint so large a number of their fellow-citizens. the peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the union are vested in the hands of the seven judges. without their active co-operation the constitution would be a dead letter: the executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative powers; the legislature demands their protection from the designs of the executive; they defend the union from the disobedience of the states, the states from the exaggerated claims of the union, the public interest against the interests of private citizens, and the conservative spirit of order against the fleeting innovations of democracy. their power is enormous, but it is clothed in the authority of public opinion. they are the all-powerful guardians of a people which respects law, but they would be impotent against popular neglect or popular contempt. the force of public opinion is the most intractable of agents, because its exact limits cannot be defined; and it is not less dangerous to exceed than to remain below the boundary prescribed. the federal judges must not only be good citizens, and men possessed of that information and integrity which are indispensable to magistrates, but they must be statesmen--politicians, not unread in the signs of the times, not afraid to brave the obstacles which can be subdued, nor slow to turn aside such encroaching elements as may threaten the supremacy of the union and the obedience which is due to the laws. the president, who exercises a limited power, may err without causing great mischief in the state. congress may decide amiss without destroying the union, because the electoral body in which congress originates may cause it to retract its decision by changing its members. but if the supreme court is ever composed of imprudent men or bad citizens, the union may be plunged into anarchy or civil war. the real cause of this danger, however, does not lie in the constitution of the tribunal, but in the very nature of federal governments. we have observed that in confederate peoples it is especially necessary to consolidate the judicial authority, because in no other nations do those independent persons who are able to cope with the social body exist in greater power or in a better condition to resist the physical strength of the government. but the more a power requires to be strengthened, the more extensive and independent it must be made; and the dangers which its abuse may create are heightened by its independence and its strength. the source of the evil is not, therefore, in the constitution of the power, but in the constitution of those states which render its existence necessary. in what respects the federal constitution is superior to that of the states in what respects the constitution of the union can be compared to that of the states--superiority of the constitution of the union attributable to the wisdom of the federal legislators--legislature of the union less dependent on the people than that of the states--executive power more independent in its sphere--judicial power less subjected to the inclinations of the majority--practical consequence of these facts--the dangers inherent in a democratic government eluded by the federal legislators, and increased by the legislators of the states. the federal constitution differs essentially from that of the states in the ends which it is intended to accomplish, but in the means by which these ends are promoted a greater analogy exists between them. the objects of the governments are different, but their forms are the same; and in this special point of view there is some advantage in comparing them together. i am of opinion that the federal constitution is superior to all the constitutions of the states, for several reasons. the present constitution of the union was formed at a later period than those of the majority of the states, and it may have derived some ameliorations from past experience. but we shall be led to acknowledge that this is only a secondary cause of its superiority, when we recollect that eleven new states *n have been added to the american confederation since the promulgation of the federal constitution, and that these new republics have always rather exaggerated than avoided the defects which existed in the former constitutions. [footnote n: [the number of states has now risen to ( ), besides the district of columbia.]] the chief cause of the superiority of the federal constitution lay in the character of the legislators who composed it. at the time when it was formed the dangers of the confederation were imminent, and its ruin seemed inevitable. in this extremity the people chose the men who most deserved the esteem, rather than those who had gained the affections, of the country. i have already observed that distinguished as almost all the legislators of the union were for their intelligence, they were still more so for their patriotism. they had all been nurtured at a time when the spirit of liberty was braced by a continual struggle against a powerful and predominant authority. when the contest was terminated, whilst the excited passions of the populace persisted in warring with dangers which had ceased to threaten them, these men stopped short in their career; they cast a calmer and more penetrating look upon the country which was now their own; they perceived that the war of independence was definitely ended, and that the only dangers which america had to fear were those which might result from the abuse of the freedom she had won. they had the courage to say what they believed to be true, because they were animated by a warm and sincere love of liberty; and they ventured to propose restrictions, because they were resolutely opposed to destruction. *o [footnote o: at this time alexander hamilton, who was one of the principal founders of the constitution, ventured to express the following sentiments in "the federalist," no. :-- "there are some who would be inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation. but such men entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted as of the true means by which the public happiness may be promoted. the republican principle demands that the deliberative sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. it is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the public good. this often applies to their very errors. but their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. they know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants; by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate; by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possess rather than to deserve it. when occasions present themselves in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure."] the greater number of the constitutions of the states assign one year for the duration of the house of representatives, and two years for that of the senate; so that members of the legislative body are constantly and narrowly tied down by the slightest desires of their constituents. the legislators of the union were of opinion that this excessive dependence of the legislature tended to alter the nature of the main consequences of the representative system, since it vested the source, not only of authority, but of government, in the people. they increased the length of the time for which the representatives were returned, in order to give them freer scope for the exercise of their own judgment. the federal constitution, as well as the constitutions of the different states, divided the legislative body into two branches. but in the states these two branches were composed of the same elements, and elected in the same manner. the consequence was that the passions and inclinations of the populace were as rapidly and as energetically represented in one chamber as in the other, and that laws were made with all the characteristics of violence and precipitation. by the federal constitution the two houses originate in like manner in the choice of the people; but the conditions of eligibility and the mode of election were changed, to the end that, if, as is the case in certain nations, one branch of the legislature represents the same interests as the other, it may at least represent a superior degree of intelligence and discretion. a mature age was made one of the conditions of the senatorial dignity, and the upper house was chosen by an elected assembly of a limited number of members. to concentrate the whole social force in the hands of the legislative body is the natural tendency of democracies; for as this is the power which emanates the most directly from the people, it is made to participate most fully in the preponderating authority of the multitude, and it is naturally led to monopolize every species of influence. this concentration is at once prejudicial to a well-conducted administration, and favorable to the despotism of the majority. the legislators of the states frequently yielded to these democratic propensities, which were invariably and courageously resisted by the founders of the union. in the states the executive power is vested in the hands of a magistrate, who is apparently placed upon a level with the legislature, but who is in reality nothing more than the blind agent and the passive instrument of its decisions. he can derive no influence from the duration of his functions, which terminate with the revolving year, or from the exercise of prerogatives which can scarcely be said to exist. the legislature can condemn him to inaction by intrusting the execution of the laws to special committees of its own members, and can annul his temporary dignity by depriving him of his salary. the federal constitution vests all the privileges and all the responsibility of the executive power in a single individual. the duration of the presidency is fixed at four years; the salary of the individual who fills that office cannot be altered during the term of his functions; he is protected by a body of official dependents, and armed with a suspensive veto. in short, every effort was made to confer a strong and independent position upon the executive authority within the limits which had been prescribed to it. in the constitutions of all the states the judicial power is that which remains the most independent of the legislative authority; nevertheless, in all the states the legislature has reserved to itself the right of regulating the emoluments of the judges, a practice which necessarily subjects these magistrates to its immediate influence. in some states the judges are only temporarily appointed, which deprives them of a great portion of their power and their freedom. in others the legislative and judicial powers are entirely confounded; thus the senate of new york, for instance, constitutes in certain cases the superior court of the state. the federal constitution, on the other hand, carefully separates the judicial authority from all external influences; and it provides for the independence of the judges, by declaring that their salary shall not be altered, and that their functions shall be inalienable. the practical consequences of these different systems may easily be perceived. an attentive observer will soon remark that the business of the union is incomparably better conducted than that of any individual state. the conduct of the federal government is more fair and more temperate than that of the states, its designs are more fraught with wisdom, its projects are more durable and more skilfully combined, its measures are put into execution with more vigor and consistency. i recapitulate the substance of this chapter in a few words: the existence of democracies is threatened by two dangers, viz., the complete subjection of the legislative body to the caprices of the electoral body, and the concentration of all the powers of the government in the legislative authority. the growth of these evils has been encouraged by the policy of the legislators of the states, but it has been resisted by the legislators of the union by every means which lay within their control. characteristics which distinguish the federal constitution of the united states of america from all other federal constitutions american union appears to resemble all other confederations--nevertheless its effects are different--reason of this--distinctions between the union and all other confederations--the american government not a federal but an imperfect national government. the united states of america do not afford either the first or the only instance of confederate states, several of which have existed in modern europe, without adverting to those of antiquity. switzerland, the germanic empire, and the republic of the united provinces either have been or still are confederations. in studying the constitutions of these different countries, the politician is surprised to observe that the powers with which they invested the federal government are nearly identical with the privileges awarded by the american constitution to the government of the united states. they confer upon the central power the same rights of making peace and war, of raising money and troops, and of providing for the general exigencies and the common interests of the nation. nevertheless the federal government of these different peoples has always been as remarkable for its weakness and inefficiency as that of the union is for its vigorous and enterprising spirit. again, the first american confederation perished through the excessive weakness of its government; and this weak government was, notwithstanding, in possession of rights even more extensive than those of the federal government of the present day. but the more recent constitution of the united states contains certain principles which exercise a most important influence, although they do not at once strike the observer. this constitution, which may at first sight be confounded with the federal constitutions which preceded it, rests upon a novel theory, which may be considered as a great invention in modern political science. in all the confederations which had been formed before the american constitution of the allied states agreed to obey the injunctions of a federal government; but they reserved to themselves the right of ordaining and enforcing the execution of the laws of the union. the american states which combined in agreed that the federal government should not only dictate the laws, but that it should execute it own enactments. in both cases the right is the same, but the exercise of the right is different; and this alteration produced the most momentous consequences. in all the confederations which had been formed before the american union the federal government demanded its supplies at the hands of the separate governments; and if the measure it prescribed was onerous to any one of those bodies means were found to evade its claims: if the state was powerful, it had recourse to arms; if it was weak, it connived at the resistance which the law of the union, its sovereign, met with, and resorted to inaction under the plea of inability. under these circumstances one of the two alternatives has invariably occurred; either the most preponderant of the allied peoples has assumed the privileges of the federal authority and ruled all the states in its name, *p or the federal government has been abandoned by its natural supporters, anarchy has arisen between the confederates, and the union has lost all powers of action. *q [footnote p: this was the case in greece, when philip undertook to execute the decree of the amphictyons; in the low countries, where the province of holland always gave the law; and, in our own time, in the germanic confederation, in which austria and prussia assume a great degree of influence over the whole country, in the name of the diet.] [footnote q: such has always been the situation of the swiss confederation, which would have perished ages ago but for the mutual jealousies of its neighbors.] in america the subjects of the union are not states, but private citizens: the national government levies a tax, not upon the state of massachusetts, but upon each inhabitant of massachusetts. all former confederate governments presided over communities, but that of the union rules individuals; its force is not borrowed, but self-derived; and it is served by its own civil and military officers, by its own army, and its own courts of justice. it cannot be doubted that the spirit of the nation, the passions of the multitude, and the provincial prejudices of each state tend singularly to diminish the authority of a federal authority thus constituted, and to facilitate the means of resistance to its mandates; but the comparative weakness of a restricted sovereignty is an evil inherent in the federal system. in america, each state has fewer opportunities of resistance and fewer temptations to non-compliance; nor can such a design be put in execution (if indeed it be entertained) without an open violation of the laws of the union, a direct interruption of the ordinary course of justice, and a bold declaration of revolt; in a word, without taking a decisive step which men hesitate to adopt. in all former confederations the privileges of the union furnished more elements of discord than of power, since they multiplied the claims of the nation without augmenting the means of enforcing them: and in accordance with this fact it may be remarked that the real weakness of federal governments has almost always been in the exact ratio of their nominal power. such is not the case in the american union, in which, as in ordinary governments, the federal government has the means of enforcing all it is empowered to demand. the human understanding more easily invents new things than new words, and we are thence constrained to employ a multitude of improper and inadequate expressions. when several nations form a permanent league and establish a supreme authority, which, although it has not the same influence over the members of the community as a national government, acts upon each of the confederate states in a body, this government, which is so essentially different from all others, is denominated a federal one. another form of society is afterwards discovered, in which several peoples are fused into one and the same nation with regard to certain common interests, although they remain distinct, or at least only confederate, with regard to all their other concerns. in this case the central power acts directly upon those whom it governs, whom it rules, and whom it judges, in the same manner, as, but in a more limited circle than, a national government. here the term federal government is clearly no longer applicable to a state of things which must be styled an incomplete national government: a form of government has been found out which is neither exactly national nor federal; but no further progress has been made, and the new word which will one day designate this novel invention does not yet exist. the absence of this new species of confederation has been the cause which has brought all unions to civil war, to subjection, or to a stagnant apathy, and the peoples which formed these leagues have been either too dull to discern, or too pusillanimous to apply this great remedy. the american confederation perished by the same defects. but the confederate states of america had been long accustomed to form a portion of one empire before they had won their independence; they had not contracted the habit of governing themselves, and their national prejudices had not taken deep root in their minds. superior to the rest of the world in political knowledge, and sharing that knowledge equally amongst themselves, they were little agitated by the passions which generally oppose the extension of federal authority in a nation, and those passions were checked by the wisdom of the chief citizens. the americans applied the remedy with prudent firmness as soon as they were conscious of the evil; they amended their laws, and they saved their country. chapter viii: the federal constitution--part v advantages of the federal system in general, and its special utility in america. happiness and freedom of small nations--power of great nations--great empires favorable to the growth of civilization--strength often the first element of national prosperity--aim of the federal system to unite the twofold advantages resulting from a small and from a large territory--advantages derived by the united states from this system--the law adapts itself to the exigencies of the population; population does not conform to the exigencies of the law--activity, amelioration, love and enjoyment of freedom in the american communities--public spirit of the union the abstract of provincial patriotism--principles and things circulate freely over the territory of the united states--the union is happy and free as a little nation, and respected as a great empire. in small nations the scrutiny of society penetrates into every part, and the spirit of improvement enters into the most trifling details; as the ambition of the people is necessarily checked by its weakness, all the efforts and resources of the citizens are turned to the internal benefit of the community, and are not likely to evaporate in the fleeting breath of glory. the desires of every individual are limited, because extraordinary faculties are rarely to be met with. the gifts of an equal fortune render the various conditions of life uniform, and the manners of the inhabitants are orderly and simple. thus, if one estimate the gradations of popular morality and enlightenment, we shall generally find that in small nations there are more persons in easy circumstances, a more numerous population, and a more tranquil state of society, than in great empires. when tyranny is established in the bosom of a small nation, it is more galling than elsewhere, because, as it acts within a narrow circle, every point of that circle is subject to its direct influence. it supplies the place of those great designs which it cannot entertain by a violent or an exasperating interference in a multitude of minute details; and it leaves the political world, to which it properly belongs, to meddle with the arrangements of domestic life. tastes as well as actions are to be regulated at its pleasure; and the families of the citizens as well as the affairs of the state are to be governed by its decisions. this invasion of rights occurs, however, but seldom, and freedom is in truth the natural state of small communities. the temptations which the government offers to ambition are too weak, and the resources of private individuals are too slender, for the sovereign power easily to fall within the grasp of a single citizen; and should such an event have occurred, the subjects of the state can without difficulty overthrow the tyrant and his oppression by a simultaneous effort. small nations have therefore ever been the cradle of political liberty; and the fact that many of them have lost their immunities by extending their dominion shows that the freedom they enjoyed was more a consequence of the inferior size than of the character of the people. the history of the world affords no instance of a great nation retaining the form of republican government for a long series of years, *r and this has led to the conclusion that such a state of things is impracticable. for my own part, i cannot but censure the imprudence of attempting to limit the possible and to judge the future on the part of a being who is hourly deceived by the most palpable realities of life, and who is constantly taken by surprise in the circumstances with which he is most familiar. but it may be advanced with confidence that the existence of a great republic will always be exposed to far greater perils than that of a small one. [footnote r: i do not speak of a confederation of small republics, but of a great consolidated republic.] all the passions which are most fatal to republican institutions spread with an increasing territory, whilst the virtues which maintain their dignity do not augment in the same proportion. the ambition of the citizens increases with the power of the state; the strength of parties with the importance of the ends they have in view; but that devotion to the common weal which is the surest check on destructive passions is not stronger in a large than in a small republic. it might, indeed, be proved without difficulty that it is less powerful and less sincere. the arrogance of wealth and the dejection of wretchedness, capital cities of unwonted extent, a lax morality, a vulgar egotism, and a great confusion of interests, are the dangers which almost invariably arise from the magnitude of states. but several of these evils are scarcely prejudicial to a monarchy, and some of them contribute to maintain its existence. in monarchical states the strength of the government is its own; it may use, but it does not depend on, the community, and the authority of the prince is proportioned to the prosperity of the nation; but the only security which a republican government possesses against these evils lies in the support of the majority. this support is not, however, proportionably greater in a large republic than it is in a small one; and thus, whilst the means of attack perpetually increase both in number and in influence, the power of resistance remains the same, or it may rather be said to diminish, since the propensities and interests of the people are diversified by the increase of the population, and the difficulty of forming a compact majority is constantly augmented. it has been observed, moreover, that the intensity of human passions is heightened, not only by the importance of the end which they propose to attain, but by the multitude of individuals who are animated by them at the same time. every one has had occasion to remark that his emotions in the midst of a sympathizing crowd are far greater than those which he would have felt in solitude. in great republics the impetus of political passion is irresistible, not only because it aims at gigantic purposes, but because it is felt and shared by millions of men at the same time. it may therefore be asserted as a general proposition that nothing is more opposed to the well-being and the freedom of man than vast empires. nevertheless it is important to acknowledge the peculiar advantages of great states. for the very reason which renders the desire of power more intense in these communities than amongst ordinary men, the love of glory is also more prominent in the hearts of a class of citizens, who regard the applause of a great people as a reward worthy of their exertions, and an elevating encouragement to man. if we would learn why it is that great nations contribute more powerfully to the spread of human improvement than small states, we shall discover an adequate cause in the rapid and energetic circulation of ideas, and in those great cities which are the intellectual centres where all the rays of human genius are reflected and combined. to this it may be added that most important discoveries demand a display of national power which the government of a small state is unable to make; in great nations the government entertains a greater number of general notions, and is more completely disengaged from the routine of precedent and the egotism of local prejudice; its designs are conceived with more talent, and executed with more boldness. in time of peace the well-being of small nations is undoubtedly more general and more complete, but they are apt to suffer more acutely from the calamities of war than those great empires whose distant frontiers may for ages avert the presence of the danger from the mass of the people, which is therefore more frequently afflicted than ruined by the evil. but in this matter, as in many others, the argument derived from the necessity of the case predominates over all others. if none but small nations existed, i do not doubt that mankind would be more happy and more free; but the existence of great nations is unavoidable. this consideration introduces the element of physical strength as a condition of national prosperity. it profits a people but little to be affluent and free if it is perpetually exposed to be pillaged or subjugated; the number of its manufactures and the extent of its commerce are of small advantage if another nation has the empire of the seas and gives the law in all the markets of the globe. small nations are often impoverished, not because they are small, but because they are weak; the great empires prosper less because they are great than because they are strong. physical strength is therefore one of the first conditions of the happiness and even of the existence of nations. hence it occurs that, unless very peculiar circumstances intervene, small nations are always united to large empires in the end, either by force or by their own consent: yet i am unacquainted with a more deplorable spectacle than that of a people unable either to defend or to maintain its independence. the federal system was created with the intention of combining the different advantages which result from the greater and the lesser extent of nations; and a single glance over the united states of america suffices to discover the advantages which they have derived from its adoption. in great centralized nations the legislator is obliged to impart a character of uniformity to the laws which does not always suit the diversity of customs and of districts; as he takes no cognizance of special cases, he can only proceed upon general principles; and the population is obliged to conform to the exigencies of the legislation, since the legislation cannot adapt itself to the exigencies and the customs of the population, which is the cause of endless trouble and misery. this disadvantage does not exist in confederations. congress regulates the principal measures of the national government, and all the details of the administration are reserved to the provincial legislatures. it is impossible to imagine how much this division of sovereignty contributes to the well-being of each of the states which compose the union. in these small communities, which are never agitated by the desire of aggrandizement or the cares of self-defence, all public authority and private energy is employed in internal amelioration. the central government of each state, which is in immediate juxtaposition to the citizens, is daily apprised of the wants which arise in society; and new projects are proposed every year, which are discussed either at town meetings or by the legislature of the state, and which are transmitted by the press to stimulate the zeal and to excite the interest of the citizens. this spirit of amelioration is constantly alive in the american republics, without compromising their tranquillity; the ambition of power yields to the less refined and less dangerous love of comfort. it is generally believed in america that the existence and the permanence of the republican form of government in the new world depend upon the existence and the permanence of the federal system; and it is not unusual to attribute a large share of the misfortunes which have befallen the new states of south america to the injudicious erection of great republics, instead of a divided and confederate sovereignty. it is incontestably true that the love and the habits of republican government in the united states were engendered in the townships and in the provincial assemblies. in a small state, like that of connecticut for instance, where cutting a canal or laying down a road is a momentous political question, where the state has no army to pay and no wars to carry on, and where much wealth and much honor cannot be bestowed upon the chief citizens, no form of government can be more natural or more appropriate than that of a republic. but it is this same republican spirit, it is these manners and customs of a free people, which are engendered and nurtured in the different states, to be afterwards applied to the country at large. the public spirit of the union is, so to speak, nothing more than an abstract of the patriotic zeal of the provinces. every citizen of the united states transfuses his attachment to his little republic in the common store of american patriotism. in defending the union he defends the increasing prosperity of his own district, the right of conducting its affairs, and the hope of causing measures of improvement to be adopted which may be favorable to his own interest; and these are motives which are wont to stir men more readily than the general interests of the country and the glory of the nation. on the other hand, if the temper and the manners of the inhabitants especially fitted them to promote the welfare of a great republic, the federal system smoothed the obstacles which they might have encountered. the confederation of all the american states presents none of the ordinary disadvantages resulting from great agglomerations of men. the union is a great republic in extent, but the paucity of objects for which its government provides assimilates it to a small state. its acts are important, but they are rare. as the sovereignty of the union is limited and incomplete, its exercise is not incompatible with liberty; for it does not excite those insatiable desires of fame and power which have proved so fatal to great republics. as there is no common centre to the country, vast capital cities, colossal wealth, abject poverty, and sudden revolutions are alike unknown; and political passion, instead of spreading over the land like a torrent of desolation, spends its strength against the interests and the individual passions of every state. nevertheless, all commodities and ideas circulate throughout the union as freely as in a country inhabited by one people. nothing checks the spirit of enterprise. government avails itself of the assistance of all who have talents or knowledge to serve it. within the frontiers of the union the profoundest peace prevails, as within the heart of some great empire; abroad, it ranks with the most powerful nations of the earth; two thousand miles of coast are open to the commerce of the world; and as it possesses the keys of the globe, its flags is respected in the most remote seas. the union is as happy and as free as a small people, and as glorious and as strong as a great nation. why the federal system is not adapted to all peoples, and how the anglo-americans were enabled to adopt it. every federal system contains defects which baffle the efforts of the legislator--the federal system is complex--it demands a daily exercise of discretion on the part of the citizens--practical knowledge of government common amongst the americans--relative weakness of the government of the union, another defect inherent in the federal system--the americans have diminished without remedying it--the sovereignty of the separate states apparently weaker, but really stronger, than that of the union--why?--natural causes of union must exist between confederate peoples besides the laws--what these causes are amongst the anglo-americans--maine and georgia, separated by a distance of a thousand miles, more naturally united than normandy and brittany--war, the main peril of confederations--this proved even by the example of the united states--the union has no great wars to fear--why?--dangers to which europeans would be exposed if they adopted the federal system of the americans. when a legislator succeeds, after persevering efforts, in exercising an indirect influence upon the destiny of nations, his genius is lauded by mankind, whilst, in point of fact, the geographical position of the country which he is unable to change, a social condition which arose without his co-operation, manners and opinions which he cannot trace to their source, and an origin with which he is unacquainted, exercise so irresistible an influence over the courses of society that he is himself borne away by the current, after an ineffectual resistance. like the navigator, he may direct the vessel which bears him along, but he can neither change its structure, nor raise the winds, nor lull the waters which swell beneath him. i have shown the advantages which the americans derive from their federal system; it remains for me to point out the circumstances which rendered that system practicable, as its benefits are not to be enjoyed by all nations. the incidental defects of the federal system which originate in the laws may be corrected by the skill of the legislator, but there are further evils inherent in the system which cannot be counteracted by the peoples which adopt it. these nations must therefore find the strength necessary to support the natural imperfections of their government. the most prominent evil of all federal systems is the very complex nature of the means they employ. two sovereignties are necessarily in presence of each other. the legislator may simplify and equalize the action of these two sovereignties, by limiting each of them to a sphere of authority accurately defined; but he cannot combine them into one, or prevent them from coming into collision at certain points. the federal system therefore rests upon a theory which is necessarily complicated, and which demands the daily exercise of a considerable share of discretion on the part of those it governs. a proposition must be plain to be adopted by the understanding of a people. a false notion which is clear and precise will always meet with a greater number of adherents in the world than a true principle which is obscure or involved. hence it arises that parties, which are like small communities in the heart of the nation, invariably adopt some principle or some name as a symbol, which very inadequately represents the end they have in view and the means which are at their disposal, but without which they could neither act nor subsist. the governments which are founded upon a single principle or a single feeling which is easily defined are perhaps not the best, but they are unquestionably the strongest and the most durable in the world. in examining the constitution of the united states, which is the most perfect federal constitution that ever existed, one is startled, on the other hand, at the variety of information and the excellence of discretion which it presupposes in the people whom it is meant to govern. the government of the union depends entirely upon legal fictions; the union is an ideal nation which only exists in the mind, and whose limits and extent can only be discerned by the understanding. when once the general theory is comprehended, numberless difficulties remain to be solved in its application; for the sovereignty of the union is so involved in that of the states that it is impossible to distinguish its boundaries at the first glance. the whole structure of the government is artificial and conventional; and it would be ill adapted to a people which has not been long accustomed to conduct its own affairs, or to one in which the science of politics has not descended to the humblest classes of society. i have never been more struck by the good sense and the practical judgment of the americans than in the ingenious devices by which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their federal constitution. i scarcely ever met with a plain american citizen who could not distinguish, with surprising facility, the obligations created by the laws of congress from those created by the laws of his own state; and who, after having discriminated between the matters which come under the cognizance of the union and those which the local legislature is competent to regulate, could not point out the exact limit of the several jurisdictions of the federal courts and the tribunals of the state. the constitution of the united states is like those exquisite productions of human industry which ensure wealth and renown to their inventors, but which are profitless in any other hands. this truth is exemplified by the condition of mexico at the present time. the mexicans were desirous of establishing a federal system, and they took the federal constitution of their neighbors, the anglo-americans, as their model, and copied it with considerable accuracy. *s but although they had borrowed the letter of the law, they were unable to create or to introduce the spirit and the sense which give it life. they were involved in ceaseless embarrassments between the mechanism of their double government; the sovereignty of the states and that of the union perpetually exceeded their respective privileges, and entered into collision; and to the present day mexico is alternately the victim of anarchy and the slave of military despotism. [footnote s: see the mexican constitution of .] the second and the most fatal of all the defects i have alluded to, and that which i believe to be inherent in the federal system, is the relative weakness of the government of the union. the principle upon which all confederations rest is that of a divided sovereignty. the legislator may render this partition less perceptible, he may even conceal it for a time from the public eye, but he cannot prevent it from existing, and a divided sovereignty must always be less powerful than an entire supremacy. the reader has seen in the remarks i have made on the constitution of the united states that the americans have displayed singular ingenuity in combining the restriction of the power of the union within the narrow limits of a federal government with the semblance and, to a certain extent, with the force of a national government. by this means the legislators of the union have succeeded in diminishing, though not in counteracting the natural danger of confederations. it has been remarked that the american government does not apply itself to the states, but that it immediately transmits its injunctions to the citizens, and compels them as isolated individuals to comply with its demands. but if the federal law were to clash with the interests and the prejudices of a state, it might be feared that all the citizens of that state would conceive themselves to be interested in the cause of a single individual who should refuse to obey. if all the citizens of the state were aggrieved at the same time and in the same manner by the authority of the union, the federal government would vainly attempt to subdue them individually; they would instinctively unite in a common defence, and they would derive a ready-prepared organization from the share of sovereignty which the institution of their state allows them to enjoy. fiction would give way to reality, and an organized portion of the territory might then contest the central authority. *t the same observation holds good with regard to the federal jurisdiction. if the courts of the union violated an important law of a state in a private case, the real, if not the apparent, contest would arise between the aggrieved state represented by a citizen and the union represented by its courts of justice. *u [footnote t: [this is precisely what occurred in , and the following paragraph describes correctly the feelings and notions of the south. general lee held that his primary allegiance was due, not to the union, but to virginia.]] [footnote u: for instance, the union possesses by the constitution the right of selling unoccupied lands for its own profit. supposing that the state of ohio should claim the same right in behalf of certain territories lying within its boundaries, upon the plea that the constitution refers to those lands alone which do not belong to the jurisdiction of any particular state, and consequently should choose to dispose of them itself, the litigation would be carried on in the names of the purchasers from the state of ohio and the purchasers from the union, and not in the names of ohio and the union. but what would become of this legal fiction if the federal purchaser was confirmed in his right by the courts of the union, whilst the other competitor was ordered to retain possession by the tribunals of the state of ohio?] he would have but a partial knowledge of the world who should imagine that it is possible, by the aid of legal fictions, to prevent men from finding out and employing those means of gratifying their passions which have been left open to them; and it may be doubted whether the american legislators, when they rendered a collision between the two sovereigns less probable, destroyed the cause of such a misfortune. but it may even be affirmed that they were unable to ensure the preponderance of the federal element in a case of this kind. the union is possessed of money and of troops, but the affections and the prejudices of the people are in the bosom of the states. the sovereignty of the union is an abstract being, which is connected with but few external objects; the sovereignty of the states is hourly perceptible, easily understood, constantly active; and if the former is of recent creation, the latter is coeval with the people itself. the sovereignty of the union is factitious, that of the states is natural, and derives its existence from its own simple influence, like the authority of a parent. the supreme power of the nation only affects a few of the chief interests of society; it represents an immense but remote country, and claims a feeling of patriotism which is vague and ill defined; but the authority of the states controls every individual citizen at every hour and in all circumstances; it protects his property, his freedom, and his life; and when we recollect the traditions, the customs, the prejudices of local and familiar attachment with which it is connected, we cannot doubt of the superiority of a power which is interwoven with every circumstance that renders the love of one's native country instinctive in the human heart. since legislators are unable to obviate such dangerous collisions as occur between the two sovereignties which coexist in the federal system, their first object must be, not only to dissuade the confederate states from warfare, but to encourage such institutions as may promote the maintenance of peace. hence it results that the federal compact cannot be lasting unless there exists in the communities which are leagued together a certain number of inducements to union which render their common dependence agreeable, and the task of the government light, and that system cannot succeed without the presence of favorable circumstances added to the influence of good laws. all the peoples which have ever formed a confederation have been held together by a certain number of common interests, which served as the intellectual ties of association. but the sentiments and the principles of man must be taken into consideration as well as his immediate interests. a certain uniformity of civilization is not less necessary to the durability of a confederation than a uniformity of interests in the states which compose it. in switzerland the difference which exists between the canton of uri and the canton of vaud is equal to that between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries; and, properly speaking, switzerland has never possessed a federal government. the union between these two cantons only subsists upon the map, and their discrepancies would soon be perceived if an attempt were made by a central authority to prescribe the same laws to the whole territory. one of the circumstances which most powerfully contribute to support the federal government in america is that the states have not only similar interests, a common origin, and a common tongue, but that they are also arrived at the same stage of civilization; which almost always renders a union feasible. i do not know of any european nation, how small soever it may be, which does not present less uniformity in its different provinces than the american people, which occupies a territory as extensive as one-half of europe. the distance from the state of maine to that of georgia is reckoned at about one thousand miles; but the difference between the civilization of maine and that of georgia is slighter than the difference between the habits of normandy and those of brittany. maine and georgia, which are placed at the opposite extremities of a great empire, are consequently in the natural possession of more real inducements to form a confederation than normandy and brittany, which are only separated by a bridge. the geographical position of the country contributed to increase the facilities which the american legislators derived from the manners and customs of the inhabitants; and it is to this circumstance that the adoption and the maintenance of the federal system are mainly attributable. the most important occurrence which can mark the annals of a people is the breaking out of a war. in war a people struggles with the energy of a single man against foreign nations in the defence of its very existence. the skill of a government, the good sense of the community, and the natural fondness which men entertain for their country, may suffice to maintain peace in the interior of a district, and to favor its internal prosperity; but a nation can only carry on a great war at the cost of more numerous and more painful sacrifices; and to suppose that a great number of men will of their own accord comply with these exigencies of the state is to betray an ignorance of mankind. all the peoples which have been obliged to sustain a long and serious warfare have consequently been led to augment the power of their government. those which have not succeeded in this attempt have been subjugated. a long war almost always places nations in the wretched alternative of being abandoned to ruin by defeat or to despotism by success. war therefore renders the symptoms of the weakness of a government most palpable and most alarming; and i have shown that the inherent defeat of federal governments is that of being weak. the federal system is not only deficient in every kind of centralized administration, but the central government itself is imperfectly organized, which is invariably an influential cause of inferiority when the nation is opposed to other countries which are themselves governed by a single authority. in the federal constitution of the united states, by which the central government possesses more real force, this evil is still extremely sensible. an example will illustrate the case to the reader. the constitution confers upon congress the right of calling forth militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; and another article declares that the president of the united states is the commander-in-chief of the militia. in the war of the president ordered the militia of the northern states to march to the frontiers; but connecticut and massachusetts, whose interests were impaired by the war, refused to obey the command. they argued that the constitution authorizes the federal government to call forth the militia in case of insurrection or invasion, but that in the present instance there was neither invasion nor insurrection. they added, that the same constitution which conferred upon the union the right of calling forth the militia reserved to the states that of naming the officers; and that consequently (as they understood the clause) no officer of the union had any right to command the militia, even during war, except the president in person; and in this case they were ordered to join an army commanded by another individual. these absurd and pernicious doctrines received the sanction not only of the governors and the legislative bodies, but also of the courts of justice in both states; and the federal government was constrained to raise elsewhere the troops which it required. *v [footnote v: kent's "commentaries," vol. i. p. . i have selected an example which relates to a time posterior to the promulgation of the present constitution. if i had gone back to the days of the confederation, i might have given still more striking instances. the whole nation was at that time in a state of enthusiastic excitement; the revolution was represented by a man who was the idol of the people; but at that very period congress had, to say the truth, no resources at all at its disposal. troops and supplies were perpetually wanting. the best-devised projects failed in the execution, and the union, which was constantly on the verge of destruction, was saved by the weakness of its enemies far more than by its own strength. [all doubt as to the powers of the federal executive was, however, removed by its efforts in the civil war, and those powers were largely extended.]] the only safeguard which the american union, with all the relative perfection of its laws, possesses against the dissolution which would be produced by a great war, lies in its probable exemption from that calamity. placed in the centre of an immense continent, which offers a boundless field for human industry, the union is almost as much insulated from the world as if its frontiers were girt by the ocean. canada contains only a million of inhabitants, and its population is divided into two inimical nations. the rigor of the climate limits the extension of its territory, and shuts up its ports during the six months of winter. from canada to the gulf of mexico a few savage tribes are to be met with, which retire, perishing in their retreat, before six thousand soldiers. to the south, the union has a point of contact with the empire of mexico; and it is thence that serious hostilities may one day be expected to arise. but for a long while to come the uncivilized state of the mexican community, the depravity of its morals, and its extreme poverty, will prevent that country from ranking high amongst nations. *w as for the powers of europe, they are too distant to be formidable. [footnote w: [war broke out between the united states and mexico in , and ended in the conquest of an immense territory, including california.]] the great advantage of the united states does not, then, consist in a federal constitution which allows them to carry on great wars, but in a geographical position which renders such enterprises extremely improbable. no one can be more inclined than i am myself to appreciate the advantages of the federal system, which i hold to be one of the combinations most favorable to the prosperity and freedom of man. i envy the lot of those nations which have been enabled to adopt it; but i cannot believe that any confederate peoples could maintain a long or an equal contest with a nation of similar strength in which the government should be centralized. a people which should divide its sovereignty into fractional powers, in the presence of the great military monarchies of europe, would, in my opinion, by that very act, abdicate its power, and perhaps its existence and its name. but such is the admirable position of the new world that man has no other enemy than himself; and that, in order to be happy and to be free, it suffices to seek the gifts of prosperity and the knowledge of freedom. chapter ix: why the people may strictly be said to govern in the united states i have hitherto examined the institutions of the united states; i have passed their legislation in review, and i have depicted the present characteristics of political society in that country. but a sovereign power exists above these institutions and beyond these characteristic features which may destroy or modify them at its pleasure--i mean that of the people. it remains to be shown in what manner this power, which regulates the laws, acts: its propensities and its passions remain to be pointed out, as well as the secret springs which retard, accelerate, or direct its irresistible course; and the effects of its unbounded authority, with the destiny which is probably reserved for it. in america the people appoints the legislative and the executive power, and furnishes the jurors who punish all offences against the laws. the american institutions are democratic, not only in their principle but in all their consequences; and the people elects its representatives directly, and for the most part annually, in order to ensure their dependence. the people is therefore the real directing power; and although the form of government is representative, it is evident that the opinions, the prejudices, the interests, and even the passions of the community are hindered by no durable obstacles from exercising a perpetual influence on society. in the united states the majority governs in the name of the people, as is the case in all the countries in which the people is supreme. the majority is principally composed of peaceful citizens who, either by inclination or by interest, are sincerely desirous of the welfare of their country. but they are surrounded by the incessant agitation of parties, which attempt to gain their co-operation and to avail themselves of their support. chapter x: parties in the united states chapter summary great distinction to be made between parties--parties which are to each other as rival nations--parties properly so called--difference between great and small parties--epochs which produce them--their characteristics--america has had great parties--they are extinct--federalists--republicans--defeat of the federalists--difficulty of creating parties in the united states--what is done with this intention--aristocratic or democratic character to be met with in all parties--struggle of general jackson against the bank. parties in the united states a great distinction must be made between parties. some countries are so large that the different populations which inhabit them have contradictory interests, although they are the subjects of the same government, and they may thence be in a perpetual state of opposition. in this case the different fractions of the people may more properly be considered as distinct nations than as mere parties; and if a civil war breaks out, the struggle is carried on by rival peoples rather than by factions in the state. but when the citizens entertain different opinions upon subjects which affect the whole country alike, such, for instance, as the principles upon which the government is to be conducted, then distinctions arise which may correctly be styled parties. parties are a necessary evil in free governments; but they have not at all times the same character and the same propensities. at certain periods a nation may be oppressed by such insupportable evils as to conceive the design of effecting a total change in its political constitution; at other times the mischief lies still deeper, and the existence of society itself is endangered. such are the times of great revolutions and of great parties. but between these epochs of misery and of confusion there are periods during which human society seems to rest, and mankind to make a pause. this pause is, indeed, only apparent, for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for men; they are all advancing towards a goal with which they are unacquainted; and we only imagine them to be stationary when their progress escapes our observation, as men who are going at a foot-pace seem to be standing still to those who run. but however this may be, there are certain epochs at which the changes that take place in the social and political constitution of nations are so slow and so insensible that men imagine their present condition to be a final state; and the human mind, believing itself to be firmly based upon certain foundations, does not extend its researches beyond the horizon which it descries. these are the times of small parties and of intrigue. the political parties which i style great are those which cling to principles more than to their consequences; to general, and not to especial cases; to ideas, and not to men. these parties are usually distinguished by a nobler character, by more generous passions, more genuine convictions, and a more bold and open conduct than the others. in them private interest, which always plays the chief part in political passions, is more studiously veiled under the pretext of the public good; and it may even be sometimes concealed from the eyes of the very persons whom it excites and impels. minor parties are, on the other hand, generally deficient in political faith. as they are not sustained or dignified by a lofty purpose, they ostensibly display the egotism of their character in their actions. they glow with a factitious zeal; their language is vehement, but their conduct is timid and irresolute. the means they employ are as wretched as the end at which they aim. hence it arises that when a calm state of things succeeds a violent revolution, the leaders of society seem suddenly to disappear, and the powers of the human mind to lie concealed. society is convulsed by great parties, by minor ones it is agitated; it is torn by the former, by the latter it is degraded; and if these sometimes save it by a salutary perturbation, those invariably disturb it to no good end. america has already lost the great parties which once divided the nation; and if her happiness is considerably increased, her morality has suffered by their extinction. when the war of independence was terminated, and the foundations of the new government were to be laid down, the nation was divided between two opinions--two opinions which are as old as the world, and which are perpetually to be met with under all the forms and all the names which have ever obtained in free communities--the one tending to limit, the other to extend indefinitely, the power of the people. the conflict of these two opinions never assumed that degree of violence in america which it has frequently displayed elsewhere. both parties of the americans were, in fact, agreed upon the most essential points; and neither of them had to destroy a traditionary constitution, or to overthrow the structure of society, in order to ensure its own triumph. in neither of them, consequently, were a great number of private interests affected by success or by defeat; but moral principles of a high order, such as the love of equality and of independence, were concerned in the struggle, and they sufficed to kindle violent passions. the party which desired to limit the power of the people endeavored to apply its doctrines more especially to the constitution of the union, whence it derived its name of federal. the other party, which affected to be more exclusively attached to the cause of liberty, took that of republican. america is a land of democracy, and the federalists were always in a minority; but they reckoned on their side almost all the great men who had been called forth by the war of independence, and their moral influence was very considerable. their cause was, moreover, favored by circumstances. the ruin of the confederation had impressed the people with a dread of anarchy, and the federalists did not fail to profit by this transient disposition of the multitude. for ten or twelve years they were at the head of affairs, and they were able to apply some, though not all, of their principles; for the hostile current was becoming from day to day too violent to be checked or stemmed. in the republicans got possession of the government; thomas jefferson was named president; and he increased the influence of their party by the weight of his celebrity, the greatness of his talents, and the immense extent of his popularity. the means by which the federalists had maintained their position were artificial, and their resources were temporary; it was by the virtues or the talents of their leaders that they had risen to power. when the republicans attained to that lofty station, their opponents were overwhelmed by utter defeat. an immense majority declared itself against the retiring party, and the federalists found themselves in so small a minority that they at once despaired of their future success. from that moment the republican or democratic party *a has proceeded from conquest to conquest, until it has acquired absolute supremacy in the country. the federalists, perceiving that they were vanquished without resource, and isolated in the midst of the nation, fell into two divisions, of which one joined the victorious republicans, and the other abandoned its rallying-point and its name. many years have already elapsed since they ceased to exist as a party. [footnote a: [it is scarcely necessary to remark that in more recent times the signification of these terms has changed. the republicans are the representatives of the old federalists, and the democrats of the old republicans.--trans. note ( ).]] the accession of the federalists to power was, in my opinion, one of the most fortunate incidents which accompanied the formation of the great american union; they resisted the inevitable propensities of their age and of the country. but whether their theories were good or bad, they had the effect of being inapplicable, as a system, to the society which they professed to govern, and that which occurred under the auspices of jefferson must therefore have taken place sooner or later. but their government gave the new republic time to acquire a certain stability, and afterwards to support the rapid growth of the very doctrines which they had combated. a considerable number of their principles were in point of fact embodied in the political creed of their opponents; and the federal constitution which subsists at the present day is a lasting monument of their patriotism and their wisdom. great political parties are not, then, to be met with in the united states at the present time. parties, indeed, may be found which threaten the future tranquillity of the union; but there are none which seem to contest the present form of government or the present course of society. the parties by which the union is menaced do not rest upon abstract principles, but upon temporal interests. these interests, disseminated in the provinces of so vast an empire, may be said to constitute rival nations rather than parties. thus, upon a recent occasion, the north contended for the system of commercial prohibition, and the south took up arms in favor of free trade, simply because the north is a manufacturing and the south an agricultural district; and that the restrictive system which was profitable to the one was prejudicial to the other. *b [footnote b: [the divisions of north and south have since acquired a far greater degree of intensity, and the south, though conquered, still presents a formidable spirit of opposition to northern government.--translator's note, .]] in the absence of great parties, the united states abound with lesser controversies; and public opinion is divided into a thousand minute shades of difference upon questions of very little moment. the pains which are taken to create parties are inconceivable, and at the present day it is no easy task. in the united states there is no religious animosity, because all religion is respected, and no sect is predominant; there is no jealousy of rank, because the people is everything, and none can contest its authority; lastly, there is no public indigence to supply the means of agitation, because the physical position of the country opens so wide a field to industry that man is able to accomplish the most surprising undertakings with his own native resources. nevertheless, ambitious men are interested in the creation of parties, since it is difficult to eject a person from authority upon the mere ground that his place is coveted by others. the skill of the actors in the political world lies therefore in the art of creating parties. a political aspirant in the united states begins by discriminating his own interest, and by calculating upon those interests which may be collected around and amalgamated with it; he then contrives to discover some doctrine or some principle which may suit the purposes of this new association, and which he adopts in order to bring forward his party and to secure his popularity; just as the imprimatur of a king was in former days incorporated with the volume which it authorized, but to which it nowise belonged. when these preliminaries are terminated, the new party is ushered into the political world. all the domestic controversies of the americans at first appear to a stranger to be so incomprehensible and so puerile that he is at a loss whether to pity a people which takes such arrant trifles in good earnest, or to envy the happiness which enables it to discuss them. but when he comes to study the secret propensities which govern the factions of america, he easily perceives that the greater part of them are more or less connected with one or the other of those two divisions which have always existed in free communities. the deeper we penetrate into the working of these parties, the more do we perceive that the object of the one is to limit, and that of the other to extend, the popular authority. i do not assert that the ostensible end, or even that the secret aim, of american parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy or democracy in the country; but i affirm that aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, and that, although they escape a superficial observation, they are the main point and the very soul of every faction in the united states. to quote a recent example. when the president attacked the bank, the country was excited and parties were formed; the well-informed classes rallied round the bank, the common people round the president. but it must not be imagined that the people had formed a rational opinion upon a question which offers so many difficulties to the most experienced statesmen. the bank is a great establishment which enjoys an independent existence, and the people, accustomed to make and unmake whatsoever it pleases, is startled to meet with this obstacle to its authority. in the midst of the perpetual fluctuation of society the community is irritated by so permanent an institution, and is led to attack it in order to see whether it can be shaken and controlled, like all the other institutions of the country. remains of the aristocratic party in the united states secret opposition of wealthy individuals to democracy--their retirement--their taste for exclusive pleasures and for luxury at home--their simplicity abroad--their affected condescension towards the people. it sometimes happens in a people amongst which various opinions prevail that the balance of the several parties is lost, and one of them obtains an irresistible preponderance, overpowers all obstacles, harasses its opponents, and appropriates all the resources of society to its own purposes. the vanquished citizens despair of success and they conceal their dissatisfaction in silence and in general apathy. the nation seems to be governed by a single principle, and the prevailing party assumes the credit of having restored peace and unanimity to the country. but this apparent unanimity is merely a cloak to alarming dissensions and perpetual opposition. this is precisely what occurred in america; when the democratic party got the upper hand, it took exclusive possession of the conduct of affairs, and from that time the laws and the customs of society have been adapted to its caprices. at the present day the more affluent classes of society are so entirely removed from the direction of political affairs in the united states that wealth, far from conferring a right to the exercise of power, is rather an obstacle than a means of attaining to it. the wealthy members of the community abandon the lists, through unwillingness to contend, and frequently to contend in vain, against the poorest classes of their fellow citizens. they concentrate all their enjoyments in the privacy of their homes, where they occupy a rank which cannot be assumed in public; and they constitute a private society in the state, which has its own tastes and its own pleasures. they submit to this state of things as an irremediable evil, but they are careful not to show that they are galled by its continuance; it is even not uncommon to hear them laud the delights of a republican government, and the advantages of democratic institutions when they are in public. next to hating their enemies, men are most inclined to flatter them. mark, for instance, that opulent citizen, who is as anxious as a jew of the middle ages to conceal his wealth. his dress is plain, his demeanor unassuming; but the interior of his dwelling glitters with luxury, and none but a few chosen guests whom he haughtily styles his equals are allowed to penetrate into this sanctuary. no european noble is more exclusive in his pleasures, or more jealous of the smallest advantages which his privileged station confers upon him. but the very same individual crosses the city to reach a dark counting-house in the centre of traffic, where every one may accost him who pleases. if he meets his cobbler upon the way, they stop and converse; the two citizens discuss the affairs of the state in which they have an equal interest, and they shake hands before they part. but beneath this artificial enthusiasm, and these obsequious attentions to the preponderating power, it is easy to perceive that the wealthy members of the community entertain a hearty distaste to the democratic institutions of their country. the populace is at once the object of their scorn and of their fears. if the maladministration of the democracy ever brings about a revolutionary crisis, and if monarchical institutions ever become practicable in the united states, the truth of what i advance will become obvious. the two chief weapons which parties use in order to ensure success are the public press and the formation of associations. chapter xi: liberty of the press in the united states chapter summary difficulty of restraining the liberty of the press--particular reasons which some nations have to cherish this liberty--the liberty of the press a necessary consequence of the sovereignty of the people as it is understood in america--violent language of the periodical press in the united states--propensities of the periodical press--illustrated by the united states--opinion of the americans upon the repression of the abuse of the liberty of the press by judicial prosecutions--reasons for which the press is less powerful in america than in france. liberty of the press in the united states the influence of the liberty of the press does not affect political opinions alone, but it extends to all the opinions of men, and it modifies customs as well as laws. in another part of this work i shall attempt to determinate the degree of influence which the liberty of the press has exercised upon civil society in the united states, and to point out the direction which it has given to the ideas, as well as the tone which it has imparted to the character and the feelings, of the anglo-americans, but at present i purpose simply to examine the effects produced by the liberty of the press in the political world. i confess that i do not entertain that firm and complete attachment to the liberty of the press which things that are supremely good in their very nature are wont to excite in the mind; and i approve of it more from a recollection of the evils it prevents than from a consideration of the advantages it ensures. if any one could point out an intermediate and yet a tenable position between the complete independence and the entire subjection of the public expression of opinion, i should perhaps be inclined to adopt it; but the difficulty is to discover this position. if it is your intention to correct the abuses of unlicensed printing and to restore the use of orderly language, you may in the first instance try the offender by a jury; but if the jury acquits him, the opinion which was that of a single individual becomes the opinion of the country at large. too much and too little has therefore hitherto been done. if you proceed, you must bring the delinquent before a court of permanent judges. but even here the cause must be heard before it can be decided; and the very principles which no book would have ventured to avow are blazoned forth in the pleadings, and what was obscurely hinted at in a single composition is then repeated in a multitude of other publications. the language in which a thought is embodied is the mere carcass of the thought, and not the idea itself; tribunals may condemn the form, but the sense and spirit of the work is too subtle for their authority. too much has still been done to recede, too little to attain your end; you must therefore proceed. if you establish a censorship of the press, the tongue of the public speaker will still make itself heard, and you have only increased the mischief. the powers of thought do not rely, like the powers of physical strength, upon the number of their mechanical agents, nor can a host of authors be reckoned like the troops which compose an army; on the contrary, the authority of a principle is often increased by the smallness of the number of men by whom it is expressed. the words of a strong-minded man, which penetrate amidst the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators; and if it be allowed to speak freely in any public place, the consequence is the same as if free speaking was allowed in every village. the liberty of discourse must therefore be destroyed as well as the liberty of the press; this is the necessary term of your efforts; but if your object was to repress the abuses of liberty, they have brought you to the feet of a despot. you have been led from the extreme of independence to the extreme of subjection without meeting with a single tenable position for shelter or repose. there are certain nations which have peculiar reasons for cherishing the liberty of the press, independently of the general motives which i have just pointed out. for in certain countries which profess to enjoy the privileges of freedom every individual agent of the government may violate the laws with impunity, since those whom he oppresses cannot prosecute him before the courts of justice. in this case the liberty of the press is not merely a guarantee, but it is the only guarantee, of their liberty and their security which the citizens possess. if the rulers of these nations propose to abolish the independence of the press, the people would be justified in saying: give us the right of prosecuting your offences before the ordinary tribunals, and perhaps we may then waive our right of appeal to the tribunal of public opinion. but in the countries in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but it is absurd. when the right of every citizen to co-operate in the government of society is acknowledged, every citizen must be presumed to possess the power of discriminating between the different opinions of his contemporaries, and of appreciating the different facts from which inferences may be drawn. the sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be looked upon as correlative institutions; just as the censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcilably opposed, and which cannot long be retained among the institutions of the same people. not a single individual of the twelve millions who inhabit the territory of the united states has as yet dared to propose any restrictions to the liberty of the press. the first newspaper over which i cast my eyes, upon my arrival in america, contained the following article: in all this affair the language of jackson has been that of a heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority. ambition is his crime, and it will be his punishment too: intrigue is his native element, and intrigue will confound his tricks, and will deprive him of his power: he governs by means of corruption, and his immoral practices will redound to his shame and confusion. his conduct in the political arena has been that of a shameless and lawless gamester. he succeeded at the time, but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings, to throw aside his false dice, and to end his days in some retirement, where he may curse his madness at his leisure; for repentance is a virtue with which his heart is likely to remain forever unacquainted. it is not uncommonly imagined in france that the virulence of the press originates in the uncertain social condition, in the political excitement, and the general sense of consequent evil which prevail in that country; and it is therefore supposed that as soon as society has resumed a certain degree of composure the press will abandon its present vehemence. i am inclined to think that the above causes explain the reason of the extraordinary ascendency it has acquired over the nation, but that they do not exercise much influence upon the tone of its language. the periodical press appears to me to be actuated by passions and propensities independent of the circumstances in which it is placed, and the present position of america corroborates this opinion. america is perhaps, at this moment, the country of the whole world which contains the fewest germs of revolution; but the press is not less destructive in its principles than in france, and it displays the same violence without the same reasons for indignation. in america, as in france, it constitutes a singular power, so strangely composed of mingled good and evil that it is at the same time indispensable to the existence of freedom, and nearly incompatible with the maintenance of public order. its power is certainly much greater in france than in the united states; though nothing is more rare in the latter country than to hear of a prosecution having been instituted against it. the reason of this is perfectly simple: the americans, having once admitted the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, apply it with perfect consistency. it was never their intention to found a permanent state of things with elements which undergo daily modifications; and there is consequently nothing criminal in an attack upon the existing laws, provided it be not attended with a violent infraction of them. they are moreover of opinion that courts of justice are unable to check the abuses of the press; and that as the subtilty of human language perpetually eludes the severity of judicial analysis, offences of this nature are apt to escape the hand which attempts to apprehend them. they hold that to act with efficacy upon the press it would be necessary to find a tribunal, not only devoted to the existing order of things, but capable of surmounting the influence of public opinion; a tribunal which should conduct its proceedings without publicity, which should pronounce its decrees without assigning its motives, and punish the intentions even more than the language of an author. whosoever should have the power of creating and maintaining a tribunal of this kind would waste his time in prosecuting the liberty of the press; for he would be the supreme master of the whole community, and he would be as free to rid himself of the authors as of their writings. in this question, therefore, there is no medium between servitude and extreme license; in order to enjoy the inestimable benefits which the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils which it engenders. to expect to acquire the former and to escape the latter is to cherish one of those illusions which commonly mislead nations in their times of sickness, when, tired with faction and exhausted by effort, they attempt to combine hostile opinions and contrary principles upon the same soil. the small influence of the american journals is attributable to several reasons, amongst which are the following: the liberty of writing, like all other liberty, is most formidable when it is a novelty; for a people which has never been accustomed to co-operate in the conduct of state affairs places implicit confidence in the first tribune who arouses its attention. the anglo-americans have enjoyed this liberty ever since the foundation of the settlements; moreover, the press cannot create human passions by its own power, however skillfully it may kindle them where they exist. in america politics are discussed with animation and a varied activity, but they rarely touch those deep passions which are excited whenever the positive interest of a part of the community is impaired: but in the united states the interests of the community are in a most prosperous condition. a single glance upon a french and an american newspaper is sufficient to show the difference which exists between the two nations on this head. in france the space allotted to commercial advertisements is very limited, and the intelligence is not considerable, but the most essential part of the journal is that which contains the discussion of the politics of the day. in america three-quarters of the enormous sheet which is set before the reader are filled with advertisements, and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes: it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to passionate discussions like those with which the journalists of france are wont to indulge their readers. it has been demonstrated by observation, and discovered by the innate sagacity of the pettiest as well as the greatest of despots, that the influence of a power is increased in proportion as its direction is rendered more central. in france the press combines a twofold centralization; almost all its power is centred in the same spot, and vested in the same hands, for its organs are far from numerous. the influence of a public press thus constituted, upon a sceptical nation, must be unbounded. it is an enemy with which a government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time. neither of these kinds of centralization exists in america. the united states have no metropolis; the intelligence as well as the power of the country are dispersed abroad, and instead of radiating from a point, they cross each other in every direction; the americans have established no central control over the expression of opinion, any more than over the conduct of business. these are circumstances which do not depend on human foresight; but it is owing to the laws of the union that there are no licenses to be granted to printers, no securities demanded from editors as in france, and no stamp duty as in france and formerly in england. the consequence of this is that nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper, and a small number of readers suffices to defray the expenses of the editor. the number of periodical and occasional publications which appears in the united states actually surpasses belief. the most enlightened americans attribute the subordinate influence of the press to this excessive dissemination; and it is adopted as an axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely. i cannot conceive that a truth which is so self-evident should not already have been more generally admitted in europe; it is comprehensible that the persons who hope to bring about revolutions by means of the press should be desirous of confining its action to a few powerful organs, but it is perfectly incredible that the partisans of the existing state of things, and the natural supporters of the law, should attempt to diminish the influence of the press by concentrating its authority. the governments of europe seem to treat the press with the courtesy of the knights of old; they are anxious to furnish it with the same central power which they have found to be so trusty a weapon, in order to enhance the glory of their resistance to its attacks. in america there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper. it may readily be imagined that neither discipline nor unity of design can be communicated to so multifarious a host, and each one is consequently led to fight under his own standard. all the political journals of the united states are indeed arrayed on the side of the administration or against it; but they attack and defend in a thousand different ways. they cannot succeed in forming those great currents of opinion which overwhelm the most solid obstacles. this division of the influence of the press produces a variety of other consequences which are scarcely less remarkable. the facility with which journals can be established induces a multitude of individuals to take a part in them; but as the extent of competition precludes the possibility of considerable profit, the most distinguished classes of society are rarely led to engage in these undertakings. but such is the number of the public prints that, even if they were a source of wealth, writers of ability could not be found to direct them all. the journalists of the united states are usually placed in a very humble position, with a scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind. the will of the majority is the most general of laws, and it establishes certain habits which form the characteristics of each peculiar class of society; thus it dictates the etiquette practised at courts and the etiquette of the bar. the characteristics of the french journalist consist in a violent, but frequently an eloquent and lofty, manner of discussing the politics of the day; and the exceptions to this habitual practice are only occasional. the characteristics of the american journalist consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace; and he habitually abandons the principles of political science to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and disclose all their weaknesses and errors. nothing can be more deplorable than this abuse of the powers of thought; i shall have occasion to point out hereafter the influence of the newspapers upon the taste and the morality of the american people, but my present subject exclusively concerns the political world. it cannot be denied that the effects of this extreme license of the press tend indirectly to the maintenance of public order. the individuals who are already in the possession of a high station in the esteem of their fellow-citizens are afraid to write in the newspapers, and they are thus deprived of the most powerful instrument which they can use to excite the passions of the multitude to their own advantage. *a [footnote a: they only write in the papers when they choose to address the people in their own name; as, for instance, when they are called upon to repel calumnious imputations, and to correct a misstatement of facts.] the personal opinions of the editors have no kind of weight in the eyes of the public: the only use of a journal is, that it imparts the knowledge of certain facts, and it is only by altering or distorting those facts that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own views. but although the press is limited to these resources, its influence in america is immense. it is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory. its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion. it rallies the interests of the community round certain principles, and it draws up the creed which factions adopt; for it affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear, and which address each other without ever having been in immediate contact. when a great number of the organs of the press adopt the same line of conduct, their influence becomes irresistible; and public opinion, when it is perpetually assailed from the same side, eventually yields to the attack. in the united states each separate journal exercises but little authority, but the power of the periodical press is only second to that of the people. *b [footnote b: see appendix, p.] the opinions established in the united states under the empire of the liberty of the press are frequently more firmly rooted than those which are formed elsewhere under the sanction of a censor. in the united states the democracy perpetually raises fresh individuals to the conduct of public affairs; and the measures of the administration are consequently seldom regulated by the strict rules of consistency or of order. but the general principles of the government are more stable, and the opinions most prevalent in society are generally more durable than in many other countries. when once the americans have taken up an idea, whether it be well or ill founded, nothing is more difficult than to eradicate it from their minds. the same tenacity of opinion has been observed in england, where, for the last century, greater freedom of conscience and more invincible prejudices have existed than in all the other countries of europe. i attribute this consequence to a cause which may at first sight appear to have a very opposite tendency, namely, to the liberty of the press. the nations amongst which this liberty exists are as apt to cling to their opinions from pride as from conviction. they cherish them because they hold them to be just, and because they exercised their own free-will in choosing them; and they maintain them not only because they are true, but because they are their own. several other reasons conduce to the same end. it was remarked by a man of genius that "ignorance lies at the two ends of knowledge." perhaps it would have been more correct to have said, that absolute convictions are to be met with at the two extremities, and that doubt lies in the middle; for the human intellect may be considered in three distinct states, which frequently succeed one another. a man believes implicitly, because he adopts a proposition without inquiry. he doubts as soon as he is assailed by the objections which his inquiries may have aroused. but he frequently succeeds in satisfying these doubts, and then he begins to believe afresh: he no longer lays hold on a truth in its most shadowy and uncertain form, but he sees it clearly before him, and he advances onwards by the light it gives him. *c [footnote c: it may, however, be doubted whether this rational and self-guiding conviction arouses as much fervor or enthusiastic devotedness in men as their first dogmatical belief.] when the liberty of the press acts upon men who are in the first of these three states, it does not immediately disturb their habit of believing implicitly without investigation, but it constantly modifies the objects of their intuitive convictions. the human mind continues to discern but one point upon the whole intellectual horizon, and that point is in continual motion. such are the symptoms of sudden revolutions, and of the misfortunes which are sure to befall those generations which abruptly adopt the unconditional freedom of the press. the circle of novel ideas is, however, soon terminated; the touch of experience is upon them, and the doubt and mistrust which their uncertainty produces become universal. we may rest assured that the majority of mankind will either believe they know not wherefore, or will not know what to believe. few are the beings who can ever hope to attain to that state of rational and independent conviction which true knowledge can beget in defiance of the attacks of doubt. it has been remarked that in times of great religious fervor men sometimes change their religious opinions; whereas in times of general scepticism everyone clings to his own persuasion. the same thing takes place in politics under the liberty of the press. in countries where all the theories of social science have been contested in their turn, the citizens who have adopted one of them stick to it, not so much because they are assured of its excellence, as because they are not convinced of the superiority of any other. in the present age men are not very ready to die in defence of their opinions, but they are rarely inclined to change them; and there are fewer martyrs as well as fewer apostates. another still more valid reason may yet be adduced: when no abstract opinions are looked upon as certain, men cling to the mere propensities and external interests of their position, which are naturally more tangible and more permanent than any opinions in the world. it is not a question of easy solution whether aristocracy or democracy is most fit to govern a country. but it is certain that democracy annoys one part of the community, and that aristocracy oppresses another part. when the question is reduced to the simple expression of the struggle between poverty and wealth, the tendency of each side of the dispute becomes perfectly evident without further controversy. chapter xii: political associations in the united states chapter summary daily use which the anglo-americans make of the right of association--three kinds of political associations--in what manner the americans apply the representative system to associations--dangers resulting to the state--great convention of relative to the tariff--legislative character of this convention--why the unlimited exercise of the right of association is less dangerous in the united states than elsewhere--why it may be looked upon as necessary--utility of associations in a democratic people. political associations in the united states in no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in america. besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals. the citizen of the united states is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it. this habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined. the same spirit pervades every act of social life. if a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned. if the public pleasures are concerned, an association is formed to provide for the splendor and the regularity of the entertainment. societies are formed to resist enemies which are exclusively of a moral nature, and to diminish the vice of intemperance: in the united states associations are established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and religion; for there is no end which the human will, seconded by the collective exertions of individuals, despairs of attaining. i shall hereafter have occasion to show the effects of association upon the course of society, and i must confine myself for the present to the political world. when once the right of association is recognized, the citizens may employ it in several different ways. an association consists simply in the public assent which a number of individuals give to certain doctrines, and in the engagement which they contract to promote the spread of those doctrines by their exertions. the right of association with these views is very analogous to the liberty of unlicensed writing; but societies thus formed possess more authority than the press. when an opinion is represented by a society, it necessarily assumes a more exact and explicit form. it numbers its partisans, and compromises their welfare in its cause: they, on the other hand, become acquainted with each other, and their zeal is increased by their number. an association unites the efforts of minds which have a tendency to diverge in one single channel, and urges them vigorously towards one single end which it points out. the second degree in the right of association is the power of meeting. when an association is allowed to establish centres of action at certain important points in the country, its activity is increased and its influence extended. men have the opportunity of seeing each other; means of execution are more readily combined, and opinions are maintained with a degree of warmth and energy which written language cannot approach. lastly, in the exercise of the right of political association, there is a third degree: the partisans of an opinion may unite in electoral bodies, and choose delegates to represent them in a central assembly. this is, properly speaking, the application of the representative system to a party. thus, in the first instance, a society is formed between individuals professing the same opinion, and the tie which keeps it together is of a purely intellectual nature; in the second case, small assemblies are formed which only represent a fraction of the party. lastly, in the third case, they constitute a separate nation in the midst of the nation, a government within the government. their delegates, like the real delegates of the majority, represent the entire collective force of their party; and they enjoy a certain degree of that national dignity and great influence which belong to the chosen representatives of the people. it is true that they have not the right of making the laws, but they have the power of attacking those which are in being, and of drawing up beforehand those which they may afterwards cause to be adopted. if, in a people which is imperfectly accustomed to the exercise of freedom, or which is exposed to violent political passions, a deliberating minority, which confines itself to the contemplation of future laws, be placed in juxtaposition to the legislative majority, i cannot but believe that public tranquillity incurs very great risks in that nation. there is doubtless a very wide difference between proving that one law is in itself better than another and proving that the former ought to be substituted for the latter. but the imagination of the populace is very apt to overlook this difference, which is so apparent to the minds of thinking men. it sometimes happens that a nation is divided into two nearly equal parties, each of which affects to represent the majority. if, in immediate contiguity to the directing power, another power be established, which exercises almost as much moral authority as the former, it is not to be believed that it will long be content to speak without acting; or that it will always be restrained by the abstract consideration of the nature of associations which are meant to direct but not to enforce opinions, to suggest but not to make the laws. the more we consider the independence of the press in its principal consequences, the more are we convinced that it is the chief and, so to speak, the constitutive element of freedom in the modern world. a nation which is determined to remain free is therefore right in demanding the unrestrained exercise of this independence. but the unrestrained liberty of political association cannot be entirely assimilated to the liberty of the press. the one is at the same time less necessary and more dangerous than the other. a nation may confine it within certain limits without forfeiting any part of its self-control; and it may sometimes be obliged to do so in order to maintain its own authority. in america the liberty of association for political purposes is unbounded. an example will show in the clearest light to what an extent this privilege is tolerated. the question of the tariff, or of free trade, produced a great manifestation of party feeling in america; the tariff was not only a subject of debate as a matter of opinion, but it exercised a favorable or a prejudicial influence upon several very powerful interests of the states. the north attributed a great portion of its prosperity, and the south all its sufferings, to this system; insomuch that for a long time the tariff was the sole source of the political animosities which agitated the union. in , when the dispute was raging with the utmost virulence, a private citizen of massachusetts proposed to all the enemies of the tariff, by means of the public prints, to send delegates to philadelphia in order to consult together upon the means which were most fitted to promote freedom of trade. this proposal circulated in a few days from maine to new orleans by the power of the printing-press: the opponents of the tariff adopted it with enthusiasm; meetings were formed on all sides, and delegates were named. the majority of these individuals were well known, and some of them had earned a considerable degree of celebrity. south carolina alone, which afterwards took up arms in the same cause, sent sixty-three delegates. on october , , this assembly, which according to the american custom had taken the name of a convention, met at philadelphia; it consisted of more than two hundred members. its debates were public, and they at once assumed a legislative character; the extent of the powers of congress, the theories of free trade, and the different clauses of the tariff, were discussed in turn. at the end of ten days' deliberation the convention broke up, after having published an address to the american people, in which it declared: i. that congress had not the right of making a tariff, and that the existing tariff was unconstitutional; ii. that the prohibition of free trade was prejudicial to the interests of all nations, and to that of the american people in particular. it must be acknowledged that the unrestrained liberty of political association has not hitherto produced, in the united states, those fatal consequences which might perhaps be expected from it elsewhere. the right of association was imported from england, and it has always existed in america; so that the exercise of this privilege is now amalgamated with the manners and customs of the people. at the present time the liberty of association is become a necessary guarantee against the tyranny of the majority. in the united states, as soon as a party is become preponderant, all public authority passes under its control; its private supporters occupy all the places, and have all the force of the administration at their disposal. as the most distinguished partisans of the other side of the question are unable to surmount the obstacles which exclude them from power, they require some means of establishing themselves upon their own basis, and of opposing the moral authority of the minority to the physical power which domineers over it. thus a dangerous expedient is used to obviate a still more formidable danger. the omnipotence of the majority appears to me to present such extreme perils to the american republics that the dangerous measure which is used to repress it seems to be more advantageous than prejudicial. and here i am about to advance a proposition which may remind the reader of what i said before in speaking of municipal freedom: there are no countries in which associations are more needed, to prevent the despotism of faction or the arbitrary power of a prince, than those which are democratically constituted. in aristocratic nations the body of the nobles and the more opulent part of the community are in themselves natural associations, which act as checks upon the abuses of power. in countries in which these associations do not exist, if private individuals are unable to create an artificial and a temporary substitute for them, i can imagine no permanent protection against the most galling tyranny; and a great people may be oppressed by a small faction, or by a single individual, with impunity. the meeting of a great political convention (for there are conventions of all kinds), which may frequently become a necessary measure, is always a serious occurrence, even in america, and one which is never looked forward to, by the judicious friends of the country, without alarm. this was very perceptible in the convention of , at which the exertions of all the most distinguished members of the assembly tended to moderate its language, and to restrain the subjects which it treated within certain limits. it is probable, in fact, that the convention of exercised a very great influence upon the minds of the malcontents, and prepared them for the open revolt against the commercial laws of the union which took place in . it cannot be denied that the unrestrained liberty of association for political purposes is the privilege which a people is longest in learning how to exercise. if it does not throw the nation into anarchy, it perpetually augments the chances of that calamity. on one point, however, this perilous liberty offers a security against dangers of another kind; in countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. in america there are numerous factions, but no conspiracies. different ways in which the right of association is understood in europe and in the united states--different use which is made of it. the most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow-creatures, and of acting in common with them. i am therefore led to conclude that the right of association is almost as inalienable as the right of personal liberty. no legislator can attack it without impairing the very foundations of society. nevertheless, if the liberty of association is a fruitful source of advantages and prosperity to some nations, it may be perverted or carried to excess by others, and the element of life may be changed into an element of destruction. a comparison of the different methods which associations pursue in those countries in which they are managed with discretion, as well as in those where liberty degenerates into license, may perhaps be thought useful both to governments and to parties. the greater part of europeans look upon an association as a weapon which is to be hastily fashioned, and immediately tried in the conflict. a society is formed for discussion, but the idea of impending action prevails in the minds of those who constitute it: it is, in fact, an army; and the time given to parley serves to reckon up the strength and to animate the courage of the host, after which they direct their march against the enemy. resources which lie within the bounds of the law may suggest themselves to the persons who compose it as means, but never as the only means, of success. such, however, is not the manner in which the right of association is understood in the united states. in america the citizens who form the minority associate, in order, in the first place, to show their numerical strength, and so to diminish the moral authority of the majority; and, in the second place, to stimulate competition, and to discover those arguments which are most fitted to act upon the majority; for they always entertain hopes of drawing over their opponents to their own side, and of afterwards disposing of the supreme power in their name. political associations in the united states are therefore peaceable in their intentions, and strictly legal in the means which they employ; and they assert with perfect truth that they only aim at success by lawful expedients. the difference which exists between the americans and ourselves depends on several causes. in europe there are numerous parties so diametrically opposed to the majority that they can never hope to acquire its support, and at the same time they think that they are sufficiently strong in themselves to struggle and to defend their cause. when a party of this kind forms an association, its object is, not to conquer, but to fight. in america the individuals who hold opinions very much opposed to those of the majority are no sort of impediment to its power, and all other parties hope to win it over to their own principles in the end. the exercise of the right of association becomes dangerous in proportion to the impossibility which excludes great parties from acquiring the majority. in a country like the united states, in which the differences of opinion are mere differences of hue, the right of association may remain unrestrained without evil consequences. the inexperience of many of the european nations in the enjoyment of liberty leads them only to look upon the liberty of association as a right of attacking the government. the first notion which presents itself to a party, as well as to an individual, when it has acquired a consciousness of its own strength, is that of violence: the notion of persuasion arises at a later period and is only derived from experience. the english, who are divided into parties which differ most essentially from each other, rarely abuse the right of association, because they have long been accustomed to exercise it. in france the passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the state, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life. but perhaps the most powerful of the causes which tend to mitigate the excesses of political association in the united states is universal suffrage. in countries in which universal suffrage exists the majority is never doubtful, because neither party can pretend to represent that portion of the community which has not voted. the associations which are formed are aware, as well as the nation at large, that they do not represent the majority: this is, indeed, a condition inseparable from their existence; for if they did represent the preponderating power, they would change the law instead of soliciting its reform. the consequence of this is that the moral influence of the government which they attack is very much increased, and their own power is very much enfeebled. in europe there are few associations which do not affect to represent the majority, or which do not believe that they represent it. this conviction or this pretension tends to augment their force amazingly, and contributes no less to legalize their measures. violence may seem to be excusable in defence of the cause of oppressed right. thus it is, in the vast labyrinth of human laws, that extreme liberty sometimes corrects the abuses of license, and that extreme democracy obviates the dangers of democratic government. in europe, associations consider themselves, in some degree, as the legislative and executive councils of the people, which is unable to speak for itself. in america, where they only represent a minority of the nation, they argue and they petition. the means which the associations of europe employ are in accordance with the end which they propose to obtain. as the principal aim of these bodies is to act, and not to debate, to fight rather than to persuade, they are naturally led to adopt a form of organization which differs from the ordinary customs of civil bodies, and which assumes the habits and the maxims of military life. they centralize the direction of their resources as much as possible, and they intrust the power of the whole party to a very small number of leaders. the members of these associations respond to a watchword, like soldiers on duty; they profess the doctrine of passive obedience; say rather, that in uniting together they at once abjure the exercise of their own judgment and free will; and the tyrannical control which these societies exercise is often far more insupportable than the authority possessed over society by the government which they attack. their moral force is much diminished by these excesses, and they lose the powerful interest which is always excited by a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. the man who in given cases consents to obey his fellows with servility, and who submits his activity and even his opinions to their control, can have no claim to rank as a free citizen. the americans have also established certain forms of government which are applied to their associations, but these are invariably borrowed from the forms of the civil administration. the independence of each individual is formally recognized; the tendency of the members of the association points, as it does in the body of the community, towards the same end, but they are not obliged to follow the same track. no one abjures the exercise of his reason and his free will; but every one exerts that reason and that will for the benefit of a common undertaking. chapter xiii: government of the democracy in america--part i i am well aware of the difficulties which attend this part of my subject, but although every expression which i am about to make use of may clash, upon some one point, with the feelings of the different parties which divide my country, i shall speak my opinion with the most perfect openness. in europe we are at a loss how to judge the true character and the more permanent propensities of democracy, because in europe two conflicting principles exist, and we do not know what to attribute to the principles themselves, and what to refer to the passions which they bring into collision. such, however, is not the case in america; there the people reigns without any obstacle, and it has no perils to dread and no injuries to avenge. in america, democracy is swayed by its own free propensities; its course is natural and its activity is unrestrained; the united states consequently afford the most favorable opportunity of studying its real character. and to no people can this inquiry be more vitally interesting than to the french nation, which is blindly driven onwards by a daily and irresistible impulse towards a state of things which may prove either despotic or republican, but which will assuredly be democratic. universal suffrage i have already observed that universal suffrage has been adopted in all the states of the union; it consequently occurs amongst different populations which occupy very different positions in the scale of society. i have had opportunities of observing its effects in different localities, and amongst races of men who are nearly strangers to each other by their language, their religion, and their manner of life; in louisiana as well as in new england, in georgia and in canada. i have remarked that universal suffrage is far from producing in america either all the good or all the evil consequences which are assigned to it in europe, and that its effects differ very widely from those which are usually attributed to it. choice of the people, and instinctive preferences of the american democracy in the united states the most able men are rarely placed at the head of affairs--reason of this peculiarity--the envy which prevails in the lower orders of france against the higher classes is not a french, but a purely democratic sentiment--for what reason the most distinguished men in america frequently seclude themselves from public affairs. many people in europe are apt to believe without saying it, or to say without believing it, that one of the great advantages of universal suffrage is, that it entrusts the direction of public affairs to men who are worthy of the public confidence. they admit that the people is unable to govern for itself, but they aver that it is always sincerely disposed to promote the welfare of the state, and that it instinctively designates those persons who are animated by the same good wishes, and who are the most fit to wield the supreme authority. i confess that the observations i made in america by no means coincide with these opinions. on my arrival in the united states i was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the subjects, and so little among the heads of the government. it is a well-authenticated fact, that at the present day the most able men in the united states are very rarely placed at the head of affairs; and it must be acknowledged that such has been the result in proportion as democracy has outstepped all its former limits. the race of american statesmen has evidently dwindled most remarkably in the course of the last fifty years. several causes may be assigned to this phenomenon. it is impossible, notwithstanding the most strenuous exertions, to raise the intelligence of the people above a certain level. whatever may be the facilities of acquiring information, whatever may be the profusion of easy methods and of cheap science, the human mind can never be instructed and educated without devoting a considerable space of time to those objects. the greater or the lesser possibility of subsisting without labor is therefore the necessary boundary of intellectual improvement. this boundary is more remote in some countries and more restricted in others; but it must exist somewhere as long as the people is constrained to work in order to procure the means of physical subsistence, that is to say, as long as it retains its popular character. it is therefore quite as difficult to imagine a state in which all the citizens should be very well informed as a state in which they should all be wealthy; these two difficulties may be looked upon as correlative. it may very readily be admitted that the mass of the citizens are sincerely disposed to promote the welfare of their country; nay more, it may even be allowed that the lower classes are less apt to be swayed by considerations of personal interest than the higher orders: but it is always more or less impossible for them to discern the best means of attaining the end which they desire with sincerity. long and patient observation, joined to a multitude of different notions, is required to form a just estimate of the character of a single individual; and can it be supposed that the vulgar have the power of succeeding in an inquiry which misleads the penetration of genius itself? the people has neither the time nor the means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation of this kind: its conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial inspection of the more prominent features of a question. hence it often assents to the clamor of a mountebank who knows the secret of stimulating its tastes, while its truest friends frequently fail in their exertions. moreover, the democracy is not only deficient in that soundness of judgment which is necessary to select men really deserving of its confidence, but it has neither the desire nor the inclination to find them out. it cannot be denied that democratic institutions have a very strong tendency to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to every one the means of rising to the level of any of his fellow-citizens, as because those means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy. this complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment at which it thinks to hold it fast, and "flies," as pascal says, "with eternal flight"; the people is excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown, or sufficiently near to be enjoyed. the lower orders are agitated by the chance of success, they are irritated by its uncertainty; and they pass from the enthusiasm of pursuit to the exhaustion of ill-success, and lastly to the acrimony of disappointment. whatever transcends their own limits appears to be an obstacle to their desires, and there is no kind of superiority, however legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight. it has been supposed that the secret instinct which leads the lower orders to remove their superiors as much as possible from the direction of public affairs is peculiar to france. this, however, is an error; the propensity to which i allude is not inherent in any particular nation, but in democratic institutions in general; and although it may have been heightened by peculiar political circumstances, it owes its origin to a higher cause. in the united states the people is not disposed to hate the superior classes of society; but it is not very favorably inclined towards them, and it carefully excludes them from the exercise of authority. it does not entertain any dread of distinguished talents, but it is rarely captivated by them; and it awards its approbation very sparingly to such as have risen without the popular support. whilst the natural propensities of democracy induce the people to reject the most distinguished citizens as its rulers, these individuals are no less apt to retire from a political career in which it is almost impossible to retain their independence, or to advance without degrading themselves. this opinion has been very candidly set forth by chancellor kent, who says, in speaking with great eulogiums of that part of the constitution which empowers the executive to nominate the judges: "it is indeed probable that the men who are best fitted to discharge the duties of this high office would have too much reserve in their manners, and too much austerity in their principles, for them to be returned by the majority at an election where universal suffrage is adopted." such were the opinions which were printed without contradiction in america in the year ! i hold it to be sufficiently demonstrated that universal suffrage is by no means a guarantee of the wisdom of the popular choice, and that, whatever its advantages may be, this is not one of them. causes which may partly correct these tendencies of the democracy contrary effects produced on peoples as well as on individuals by great dangers--why so many distinguished men stood at the head of affairs in america fifty years ago--influence which the intelligence and the manners of the people exercise upon its choice--example of new england--states of the southwest--influence of certain laws upon the choice of the people--election by an elected body--its effects upon the composition of the senate. when a state is threatened by serious dangers, the people frequently succeeds in selecting the citizens who are the most able to save it. it has been observed that man rarely retains his customary level in presence of very critical circumstances; he rises above or he sinks below his usual condition, and the same thing occurs in nations at large. extreme perils sometimes quench the energy of a people instead of stimulating it; they excite without directing its passions, and instead of clearing they confuse its powers of perception. the jews deluged the smoking ruins of their temple with the carnage of the remnant of their host. but it is more common, both in the case of nations and in that of individuals, to find extraordinary virtues arising from the very imminence of the danger. great characters are then thrown into relief, as edifices which are concealed by the gloom of night are illuminated by the glare of a conflagration. at those dangerous times genius no longer abstains from presenting itself in the arena; and the people, alarmed by the perils of its situation, buries its envious passions in a short oblivion. great names may then be drawn from the balloting-box. i have already observed that the american statesmen of the present day are very inferior to those who stood at the head of affairs fifty years ago. this is as much a consequence of the circumstances as of the laws of the country. when america was struggling in the high cause of independence to throw off the yoke of another country, and when it was about to usher a new nation into the world, the spirits of its inhabitants were roused to the height which their great efforts required. in this general excitement the most distinguished men were ready to forestall the wants of the community, and the people clung to them for support, and placed them at its head. but events of this magnitude are rare, and it is from an inspection of the ordinary course of affairs that our judgment must be formed. if passing occurrences sometimes act as checks upon the passions of democracy, the intelligence and the manners of the community exercise an influence which is not less powerful and far more permanent. this is extremely perceptible in the united states. in new england the education and the liberties of the communities were engendered by the moral and religious principles of their founders. where society has acquired a sufficient degree of stability to enable it to hold certain maxims and to retain fixed habits, the lower orders are accustomed to respect intellectual superiority and to submit to it without complaint, although they set at naught all those privileges which wealth and birth have introduced among mankind. the democracy in new england consequently makes a more judicious choice than it does elsewhere. but as we descend towards the south, to those states in which the constitution of society is more modern and less strong, where instruction is less general, and where the principles of morality, of religion, and of liberty are less happily combined, we perceive that the talents and the virtues of those who are in authority become more and more rare. lastly, when we arrive at the new south-western states, in which the constitution of society dates but from yesterday, and presents an agglomeration of adventurers and speculators, we are amazed at the persons who are invested with public authority, and we are led to ask by what force, independent of the legislation and of the men who direct it, the state can be protected, and society be made to flourish. there are certain laws of a democratic nature which contribute, nevertheless, to correct, in some measure, the dangerous tendencies of democracy. on entering the house of representatives of washington one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly. the eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity within its walls. its members are almost all obscure individuals whose names present no associations to the mind: they are mostly village lawyers, men in trade, or even persons belonging to the lower classes of society. in a country in which education is very general, it is said that the representatives of the people do not always know how to write correctly. at a few yards' distance from this spot is the door of the senate, which contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of america. scarcely an individual is to be perceived in it who does not recall the idea of an active and illustrious career: the senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of europe. what then is the cause of this strange contrast, and why are the most able citizens to be found in one assembly rather than in the other? why is the former body remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent, whilst the latter seems to enjoy a monopoly of intelligence and of sound judgment? both of these assemblies emanate from the people; both of them are chosen by universal suffrage; and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert in america that the senate is hostile to the interests of the people. from what cause, then, does so startling a difference arise? the only reason which appears to me adequately to account for it is, that the house of representatives is elected by the populace directly, and that the senate is elected by elected bodies. the whole body of the citizens names the legislature of each state, and the federal constitution converts these legislatures into so many electoral bodies, which return the members of the senate. the senators are elected by an indirect application of universal suffrage; for the legislatures which name them are not aristocratic or privileged bodies which exercise the electoral franchise in their own right; but they are chosen by the totality of the citizens; they are generally elected every year, and new members may constantly be chosen who will employ their electoral rights in conformity with the wishes of the public. but this transmission of the popular authority through an assembly of chosen men operates an important change in it, by refining its discretion and improving the forms which it adopts. men who are chosen in this manner accurately represent the majority of the nation which governs them; but they represent the elevated thoughts which are current in the community, the propensities which prompt its nobler actions, rather than the petty passions which disturb or the vices which disgrace it. the time may be already anticipated at which the american republics will be obliged to introduce the plan of election by an elected body more frequently into their system of representation, or they will incur no small risk of perishing miserably amongst the shoals of democracy. and here i have no scruple in confessing that i look upon this peculiar system of election as the only means of bringing the exercise of political power to the level of all classes of the people. those thinkers who regard this institution as the exclusive weapon of a party, and those who fear, on the other hand, to make use of it, seem to me to fall into as great an error in the one case as in the other. influence which the american democracy has exercised on the laws relating to elections when elections are rare, they expose the state to a violent crisis--when they are frequent, they keep up a degree of feverish excitement--the americans have preferred the second of these two evils--mutability of the laws--opinions of hamilton and jefferson on this subject. when elections recur at long intervals the state is exposed to violent agitation every time they take place. parties exert themselves to the utmost in order to gain a prize which is so rarely within their reach; and as the evil is almost irremediable for the candidates who fail, the consequences of their disappointed ambition may prove most disastrous; if, on the other hand, the legal struggle can be repeated within a short space of time, the defeated parties take patience. when elections occur frequently, their recurrence keeps society in a perpetual state of feverish excitement, and imparts a continual instability to public affairs. thus, on the one hand the state is exposed to the perils of a revolution, on the other to perpetual mutability; the former system threatens the very existence of the government, the latter is an obstacle to all steady and consistent policy. the americans have preferred the second of these evils to the first; but they were led to this conclusion by their instinct much more than by their reason; for a taste for variety is one of the characteristic passions of democracy. an extraordinary mutability has, by this means, been introduced into their legislation. many of the americans consider the instability of their laws as a necessary consequence of a system whose general results are beneficial. but no one in the united states affects to deny the fact of this instability, or to contend that it is not a great evil. hamilton, after having demonstrated the utility of a power which might prevent, or which might at least impede, the promulgation of bad laws, adds: "it might perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones, and may be used to the one purpose as well as to the other. but this objection will have little weight with those who can properly estimate the mischiefs of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws which form the greatest blemish in the character and genius of our governments." (federalist, no. .) and again in no. of the same work he observes: "the facility and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable. . . . the mischievous effects of the mutability in the public councils arising from a rapid succession of new members would fill a volume: every new election in the states is found to change one-half of the representatives. from this change of men must proceed a change of opinions and of measures, which forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, poisons the blessings of liberty itself, and diminishes the attachment and reverence of the people toward a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity." jefferson himself, the greatest democrat whom the democracy of america has yet produced, pointed out the same evils. "the instability of our laws," said he in a letter to madison, "is really a very serious inconvenience. i think that we ought to have obviated it by deciding that a whole year should always be allowed to elapse between the bringing in of a bill and the final passing of it. it should afterward be discussed and put to the vote without the possibility of making any alteration in it; and if the circumstances of the case required a more speedy decision, the question should not be decided by a simple majority, but by a majority of at least two-thirds of both houses." public officers under the control of the democracy in america simple exterior of the american public officers--no official costume--all public officers are remunerated--political consequences of this system--no public career exists in america--result of this. public officers in the united states are commingled with the crowd of citizens; they have neither palaces, nor guards, nor ceremonial costumes. this simple exterior of the persons in authority is connected not only with the peculiarities of the american character, but with the fundamental principles of that society. in the estimation of the democracy a government is not a benefit, but a necessary evil. a certain degree of power must be granted to public officers, for they would be of no use without it. but the ostensible semblance of authority is by no means indispensable to the conduct of affairs, and it is needlessly offensive to the susceptibility of the public. the public officers themselves are well aware that they only enjoy the superiority over their fellow-citizens which they derive from their authority upon condition of putting themselves on a level with the whole community by their manners. a public officer in the united states is uniformly civil, accessible to all the world, attentive to all requests, and obliging in his replies. i was pleased by these characteristics of a democratic government; and i was struck by the manly independence of the citizens, who respect the office more than the officer, and who are less attached to the emblems of authority than to the man who bears them. i am inclined to believe that the influence which costumes really exercise, in an age like that in which we live, has been a good deal exaggerated. i never perceived that a public officer in america was the less respected whilst he was in the discharge of his duties because his own merit was set off by no adventitious signs. on the other hand, it is very doubtful whether a peculiar dress contributes to the respect which public characters ought to have for their own position, at least when they are not otherwise inclined to respect it. when a magistrate (and in france such instances are not rare) indulges his trivial wit at the expense of the prisoner, or derides the predicament in which a culprit is placed, it would be well to deprive him of his robes of office, to see whether he would recall some portion of the natural dignity of mankind when he is reduced to the apparel of a private citizen. a democracy may, however, allow a certain show of magisterial pomp, and clothe its officers in silks and gold, without seriously compromising its principles. privileges of this kind are transitory; they belong to the place, and are distinct from the individual: but if public officers are not uniformly remunerated by the state, the public charges must be entrusted to men of opulence and independence, who constitute the basis of an aristocracy; and if the people still retains its right of election, that election can only be made from a certain class of citizens. when a democratic republic renders offices which had formerly been remunerated gratuitous, it may safely be believed that the state is advancing to monarchical institutions; and when a monarchy begins to remunerate such officers as had hitherto been unpaid, it is a sure sign that it is approaching toward a despotic or a republican form of government. the substitution of paid for unpaid functionaries is of itself, in my opinion, sufficient to constitute a serious revolution. i look upon the entire absence of gratuitous functionaries in america as one of the most prominent signs of the absolute dominion which democracy exercises in that country. all public services, of whatsoever nature they may be, are paid; so that every one has not merely the right, but also the means of performing them. although, in democratic states, all the citizens are qualified to occupy stations in the government, all are not tempted to try for them. the number and the capacities of the candidates are more apt to restrict the choice of electors than the connections of the candidateship. in nations in which the principle of election extends to every place in the state no political career can, properly speaking, be said to exist. men are promoted as if by chance to the rank which they enjoy, and they are by no means sure of retaining it. the consequence is that in tranquil times public functions offer but few lures to ambition. in the united states the persons who engage in the perplexities of political life are individuals of very moderate pretensions. the pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the state until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs. the vast number of very ordinary men who occupy public stations is quite as attributable to these causes as to the bad choice of the democracy. in the united states, i am not sure that the people would return the men of superior abilities who might solicit its support, but it is certain that men of this description do not come forward. arbitrary power of magistrates under the rule of the american democracy for what reason the arbitrary power of magistrates is greater in absolute monarchies and in democratic republics than it is in limited monarchies--arbitrary power of the magistrates in new england. in two different kinds of government the magistrates *a exercise a considerable degree of arbitrary power; namely, under the absolute government of a single individual, and under that of a democracy. this identical result proceeds from causes which are nearly analogous. [footnote a: i here use the word magistrates in the widest sense in which it can be taken; i apply it to all the officers to whom the execution of the laws is intrusted.] in despotic states the fortune of no citizen is secure; and public officers are not more safe than private individuals. the sovereign, who has under his control the lives, the property, and sometimes the honor of the men whom he employs, does not scruple to allow them a great latitude of action, because he is convinced that they will not use it to his prejudice. in despotic states the sovereign is so attached to the exercise of his power, that he dislikes the constraint even of his own regulations; and he is well pleased that his agents should follow a somewhat fortuitous line of conduct, provided he be certain that their actions will never counteract his desires. in democracies, as the majority has every year the right of depriving the officers whom it has appointed of their power, it has no reason to fear any abuse of their authority. as the people is always able to signify its wishes to those who conduct the government, it prefers leaving them to make their own exertions to prescribing an invariable rule of conduct which would at once fetter their activity and the popular authority. it may even be observed, on attentive consideration, that under the rule of a democracy the arbitrary power of the magistrate must be still greater than in despotic states. in the latter the sovereign has the power of punishing all the faults with which he becomes acquainted, but it would be vain for him to hope to become acquainted with all those which are committed. in the former the sovereign power is not only supreme, but it is universally present. the american functionaries are, in point of fact, much more independent in the sphere of action which the law traces out for them than any public officer in europe. very frequently the object which they are to accomplish is simply pointed out to them, and the choice of the means is left to their own discretion. in new england, for instance, the selectmen of each township are bound to draw up the list of persons who are to serve on the jury; the only rule which is laid down to guide them in their choice is that they are to select citizens possessing the elective franchise and enjoying a fair reputation. *b in france the lives and liberties of the subjects would be thought to be in danger if a public officer of any kind was entrusted with so formidable a right. in new england the same magistrates are empowered to post the names of habitual drunkards in public-houses, and to prohibit the inhabitants of a town from supplying them with liquor. *c a censorial power of this excessive kind would be revolting to the population of the most absolute monarchies; here, however, it is submitted to without difficulty. [footnote b: see the act of february , . "general collection of the laws of massachusetts," vol. ii. p. . it should be added that the jurors are afterwards drawn from these lists by lot.] [footnote c: see act of february , . "general collection of the laws of massachusetts," vol. i. p. .] nowhere has so much been left by the law to the arbitrary determination of the magistrate as in democratic republics, because this arbitrary power is unattended by any alarming consequences. it may even be asserted that the freedom of the magistrate increases as the elective franchise is extended, and as the duration of the time of office is shortened. hence arises the great difficulty which attends the conversion of a democratic republic into a monarchy. the magistrate ceases to be elective, but he retains the rights and the habits of an elected officer, which lead directly to despotism. it is only in limited monarchies that the law, which prescribes the sphere in which public officers are to act, superintends all their measures. the cause of this may be easily detected. in limited monarchies the power is divided between the king and the people, both of whom are interested in the stability of the magistrate. the king does not venture to place the public officers under the control of the people, lest they should be tempted to betray his interests; on the other hand, the people fears lest the magistrates should serve to oppress the liberties of the country, if they were entirely dependent upon the crown; they cannot therefore be said to depend on either one or the other. the same cause which induces the king and the people to render public officers independent suggests the necessity of such securities as may prevent their independence from encroaching upon the authority of the former and the liberties of the latter. they consequently agree as to the necessity of restricting the functionary to a line of conduct laid down beforehand, and they are interested in confining him by certain regulations which he cannot evade. chapter xiii: government of the democracy in america--part ii instability of the administration in the united states in america the public acts of a community frequently leave fewer traces than the occurrences of a family--newspapers the only historical remains--instability of the administration prejudicial to the art of government. the authority which public men possess in america is so brief, and they are so soon commingled with the ever-changing population of the country, that the acts of a community frequently leave fewer traces than the occurrences of a private family. the public administration is, so to speak, oral and traditionary. but little is committed to writing, and that little is wafted away forever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by the smallest breeze. the only historical remains in the united states are the newspapers; but if a number be wanting, the chain of time is broken, and the present is severed from the past. i am convinced that in fifty years it will be more difficult to collect authentic documents concerning the social condition of the americans at the present day than it is to find remains of the administration of france during the middle ages; and if the united states were ever invaded by barbarians, it would be necessary to have recourse to the history of other nations in order to learn anything of the people which now inhabits them. the instability of the administration has penetrated into the habits of the people: it even appears to suit the general taste, and no one cares for what occurred before his time. no methodical system is pursued; no archives are formed; and no documents are brought together when it would be very easy to do so. where they exist, little store is set upon them; and i have amongst my papers several original public documents which were given to me in answer to some of my inquiries. in america society seems to live from hand to mouth, like an army in the field. nevertheless, the art of administration may undoubtedly be ranked as a science, and no sciences can be improved if the discoveries and observations of successive generations are not connected together in the order in which they occur. one man, in the short space of his life remarks a fact; another conceives an idea; the former invents a means of execution, the latter reduces a truth to a fixed proposition; and mankind gathers the fruits of individual experience upon its way and gradually forms the sciences. but the persons who conduct the administration in america can seldom afford any instruction to each other; and when they assume the direction of society, they simply possess those attainments which are most widely disseminated in the community, and no experience peculiar to themselves. democracy, carried to its furthest limits, is therefore prejudicial to the art of government; and for this reason it is better adapted to a people already versed in the conduct of an administration than to a nation which is uninitiated in public affairs. this remark, indeed, is not exclusively applicable to the science of administration. although a democratic government is founded upon a very simple and natural principle, it always presupposes the existence of a high degree of culture and enlightenment in society. *d at the first glance it may be imagined to belong to the earliest ages of the world; but maturer observation will convince us that it could only come last in the succession of human history. [footnote d: it is needless to observe that i speak here of the democratic form of government as applied to a people, not merely to a tribe.] charges levied by the state under the rule of the american democracy in all communities citizens divisible into three classes--habits of each of these classes in the direction of public finances--why public expenditure must tend to increase when the people governs--what renders the extravagance of a democracy less to be feared in america--public expenditure under a democracy. before we can affirm whether a democratic form of government is economical or not, we must establish a suitable standard of comparison. the question would be one of easy solution if we were to attempt to draw a parallel between a democratic republic and an absolute monarchy. the public expenditure would be found to be more considerable under the former than under the latter; such is the case with all free states compared to those which are not so. it is certain that despotism ruins individuals by preventing them from producing wealth, much more than by depriving them of the wealth they have produced; it dries up the source of riches, whilst it usually respects acquired property. freedom, on the contrary, engenders far more benefits than it destroys; and the nations which are favored by free institutions invariably find that their resources increase even more rapidly than their taxes. my present object is to compare free nations to each other, and to point out the influence of democracy upon the finances of a state. communities, as well as organic bodies, are subject to certain fixed rules in their formation which they cannot evade. they are composed of certain elements which are common to them at all times and under all circumstances. the people may always be mentally divided into three distinct classes. the first of these classes consists of the wealthy; the second, of those who are in easy circumstances; and the third is composed of those who have little or no property, and who subsist more especially by the work which they perform for the two superior orders. the proportion of the individuals who are included in these three divisions may vary according to the condition of society, but the divisions themselves can never be obliterated. it is evident that each of these classes will exercise an influence peculiar to its own propensities upon the administration of the finances of the state. if the first of the three exclusively possesses the legislative power, it is probable that it will not be sparing of the public funds, because the taxes which are levied on a large fortune only tend to diminish the sum of superfluous enjoyment, and are, in point of fact, but little felt. if the second class has the power of making the laws, it will certainly not be lavish of taxes, because nothing is so onerous as a large impost which is levied upon a small income. the government of the middle classes appears to me to be the most economical, though perhaps not the most enlightened, and certainly not the most generous, of free governments. but let us now suppose that the legislative authority is vested in the lowest orders: there are two striking reasons which show that the tendency of the expenditure will be to increase, not to diminish. as the great majority of those who create the laws are possessed of no property upon which taxes can be imposed, all the money which is spent for the community appears to be spent to their advantage, at no cost of their own; and those who are possessed of some little property readily find means of regulating the taxes so that they are burdensome to the wealthy and profitable to the poor, although the rich are unable to take the same advantage when they are in possession of the government. in countries in which the poor *e should be exclusively invested with the power of making the laws no great economy of public expenditure ought to be expected: that expenditure will always be considerable; either because the taxes do not weigh upon those who levy them, or because they are levied in such a manner as not to weigh upon those classes. in other words, the government of the democracy is the only one under which the power which lays on taxes escapes the payment of them. [footnote e: the word poor is used here, and throughout the remainder of this chapter, in a relative, not in an absolute sense. poor men in america would often appear rich in comparison with the poor of europe; but they may with propriety by styled poor in comparison with their more affluent countrymen.] it may be objected (but the argument has no real weight) that the true interest of the people is indissolubly connected with that of the wealthier portion of the community, since it cannot but suffer by the severe measures to which it resorts. but is it not the true interest of kings to render their subjects happy, and the true interest of nobles to admit recruits into their order on suitable grounds? if remote advantages had power to prevail over the passions and the exigencies of the moment, no such thing as a tyrannical sovereign or an exclusive aristocracy could ever exist. again, it may be objected that the poor are never invested with the sole power of making the laws; but i reply, that wherever universal suffrage has been established the majority of the community unquestionably exercises the legislative authority; and if it be proved that the poor always constitute the majority, it may be added, with perfect truth, that in the countries in which they possess the elective franchise they possess the sole power of making laws. but it is certain that in all the nations of the world the greater number has always consisted of those persons who hold no property, or of those whose property is insufficient to exempt them from the necessity of working in order to procure an easy subsistence. universal suffrage does therefore, in point of fact, invest the poor with the government of society. the disastrous influence which popular authority may sometimes exercise upon the finances of a state was very clearly seen in some of the democratic republics of antiquity, in which the public treasure was exhausted in order to relieve indigent citizens, or to supply the games and theatrical amusements of the populace. it is true that the representative system was then very imperfectly known, and that, at the present time, the influence of popular passion is less felt in the conduct of public affairs; but it may be believed that the delegate will in the end conform to the principles of his constituents, and favor their propensities as much as their interests. the extravagance of democracy is, however, less to be dreaded in proportion as the people acquires a share of property, because on the one hand the contributions of the rich are then less needed, and, on the other, it is more difficult to lay on taxes which do not affect the interests of the lower classes. on this account universal suffrage would be less dangerous in france than in england, because in the latter country the property on which taxes may be levied is vested in fewer hands. america, where the great majority of the citizens possess some fortune, is in a still more favorable position than france. there are still further causes which may increase the sum of public expenditure in democratic countries. when the aristocracy governs, the individuals who conduct the affairs of state are exempted by their own station in society from every kind of privation; they are contented with their position; power and renown are the objects for which they strive; and, as they are placed far above the obscurer throng of citizens, they do not always distinctly perceive how the well-being of the mass of the people ought to redound to their own honor. they are not indeed callous to the sufferings of the poor, but they cannot feel those miseries as acutely as if they were themselves partakers of them. provided that the people appear to submit to its lot, the rulers are satisfied, and they demand nothing further from the government. an aristocracy is more intent upon the means of maintaining its influence than upon the means of improving its condition. when, on the contrary, the people is invested with the supreme authority, the perpetual sense of their own miseries impels the rulers of society to seek for perpetual ameliorations. a thousand different objects are subjected to improvement; the most trivial details are sought out as susceptible of amendment; and those changes which are accompanied with considerable expense are more especially advocated, since the object is to render the condition of the poor more tolerable, who cannot pay for themselves. moreover, all democratic communities are agitated by an ill-defined excitement and by a kind of feverish impatience, that engender a multitude of innovations, almost all of which are attended with expense. in monarchies and aristocracies the natural taste which the rulers have for power and for renown is stimulated by the promptings of ambition, and they are frequently incited by these temptations to very costly undertakings. in democracies, where the rulers labor under privations, they can only be courted by such means as improve their well-being, and these improvements cannot take place without a sacrifice of money. when a people begins to reflect upon its situation, it discovers a multitude of wants to which it had not before been subject, and to satisfy these exigencies recourse must be had to the coffers of the state. hence it arises that the public charges increase in proportion as civilization spreads, and that imposts are augmented as knowledge pervades the community. the last cause which frequently renders a democratic government dearer than any other is, that a democracy does not always succeed in moderating its expenditure, because it does not understand the art of being economical. as the designs which it entertains are frequently changed, and the agents of those designs are still more frequently removed, its undertakings are often ill conducted or left unfinished: in the former case the state spends sums out of all proportion to the end which it proposes to accomplish; in the second, the expense itself is unprofitable. *f [footnote f: the gross receipts of the treasury of the united states in were about $ , , ; in they had risen to $ , , . the gross expenditure in was $ , , ; in , $ , , .] tendencies of the american democracy as regards the salaries of public officers in the democracies those who establish high salaries have no chance of profiting by them--tendency of the american democracy to increase the salaries of subordinate officers and to lower those of the more important functionaries--reason of this--comparative statement of the salaries of public officers in the united states and in france. there is a powerful reason which usually induces democracies to economize upon the salaries of public officers. as the number of citizens who dispense the remuneration is extremely large in democratic countries, so the number of persons who can hope to be benefited by the receipt of it is comparatively small. in aristocratic countries, on the contrary, the individuals who fix high salaries have almost always a vague hope of profiting by them. these appointments may be looked upon as a capital which they create for their own use, or at least as a resource for their children. it must, however, be allowed that a democratic state is most parsimonious towards its principal agents. in america the secondary officers are much better paid, and the dignitaries of the administration much worse, than they are elsewhere. these opposite effects result from the same cause; the people fixes the salaries of the public officers in both cases; and the scale of remuneration is determined by the consideration of its own wants. it is held to be fair that the servants of the public should be placed in the same easy circumstances as the public itself; *g but when the question turns upon the salaries of the great officers of state, this rule fails, and chance alone can guide the popular decision. the poor have no adequate conception of the wants which the higher classes of society may feel. the sum which is scanty to the rich appears enormous to the poor man whose wants do not extend beyond the necessaries of life; and in his estimation the governor of a state, with his twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, is a very fortunate and enviable being. *h if you undertake to convince him that the representative of a great people ought to be able to maintain some show of splendor in the eyes of foreign nations, he will perhaps assent to your meaning; but when he reflects on his own humble dwelling, and on the hard-earned produce of his wearisome toil, he remembers all that he could do with a salary which you say is insufficient, and he is startled or almost frightened at the sight of such uncommon wealth. besides, the secondary public officer is almost on a level with the people, whilst the others are raised above it. the former may therefore excite his interest, but the latter begins to arouse his envy. [footnote g: the easy circumstances in which secondary functionaries are placed in the united states result also from another cause, which is independent of the general tendencies of democracy; every kind of private business is very lucrative, and the state would not be served at all if it did not pay its servants. the country is in the position of a commercial undertaking, which is obliged to sustain an expensive competition, notwithstanding its tastes for economy.] [footnote h: the state of ohio, which contains a million of inhabitants, gives its governor a salary of only $ , a year.] this is very clearly seen in the united states, where the salaries seem to decrease as the authority of those who receive them augments *i [footnote i: to render this assertion perfectly evident, it will suffice to examine the scale of salaries of the agents of the federal government. i have added the salaries attached to the corresponding officers in france under the constitutional monarchy to complete the comparison. united states treasury department messenger ............................ $ clerk with lowest salary ............. , clerk with highest salary ............ , chief clerk .......................... , secretary of state ................... , the president ........................ , france ministere des finances hussier ........................... , fr. clerk with lowest salary, , to , fr. clerk with highest salary , to , fr. secretaire-general ................ , fr. the minister ...................... , fr. the king ...................... , , fr. i have perhaps done wrong in selecting france as my standard of comparison. in france the democratic tendencies of the nation exercise an ever-increasing influence upon the government, and the chambers show a disposition to raise the low salaries and to lower the principal ones. thus, the minister of finance, who received , fr. under the empire, receives , fr. in : the directeurs-generaux of finance, who then received , fr. now receive only , fr. [this comparison is based on the state of things existing in france and the united states in . it has since materially altered in both countries, but not so much as to impugn the truth of the author's observation.]] under the rule of an aristocracy it frequently happens, on the contrary, that whilst the high officers are receiving munificent salaries, the inferior ones have not more than enough to procure the necessaries of life. the reason of this fact is easily discoverable from causes very analogous to those to which i have just alluded. if a democracy is unable to conceive the pleasures of the rich or to witness them without envy, an aristocracy is slow to understand, or, to speak more correctly, is unacquainted with, the privations of the poor. the poor man is not (if we use the term aright) the fellow of the rich one; but he is a being of another species. an aristocracy is therefore apt to care but little for the fate of its subordinate agents; and their salaries are only raised when they refuse to perform their service for too scanty a remuneration. it is the parsimonious conduct of democracy towards its principal officers which has countenanced a supposition of far more economical propensities than any which it really possesses. it is true that it scarcely allows the means of honorable subsistence to the individuals who conduct its affairs; but enormous sums are lavished to meet the exigencies or to facilitate the enjoyments of the people. *j the money raised by taxation may be better employed, but it is not saved. in general, democracy gives largely to the community, and very sparingly to those who govern it. the reverse is the case in aristocratic countries, where the money of the state is expended to the profit of the persons who are at the head of affairs. [footnote j: see the american budgets for the cost of indigent citizens and gratuitous instruction. in $ , were spent in the state of new york for the maintenance of the poor, and at least $ , , were devoted to gratuitous instruction. (william's "new york annual register," , pp. and .) the state of new york contained only , , inhabitants in the year , which is not more than double the amount of population in the department du nord in france.] difficulty of distinguishing the causes which contribute to the economy of the american government we are liable to frequent errors in the research of those facts which exercise a serious influence upon the fate of mankind, since nothing is more difficult than to appreciate their real value. one people is naturally inconsistent and enthusiastic; another is sober and calculating; and these characteristics originate in their physical constitution or in remote causes with which we are unacquainted. these are nations which are fond of parade and the bustle of festivity, and which do not regret the costly gaieties of an hour. others, on the contrary, are attached to more retiring pleasures, and seem almost ashamed of appearing to be pleased. in some countries the highest value is set upon the beauty of public edifices; in others the productions of art are treated with indifference, and everything which is unproductive is looked down upon with contempt. in some renown, in others money, is the ruling passion. independently of the laws, all these causes concur to exercise a very powerful influence upon the conduct of the finances of the state. if the americans never spend the money of the people in galas, it is not only because the imposition of taxes is under the control of the people, but because the people takes no delight in public rejoicings. if they repudiate all ornament from their architecture, and set no store on any but the more practical and homely advantages, it is not only because they live under democratic institutions, but because they are a commercial nation. the habits of private life are continued in public; and we ought carefully to distinguish that economy which depends upon their institutions from that which is the natural result of their manners and customs. whether the expenditure of the united states can be compared to that of france two points to be established in order to estimate the extent of the public charges, viz., the national wealth and the rate of taxation--the wealth and the charges of france not accurately known--why the wealth and charges of the union cannot be accurately known--researches of the author with a view to discover the amount of taxation of pennsylvania--general symptoms which may serve to indicate the amount of the public charges in a given nation--result of this investigation for the union. many attempts have recently been made in france to compare the public expenditure of that country with the expenditure of the united states; all these attempts have, however, been unattended by success, and a few words will suffice to show that they could not have had a satisfactory result. in order to estimate the amount of the public charges of a people two preliminaries are indispensable: it is necessary, in the first place, to know the wealth of that people; and in the second, to learn what portion of that wealth is devoted to the expenditure of the state. to show the amount of taxation without showing the resources which are destined to meet the demand, is to undertake a futile labor; for it is not the expenditure, but the relation of the expenditure to the revenue, which it is desirable to know. the same rate of taxation which may easily be supported by a wealthy contributor will reduce a poor one to extreme misery. the wealth of nations is composed of several distinct elements, of which population is the first, real property the second, and personal property the third. the first of these three elements may be discovered without difficulty. amongst civilized nations it is easy to obtain an accurate census of the inhabitants; but the two others cannot be determined with so much facility. it is difficult to take an exact account of all the lands in a country which are under cultivation, with their natural or their acquired value; and it is still more impossible to estimate the entire personal property which is at the disposal of a nation, and which eludes the strictest analysis by the diversity and the number of shapes under which it may occur. and, indeed, we find that the most ancient civilized nations of europe, including even those in which the administration is most central, have not succeeded, as yet, in determining the exact condition of their wealth. in america the attempt has never been made; for how would such an investigation be possible in a country where society has not yet settled into habits of regularity and tranquillity; where the national government is not assisted by a multiple of agents whose exertions it can command and direct to one sole end; and where statistics are not studied, because no one is able to collect the necessary documents, or to find time to peruse them? thus the primary elements of the calculations which have been made in france cannot be obtained in the union; the relative wealth of the two countries is unknown; the property of the former is not accurately determined, and no means exist of computing that of the latter. i consent, therefore, for the sake of the discussion, to abandon this necessary term of the comparison, and i confine myself to a computation of the actual amount of taxation, without investigating the relation which subsists between the taxation and the revenue. but the reader will perceive that my task has not been facilitated by the limits which i here lay down for my researches. it cannot be doubted that the central administration of france, assisted by all the public officers who are at its disposal, might determine with exactitude the amount of the direct and indirect taxes levied upon the citizens. but this investigation, which no private individual can undertake, has not hitherto been completed by the french government, or, at least, its results have not been made public. we are acquainted with the sum total of the charges of the state; we know the amount of the departmental expenditure; but the expenses of the communal divisions have not been computed, and the amount of the public expenses of france is consequently unknown. if we now turn to america, we shall perceive that the difficulties are multiplied and enhanced. the union publishes an exact return of the amount of its expenditure; the budgets of the four and twenty states furnish similar returns of their revenues; but the expenses incident to the affairs of the counties and the townships are unknown. *k [footnote k: the americans, as we have seen, have four separate budgets, the union, the states, the counties, and the townships having each severally their own. during my stay in america i made every endeavor to discover the amount of the public expenditure in the townships and counties of the principal states of the union, and i readily obtained the budget of the larger townships, but i found it quite impossible to procure that of the smaller ones. i possess, however, some documents relating to county expenses, which, although incomplete, are still curious. i have to thank mr. richards, mayor of philadelphia, for the budgets of thirteen of the counties of pennsylvania, viz., lebanon, centre, franklin, fayette, montgomery, luzerne, dauphin, butler, alleghany, columbia, northampton, northumberland, and philadelphia, for the year . their population at that time consisted of , inhabitants. on looking at the map of pennsylvania, it will be seen that these thirteen counties are scattered in every direction, and so generally affected by the causes which usually influence the condition of a country, that they may easily be supposed to furnish a correct average of the financial state of the counties of pennsylvania in general; and thus, upon reckoning that the expenses of these counties amounted in the year to about $ , , or nearly cents for each inhabitant, and calculating that each of them contributed in the same year about $ . towards the union, and about cents to the state of pennsylvania, it appears that they each contributed as their share of all the public expenses (except those of the townships) the sum of $ . . this calculation is doubly incomplete, as it applies only to a single year and to one part of the public charges; but it has at least the merit of not being conjectural.] the authority of the federal government cannot oblige the provincial governments to throw any light upon this point; and even if these governments were inclined to afford their simultaneous co-operation, it may be doubted whether they possess the means of procuring a satisfactory answer. independently of the natural difficulties of the task, the political organization of the country would act as a hindrance to the success of their efforts. the county and town magistrates are not appointed by the authorities of the state, and they are not subjected to their control. it is therefore very allowable to suppose that, if the state was desirous of obtaining the returns which we require, its design would be counteracted by the neglect of those subordinate officers whom it would be obliged to employ. *l it is, in point of fact, useless to inquire what the americans might do to forward this inquiry, since it is certain that they have hitherto done nothing at all. there does not exist a single individual at the present day, in america or in europe, who can inform us what each citizen of the union annually contributes to the public charges of the nation. *m [footnote l: those who have attempted to draw a comparison between the expenses of france and america have at once perceived that no such comparison could be drawn between the total expenditure of the two countries; but they have endeavored to contrast detached portions of this expenditure. it may readily be shown that this second system is not at all less defective than the first. if i attempt to compare the french budget with the budget of the union, it must be remembered that the latter embraces much fewer objects than then central government of the former country, and that the expenditure must consequently be much smaller. if i contrast the budgets of the departments with those of the states which constitute the union, it must be observed that, as the power and control exercised by the states is much greater than that which is exercised by the departments, their expenditure is also more considerable. as for the budgets of the counties, nothing of the kind occurs in the french system of finances; and it is, again, doubtful whether the corresponding expenses should be referred to the budget of the state or to those of the municipal divisions. municipal expenses exist in both countries, but they are not always analogous. in america the townships discharge a variety of offices which are reserved in france to the departments or to the state. it may, moreover, be asked what is to be understood by the municipal expenses of america. the organization of the municipal bodies or townships differs in the several states. are we to be guided by what occurs in new england or in georgia, in pennsylvania or in the state of illinois? a kind of analogy may very readily be perceived between certain budgets in the two countries; but as the elements of which they are composed always differ more or less, no fair comparison can be instituted between them. [the same difficulty exists, perhaps to a greater degree at the present time, when the taxation of america has largely increased.-- .]] [footnote m: even if we knew the exact pecuniary contributions of every french and american citizen to the coffers of the state, we should only come at a portion of the truth. governments do not only demand supplies of money, but they call for personal services, which may be looked upon as equivalent to a given sum. when a state raises an army, besides the pay of the troops, which is furnished by the entire nation, each soldier must give up his time, the value of which depends on the use he might make of it if he were not in the service. the same remark applies to the militia; the citizen who is in the militia devotes a certain portion of valuable time to the maintenance of the public peace, and he does in reality surrender to the state those earnings which he is prevented from gaining. many other instances might be cited in addition to these. the governments of france and of america both levy taxes of this kind, which weigh upon the citizens; but who can estimate with accuracy their relative amount in the two countries? this, however, is not the last of the difficulties which prevent us from comparing the expenditure of the union with that of france. the french government contracts certain obligations which do not exist in america, and vice versa. the french government pays the clergy; in america the voluntary principle prevails. in america there is a legal provision for the poor; in france they are abandoned to the charity of the public. the french public officers are paid by a fixed salary; in america they are allowed certain perquisites. in france contributions in kind take place on very few roads; in america upon almost all the thoroughfares: in the former country the roads are free to all travellers; in the latter turnpikes abound. all these differences in the manner in which contributions are levied in the two countries enhance the difficulty of comparing their expenditure; for there are certain expenses which the citizens would not be subject to, or which would at any rate be much less considerable, if the state did not take upon itself to act in the name of the public.] hence we must conclude that it is no less difficult to compare the social expenditure than it is to estimate the relative wealth of france and america. i will even add that it would be dangerous to attempt this comparison; for when statistics are not based upon computations which are strictly accurate, they mislead instead of guiding aright. the mind is easily imposed upon by the false affectation of exactness, which prevails even in the misstatements of science, and it adopts with confidence errors which are dressed in the forms of mathematical truth. we abandon, therefore, our numerical investigation, with the hope of meeting with data of another kind. in the absence of positive documents, we may form an opinion as to the proportion which the taxation of a people bears to its real prosperity, by observing whether its external appearance is flourishing; whether, after having discharged the calls of the state, the poor man retains the means of subsistence, and the rich the means of enjoyment; and whether both classes are contented with their position, seeking, however, to ameliorate it by perpetual exertions, so that industry is never in want of capital, nor capital unemployed by industry. the observer who draws his inferences from these signs will, undoubtedly, be led to the conclusion that the american of the united states contributes a much smaller portion of his income to the state than the citizen of france. nor, indeed, can the result be otherwise. a portion of the french debt is the consequence of two successive invasions; and the union has no similar calamity to fear. a nation placed upon the continent of europe is obliged to maintain a large standing army; the isolated position of the union enables it to have only , soldiers. the french have a fleet of sail; the americans have vessels. *n how, then, can the inhabitants of the union be called upon to contribute as largely as the inhabitants of france? no parallel can be drawn between the finances of two countries so differently situated. [footnote n: see the details in the budget of the french minister of marine; and for america, the national calendar of , p. . [but the public debt of the united states in , caused by the civil war, amounted to $ , , , ; that of france was more than doubled by the extravagance of the second empire and by the war of .]] it is by examining what actually takes place in the union, and not by comparing the union with france, that we may discover whether the american government is really economical. on casting my eyes over the different republics which form the confederation, i perceive that their governments lack perseverance in their undertakings, and that they exercise no steady control over the men whom they employ. whence i naturally infer that they must often spend the money of the people to no purpose, or consume more of it than is really necessary to their undertakings. great efforts are made, in accordance with the democratic origin of society, to satisfy the exigencies of the lower orders, to open the career of power to their endeavors, and to diffuse knowledge and comfort amongst them. the poor are maintained, immense sums are annually devoted to public instruction, all services whatsoever are remunerated, and the most subordinate agents are liberally paid. if this kind of government appears to me to be useful and rational, i am nevertheless constrained to admit that it is expensive. wherever the poor direct public affairs and dispose of the national resources, it appears certain that, as they profit by the expenditure of the state, they are apt to augment that expenditure. i conclude, therefore, without having recourse to inaccurate computations, and without hazarding a comparison which might prove incorrect, that the democratic government of the americans is not a cheap government, as is sometimes asserted; and i have no hesitation in predicting that, if the people of the united states is ever involved in serious difficulties, its taxation will speedily be increased to the rate of that which prevails in the greater part of the aristocracies and the monarchies of europe. *o [footnote o: [that is precisely what has since occurred.]] chapter xiii: government of the democracy in america--part iii corruption and vices of the rulers in a democracy, and consequent effects upon public morality in aristocracies rulers sometimes endeavor to corrupt the people--in democracies rulers frequently show themselves to be corrupt--in the former their vices are directly prejudicial to the morality of the people--in the latter their indirect influence is still more pernicious. a distinction must be made, when the aristocratic and the democratic principles mutually inveigh against each other, as tending to facilitate corruption. in aristocratic governments the individuals who are placed at the head of affairs are rich men, who are solely desirous of power. in democracies statesmen are poor, and they have their fortunes to make. the consequence is that in aristocratic states the rulers are rarely accessible to corruption, and have very little craving for money; whilst the reverse is the case in democratic nations. but in aristocracies, as those who are desirous of arriving at the head of affairs are possessed of considerable wealth, and as the number of persons by whose assistance they may rise is comparatively small, the government is, if i may use the expression, put up to a sort of auction. in democracies, on the contrary, those who are covetous of power are very seldom wealthy, and the number of citizens who confer that power is extremely great. perhaps in democracies the number of men who might be bought is by no means smaller, but buyers are rarely to be met with; and, besides, it would be necessary to buy so many persons at once that the attempt is rendered nugatory. many of the men who have been in the administration in france during the last forty years have been accused of making their fortunes at the expense of the state or of its allies; a reproach which was rarely addressed to the public characters of the ancient monarchy. but in france the practice of bribing electors is almost unknown, whilst it is notoriously and publicly carried on in england. in the united states i never heard a man accused of spending his wealth in corrupting the populace; but i have often heard the probity of public officers questioned; still more frequently have i heard their success attributed to low intrigues and immoral practices. if, then, the men who conduct the government of an aristocracy sometimes endeavor to corrupt the people, the heads of a democracy are themselves corrupt. in the former case the morality of the people is directly assailed; in the latter an indirect influence is exercised upon the people which is still more to be dreaded. as the rulers of democratic nations are almost always exposed to the suspicion of dishonorable conduct, they in some measure lend the authority of the government to the base practices of which they are accused. they thus afford an example which must prove discouraging to the struggles of virtuous independence, and must foster the secret calculations of a vicious ambition. if it be asserted that evil passions are displayed in all ranks of society, that they ascend the throne by hereditary right, and that despicable characters are to be met with at the head of aristocratic nations as well as in the sphere of a democracy, this objection has but little weight in my estimation. the corruption of men who have casually risen to power has a coarse and vulgar infection in it which renders it contagious to the multitude. on the contrary, there is a kind of aristocratic refinement and an air of grandeur in the depravity of the great, which frequently prevent it from spreading abroad. the people can never penetrate into the perplexing labyrinth of court intrigue, and it will always have difficulty in detecting the turpitude which lurks under elegant manners, refined tastes, and graceful language. but to pillage the public purse, and to vend the favors of the state, are arts which the meanest villain may comprehend, and hope to practice in his turn. in reality it is far less prejudicial to witness the immorality of the great than to witness that immorality which leads to greatness. in a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life, who rises from that obscure position, and who becomes possessed of riches and of power in a few years; the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal is to-day their ruler. to attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant; for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous and less talented than he was. they are therefore led (and not unfrequently their conjecture is a correct one) to impute his success mainly to some one of his defects; and an odious mixture is thus formed of the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor. efforts of which a democracy is capable the union has only had one struggle hitherto for its existence--enthusiasm at the commencement of the war--indifference towards its close--difficulty of establishing military conscription or impressment of seamen in america--why a democratic people is less capable of sustained effort than another. i here warn the reader that i speak of a government which implicitly follows the real desires of a people, and not of a government which simply commands in its name. nothing is so irresistible as a tyrannical power commanding in the name of the people, because, whilst it exercises that moral influence which belongs to the decision of the majority, it acts at the same time with the promptitude and the tenacity of a single man. it is difficult to say what degree of exertion a democratic government may be capable of making a crisis in the history of the nation. but no great democratic republic has hitherto existed in the world. to style the oligarchy which ruled over france in by that name would be to offer an insult to the republican form of government. the united states afford the first example of the kind. the american union has now subsisted for half a century, in the course of which time its existence has only once been attacked, namely, during the war of independence. at the commencement of that long war, various occurrences took place which betokened an extraordinary zeal for the service of the country. *p but as the contest was prolonged, symptoms of private egotism began to show themselves. no money was poured into the public treasury; few recruits could be raised to join the army; the people wished to acquire independence, but was very ill-disposed to undergo the privations by which alone it could be obtained. "tax laws," says hamilton in the "federalist" (no. ), "have in vain been multiplied; new methods to enforce the collection have in vain been tried; the public expectation has been uniformly disappointed and the treasuries of the states have remained empty. the popular system of administration inherent in the nature of popular government, coinciding with the real scarcity of money incident to a languid and mutilated state of trade, has hitherto defeated every experiment for extensive collections, and has at length taught the different legislatures the folly of attempting them." [footnote p: one of the most singular of these occurrences was the resolution which the americans took of temporarily abandoning the use of tea. those who know that men usually cling more to their habits than to their life will doubtless admire this great though obscure sacrifice which was made by a whole people.] the united states have not had any serious war to carry on ever since that period. in order, therefore, to appreciate the sacrifices which democratic nations may impose upon themselves, we must wait until the american people is obliged to put half its entire income at the disposal of the government, as was done by the english; or until it sends forth a twentieth part of its population to the field of battle, as was done by france. *q [footnote q: [the civil war showed that when the necessity arose the american people, both in the north and in the south, are capable of making the most enormous sacrifices, both in money and in men.]] in america the use of conscription is unknown, and men are induced to enlist by bounties. the notions and habits of the people of the united states are so opposed to compulsory enlistment that i do not imagine it can ever be sanctioned by the laws. what is termed the conscription in france is assuredly the heaviest tax upon the population of that country; yet how could a great continental war be carried on without it? the americans have not adopted the british impressment of seamen, and they have nothing which corresponds to the french system of maritime conscription; the navy, as well as the merchant service, is supplied by voluntary service. but it is not easy to conceive how a people can sustain a great maritime war without having recourse to one or the other of these two systems. indeed, the union, which has fought with some honor upon the seas, has never possessed a very numerous fleet, and the equipment of the small number of american vessels has always been excessively expensive. i have heard american statesmen confess that the union will have great difficulty in maintaining its rank on the seas without adopting the system of impressment or of maritime conscription; but the difficulty is to induce the people, which exercises the supreme authority, to submit to impressment or any compulsory system. it is incontestable that in times of danger a free people displays far more energy than one which is not so. but i incline to believe that this is more especially the case in those free nations in which the democratic element preponderates. democracy appears to me to be much better adapted for the peaceful conduct of society, or for an occasional effort of remarkable vigor, than for the hardy and prolonged endurance of the storms which beset the political existence of nations. the reason is very evident; it is enthusiasm which prompts men to expose themselves to dangers and privations, but they will not support them long without reflection. there is more calculation, even in the impulses of bravery, than is generally attributed to them; and although the first efforts are suggested by passion, perseverance is maintained by a distinct regard of the purpose in view. a portion of what we value is exposed, in order to save the remainder. but it is this distinct perception of the future, founded upon a sound judgment and an enlightened experience, which is most frequently wanting in democracies. the populace is more apt to feel than to reason; and if its present sufferings are great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant upon defeat will be forgotten. another cause tends to render the efforts of a democratic government less persevering than those of an aristocracy. not only are the lower classes less awakened than the higher orders to the good or evil chances of the future, but they are liable to suffer far more acutely from present privations. the noble exposes his life, indeed, but the chance of glory is equal to the chance of harm. if he sacrifices a large portion of his income to the state, he deprives himself for a time of the pleasures of affluence; but to the poor man death is embellished by no pomp or renown, and the imposts which are irksome to the rich are fatal to him. this relative impotence of democratic republics is, perhaps, the greatest obstacle to the foundation of a republic of this kind in europe. in order that such a state should subsist in one country of the old world, it would be necessary that similar institutions should be introduced into all the other nations. i am of opinion that a democratic government tends in the end to increase the real strength of society; but it can never combine, upon a single point and at a given time, so much power as an aristocracy or a monarchy. if a democratic country remained during a whole century subject to a republican government, it would probably at the end of that period be more populous and more prosperous than the neighboring despotic states. but it would have incurred the risk of being conquered much oftener than they would in that lapse of years. self-control of the american democracy the american people acquiesces slowly, or frequently does not acquiesce, in what is beneficial to its interests--the faults of the american democracy are for the most part reparable. the difficulty which a democracy has in conquering the passions and in subduing the exigencies of the moment, with a view to the future, is conspicuous in the most trivial occurrences of the united states. the people, which is surrounded by flatterers, has great difficulty in surmounting its inclinations, and whenever it is solicited to undergo a privation or any kind of inconvenience, even to attain an end which is sanctioned by its own rational conviction, it almost always refuses to comply at first. the deference of the americans to the laws has been very justly applauded; but it must be added that in america the legislation is made by the people and for the people. consequently, in the united states the law favors those classes which are most interested in evading it elsewhere. it may therefore be supposed that an offensive law, which should not be acknowledged to be one of immediate utility, would either not be enacted or would not be obeyed. in america there is no law against fraudulent bankruptcies; not because they are few, but because there are a great number of bankruptcies. the dread of being prosecuted as a bankrupt acts with more intensity upon the mind of the majority of the people than the fear of being involved in losses or ruin by the failure of other parties, and a sort of guilty tolerance is extended by the public conscience to an offence which everyone condemns in his individual capacity. in the new states of the southwest the citizens generally take justice into their own hands, and murders are of very frequent occurrence. this arises from the rude manners and the ignorance of the inhabitants of those deserts, who do not perceive the utility of investing the law with adequate force, and who prefer duels to prosecutions. someone observed to me one day, in philadelphia, that almost all crimes in america are caused by the abuse of intoxicating liquors, which the lower classes can procure in great abundance, from their excessive cheapness. "how comes it," said i, "that you do not put a duty upon brandy?" "our legislators," rejoined my informant, "have frequently thought of this expedient; but the task of putting it in operation is a difficult one; a revolt might be apprehended, and the members who should vote for a law of this kind would be sure of losing their seats." "whence i am to infer," replied i, "that the drinking population constitutes the majority in your country, and that temperance is somewhat unpopular." when these things are pointed out to the american statesmen, they content themselves with assuring you that time will operate the necessary change, and that the experience of evil will teach the people its true interests. this is frequently true, although a democracy is more liable to error than a monarch or a body of nobles; the chances of its regaining the right path when once it has acknowledged its mistake, are greater also; because it is rarely embarrassed by internal interests, which conflict with those of the majority, and resist the authority of reason. but a democracy can only obtain truth as the result of experience, and many nations may forfeit their existence whilst they are awaiting the consequences of their errors. the great privilege of the americans does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit. to which it must be added, that a democracy cannot derive substantial benefit from past experience, unless it be arrived at a certain pitch of knowledge and civilization. there are tribes and peoples whose education has been so vicious, and whose character presents so strange a mixture of passion, of ignorance, and of erroneous notions upon all subjects, that they are unable to discern the causes of their own wretchedness, and they fall a sacrifice to ills with which they are unacquainted. i have crossed vast tracts of country that were formerly inhabited by powerful indian nations which are now extinct; i have myself passed some time in the midst of mutilated tribes, which witness the daily decline of their numerical strength and of the glory of their independence; and i have heard these indians themselves anticipate the impending doom of their race. every european can perceive means which would rescue these unfortunate beings from inevitable destruction. they alone are insensible to the expedient; they feel the woe which year after year heaps upon their heads, but they will perish to a man without accepting the remedy. it would be necessary to employ force to induce them to submit to the protection and the constraint of civilization. the incessant revolutions which have convulsed the south american provinces for the last quarter of a century have frequently been adverted to with astonishment, and expectations have been expressed that those nations would speedily return to their natural state. but can it be affirmed that the turmoil of revolution is not actually the most natural state of the south american spaniards at the present time? in that country society is plunged into difficulties from which all its efforts are insufficient to rescue it. the inhabitants of that fair portion of the western hemisphere seem obstinately bent on pursuing the work of inward havoc. if they fall into a momentary repose from the effects of exhaustion, that repose prepares them for a fresh state of frenzy. when i consider their condition, which alternates between misery and crime, i should be inclined to believe that despotism itself would be a benefit to them, if it were possible that the words despotism and benefit could ever be united in my mind. conduct of foreign affairs by the american democracy direction given to the foreign policy of the united states by washington and jefferson--almost all the defects inherent in democratic institutions are brought to light in the conduct of foreign affairs--their advantages are less perceptible. we have seen that the federal constitution entrusts the permanent direction of the external interests of the nation to the president and the senate, *r which tends in some degree to detach the general foreign policy of the union from the control of the people. it cannot therefore be asserted with truth that the external affairs of state are conducted by the democracy. [footnote r: "the president," says the constitution, art. ii, sect. , section , "shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur." the reader is reminded that the senators are returned for a term of six years, and that they are chosen by the legislature of each state.] the policy of america owes its rise to washington, and after him to jefferson, who established those principles which it observes at the present day. washington said in the admirable letter which he addressed to his fellow-citizens, and which may be looked upon as his political bequest to the country: "the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. so far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. here let us stop. europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none, or a very remote relation. hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. if we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel. why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of european ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, i mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. i hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. i repeat it; therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense; but in my opinion it is unnecessary, and would be unwise, to extend them. taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, in a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." in a previous part of the same letter washington makes the following admirable and just remark: "the nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. it is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." the political conduct of washington was always guided by these maxims. he succeeded in maintaining his country in a state of peace whilst all the other nations of the globe were at war; and he laid it down as a fundamental doctrine, that the true interest of the americans consisted in a perfect neutrality with regard to the internal dissensions of the european powers. jefferson went still further, and he introduced a maxim into the policy of the union, which affirms that "the americans ought never to solicit any privileges from foreign nations, in order not to be obliged to grant similar privileges themselves." these two principles, which were so plain and so just as to be adapted to the capacity of the populace, have greatly simplified the foreign policy of the united states. as the union takes no part in the affairs of europe, it has, properly speaking, no foreign interests to discuss, since it has at present no powerful neighbors on the american continent. the country is as much removed from the passions of the old world by its position as by the line of policy which it has chosen, and it is neither called upon to repudiate nor to espouse the conflicting interests of europe; whilst the dissensions of the new world are still concealed within the bosom of the future. the union is free from all pre-existing obligations, and it is consequently enabled to profit by the experience of the old nations of europe, without being obliged, as they are, to make the best of the past, and to adapt it to their present circumstances; or to accept that immense inheritance which they derive from their forefathers--an inheritance of glory mingled with calamities, and of alliances conflicting with national antipathies. the foreign policy of the united states is reduced by its very nature to await the chances of the future history of the nation, and for the present it consists more in abstaining from interference than in exerting its activity. it is therefore very difficult to ascertain, at present, what degree of sagacity the american democracy will display in the conduct of the foreign policy of the country; and upon this point its adversaries, as well as its advocates, must suspend their judgment. as for myself i have no hesitation in avowing my conviction, that it is most especially in the conduct of foreign relations that democratic governments appear to me to be decidedly inferior to governments carried on upon different principles. experience, instruction, and habit may almost always succeed in creating a species of practical discretion in democracies, and that science of the daily occurrences of life which is called good sense. good sense may suffice to direct the ordinary course of society; and amongst a people whose education has been provided for, the advantages of democratic liberty in the internal affairs of the country may more than compensate for the evils inherent in a democratic government. but such is not always the case in the mutual relations of foreign nations. foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses; and they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those faculties in which it is deficient. democracy is favorable to the increase of the internal resources of the state; it tends to diffuse a moderate independence; it promotes the growth of public spirit, and fortifies the respect which is entertained for law in all classes of society; and these are advantages which only exercise an indirect influence over the relations which one people bears to another. but a democracy is unable to regulate the details of an important undertaking, to persevere in a design, and to work out its execution in the presence of serious obstacles. it cannot combine its measures with secrecy, and it will not await their consequences with patience. these are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or to an aristocracy; and they are precisely the means by which an individual people attains to a predominant position. if, on the contrary, we observe the natural defects of aristocracy, we shall find that their influence is comparatively innoxious in the direction of the external affairs of a state. the capital fault of which aristocratic bodies may be accused is that they are more apt to contrive their own advantage than that of the mass of the people. in foreign politics it is rare for the interest of the aristocracy to be in any way distinct from that of the people. the propensity which democracies have to obey the impulse of passion rather than the suggestions of prudence, and to abandon a mature design for the gratification of a momentary caprice, was very clearly seen in america on the breaking out of the french revolution. it was then as evident to the simplest capacity as it is at the present time that the interest of the americans forbade them to take any part in the contest which was about to deluge europe with blood, but which could by no means injure the welfare of their own country. nevertheless the sympathies of the people declared themselves with so much violence in behalf of france that nothing but the inflexible character of washington, and the immense popularity which he enjoyed, could have prevented the americans from declaring war against england. and even then, the exertions which the austere reason of that great man made to repress the generous but imprudent passions of his fellow-citizens, very nearly deprived him of the sole recompense which he had ever claimed--that of his country's love. the majority then reprobated the line of policy which he adopted, and which has since been unanimously approved by the nation. *s if the constitution and the favor of the public had not entrusted the direction of the foreign affairs of the country to washington, it is certain that the american nation would at that time have taken the very measures which it now condemns. [footnote s: see the fifth volume of marshall's "life of washington." in a government constituted like that of the united states, he says, "it is impossible for the chief magistrate, however firm he may be, to oppose for any length of time the torrent of popular opinion; and the prevalent opinion of that day seemed to incline to war. in fact, in the session of congress held at the time, it was frequently seen that washington had lost the majority in the house of representatives." the violence of the language used against him in public was extreme, and in a political meeting they did not scruple to compare him indirectly to the treacherous arnold. "by the opposition," says marshall, "the friends of the administration were declared to be an aristocratic and corrupt faction, who, from a desire to introduce monarchy, were hostile to france and under the influence of britain; that they were a paper nobility, whose extreme sensibility at every measure which threatened the funds, induced a tame submission to injuries and insults, which the interests and honor of the nation required them to resist."] almost all the nations which have ever exercised a powerful influence upon the destinies of the world by conceiving, following up, and executing vast designs--from the romans to the english--have been governed by aristocratic institutions. nor will this be a subject of wonder when we recollect that nothing in the world has so absolute a fixity of purpose as an aristocracy. the mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion; the mind of a king may be biased, and his perseverance in his designs may be shaken--besides which a king is not immortal--but an aristocratic body is too numerous to be led astray by the blandishments of intrigue, and yet not numerous enough to yield readily to the intoxicating influence of unreflecting passion: it has the energy of a firm and enlightened individual, added to the power which it derives from perpetuity. chapter xiv: advantages american society derive from democracy--part i what the real advantages are which american society derives from the government of the democracy before i enter upon the subject of the present chapter i am induced to remind the reader of what i have more than once adverted to in the course of this book. the political institutions of the united states appear to me to be one of the forms of government which a democracy may adopt; but i do not regard the american constitution as the best, or as the only one, which a democratic people may establish. in showing the advantages which the americans derive from the government of democracy, i am therefore very far from meaning, or from believing, that similar advantages can only be obtained from the same laws. general tendency of the laws under the rule of the american democracy, and habits of those who apply them defects of a democratic government easy to be discovered--its advantages only to be discerned by long observation--democracy in america often inexpert, but the general tendency of the laws advantageous--in the american democracy public officers have no permanent interests distinct from those of the majority--result of this state of things. the defects and the weaknesses of a democratic government may very readily be discovered; they are demonstrated by the most flagrant instances, whilst its beneficial influence is less perceptibly exercised. a single glance suffices to detect its evil consequences, but its good qualities can only be discerned by long observation. the laws of the american democracy are frequently defective or incomplete; they sometimes attack vested rights, or give a sanction to others which are dangerous to the community; but even if they were good, the frequent changes which they undergo would be an evil. how comes it, then, that the american republics prosper and maintain their position? in the consideration of laws a distinction must be carefully observed between the end at which they aim and the means by which they are directed to that end, between their absolute and their relative excellence. if it be the intention of the legislator to favor the interests of the minority at the expense of the majority, and if the measures he takes are so combined as to accomplish the object he has in view with the least possible expense of time and exertion, the law may be well drawn up, although its purpose be bad; and the more efficacious it is, the greater is the mischief which it causes. democratic laws generally tend to promote the welfare of the greatest possible number; for they emanate from the majority of the citizens, who are subject to error, but who cannot have an interest opposed to their own advantage. the laws of an aristocracy tend, on the contrary, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the minority, because an aristocracy, by its very nature, constitutes a minority. it may therefore be asserted, as a general proposition, that the purpose of a democracy in the conduct of its legislation is useful to a greater number of citizens than that of an aristocracy. this is, however, the sum total of its advantages. aristocracies are infinitely more expert in the science of legislation than democracies ever can be. they are possessed of a self-control which protects them from the errors of temporary excitement, and they form lasting designs which they mature with the assistance of favorable opportunities. aristocratic government proceeds with the dexterity of art; it understands how to make the collective force of all its laws converge at the same time to a given point. such is not the case with democracies, whose laws are almost always ineffective or inopportune. the means of democracy are therefore more imperfect than those of aristocracy, and the measures which it unwittingly adopts are frequently opposed to its own cause; but the object it has in view is more useful. let us now imagine a community so organized by nature, or by its constitution, that it can support the transitory action of bad laws, and that it can await, without destruction, the general tendency of the legislation: we shall then be able to conceive that a democratic government, notwithstanding its defects, will be most fitted to conduce to the prosperity of this community. this is precisely what has occurred in the united states; and i repeat, what i have before remarked, that the great advantage of the americans consists in their being able to commit faults which they may afterward repair. an analogous observation may be made respecting public officers. it is easy to perceive that the american democracy frequently errs in the choice of the individuals to whom it entrusts the power of the administration; but it is more difficult to say why the state prospers under their rule. in the first place it is to be remarked, that if in a democratic state the governors have less honesty and less capacity than elsewhere, the governed, on the other hand, are more enlightened and more attentive to their interests. as the people in democracies is more incessantly vigilant in its affairs and more jealous of its rights, it prevents its representatives from abandoning that general line of conduct which its own interest prescribes. in the second place, it must be remembered that if the democratic magistrate is more apt to misuse his power, he possesses it for a shorter period of time. but there is yet another reason which is still more general and conclusive. it is no doubt of importance to the welfare of nations that they should be governed by men of talents and virtue; but it is perhaps still more important that the interests of those men should not differ from the interests of the community at large; for, if such were the case, virtues of a high order might become useless, and talents might be turned to a bad account. i say that it is important that the interests of the persons in authority should not conflict with or oppose the interests of the community at large; but i do not insist upon their having the same interests as the whole population, because i am not aware that such a state of things ever existed in any country. no political form has hitherto been discovered which is equally favorable to the prosperity and the development of all the classes into which society is divided. these classes continue to form, as it were, a certain number of distinct nations in the same nation; and experience has shown that it is no less dangerous to place the fate of these classes exclusively in the hands of any one of them than it is to make one people the arbiter of the destiny of another. when the rich alone govern, the interest of the poor is always endangered; and when the poor make the laws, that of the rich incurs very serious risks. the advantage of democracy does not consist, therefore, as has sometimes been asserted, in favoring the prosperity of all, but simply in contributing to the well-being of the greatest possible number. the men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs in the united states are frequently inferior, both in point of capacity and of morality, to those whom aristocratic institutions would raise to power. but their interest is identified and confounded with that of the majority of their fellow-citizens. they may frequently be faithless and frequently mistaken, but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct opposed to the will of the majority; and it is impossible that they should give a dangerous or an exclusive tendency to the government. the mal-administration of a democratic magistrate is a mere isolated fact, which only occurs during the short period for which he is elected. corruption and incapacity do not act as common interests, which may connect men permanently with one another. a corrupt or an incapable magistrate will not concert his measures with another magistrate, simply because that individual is as corrupt and as incapable as himself; and these two men will never unite their endeavors to promote the corruption and inaptitude of their remote posterity. the ambition and the manoeuvres of the one will serve, on the contrary, to unmask the other. the vices of a magistrate, in democratic states, are usually peculiar to his own person. but under aristocratic governments public men are swayed by the interest of their order, which, if it is sometimes confounded with the interests of the majority, is very frequently distinct from them. this interest is the common and lasting bond which unites them together; it induces them to coalesce, and to combine their efforts in order to attain an end which does not always ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number; and it serves not only to connect the persons in authority, but to unite them to a considerable portion of the community, since a numerous body of citizens belongs to the aristocracy, without being invested with official functions. the aristocratic magistrate is therefore constantly supported by a portion of the community, as well as by the government of which he is a member. the common purpose which connects the interest of the magistrates in aristocracies with that of a portion of their contemporaries identifies it with that of future generations; their influence belongs to the future as much as to the present. the aristocratic magistrate is urged at the same time toward the same point by the passions of the community, by his own, and i may almost add by those of his posterity. is it, then, wonderful that he does not resist such repeated impulses? and indeed aristocracies are often carried away by the spirit of their order without being corrupted by it; and they unconsciously fashion society to their own ends, and prepare it for their own descendants. the english aristocracy is perhaps the most liberal which ever existed, and no body of men has ever, uninterruptedly, furnished so many honorable and enlightened individuals to the government of a country. it cannot, however, escape observation that in the legislation of england the good of the poor has been sacrificed to the advantage of the rich, and the rights of the majority to the privileges of the few. the consequence is, that england, at the present day, combines the extremes of fortune in the bosom of her society, and her perils and calamities are almost equal to her power and her renown. *a [footnote a: [the legislation of england for the forty years is certainly not fairly open to this criticism, which was written before the reform bill of , and accordingly great britain has thus far escaped and surmounted the perils and calamities to which she seemed to be exposed.]] in the united states, where the public officers have no interests to promote connected with their caste, the general and constant influence of the government is beneficial, although the individuals who conduct it are frequently unskilful and sometimes contemptible. there is indeed a secret tendency in democratic institutions to render the exertions of the citizens subservient to the prosperity of the community, notwithstanding their private vices and mistakes; whilst in aristocratic institutions there is a secret propensity which, notwithstanding the talents and the virtues of those who conduct the government, leads them to contribute to the evils which oppress their fellow-creatures. in aristocratic governments public men may frequently do injuries which they do not intend, and in democratic states they produce advantages which they never thought of. public spirit in the united states patriotism of instinct--patriotism of reflection--their different characteristics--nations ought to strive to acquire the second when the first has disappeared--efforts of the americans to it--interest of the individual intimately connected with that of the country. there is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. this natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansions of their fathers. they enjoy the tranquillity which it affords them; they cling to the peaceful habits which they have contracted within its bosom; they are attached to the reminiscences which it awakens, and they are even pleased by the state of obedience in which they are placed. this patriotism is sometimes stimulated by religious enthusiasm, and then it is capable of making the most prodigious efforts. it is in itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and of sentiment. by some nations the monarch has been regarded as a personification of the country; and the fervor of patriotism being converted into the fervor of loyalty, they took a sympathetic pride in his conquests, and gloried in his power. at one time, under the ancient monarchy, the french felt a sort of satisfaction in the sense of their dependence upon the arbitrary pleasure of their king, and they were wont to say with pride, "we are the subjects of the most powerful king in the world." but, like all instinctive passions, this kind of patriotism is more apt to prompt transient exertion than to supply the motives of continuous endeavor. it may save the state in critical circumstances, but it will not unfrequently allow the nation to decline in the midst of peace. whilst the manners of a people are simple and its faith unshaken, whilst society is steadily based upon traditional institutions whose legitimacy has never been contested, this instinctive patriotism is wont to endure. but there is another species of attachment to a country which is more rational than the one we have been describing. it is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful and more lasting; it is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen. a man comprehends the influence which the prosperity of his country has upon his own welfare; he is aware that the laws authorize him to contribute his assistance to that prosperity, and he labors to promote it as a portion of his interest in the first place, and as a portion of his right in the second. but epochs sometimes occur, in the course of the existence of a nation, at which the ancient customs of a people are changed, public morality destroyed, religious belief disturbed, and the spell of tradition broken, whilst the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect, and the civil rights of the community are ill secured, or confined within very narrow limits. the country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to look upon as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise. the country is lost to their senses, they can neither discover it under its own nor under borrowed features, and they entrench themselves within the dull precincts of a narrow egotism. they are emancipated from prejudice without having acknowledged the empire of reason; they are neither animated by the instinctive patriotism of monarchical subjects nor by the thinking patriotism of republican citizens; but they have stopped halfway between the two, in the midst of confusion and of distress. in this predicament, to retreat is impossible; for a people cannot restore the vivacity of its earlier times, any more than a man can return to the innocence and the bloom of childhood; such things may be regretted, but they cannot be renewed. the only thing, then, which remains to be done is to proceed, and to accelerate the union of private with public interests, since the period of disinterested patriotism is gone by forever. i am certainly very far from averring that, in order to obtain this result, the exercise of political rights should be immediately granted to all the members of the community. but i maintain that the most powerful, and perhaps the only, means of interesting men in the welfare of their country which we still possess is to make them partakers in the government. at the present time civic zeal seems to me to be inseparable from the exercise of political rights; and i hold that the number of citizens will be found to augment or to decrease in europe in proportion as those rights are extended. in the united states the inhabitants were thrown but as yesterday upon the soil which they now occupy, and they brought neither customs nor traditions with them there; they meet each other for the first time with no previous acquaintance; in short, the instinctive love of their country can scarcely exist in their minds; but everyone takes as zealous an interest in the affairs of his township, his county, and of the whole state, as if they were his own, because everyone, in his sphere, takes an active part in the government of society. the lower orders in the united states are alive to the perception of the influence exercised by the general prosperity upon their own welfare; and simple as this observation is, it is one which is but too rarely made by the people. but in america the people regards this prosperity as the result of its own exertions; the citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his private interest, and he co-operates in its success, not so much from a sense of pride or of duty, as from what i shall venture to term cupidity. it is unnecessary to study the institutions and the history of the americans in order to discover the truth of this remark, for their manners render it sufficiently evident. as the american participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is himself. the consequence is, that his national pride resorts to a thousand artifices, and to all the petty tricks of individual vanity. nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the americans. a stranger may be very well inclined to praise many of the institutions of their country, but he begs permission to blame some of the peculiarities which he observes--a permission which is, however, inexorably refused. america is therefore a free country, in which, lest anybody should be hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed to speak freely of private individuals, or of the state, of the citizens or of the authorities, of public or of private undertakings, or, in short, of anything at all, except it be of the climate and the soil; and even then americans will be found ready to defend either the one or the other, as if they had been contrived by the inhabitants of the country. in our times option must be made between the patriotism of all and the government of a few; for the force and activity which the first confers are irreconcilable with the guarantees of tranquillity which the second furnishes. notion of rights in the united states no great people without a notion of rights--how the notion of rights can be given to people--respect of rights in the united states--whence it arises. after the idea of virtue, i know no higher principle than that of right; or, to speak more accurately, these two ideas are commingled in one. the idea of right is simply that of virtue introduced into the political world. it is the idea of right which enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny; and which taught them to remain independent without arrogance, as well as to obey without servility. the man who submits to violence is debased by his compliance; but when he obeys the mandate of one who possesses that right of authority which he acknowledges in a fellow-creature, he rises in some measure above the person who delivers the command. there are no great men without virtue, and there are no great nations--it may almost be added that there would be no society--without the notion of rights; for what is the condition of a mass of rational and intelligent beings who are only united together by the bond of force? i am persuaded that the only means which we possess at the present time of inculcating the notion of rights, and of rendering it, as it were, palpable to the senses, is to invest all the members of the community with the peaceful exercise of certain rights: this is very clearly seen in children, who are men without the strength and the experience of manhood. when a child begins to move in the midst of the objects which surround him, he is instinctively led to turn everything which he can lay his hands upon to his own purposes; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things, and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be deprived of his possessions, he becomes more circumspect, and he observes those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. the principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own. in america those complaints against property in general which are so frequent in europe are never heard, because in america there are no paupers; and as everyone has property of his own to defend, everyone recognizes the principle upon which he holds it. the same thing occurs in the political world. in america the lowest classes have conceived a very high notion of political rights, because they exercise those rights; and they refrain from attacking those of other people, in order to ensure their own from attack. whilst in europe the same classes sometimes recalcitrate even against the supreme power, the american submits without a murmur to the authority of the pettiest magistrate. this truth is exemplified by the most trivial details of national peculiarities. in france very few pleasures are exclusively reserved for the higher classes; the poor are admitted wherever the rich are received, and they consequently behave with propriety, and respect whatever contributes to the enjoyments in which they themselves participate. in england, where wealth has a monopoly of amusement as well as of power, complaints are made that whenever the poor happen to steal into the enclosures which are reserved for the pleasures of the rich, they commit acts of wanton mischief: can this be wondered at, since care has been taken that they should have nothing to lose? *b [footnote b: [this, too, has been amended by much larger provisions for the amusements of the people in public parks, gardens, museums, etc.; and the conduct of the people in these places of amusement has improved in the same proportion.]] the government of democracy brings the notion of political rights to the level of the humblest citizens, just as the dissemination of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all the members of the community; and i confess that, to my mind, this is one of its greatest advantages. i do not assert that it is easy to teach men to exercise political rights; but i maintain that, when it is possible, the effects which result from it are highly important; and i add that, if there ever was a time at which such an attempt ought to be made, that time is our own. it is clear that the influence of religious belief is shaken, and that the notion of divine rights is declining; it is evident that public morality is vitiated, and the notion of moral rights is also disappearing: these are general symptoms of the substitution of argument for faith, and of calculation for the impulses of sentiment. if, in the midst of this general disruption, you do not succeed in connecting the notion of rights with that of personal interest, which is the only immutable point in the human heart, what means will you have of governing the world except by fear? when i am told that, since the laws are weak and the populace is wild, since passions are excited and the authority of virtue is paralyzed, no measures must be taken to increase the rights of the democracy, i reply, that it is for these very reasons that some measures of the kind must be taken; and i am persuaded that governments are still more interested in taking them than society at large, because governments are liable to be destroyed and society cannot perish. i am not, however, inclined to exaggerate the example which america furnishes. in those states the people are invested with political rights at a time when they could scarcely be abused, for the citizens were few in number and simple in their manners. as they have increased, the americans have not augmented the power of the democracy, but they have, if i may use the expression, extended its dominions. it cannot be doubted that the moment at which political rights are granted to a people that had before been without them is a very critical, though it be a necessary one. a child may kill before he is aware of the value of life; and he may deprive another person of his property before he is aware that his own may be taken away from him. the lower orders, when first they are invested with political rights, stand, in relation to those rights, in the same position as the child does to the whole of nature, and the celebrated adage may then be applied to them, homo puer robustus. this truth may even be perceived in america. the states in which the citizens have enjoyed their rights longest are those in which they make the best use of them. it cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty. such is not the case with despotic institutions: despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills; it supports the right, it protects the oppressed, and it maintains public order. the nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity which accrues to it, until it is roused to a sense of its own misery. liberty, on the contrary, is generally established in the midst of agitation, it is perfected by civil discord, and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old. chapter xiv: advantages american society derive from democracy--part ii respect for the law in the united states respect of the americans for the law--parental affection which they entertain for it--personal interest of everyone to increase the authority of the law. it is not always feasible to consult the whole people, either directly or indirectly, in the formation of the law; but it cannot be denied that, when such a measure is possible the authority of the law is very much augmented. this popular origin, which impairs the excellence and the wisdom of legislation, contributes prodigiously to increase its power. there is an amazing strength in the expression of the determination of a whole people, and when it declares itself the imagination of those who are most inclined to contest it is overawed by its authority. the truth of this fact is very well known by parties, and they consequently strive to make out a majority whenever they can. if they have not the greater number of voters on their side, they assert that the true majority abstained from voting; and if they are foiled even there, they have recourse to the body of those persons who had no votes to give. in the united states, except slaves, servants, and paupers in the receipt of relief from the townships, there is no class of persons who do not exercise the elective franchise, and who do not indirectly contribute to make the laws. those who design to attack the laws must consequently either modify the opinion of the nation or trample upon its decision. a second reason, which is still more weighty, may be further adduced; in the united states everyone is personally interested in enforcing the obedience of the whole community to the law; for as the minority may shortly rally the majority to its principles, it is interested in professing that respect for the decrees of the legislator which it may soon have occasion to claim for its own. however irksome an enactment may be, the citizen of the united states complies with it, not only because it is the work of the majority, but because it originates in his own authority, and he regards it as a contract to which he is himself a party. in the united states, then, that numerous and turbulent multitude does not exist which always looks upon the law as its natural enemy, and accordingly surveys it with fear and with fear and with distrust. it is impossible, on the other hand, not to perceive that all classes display the utmost reliance upon the legislation of their country, and that they are attached to it by a kind of parental affection. i am wrong, however, in saying all classes; for as in america the european scale of authority is inverted, the wealthy are there placed in a position analogous to that of the poor in the old world, and it is the opulent classes which frequently look upon the law with suspicion. i have already observed that the advantage of democracy is not, as has been sometimes asserted, that it protects the interests of the whole community, but simply that it protects those of the majority. in the united states, where the poor rule, the rich have always some reason to dread the abuses of their power. this natural anxiety of the rich may produce a sullen dissatisfaction, but society is not disturbed by it; for the same reason which induces the rich to withhold their confidence in the legislative authority makes them obey its mandates; their wealth, which prevents them from making the law, prevents them from withstanding it. amongst civilized nations revolts are rarely excited, except by such persons as have nothing to lose by them; and if the laws of a democracy are not always worthy of respect, at least they always obtain it; for those who usually infringe the laws have no excuse for not complying with the enactments they have themselves made, and by which they are themselves benefited, whilst the citizens whose interests might be promoted by the infraction of them are induced, by their character and their stations, to submit to the decisions of the legislature, whatever they may be. besides which, the people in america obeys the law not only because it emanates from the popular authority, but because that authority may modify it in any points which may prove vexatory; a law is observed because it is a self-imposed evil in the first place, and an evil of transient duration in the second. activity which pervades all the branches of the body politic in the united states; influence which it exercises upon society more difficult to conceive the political activity which pervades the united states than the freedom and equality which reign there--the great activity which perpetually agitates the legislative bodies is only an episode to the general activity--difficult for an american to confine himself to his own business--political agitation extends to all social intercourse--commercial activity of the americans partly attributable to this cause--indirect advantages which society derives from a democratic government. on passing from a country in which free institutions are established to one where they do not exist, the traveller is struck by the change; in the former all is bustle and activity, in the latter everything is calm and motionless. in the one, amelioration and progress are the general topics of inquiry; in the other, it seems as if the community only aspired to repose in the enjoyment of the advantages which it has acquired. nevertheless, the country which exerts itself so strenuously to promote its welfare is generally more wealthy and more prosperous than that which appears to be so contented with its lot; and when we compare them together, we can scarcely conceive how so many new wants are daily felt in the former, whilst so few seem to occur in the latter. if this remark is applicable to those free countries in which monarchical and aristocratic institutions subsist, it is still more striking with regard to democratic republics. in these states it is not only a portion of the people which is busied with the amelioration of its social condition, but the whole community is engaged in the task; and it is not the exigencies and the convenience of a single class for which a provision is to be made, but the exigencies and the convenience of all ranks of life. it is not impossible to conceive the surpassing liberty which the americans enjoy; some idea may likewise be formed of the extreme equality which subsists amongst them, but the political activity which pervades the united states must be seen in order to be understood. no sooner do you set foot upon the american soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants. everything is in motion around you; here, the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; there, the election of a representative is going on; a little further the delegates of a district are posting to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; or in another place the laborers of a village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon the project of a road or a public school. meetings are called for the sole purpose of declaring their disapprobation of the line of conduct pursued by the government; whilst in other assemblies the citizens salute the authorities of the day as the fathers of their country. societies are formed which regard drunkenness as the principal cause of the evils under which the state labors, and which solemnly bind themselves to give a constant example of temperance. *c [footnote c: at the time of my stay in the united states the temperance societies already consisted of more than , members, and their effect had been to diminish the consumption of fermented liquors by , gallons per annum in the state of pennsylvania alone.] the great political agitation of the american legislative bodies, which is the only kind of excitement that attracts the attention of foreign countries, is a mere episode or a sort of continuation of that universal movement which originates in the lowest classes of the people and extends successively to all the ranks of society. it is impossible to spend more efforts in the pursuit of enjoyment. the cares of political life engross a most prominent place in the occupation of a citizen in the united states, and almost the only pleasure of which an american has any idea is to take a part in the government, and to discuss the part he has taken. this feeling pervades the most trifling habits of life; even the women frequently attend public meetings and listen to political harangues as a recreation after their household labors. debating clubs are to a certain extent a substitute for theatrical entertainments: an american cannot converse, but he can discuss; and when he attempts to talk he falls into a dissertation. he speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to warm in the course of the discussion, he will infallibly say, "gentlemen," to the person with whom he is conversing. in some countries the inhabitants display a certain repugnance to avail themselves of the political privileges with which the law invests them; it would seem that they set too high a value upon their time to spend it on the interests of the community; and they prefer to withdraw within the exact limits of a wholesome egotism, marked out by four sunk fences and a quickset hedge. but if an american were condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence; he would feel an immense void in the life which he is accustomed to lead, and his wretchedness would be unbearable. *d i am persuaded that, if ever a despotic government is established in america, it will find it more difficult to surmount the habits which free institutions have engendered than to conquer the attachment of the citizens to freedom. [footnote d: the same remark was made at rome under the first caesars. montesquieu somewhere alludes to the excessive despondency of certain roman citizens who, after the excitement of political life, were all at once flung back into the stagnation of private life.] this ceaseless agitation which democratic government has introduced into the political world influences all social intercourse. i am not sure that upon the whole this is not the greatest advantage of democracy. and i am much less inclined to applaud it for what it does than for what it causes to be done. it is incontestable that the people frequently conducts public business very ill; but it is impossible that the lower orders should take a part in public business without extending the circle of their ideas, and without quitting the ordinary routine of their mental acquirements. the humblest individual who is called upon to co-operate in the government of society acquires a certain degree of self-respect; and as he possesses authority, he can command the services of minds much more enlightened than his own. he is canvassed by a multitude of applicants, who seek to deceive him in a thousand different ways, but who instruct him by their deceit. he takes a part in political undertakings which did not originate in his own conception, but which give him a taste for undertakings of the kind. new ameliorations are daily pointed out in the property which he holds in common with others, and this gives him the desire of improving that property which is more peculiarly his own. he is perhaps neither happier nor better than those who came before him, but he is better informed and more active. i have no doubt that the democratic institutions of the united states, joined to the physical constitution of the country, are the cause (not the direct, as is so often asserted, but the indirect cause) of the prodigious commercial activity of the inhabitants. it is not engendered by the laws, but the people learns how to promote it by the experience derived from legislation. when the opponents of democracy assert that a single individual performs the duties which he undertakes much better than the government of the community, it appears to me that they are perfectly right. the government of an individual, supposing an equality of instruction on either side, is more consistent, more persevering, and more accurate than that of a multitude, and it is much better qualified judiciously to discriminate the characters of the men it employs. if any deny what i advance, they have certainly never seen a democratic government, or have formed their opinion upon very partial evidence. it is true that even when local circumstances and the disposition of the people allow democratic institutions to subsist, they never display a regular and methodical system of government. democratic liberty is far from accomplishing all the projects it undertakes, with the skill of an adroit despotism. it frequently abandons them before they have borne their fruits, or risks them when the consequences may prove dangerous; but in the end it produces more than any absolute government, and if it do fewer things well, it does a greater number of things. under its sway the transactions of the public administration are not nearly so important as what is done by private exertion. democracy does not confer the most skilful kind of government upon the people, but it produces that which the most skilful governments are frequently unable to awaken, namely, an all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy which is inseparable from it, and which may, under favorable circumstances, beget the most amazing benefits. these are the true advantages of democracy. in the present age, when the destinies of christendom seem to be in suspense, some hasten to assail democracy as its foe whilst it is yet in its early growth; and others are ready with their vows of adoration for this new deity which is springing forth from chaos: but both parties are very imperfectly acquainted with the object of their hatred or of their desires; they strike in the dark, and distribute their blows by mere chance. we must first understand what the purport of society and the aim of government is held to be. if it be your intention to confer a certain elevation upon the human mind, and to teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantage, to give birth to living convictions, and to keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness; if you hold it to be a good thing to refine the habits, to embellish the manners, to cultivate the arts of a nation, and to promote the love of poetry, of beauty, and of renown; if you would constitute a people not unfitted to act with power upon all other nations, nor unprepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be the result of its efforts, will leave a name forever famous in time--if you believe such to be the principal object of society, you must avoid the government of democracy, which would be a very uncertain guide to the end you have in view. but if you hold it to be expedient to divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort, and to the acquirement of the necessaries of life; if a clear understanding be more profitable to man than genius; if your object be not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but to create habits of peace; if you had rather witness vices than crimes and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offences be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant state of society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of opinion that the principal object of a government is not to confer the greatest possible share of power and of glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest degree of enjoyment and the least degree of misery to each of the individuals who compose it--if such be your desires, you can have no surer means of satisfying them than by equalizing the conditions of men, and establishing democratic institutions. but if the time be passed at which such a choice was possible, and if some superhuman power impel us towards one or the other of these two governments without consulting our wishes, let us at least endeavor to make the best of that which is allotted to us; and let us so inquire into its good and its evil propensities as to be able to foster the former and repress the latter to the utmost. chapter xv: unlimited power of majority, and its consequences--part i chapter summary natural strength of the majority in democracies--most of the american constitutions have increased this strength by artificial means--how this has been done--pledged delegates--moral power of the majority--opinion as to its infallibility--respect for its rights, how augmented in the united states. unlimited power of the majority in the united states, and its consequences the very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority; for there is nothing in democratic states which is capable of resisting it. most of the american constitutions have sought to increase this natural strength of the majority by artificial means. *a [footnote a: we observed, in examining the federal constitution, that the efforts of the legislators of the union had been diametrically opposed to the present tendency. the consequence has been that the federal government is more independent in its sphere than that of the states. but the federal government scarcely ever interferes in any but external affairs; and the governments of the state are in the governments of the states are in reality the authorities which direct society in america.] the legislature is, of all political institutions, the one which is most easily swayed by the wishes of the majority. the americans determined that the members of the legislature should be elected by the people immediately, and for a very brief term, in order to subject them, not only to the general convictions, but even to the daily passion, of their constituents. the members of both houses are taken from the same class in society, and are nominated in the same manner; so that the modifications of the legislative bodies are almost as rapid and quite as irresistible as those of a single assembly. it is to a legislature thus constituted that almost all the authority of the government has been entrusted. but whilst the law increased the strength of those authorities which of themselves were strong, it enfeebled more and more those which were naturally weak. it deprived the representatives of the executive of all stability and independence, and by subjecting them completely to the caprices of the legislature, it robbed them of the slender influence which the nature of a democratic government might have allowed them to retain. in several states the judicial power was also submitted to the elective discretion of the majority, and in all of them its existence was made to depend on the pleasure of the legislative authority, since the representatives were empowered annually to regulate the stipend of the judges. custom, however, has done even more than law. a proceeding which will in the end set all the guarantees of representative government at naught is becoming more and more general in the united states; it frequently happens that the electors, who choose a delegate, point out a certain line of conduct to him, and impose upon him a certain number of positive obligations which he is pledged to fulfil. with the exception of the tumult, this comes to the same thing as if the majority of the populace held its deliberations in the market-place. several other circumstances concur in rendering the power of the majority in america not only preponderant, but irresistible. the moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and more wisdom in a great number of men collected together than in a single individual, and that the quantity of legislators is more important than their quality. the theory of equality is in fact applied to the intellect of man: and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and in which they very slowly concur. like all other powers, and perhaps more than all other powers, the authority of the many requires the sanction of time; at first it enforces obedience by constraint, but its laws are not respected until they have long been maintained. the right of governing society, which the majority supposes itself to derive from its superior intelligence, was introduced into the united states by the first settlers, and this idea, which would be sufficient of itself to create a free nation, has now been amalgamated with the manners of the people and the minor incidents of social intercourse. the french, under the old monarchy, held it for a maxim (which is still a fundamental principle of the english constitution) that the king could do no wrong; and if he did do wrong, the blame was imputed to his advisers. this notion was highly favorable to habits of obedience, and it enabled the subject to complain of the law without ceasing to love and honor the lawgiver. the americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority. the moral power of the majority is founded upon yet another principle, which is, that the interests of the many are to be preferred to those of the few. it will readily be perceived that the respect here professed for the rights of the majority must naturally increase or diminish according to the state of parties. when a nation is divided into several irreconcilable factions, the privilege of the majority is often overlooked, because it is intolerable to comply with its demands. if there existed in america a class of citizens whom the legislating majority sought to deprive of exclusive privileges which they had possessed for ages, and to bring down from an elevated station to the level of the ranks of the multitude, it is probable that the minority would be less ready to comply with its laws. but as the united states were colonized by men holding equal rank amongst themselves, there is as yet no natural or permanent source of dissension between the interests of its different inhabitants. there are certain communities in which the persons who constitute the minority can never hope to draw over the majority to their side, because they must then give up the very point which is at issue between them. thus, an aristocracy can never become a majority whilst it retains its exclusive privileges, and it cannot cede its privileges without ceasing to be an aristocracy. in the united states political questions cannot be taken up in so general and absolute a manner, and all parties are willing to recognize the right of the majority, because they all hope to turn those rights to their own advantage at some future time. the majority therefore in that country exercises a prodigious actual authority, and a moral influence which is scarcely less preponderant; no obstacles exist which can impede or so much as retard its progress, or which can induce it to heed the complaints of those whom it crushes upon its path. this state of things is fatal in itself and dangerous for the future. how the unlimited power of the majority increases in america the instability of legislation and administration inherent in democracy the americans increase the mutability of the laws which is inherent in democracy by changing the legislature every year, and by investing it with unbounded authority--the same effect is produced upon the administration--in america social amelioration is conducted more energetically but less perseveringly than in europe. i have already spoken of the natural defects of democratic institutions, and they all of them increase at the exact ratio of the power of the majority. to begin with the most evident of them all; the mutability of the laws is an evil inherent in democratic government, because it is natural to democracies to raise men to power in very rapid succession. but this evil is more or less sensible in proportion to the authority and the means of action which the legislature possesses. in america the authority exercised by the legislative bodies is supreme; nothing prevents them from accomplishing their wishes with celerity, and with irresistible power, whilst they are supplied by new representatives every year. that is to say, the circumstances which contribute most powerfully to democratic instability, and which admit of the free application of caprice to every object in the state, are here in full operation. in conformity with this principle, america is, at the present day, the country in the world where laws last the shortest time. almost all the american constitutions have been amended within the course of thirty years: there is therefore not a single american state which has not modified the principles of its legislation in that lapse of time. as for the laws themselves, a single glance upon the archives of the different states of the union suffices to convince one that in america the activity of the legislator never slackens. not that the american democracy is naturally less stable than any other, but that it is allowed to follow its capricious propensities in the formation of the laws. *b [footnote b: the legislative acts promulgated by the state of massachusetts alone, from the year to the present time, already fill three stout volumes; and it must not be forgotten that the collection to which i allude was published in , when many old laws which had fallen into disuse were omitted. the state of massachusetts, which is not more populous than a department of france, may be considered as the most stable, the most consistent, and the most sagacious in its undertakings of the whole union.] the omnipotence of the majority, and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the united states, has not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but it exercises the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration. as the majority is the only power which it is important to court, all its projects are taken up with the greatest ardor, but no sooner is its attention distracted than all this ardor ceases; whilst in the free states of europe the administration is at once independent and secure, so that the projects of the legislature are put into execution, although its immediate attention may be directed to other objects. in america certain ameliorations are undertaken with much more zeal and activity than elsewhere; in europe the same ends are promoted by much less social effort, more continuously applied. some years ago several pious individuals undertook to ameliorate the condition of the prisons. the public was excited by the statements which they put forward, and the regeneration of criminals became a very popular undertaking. new prisons were built, and for the first time the idea of reforming as well as of punishing the delinquent formed a part of prison discipline. but this happy alteration, in which the public had taken so hearty an interest, and which the exertions of the citizens had irresistibly accelerated, could not be completed in a moment. whilst the new penitentiaries were being erected (and it was the pleasure of the majority that they should be terminated with all possible celerity), the old prisons existed, which still contained a great number of offenders. these jails became more unwholesome and more corrupt in proportion as the new establishments were beautified and improved, forming a contrast which may readily be understood. the majority was so eagerly employed in founding the new prisons that those which already existed were forgotten; and as the general attention was diverted to a novel object, the care which had hitherto been bestowed upon the others ceased. the salutary regulations of discipline were first relaxed, and afterwards broken; so that in the immediate neighborhood of a prison which bore witness to the mild and enlightened spirit of our time, dungeons might be met with which reminded the visitor of the barbarity of the middle ages. chapter xv: unlimited power of majority, and its consequences--part ii tyranny of the majority how the principle of the sovereignty of the people is to be understood--impossibility of conceiving a mixed government--the sovereign power must centre somewhere--precautions to be taken to control its action--these precautions have not been taken in the united states--consequences. i hold it to be an impious and an execrable maxim that, politically speaking, a people has a right to do whatsoever it pleases, and yet i have asserted that all authority originates in the will of the majority. am i then, in contradiction with myself? a general law--which bears the name of justice--has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. the rights of every people are consequently confined within the limits of what is just. a nation may be considered in the light of a jury which is empowered to represent society at large, and to apply the great and general law of justice. ought such a jury, which represents society, to have more power than the society in which the laws it applies originate? when i refuse to obey an unjust law, i do not contest the right which the majority has of commanding, but i simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind. it has been asserted that a people can never entirely outstep the boundaries of justice and of reason in those affairs which are more peculiarly its own, and that consequently, full power may fearlessly be given to the majority by which it is represented. but this language is that of a slave. a majority taken collectively may be regarded as a being whose opinions, and most frequently whose interests, are opposed to those of another being, which is styled a minority. if it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? men are not apt to change their characters by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. *c and for these reasons i can never willingly invest any number of my fellow-creatures with that unlimited authority which i should refuse to any one of them. [footnote c: no one will assert that a people cannot forcibly wrong another people; but parties may be looked upon as lesser nations within a greater one, and they are aliens to each other: if, therefore, it be admitted that a nation can act tyrannically towards another nation, it cannot be denied that a party may do the same towards another party.] i do not think that it is possible to combine several principles in the same government, so as at the same time to maintain freedom, and really to oppose them to one another. the form of government which is usually termed mixed has always appeared to me to be a mere chimera. accurately speaking there is no such thing as a mixed government (with the meaning usually given to that word), because in all communities some one principle of action may be discovered which preponderates over the others. england in the last century, which has been more especially cited as an example of this form of government, was in point of fact an essentially aristocratic state, although it comprised very powerful elements of democracy; for the laws and customs of the country were such that the aristocracy could not but preponderate in the end, and subject the direction of public affairs to its own will. the error arose from too much attention being paid to the actual struggle which was going on between the nobles and the people, without considering the probable issue of the contest, which was in reality the important point. when a community really has a mixed government, that is to say, when it is equally divided between two adverse principles, it must either pass through a revolution or fall into complete dissolution. i am therefore of opinion that some one social power must always be made to predominate over the others; but i think that liberty is endangered when this power is checked by no obstacles which may retard its course, and force it to moderate its own vehemence. unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing; human beings are not competent to exercise it with discretion, and god alone can be omnipotent, because his wisdom and his justice are always equal to his power. but no power upon earth is so worthy of honor for itself, or of reverential obedience to the rights which it represents, that i would consent to admit its uncontrolled and all-predominant authority. when i see that the right and the means of absolute command are conferred on a people or upon a king, upon an aristocracy or a democracy, a monarchy or a republic, i recognize the germ of tyranny, and i journey onward to a land of more hopeful institutions. in my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not arise, as is often asserted in europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and i am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny. when an individual or a party is wronged in the united states, to whom can he apply for redress? if to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority, and implicitly obeys its injunctions; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority, and remains a passive tool in its hands; the public troops consist of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. however iniquitous or absurd the evil of which you complain may be, you must submit to it as well as you can. *d [footnote d: a striking instance of the excesses which may be occasioned by the despotism of the majority occurred at baltimore in the year . at that time the war was very popular in baltimore. a journal which had taken the other side of the question excited the indignation of the inhabitants by its opposition. the populace assembled, broke the printing-presses, and attacked the houses of the newspaper editors. the militia was called out, but no one obeyed the call; and the only means of saving the poor wretches who were threatened by the frenzy of the mob was to throw them into prison as common malefactors. but even this precaution was ineffectual; the mob collected again during the night, the magistrates again made a vain attempt to call out the militia, the prison was forced, one of the newspaper editors was killed upon the spot, and the others were left for dead; the guilty parties were acquitted by the jury when they were brought to trial. i said one day to an inhabitant of pennsylvania, "be so good as to explain to me how it happens that in a state founded by quakers, and celebrated for its toleration, freed blacks are not allowed to exercise civil rights. they pay the taxes; is it not fair that they should have a vote?" "you insult us," replied my informant, "if you imagine that our legislators could have committed so gross an act of injustice and intolerance." "what! then the blacks possess the right of voting in this county?" "without the smallest doubt." "how comes it, then, that at the polling-booth this morning i did not perceive a single negro in the whole meeting?" "this is not the fault of the law: the negroes have an undisputed right of voting, but they voluntarily abstain from making their appearance." "a very pretty piece of modesty on their parts!" rejoined i. "why, the truth is, that they are not disinclined to vote, but they are afraid of being maltreated; in this country the law is sometimes unable to maintain its authority without the support of the majority. but in this case the majority entertains very strong prejudices against the blacks, and the magistrates are unable to protect them in the exercise of their legal privileges." "what! then the majority claims the right not only of making the laws, but of breaking the laws it has made?"] if, on the other hand, a legislative power could be so constituted as to represent the majority without necessarily being the slave of its passions; an executive, so as to retain a certain degree of uncontrolled authority; and a judiciary, so as to remain independent of the two other powers; a government would be formed which would still be democratic without incurring any risk of tyrannical abuse. i do not say that tyrannical abuses frequently occur in america at the present day, but i maintain that no sure barrier is established against them, and that the causes which mitigate the government are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws. effects of the unlimited power of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of the american public officers liberty left by the american laws to public officers within a certain sphere--their power. a distinction must be drawn between tyranny and arbitrary power. tyranny may be exercised by means of the law, and in that case it is not arbitrary; arbitrary power may be exercised for the good of the community at large, in which case it is not tyrannical. tyranny usually employs arbitrary means, but, if necessary, it can rule without them. in the united states the unbounded power of the majority, which is favorable to the legal despotism of the legislature, is likewise favorable to the arbitrary authority of the magistrate. the majority has an entire control over the law when it is made and when it is executed; and as it possesses an equal authority over those who are in power and the community at large, it considers public officers as its passive agents, and readily confides the task of serving its designs to their vigilance. the details of their office and the privileges which they are to enjoy are rarely defined beforehand; but the majority treats them as a master does his servants when they are always at work in his sight, and he has the power of directing or reprimanding them at every instant. in general the american functionaries are far more independent than the french civil officers within the sphere which is prescribed to them. sometimes, even, they are allowed by the popular authority to exceed those bounds; and as they are protected by the opinion, and backed by the co-operation, of the majority, they venture upon such manifestations of their power as astonish a european. by this means habits are formed in the heart of a free country which may some day prove fatal to its liberties. power exercised by the majority in america upon opinion in america, when the majority has once irrevocably decided a question, all discussion ceases--reason of this--moral power exercised by the majority upon opinion--democratic republics have deprived despotism of its physical instruments--their despotism sways the minds of men. it is in the examination of the display of public opinion in the united states that we clearly perceive how far the power of the majority surpasses all the powers with which we are acquainted in europe. intellectual principles exercise an influence which is so invisible, and often so inappreciable, that they baffle the toils of oppression. at the present time the most absolute monarchs in europe are unable to prevent certain notions, which are opposed to their authority, from circulating in secret throughout their dominions, and even in their courts. such is not the case in america; as long as the majority is still undecided, discussion is carried on; but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, a submissive silence is observed, and the friends, as well as the opponents, of the measure unite in assenting to its propriety. the reason of this is perfectly clear: no monarch is so absolute as to combine all the powers of society in his own hands, and to conquer all opposition with the energy of a majority which is invested with the right of making and of executing the laws. the authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. i know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in america. in any constitutional state in europe every sort of religious and political theory may be advocated and propagated abroad; for there is no country in europe so subdued by any single authority as not to contain citizens who are ready to protect the man who raises his voice in the cause of truth from the consequences of his hardihood. if he is unfortunate enough to live under an absolute government, the people is upon his side; if he inhabits a free country, he may find a shelter behind the authority of the throne, if he require one. the aristocratic part of society supports him in some countries, and the democracy in others. but in a nation where democratic institutions exist, organized like those of the united states, there is but one sole authority, one single element of strength and of success, with nothing beyond it. in america the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. his political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. he yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth. fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has refined the arts of despotism which seemed, however, to have been sufficiently perfected before. the excesses of monarchical power had devised a variety of physical means of oppression: the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as that will which it is intended to coerce. under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. the sovereign can no longer say, "you shall think as i do on pain of death;" but he says, "you are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but if such be your determination, you are henceforth an alien among your people. you may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow-citizens if you solicit their suffrages, and they will affect to scorn you if you solicit their esteem. you will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being, and those who are most persuaded of your innocence will abandon you too, lest they should be shunned in their turn. go in peace! i have given you your life, but it is an existence in comparably worse than death." monarchical institutions have thrown an odium upon despotism; let us beware lest democratic republics should restore oppression, and should render it less odious and less degrading in the eyes of the many, by making it still more onerous to the few. works have been published in the proudest nations of the old world expressly intended to censure the vices and deride the follies of the times; labruyere inhabited the palace of louis xiv when he composed his chapter upon the great, and moliere criticised the courtiers in the very pieces which were acted before the court. but the ruling power in the united states is not to be made game of; the smallest reproach irritates its sensibility, and the slightest joke which has any foundation in truth renders it indignant; from the style of its language to the more solid virtues of its character, everything must be made the subject of encomium. no writer, whatever be his eminence, can escape from this tribute of adulation to his fellow-citizens. the majority lives in the perpetual practice of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the americans can only learn from strangers or from experience. if great writers have not at present existed in america, the reason is very simply given in these facts; there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in america. the inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in spain. the empire of the majority succeeds much better in the united states, since it actually removes the wish of publishing them. unbelievers are to be met with in america, but, to say the truth, there is no public organ of infidelity. attempts have been made by some governments to protect the morality of nations by prohibiting licentious books. in the united states no one is punished for this sort of works, but no one is induced to write them; not because all the citizens are immaculate in their manners, but because the majority of the community is decent and orderly. in these cases the advantages derived from the exercise of this power are unquestionable, and i am simply discussing the nature of the power itself. this irresistible authority is a constant fact, and its judicious exercise is an accidental occurrence. effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the americans effects of the tyranny of the majority more sensibly felt hitherto in the manners than in the conduct of society--they check the development of leading characters--democratic republics organized like the united states bring the practice of courting favor within the reach of the many--proofs of this spirit in the united states--why there is more patriotism in the people than in those who govern in its name. the tendencies which i have just alluded to are as yet very slightly perceptible in political society, but they already begin to exercise an unfavorable influence upon the national character of the americans. i am inclined to attribute the singular paucity of distinguished political characters to the ever-increasing activity of the despotism of the majority in the united states. when the american revolution broke out they arose in great numbers, for public opinion then served, not to tyrannize over, but to direct the exertions of individuals. those celebrated men took a full part in the general agitation of mind common at that period, and they attained a high degree of personal fame, which was reflected back upon the nation, but which was by no means borrowed from it. in absolute governments the great nobles who are nearest to the throne flatter the passions of the sovereign, and voluntarily truckle to his caprices. but the mass of the nation does not degrade itself by servitude: it often submits from weakness, from habit, or from ignorance, and sometimes from loyalty. some nations have been known to sacrifice their own desires to those of the sovereign with pleasure and with pride, thus exhibiting a sort of independence in the very act of submission. these peoples are miserable, but they are not degraded. there is a great difference between doing what one does not approve and feigning to approve what one does; the one is the necessary case of a weak person, the other befits the temper of a lackey. in free countries, where everyone is more or less called upon to give his opinion in the affairs of state; in democratic republics, where public life is incessantly commingled with domestic affairs, where the sovereign authority is accessible on every side, and where its attention can almost always be attracted by vociferation, more persons are to be met with who speculate upon its foibles and live at the cost of its passions than in absolute monarchies. not because men are naturally worse in these states than elsewhere, but the temptation is stronger, and of easier access at the same time. the result is a far more extensive debasement of the characters of citizens. democratic republics extend the practice of currying favor with the many, and they introduce it into a greater number of classes at once: this is one of the most serious reproaches that can be addressed to them. in democratic states organized on the principles of the american republics, this is more especially the case, where the authority of the majority is so absolute and so irresistible that a man must give up his rights as a citizen, and almost abjure his quality as a human being, if te intends to stray from the track which it lays down. in that immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the united states i found very few men who displayed any of that manly candor and that masculine independence of opinion which frequently distinguished the americans in former times, and which constitutes the leading feature in distinguished characters, wheresoever they may be found. it seems, at first sight, as if all the minds of the americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they correspond in their manner of judging. a stranger does, indeed, sometimes meet with americans who dissent from these rigorous formularies; with men who deplore the defects of the laws, the mutability and the ignorance of democracy; who even go so far as to observe the evil tendencies which impair the national character, and to point out such remedies as it might be possible to apply; but no one is there to hear these things besides yourself, and you, to whom these secret reflections are confided, are a stranger and a bird of passage. they are very ready to communicate truths which are useless to you, but they continue to hold a different language in public. if ever these lines are read in america, i am well assured of two things: in the first place, that all who peruse them will raise their voices to condemn me; and in the second place, that very many of them will acquit me at the bottom of their conscience. i have heard of patriotism in the united states, and it is a virtue which may be found among the people, but never among the leaders of the people. this may be explained by analogy; despotism debases the oppressed much more than the oppressor: in absolute monarchies the king has often great virtues, but the courtiers are invariably servile. it is true that the american courtiers do not say "sire," or "your majesty"--a distinction without a difference. they are forever talking of the natural intelligence of the populace they serve; they do not debate the question as to which of the virtues of their master is pre-eminently worthy of admiration, for they assure him that he possesses all the virtues under heaven without having acquired them, or without caring to acquire them; they do not give him their daughters and their wives to be raised at his pleasure to the rank of his concubines, but, by sacrificing their opinions, they prostitute themselves. moralists and philosophers in america are not obliged to conceal their opinions under the veil of allegory; but, before they venture upon a harsh truth, they say, "we are aware that the people which we are addressing is too superior to all the weaknesses of human nature to lose the command of its temper for an instant; and we should not hold this language if we were not speaking to men whom their virtues and their intelligence render more worthy of freedom than all the rest of the world." it would have been impossible for the sycophants of louis xiv to flatter more dexterously. for my part, i am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will cling to power. the only means of preventing men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the surest method of debasing them. the greatest dangers of the american republics proceed from the unlimited power of the majority democratic republics liable to perish from a misuse of their power, and not by impotence--the governments of the american republics are more centralized and more energetic than those of the monarchies of europe--dangers resulting from this--opinions of hamilton and jefferson upon this point. governments usually fall a sacrifice to impotence or to tyranny. in the former case their power escapes from them; it is wrested from their grasp in the latter. many observers, who have witnessed the anarchy of democratic states, have imagined that the government of those states was naturally weak and impotent. the truth is, that when once hostilities are begun between parties, the government loses its control over society. but i do not think that a democratic power is naturally without force or without resources: say, rather, that it is almost always by the abuse of its force and the misemployment of its resources that a democratic government fails. anarchy is almost always produced by its tyranny or its mistakes, but not by its want of strength. it is important not to confound stability with force, or the greatness of a thing with its duration. in democratic republics, the power which directs *e society is not stable; for it often changes hands and assumes a new direction. but whichever way it turns, its force is almost irresistible. the governments of the american republics appear to me to be as much centralized as those of the absolute monarchies of europe, and more energetic than they are. i do not, therefore, imagine that they will perish from weakness. *f [footnote e: this power may be centred in an assembly, in which case it will be strong without being stable; or it may be centred in an individual, in which case it will be less strong, but more stable.] [footnote f: i presume that it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader here, as well as throughout the remainder of this chapter, that i am speaking, not of the federal government, but of the several governments of each state, which the majority controls at its pleasure.] if ever the free institutions of america are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism. mr. hamilton expresses the same opinion in the "federalist," no. . "it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. justice is the end of government. it is the end of civil society. it ever has been, and ever will be, pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. in a society, under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger: and as in the latter state even the stronger individuals are prompted by the uncertainty of their condition to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves, so in the former state will the more powerful factions be gradually induced by a like motive to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful. it can be little doubted that, if the state of rhode island was separated from the confederacy and left to itself, the insecurity of right under the popular form of government within such narrow limits would be displayed by such reiterated oppressions of the factious majorities, that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it." jefferson has also thus expressed himself in a letter to madison: *g "the executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. the tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. the tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period." i am glad to cite the opinion of jefferson upon this subject rather than that of another, because i consider him to be the most powerful advocate democracy has ever sent forth. [footnote g: march , .] chapter xvi: causes mitigating tyranny in the united states--part i chapter summary the national majority does not pretend to conduct all business--is obliged to employ the town and county magistrates to execute its supreme decisions. i have already pointed out the distinction which is to be made between a centralized government and a centralized administration. the former exists in america, but the latter is nearly unknown there. if the directing power of the american communities had both these instruments of government at its disposal, and united the habit of executing its own commands to the right of commanding; if, after having established the general principles of government, it descended to the details of public business; and if, having regulated the great interests of the country, it could penetrate into the privacy of individual interests, freedom would soon be banished from the new world. but in the united states the majority, which so frequently displays the tastes and the propensities of a despot, is still destitute of the more perfect instruments of tyranny. in the american republics the activity of the central government has never as yet been extended beyond a limited number of objects sufficiently prominent to call forth its attention. the secondary affairs of society have never been regulated by its authority, and nothing has hitherto betrayed its desire of interfering in them. the majority is become more and more absolute, but it has not increased the prerogatives of the central government; those great prerogatives have been confined to a certain sphere; and although the despotism of the majority may be galling upon one point, it cannot be said to extend to all. however the predominant party in the nation may be carried away by its passions, however ardent it may be in the pursuit of its projects, it cannot oblige all the citizens to comply with its desires in the same manner and at the same time throughout the country. when the central government which represents that majority has issued a decree, it must entrust the execution of its will to agents, over whom it frequently has no control, and whom it cannot perpetually direct. the townships, municipal bodies, and counties may therefore be looked upon as concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement. if an oppressive law were passed, the liberties of the people would still be protected by the means by which that law would be put in execution: the majority cannot descend to the details and (as i will venture to style them) the puerilities of administrative tyranny. nor does the people entertain that full consciousness of its authority which would prompt it to interfere in these matters; it knows the extent of its natural powers, but it is unacquainted with the increased resources which the art of government might furnish. this point deserves attention, for if a democratic republic similar to that of the united states were ever founded in a country where the power of a single individual had previously subsisted, and the effects of a centralized administration had sunk deep into the habits and the laws of the people, i do not hesitate to assert, that in that country a more insufferable despotism would prevail than any which now exists in the monarchical states of europe, or indeed than any which could be found on this side of the confines of asia. the profession of the law in the united states serves to counterpoise the democracy utility of discriminating the natural propensities of the members of the legal profession--these men called upon to act a prominent part in future society--in what manner the peculiar pursuits of lawyers give an aristocratic turn to their ideas--accidental causes which may check this tendency--ease with which the aristocracy coalesces with legal men--use of lawyers to a despot--the profession of the law constitutes the only aristocratic element with which the natural elements of democracy will combine--peculiar causes which tend to give an aristocratic turn of mind to the english and american lawyers--the aristocracy of america is on the bench and at the bar--influence of lawyers upon american society--their peculiar magisterial habits affect the legislature, the administration, and even the people. in visiting the americans and in studying their laws we perceive that the authority they have entrusted to members of the legal profession, and the influence which these individuals exercise in the government, is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy. this effect seems to me to result from a general cause which it is useful to investigate, since it may produce analogous consequences elsewhere. the members of the legal profession have taken an important part in all the vicissitudes of political society in europe during the last five hundred years. at one time they have been the instruments of those who were invested with political authority, and at another they have succeeded in converting political authorities into their instrument. in the middle ages they afforded a powerful support to the crown, and since that period they have exerted themselves to the utmost to limit the royal prerogative. in england they have contracted a close alliance with the aristocracy; in france they have proved to be the most dangerous enemies of that class. it is my object to inquire whether, under all these circumstances, the members of the legal profession have been swayed by sudden and momentary impulses; or whether they have been impelled by principles which are inherent in their pursuits, and which will always recur in history. i am incited to this investigation by reflecting that this particular class of men will most likely play a prominent part in that order of things to which the events of our time are giving birth. men who have more especially devoted themselves to legal pursuits derive from those occupations certain habits of order, a taste for formalities, and a kind of instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflecting passions of the multitude. the special information which lawyers derive from their studies ensures them a separate station in society, and they constitute a sort of privileged body in the scale of intelligence. this notion of their superiority perpetually recurs to them in the practice of their profession: they are the masters of a science which is necessary, but which is not very generally known; they serve as arbiters between the citizens; and the habit of directing the blind passions of parties in litigation to their purpose inspires them with a certain contempt for the judgment of the multitude. to this it may be added that they naturally constitute a body, not by any previous understanding, or by an agreement which directs them to a common end; but the analogy of their studies and the uniformity of their proceedings connect their minds together, as much as a common interest could combine their endeavors. a portion of the tastes and of the habits of the aristocracy may consequently be discovered in the characters of men in the profession of the law. they participate in the same instinctive love of order and of formalities; and they entertain the same repugnance to the actions of the multitude, and the same secret contempt of the government of the people. i do not mean to say that the natural propensities of lawyers are sufficiently strong to sway them irresistibly; for they, like most other men, are governed by their private interests and the advantages of the moment. in a state of society in which the members of the legal profession are prevented from holding that rank in the political world which they enjoy in private life, we may rest assured that they will be the foremost agents of revolution. but it must then be inquired whether the cause which induces them to innovate and to destroy is accidental, or whether it belongs to some lasting purpose which they entertain. it is true that lawyers mainly contributed to the overthrow of the french monarchy in ; but it remains to be seen whether they acted thus because they had studied the laws, or because they were prohibited from co-operating in the work of legislation. five hundred years ago the english nobles headed the people, and spoke in its name; at the present time the aristocracy supports the throne, and defends the royal prerogative. but aristocracy has, notwithstanding this, its peculiar instincts and propensities. we must be careful not to confound isolated members of a body with the body itself. in all free governments, of whatsoever form they may be, members of the legal profession will be found at the head of all parties. the same remark is also applicable to the aristocracy; for almost all the democratic convulsions which have agitated the world have been directed by nobles. a privileged body can never satisfy the ambition of all its members; it has always more talents and more passions to content and to employ than it can find places; so that a considerable number of individuals are usually to be met with who are inclined to attack those very privileges which they find it impossible to turn to their own account. i do not, then, assert that all the members of the legal profession are at all times the friends of order and the opponents of innovation, but merely that most of them usually are so. in a community in which lawyers are allowed to occupy, without opposition, that high station which naturally belongs to them, their general spirit will be eminently conservative and anti-democratic. when an aristocracy excludes the leaders of that profession from its ranks, it excites enemies which are the more formidable to its security as they are independent of the nobility by their industrious pursuits; and they feel themselves to be its equal in point of intelligence, although they enjoy less opulence and less power. but whenever an aristocracy consents to impart some of its privileges to these same individuals, the two classes coalesce very readily, and assume, as it were, the consistency of a single order of family interests. i am, in like manner, inclined to believe that a monarch will always be able to convert legal practitioners into the most serviceable instruments of his authority. there is a far greater affinity between this class of individuals and the executive power than there is between them and the people; just as there is a greater natural affinity between the nobles and the monarch than between the nobles and the people, although the higher orders of society have occasionally resisted the prerogative of the crown in concert with the lower classes. lawyers are attached to public order beyond every other consideration, and the best security of public order is authority. it must not be forgotten that, if they prize the free institutions of their country much, they nevertheless value the legality of those institutions far more: they are less afraid of tyranny than of arbitrary power; and provided that the legislature take upon itself to deprive men of their independence, they are not dissatisfied. i am therefore convinced that the prince who, in presence of an encroaching democracy, should endeavor to impair the judicial authority in his dominions, and to diminish the political influence of lawyers, would commit a great mistake. he would let slip the substance of authority to grasp at the shadow. he would act more wisely in introducing men connected with the law into the government; and if he entrusted them with the conduct of a despotic power, bearing some marks of violence, that power would most likely assume the external features of justice and of legality in their hands. the government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers; for when the wealthy, the noble, and the prince are excluded from the government, they are sure to occupy the highest stations, in their own right, as it were, since they are the only men of information and sagacity, beyond the sphere of the people, who can be the object of the popular choice. if, then, they are led by their tastes to combine with the aristocracy and to support the crown, they are naturally brought into contact with the people by their interests. they like the government of democracy, without participating in its propensities and without imitating its weaknesses; whence they derive a twofold authority, from it and over it. the people in democratic states does not mistrust the members of the legal profession, because it is well known that they are interested in serving the popular cause; and it listens to them without irritation, because it does not attribute to them any sinister designs. the object of lawyers is not, indeed, to overthrow the institutions of democracy, but they constantly endeavor to give it an impulse which diverts it from its real tendency, by means which are foreign to its nature. lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, to the aristocracy by habit and by taste, and they may be looked upon as the natural bond and connecting link of the two great classes of society. the profession of the law is the only aristocratic element which can be amalgamated without violence with the natural elements of democracy, and which can be advantageously and permanently combined with them. i am not unacquainted with the defects which are inherent in the character of that body of men; but without this admixture of lawyer-like sobriety with the democratic principle, i question whether democratic institutions could long be maintained, and i cannot believe that a republic could subsist at the present time if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people. this aristocratic character, which i hold to be common to the legal profession, is much more distinctly marked in the united states and in england than in any other country. this proceeds not only from the legal studies of the english and american lawyers, but from the nature of the legislation, and the position which those persons occupy in the two countries. the english and the americans have retained the law of precedents; that is to say, they continue to found their legal opinions and the decisions of their courts upon the opinions and the decisions of their forefathers. in the mind of an english or american lawyer a taste and a reverence for what is old is almost always united to a love of regular and lawful proceedings. this predisposition has another effect upon the character of the legal profession and upon the general course of society. the english and american lawyers investigate what has been done; the french advocate inquires what should have been done; the former produce precedents, the latter reasons. a french observer is surprised to hear how often an english dr an american lawyer quotes the opinions of others, and how little he alludes to his own; whilst the reverse occurs in france. there the most trifling litigation is never conducted without the introduction of an entire system of ideas peculiar to the counsel employed; and the fundamental principles of law are discussed in order to obtain a perch of land by the decision of the court. this abnegation of his own opinion, and this implicit deference to the opinion of his forefathers, which are common to the english and american lawyer, this subjection of thought which he is obliged to profess, necessarily give him more timid habits and more sluggish inclinations in england and america than in france. the french codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents. the indispensable want of legal assistance which is felt in england and in the united states, and the high opinion which is generally entertained of the ability of the legal profession, tend to separate it more and more from the people, and to place it in a distinct class. the french lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the english or american lawyer resembles the hierophants of egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science. the station which lawyers occupy in england and america exercises no less an influence upon their habits and their opinions. the english aristocracy, which has taken care to attract to its sphere whatever is at all analogous to itself, has conferred a high degree of importance and of authority upon the members of the legal profession. in english society lawyers do not occupy the first rank, but they are contented with the station assigned to them; they constitute, as it were, the younger branch of the english aristocracy, and they are attached to their elder brothers, although they do not enjoy all their privileges. the english lawyers consequently mingle the taste and the ideas of the aristocratic circles in which they move with the aristocratic interests of their profession. and indeed the lawyer-like character which i am endeavoring to depict is most distinctly to be met with in england: there laws are esteemed not so much because they are good as because they are old; and if it be necessary to modify them in any respect, or to adapt them the changes which time operates in society, recourse is had to the most inconceivable contrivances in order to uphold the traditionary fabric, and to maintain that nothing has been done which does not square with the intentions and complete the labors of former generations. the very individuals who conduct these changes disclaim all intention of innovation, and they had rather resort to absurd expedients than plead guilty to so great a crime. this spirit appertains more especially to the english lawyers; they seem indifferent to the real meaning of what they treat, and they direct all their attention to the letter, seeming inclined to infringe the rules of common sense and of humanity rather than to swerve one title from the law. the english legislation may be compared to the stock of an old tree, upon which lawyers have engrafted the most various shoots, with the hope that, although their fruits may differ, their foliage at least will be confounded with the venerable trunk which supports them all. in america there are no nobles or men of letters, and the people is apt to mistrust the wealthy; lawyers consequently form the highest political class, and the most cultivated circle of society. they have therefore nothing to gain by innovation, which adds a conservative interest to their natural taste for public order. if i were asked where i place the american aristocracy, i should reply without hesitation that it is not composed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar. the more we reflect upon all that occurs in the united states the more shall we be persuaded that the lawyers as a body form the most powerful, if not the only, counterpoise to the democratic element. in that country we perceive how eminently the legal profession is qualified by its powers, and even by its defects, to neutralize the vices which are inherent in popular government. when the american people is intoxicated by passion, or carried away by the impetuosity of its ideas, it is checked and stopped by the almost invisible influence of its legal counsellors, who secretly oppose their aristocratic propensities to its democratic instincts, their superstitious attachment to what is antique to its love of novelty, their narrow views to its immense designs, and their habitual procrastination to its ardent impatience. the courts of justice are the most visible organs by which the legal profession is enabled to control the democracy. the judge is a lawyer, who, independently of the taste for regularity and order which he has contracted in the study of legislation, derives an additional love of stability from his own inalienable functions. his legal attainments have already raised him to a distinguished rank amongst his fellow-citizens; his political power completes the distinction of his station, and gives him the inclinations natural to privileged classes. armed with the power of declaring the laws to be unconstitutional, *a the american magistrate perpetually interferes in political affairs. he cannot force the people to make laws, but at least he can oblige it not to disobey its own enactments; or to act inconsistently with its own principles. i am aware that a secret tendency to diminish the judicial power exists in the united states, and by most of the constitutions of the several states the government can, upon the demand of the two houses of the legislature, remove the judges from their station. by some other constitutions the members of the tribunals are elected, and they are even subjected to frequent re-elections. i venture to predict that these innovations will sooner or later be attended with fatal consequences, and that it will be found out at some future period that the attack which is made upon the judicial power has affected the democratic republic itself. [footnote a: see chapter vi. on the "judicial power in the united states."] it must not, however, be supposed that the legal spirit of which i have been speaking has been confined, in the united states, to the courts of justice; it extends far beyond them. as the lawyers constitute the only enlightened class which the people does not mistrust, they are naturally called upon to occupy most of the public stations. they fill the legislative assemblies, and they conduct the administration; they consequently exercise a powerful influence upon the formation of the law, and upon its execution. the lawyers are, however, obliged to yield to the current of public opinion, which is too strong for them to resist it, but it is easy to find indications of what their conduct would be if they were free to act as they chose. the americans, who have made such copious innovations in their political legislation, have introduced very sparing alterations in their civil laws, and that with great difficulty, although those laws are frequently repugnant to their social condition. the reason of this is, that in matters of civil law the majority is obliged to defer to the authority of the legal profession, and that the american lawyers are disinclined to innovate when they are left to their own choice. it is curious for a frenchman, accustomed to a very different state of things, to hear the perpetual complaints which are made in the united states against the stationary propensities of legal men, and their prejudices in favor of existing institutions. the influence of the legal habits which are common in america extends beyond the limits i have just pointed out. scarcely any question arises in the united states which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate; hence all parties are obliged to borrow the ideas, and even the language, usual in judicial proceedings in their daily controversies. as most public men are, or have been, legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and technicalities of their profession into the affairs of the country. the jury extends this habitude to all classes. the language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that the whole people contracts the habits and the tastes of the magistrate. the lawyers of the united states form a party which is but little feared and scarcely perceived, which has no badge peculiar to itself, which adapts itself with great flexibility to the exigencies of the time, and accommodates itself to all the movements of the social body; but this party extends over the whole community, and it penetrates into all classes of society; it acts upon the country imperceptibly, but it finally fashions it to suit its purposes. chapter xvi: causes mitigating tyranny in the united states--part ii trial by jury in the united states considered as a political institution trial by jury, which is one of the instruments of the sovereignty of the people, deserves to be compared with the other laws which establish that sovereignty--composition of the jury in the united states--effect of trial by jury upon the national character--it educates the people--it tends to establish the authority of the magistrates and to extend a knowledge of law among the people. since i have been led by my subject to recur to the administration of justice in the united states, i will not pass over this point without adverting to the institution of the jury. trial by jury may be considered in two separate points of view, as a judicial and as a political institution. if it entered into my present purpose to inquire how far trial by jury (more especially in civil cases) contributes to insure the best administration of justice, i admit that its utility might be contested. as the jury was first introduced at a time when society was in an uncivilized state, and when courts of justice were merely called upon to decide on the evidence of facts, it is not an easy task to adapt it to the wants of a highly civilized community when the mutual relations of men are multiplied to a surprising extent, and have assumed the enlightened and intellectual character of the age. *b [footnote b: the investigation of trial by jury as a judicial institution, and the appreciation of its effects in the united states, together with the advantages the americans have derived from it, would suffice to form a book, and a book upon a very useful and curious subject. the state of louisiana would in particular afford the curious phenomenon of a french and english legislation, as well as a french and english population, which are gradually combining with each other. see the "digeste des lois de la louisiane," in two volumes; and the "traite sur les regles des actions civiles," printed in french and english at new orleans in .] my present object is to consider the jury as a political institution, and any other course would divert me from my subject. of trial by jury, considered as a judicial institution, i shall here say but very few words. when the english adopted trial by jury they were a semi-barbarous people; they are become, in course of time, one of the most enlightened nations of the earth; and their attachment to this institution seems to have increased with their increasing cultivation. they soon spread beyond their insular boundaries to every corner of the habitable globe; some have formed colonies, others independent states; the mother-country has maintained its monarchical constitution; many of its offspring have founded powerful republics; but wherever the english have been they have boasted of the privilege of trial by jury. *c they have established it, or hastened to re-establish it, in all their settlements. a judicial institution which obtains the suffrages of a great people for so long a series of ages, which is zealously renewed at every epoch of civilization, in all the climates of the earth and under every form of human government, cannot be contrary to the spirit of justice. *d [footnote c: all the english and american jurists are unanimous upon this head. mr. story, judge of the supreme court of the united states, speaks, in his "treatise on the federal constitution," of the advantages of trial by jury in civil cases:--"the inestimable privilege of a trial by jury in civil cases--a privilege scarcely inferior to that in criminal cases, which is counted by all persons to be essential to political and civil liberty. . . ." (story, book iii., chap. xxxviii.)] [footnote d: if it were our province to point out the utility of the jury as a judicial institution in this place, much might be said, and the following arguments might be brought forward amongst others:-- by introducing the jury into the business of the courts you are enabled to diminish the number of judges, which is a very great advantage. when judges are very numerous, death is perpetually thinning the ranks of the judicial functionaries, and laying places vacant for newcomers. the ambition of the magistrates is therefore continually excited, and they are naturally made dependent upon the will of the majority, or the individual who fills up the vacant appointments; the officers of the court then rise like the officers of an army. this state of things is entirely contrary to the sound administration of justice, and to the intentions of the legislator. the office of a judge is made inalienable in order that he may remain independent: but of what advantage is it that his independence should be protected if he be tempted to sacrifice it of his own accord? when judges are very numerous many of them must necessarily be incapable of performing their important duties, for a great magistrate is a man of no common powers; and i am inclined to believe that a half-enlightened tribunal is the worst of all instruments for attaining those objects which it is the purpose of courts of justice to accomplish. for my own part, i had rather submit the decision of a case to ignorant jurors directed by a skilful judge than to judges a majority of whom are imperfectly acquainted with jurisprudence and with the laws.] i turn, however, from this part of the subject. to look upon the jury as a mere judicial institution is to confine our attention to a very narrow view of it; for however great its influence may be upon the decisions of the law courts, that influence is very subordinate to the powerful effects which it produces on the destinies of the community at large. the jury is above all a political institution, and it must be regarded in this light in order to be duly appreciated. by the jury i mean a certain number of citizens chosen indiscriminately, and invested with a temporary right of judging. trial by jury, as applied to the repression of crime, appears to me to introduce an eminently republican element into the government upon the following grounds:-- the institution of the jury may be aristocratic or democratic, according to the class of society from which the jurors are selected; but it always preserves its republican character, inasmuch as it places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or of a portion of the governed, instead of leaving it under the authority of the government. force is never more than a transient element of success; and after force comes the notion of right. a government which should only be able to crush its enemies upon a field of battle would very soon be destroyed. the true sanction of political laws is to be found in penal legislation, and if that sanction be wanting the law will sooner or later lose its cogency. he who punishes infractions of the law is therefore the real master of society. now the institution of the jury raises the people itself, or at least a class of citizens, to the bench of judicial authority. the institution of the jury consequently invests the people, or that class of citizens, with the direction of society. *e [footnote e: an important remark must, however, be made. trial by jury does unquestionably invest the people with a general control over the actions of citizens, but it does not furnish means of exercising this control in all cases, or with an absolute authority. when an absolute monarch has the right of trying offences by his representatives, the fate of the prisoner is, as it were, decided beforehand. but even if the people were predisposed to convict, the composition and the non-responsibility of the jury would still afford some chances favorable to the protection of innocence.] in england the jury is returned from the aristocratic portion of the nation; *f the aristocracy makes the laws, applies the laws, and punishes all infractions of the laws; everything is established upon a consistent footing, and england may with truth be said to constitute an aristocratic republic. in the united states the same system is applied to the whole people. every american citizen is qualified to be an elector, a juror, and is eligible to office. *g the system of the jury, as it is understood in america, appears to me to be as direct and as extreme a consequence of the sovereignty of the people as universal suffrage. these institutions are two instruments of equal power, which contribute to the supremacy of the majority. all the sovereigns who have chosen to govern by their own authority, and to direct society instead of obeying its directions, have destroyed or enfeebled the institution of the jury. the monarchs of the house of tudor sent to prison jurors who refused to convict, and napoleon caused them to be returned by his agents. [footnote f: [this may be true to some extent of special juries, but not of common juries. the author seems not to have been aware that the qualifications of jurors in england vary exceedingly.]] [footnote g: see appendix, q.] however clear most of these truths may seem to be, they do not command universal assent, and in france, at least, the institution of trial by jury is still very imperfectly understood. if the question arises as to the proper qualification of jurors, it is confined to a discussion of the intelligence and knowledge of the citizens who may be returned, as if the jury was merely a judicial institution. this appears to me to be the least part of the subject. the jury is pre-eminently a political institution; it must be regarded as one form of the sovereignty of the people; when that sovereignty is repudiated, it must be rejected, or it must be adapted to the laws by which that sovereignty is established. the jury is that portion of the nation to which the execution of the laws is entrusted, as the houses of parliament constitute that part of the nation which makes the laws; and in order that society may be governed with consistency and uniformity, the list of citizens qualified to serve on juries must increase and diminish with the list of electors. this i hold to be the point of view most worthy of the attention of the legislator, and all that remains is merely accessory. i am so entirely convinced that the jury is pre-eminently a political institution that i still consider it in this light when it is applied in civil causes. laws are always unstable unless they are founded upon the manners of a nation; manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people. when the jury is reserved for criminal offences, the people only witnesses its occasional action in certain particular cases; the ordinary course of life goes on without its interference, and it is considered as an instrument, but not as the only instrument, of obtaining justice. this is true a fortiori when the jury is only applied to certain criminal causes. when, on the contrary, the influence of the jury is extended to civil causes, its application is constantly palpable; it affects all the interests of the community; everyone co-operates in its work: it thus penetrates into all the usages of life, it fashions the human mind to its peculiar forms, and is gradually associated with the idea of justice itself. the institution of the jury, if confined to criminal causes, is always in danger, but when once it is introduced into civil proceedings it defies the aggressions of time and of man. if it had been as easy to remove the jury from the manners as from the laws of england, it would have perished under henry viii, and elizabeth, and the civil jury did in reality, at that period, save the liberties of the country. in whatever manner the jury be applied, it cannot fail to exercise a powerful influence upon the national character; but this influence is prodigiously increased when it is introduced into civil causes. the jury, and more especially the jury in civil cases, serves to communicate the spirit of the judges to the minds of all the citizens; and this spirit, with the habits which attend it, is the soundest preparation for free institutions. it imbues all classes with a respect for the thing judged, and with the notion of right. if these two elements be removed, the love of independence is reduced to a mere destructive passion. it teaches men to practice equity, every man learns to judge his neighbor as he would himself be judged; and this is especially true of the jury in civil causes, for, whilst the number of persons who have reason to apprehend a criminal prosecution is small, every one is liable to have a civil action brought against him. the jury teaches every man not to recoil before the responsibility of his own actions, and impresses him with that manly confidence without which political virtue cannot exist. it invests each citizen with a kind of magistracy, it makes them all feel the duties which they are bound to discharge towards society, and the part which they take in the government. by obliging men to turn their attention to affairs which are not exclusively their own, it rubs off that individual egotism which is the rust of society. the jury contributes most powerfully to form the judgement and to increase the natural intelligence of a people, and this is, in my opinion, its greatest advantage. it may be regarded as a gratuitous public school ever open, in which every juror learns to exercise his rights, enters into daily communication with the most learned and enlightened members of the upper classes, and becomes practically acquainted with the laws of his country, which are brought within the reach of his capacity by the efforts of the bar, the advice of the judge, and even by the passions of the parties. i think that the practical intelligence and political good sense of the americans are mainly attributable to the long use which they have made of the jury in civil causes. i do not know whether the jury is useful to those who are in litigation; but i am certain it is highly beneficial to those who decide the litigation; and i look upon it as one of the most efficacious means for the education of the people which society can employ. what i have hitherto said applies to all nations, but the remark i am now about to make is peculiar to the americans and to democratic peoples. i have already observed that in democracies the members of the legal profession and the magistrates constitute the only aristocratic body which can check the irregularities of the people. this aristocracy is invested with no physical power, but it exercises its conservative influence upon the minds of men, and the most abundant source of its authority is the institution of the civil jury. in criminal causes, when society is armed against a single individual, the jury is apt to look upon the judge as the passive instrument of social power, and to mistrust his advice. moreover, criminal causes are entirely founded upon the evidence of facts which common sense can readily appreciate; upon this ground the judge and the jury are equal. such, however, is not the case in civil causes; then the judge appears as a disinterested arbiter between the conflicting passions of the parties. the jurors look up to him with confidence and listen to him with respect, for in this instance their intelligence is completely under the control of his learning. it is the judge who sums up the various arguments with which their memory has been wearied out, and who guides them through the devious course of the proceedings; he points their attention to the exact question of fact which they are called upon to solve, and he puts the answer to the question of law into their mouths. his influence upon their verdict is almost unlimited. if i am called upon to explain why i am but little moved by the arguments derived from the ignorance of jurors in civil causes, i reply, that in these proceedings, whenever the question to be solved is not a mere question of fact, the jury has only the semblance of a judicial body. the jury sanctions the decision of the judge, they by the authority of society which they represent, and he by that of reason and of law. *h [footnote h: see appendix, r.] in england and in america the judges exercise an influence upon criminal trials which the french judges have never possessed. the reason of this difference may easily be discovered; the english and american magistrates establish their authority in civil causes, and only transfer it afterwards to tribunals of another kind, where that authority was not acquired. in some cases (and they are frequently the most important ones) the american judges have the right of deciding causes alone. *i upon these occasions they are accidentally placed in the position which the french judges habitually occupy, but they are invested with far more power than the latter; they are still surrounded by the reminiscence of the jury, and their judgment has almost as much authority as the voice of the community at large, represented by that institution. their influence extends beyond the limits of the courts; in the recreations of private life as well as in the turmoil of public business, abroad and in the legislative assemblies, the american judge is constantly surrounded by men who are accustomed to regard his intelligence as superior to their own, and after having exercised his power in the decision of causes, he continues to influence the habits of thought and the characters of the individuals who took a part in his judgment. [footnote i: the federal judges decide upon their own authority almost all the questions most important to the country.] the jury, then, which seems to restrict the rights of magistracy, does in reality consolidate its power, and in no country are the judges so powerful as there, where the people partakes their privileges. it is more especially by means of the jury in civil causes that the american magistrates imbue all classes of society with the spirit of their profession. thus the jury, which is the most energetic means of making the people rule, is also the most efficacious means of teaching it to rule well. chapter xvii: principal causes maintaining the democratic republic--part i principal causes which tend to maintain the democratic republic in the united states a democratic republic subsists in the united states, and the principal object of this book has been to account for the fact of its existence. several of the causes which contribute to maintain the institutions of america have been involuntarily passed by or only hinted at as i was borne along by my subject. others i have been unable to discuss, and those on which i have dwelt most are, as it were, buried in the details of the former parts of this work. i think, therefore, that before i proceed to speak of the future, i cannot do better than collect within a small compass the reasons which best explain the present. in this retrospective chapter i shall be succinct, for i shall take care to remind the reader very summarily of what he already knows; and i shall only select the most prominent of those facts which i have not yet pointed out. all the causes which contribute to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states are reducible to three heads:-- i. the peculiar and accidental situation in which providence has placed the americans. ii. the laws. iii. the manners and customs of the people. accidental or providential causes which contribute to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states the union has no neighbors--no metropolis--the americans have had the chances of birth in their favor--america an empty country--how this circumstance contributes powerfully to the maintenance of the democratic republic in america--how the american wilds are peopled--avidity of the anglo-americans in taking possession of the solitudes of the new world--influence of physical prosperity upon the political opinions of the americans. a thousand circumstances, independent of the will of man, concur to facilitate the maintenance of a democratic republic in the united states. some of these peculiarities are known, the others may easily be pointed out; but i shall confine myself to the most prominent amongst them. the americans have no neighbors, and consequently they have no great wars, or financial crises, or inroads, or conquest to dread; they require neither great taxes, nor great armies, nor great generals; and they have nothing to fear from a scourge which is more formidable to republics than all these evils combined, namely, military glory. it is impossible to deny the inconceivable influence which military glory exercises upon the spirit of a nation. general jackson, whom the americans have twice elected to the head of their government, is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents; no one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people, and indeed the majority of the enlightened classes of the union has always been opposed to him. but he was raised to the presidency, and has been maintained in that lofty station, solely by the recollection of a victory which he gained twenty years ago under the walls of new orleans, a victory which was, however, a very ordinary achievement, and which could only be remembered in a country where battles are rare. now the people which is thus carried away by the illusions of glory is unquestionably the most cold and calculating, the most unmilitary (if i may use the expression), and the most prosaic of all the peoples of the earth. america has no great capital *a city, whose influence is directly or indirectly felt over the whole extent of the country, which i hold to be one of the first causes of the maintenance of republican institutions in the united states. in cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention. [footnote a: the united states have no metropolis, but they already contain several very large cities. philadelphia reckoned , inhabitants and new york , in the year . the lower orders which inhabit these cities constitute a rabble even more formidable than the populace of european towns. they consist of freed blacks in the first place, who are condemned by the laws and by public opinion to a hereditary state of misery and degradation. they also contain a multitude of europeans who have been driven to the shores of the new world by their misfortunes or their misconduct; and these men inoculate the united states with all our vices, without bringing with them any of those interests which counteract their baneful influence. as inhabitants of a country where they have no civil rights, they are ready to turn all the passions which agitate the community to their own advantage; thus, within the last few months serious riots have broken out in philadelphia and in new york. disturbances of this kind are unknown in the rest of the country, which is nowise alarmed by them, because the population of the cities has hitherto exercised neither power nor influence over the rural districts. nevertheless, i look upon the size of certain american cities, and especially on the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic republics of the new world; and i venture to predict that they will perish from this circumstance unless the government succeeds in creating an armed force, which, whilst it remains under the control of the majority of the nation, will be independent of the town population, and able to repress its excesses. [the population of the city of new york had risen, in , to , , and that of philadelphia to , . brooklyn, which may be said to form part of new york city, has a population of , , in addition to that of new york. the frequent disturbances in the great cities of america, and the excessive corruption of their local governments--over which there is no effectual control--are amongst the greatest evils and dangers of the country.]] to subject the provinces to the metropolis is therefore not only to place the destiny of the empire in the hands of a portion of the community, which may be reprobated as unjust, but to place it in the hands of a populace acting under its own impulses, which must be avoided as dangerous. the preponderance of capital cities is therefore a serious blow upon the representative system, and it exposes modern republics to the same defect as the republics of antiquity, which all perished from not having been acquainted with that form of government. it would be easy for me to adduce a great number of secondary causes which have contributed to establish, and which concur to maintain, the democratic republic of the united states. but i discern two principal circumstances amongst these favorable elements, which i hasten to point out. i have already observed that the origin of the american settlements may be looked upon as the first and most efficacious cause to which the present prosperity of the united states may be attributed. the americans had the chances of birth in their favor, and their forefathers imported that equality of conditions into the country whence the democratic republic has very naturally taken its rise. nor was this all they did; for besides this republican condition of society, the early settler bequeathed to their descendants those customs, manners, and opinions which contribute most to the success of a republican form of government. when i reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, methinks i see the destiny of america embodied in the first puritan who landed on those shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man. the chief circumstance which has favored the establishment and the maintenance of a democratic republic in the united states is the nature of the territory which the american inhabit. their ancestors gave them the love of equality and of freedom, but god himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free, by placing them upon a boundless continent, which is open to their exertions. general prosperity is favorable to the stability of all governments, but more particularly of a democratic constitution, which depends upon the dispositions of the majority, and more particularly of that portion of the community which is most exposed to feel the pressure of want. when the people rules, it must be rendered happy, or it will overturn the state, and misery is apt to stimulate it to those excesses to which ambition rouses kings. the physical causes, independent of the laws, which contribute to promote general prosperity, are more numerous in america than they have ever been in any other country in the world, at any other period of history. in the united states not only is legislation democratic, but nature herself favors the cause of the people. in what part of human tradition can be found anything at all similar to that which is occurring under our eyes in north america? the celebrated communities of antiquity were all founded in the midst of hostile nations, which they were obliged to subjugate before they could flourish in their place. even the moderns have found, in some parts of south america, vast regions inhabited by a people of inferior civilization, but which occupied and cultivated the soil. to found their new states it was necessary to extirpate or to subdue a numerous population, until civilization has been made to blush for their success. but north america was only inhabited by wandering tribes, who took no thought of the natural riches of the soil, and that vast country was still, properly speaking, an empty continent, a desert land awaiting its inhabitants. everything is extraordinary in america, the social condition of the inhabitants, as well as the laws; but the soil upon which these institutions are founded is more extraordinary than all the rest. when man was first placed upon the earth by the creator, the earth was inexhaustible in its youth, but man was weak and ignorant; and when he had learned to explore the treasures which it contained, hosts of his fellow creatures covered its surface, and he was obliged to earn an asylum for repose and for freedom by the sword. at that same period north america was discovered, as if it had been kept in reserve by the deity, and had just risen from beneath the waters of the deluge. that continent still presents, as it did in the primeval time, rivers which rise from never-failing sources, green and moist solitudes, and fields which the ploughshare of the husbandman has never turned. in this state it is offered to man, not in the barbarous and isolated condition of the early ages, but to a being who is already in possession of the most potent secrets of the natural world, who is united to his fellow-men, and instructed by the experience of fifty centuries. at this very time thirteen millions of civilized europeans are peaceably spreading over those fertile plains, with whose resources and whose extent they are not yet themselves accurately acquainted. three or four thousand soldiers drive the wandering races of the aborigines before them; these are followed by the pioneers, who pierce the woods, scare off the beasts of prey, explore the courses of the inland streams, and make ready the triumphal procession of civilization across the waste. the favorable influence of the temporal prosperity of america upon the institutions of that country has been so often described by others, and adverted to by myself, that i shall not enlarge upon it beyond the addition of a few facts. an erroneous notion is generally entertained that the deserts of america are peopled by european emigrants, who annually disembark upon the coasts of the new world, whilst the american population increases and multiplies upon the soil which its forefathers tilled. the european settler, however, usually arrives in the united states without friends, and sometimes without resources; in order to subsist he is obliged to work for hire, and he rarely proceeds beyond that belt of industrious population which adjoins the ocean. the desert cannot be explored without capital or credit; and the body must be accustomed to the rigors of a new climate before it can be exposed to the chances of forest life. it is the americans themselves who daily quit the spots which gave them birth to acquire extensive domains in a remote country. thus the european leaves his cottage for the trans-atlantic shores; and the american, who is born on that very coast, plunges in his turn into the wilds of central america. this double emigration is incessant; it begins in the remotest parts of europe, it crosses the atlantic ocean, and it advances over the solitudes of the new world. millions of men are marching at once towards the same horizon; their language, their religion, their manners differ, their object is the same. the gifts of fortune are promised in the west, and to the west they bend their course. *b [footnote b: [the number of foreign immigrants into the united states in the last fifty years (from to ) is stated to be , , . of these, , , spoke english--that is, they came from great britain, ireland, or the british colonies; , , came from germany or northern europe; and about half a million from the south of europe.]] no event can be compared with this continuous removal of the human race, except perhaps those irruptions which preceded the fall of the roman empire. then, as well as now, generations of men were impelled forwards in the same direction to meet and struggle on the same spot; but the designs of providence were not the same; then, every newcomer was the harbinger of destruction and of death; now, every adventurer brings with him the elements of prosperity and of life. the future still conceals from us the ulterior consequences of this emigration of the americans towards the west; but we can readily apprehend its more immediate results. as a portion of the inhabitants annually leave the states in which they were born, the population of these states increases very slowly, although they have long been established: thus in connecticut, which only contains fifty-nine inhabitants to the square mile, the population has not increased by more than one-quarter in forty years, whilst that of england has been augmented by one-third in the lapse of the same period. the european emigrant always lands, therefore, in a country which is but half full, and where hands are in request: he becomes a workman in easy circumstances; his son goes to seek his fortune in unpeopled regions, and he becomes a rich landowner. the former amasses the capital which the latter invests, and the stranger as well as the native is unacquainted with want. the laws of the united states are extremely favorable to the division of property; but a cause which is more powerful than the laws prevents property from being divided to excess. *c this is very perceptible in the states which are beginning to be thickly peopled; massachusetts is the most populous part of the union, but it contains only eighty inhabitants to the square mile, which is must less than in france, where are reckoned to the same extent of country. but in massachusetts estates are very rarely divided; the eldest son takes the land, and the others go to seek their fortune in the desert. the law has abolished the rights of primogeniture, but circumstances have concurred to re-establish it under a form of which none can complain, and by which no just rights are impaired. [footnote c: in new england the estates are exceedingly small, but they are rarely subjected to further division.] a single fact will suffice to show the prodigious number of individuals who leave new england, in this manner, to settle themselves in the wilds. we were assured in that thirty-six of the members of congress were born in the little state of connecticut. the population of connecticut, which constitutes only one forty-third part of that of the united states, thus furnished one-eighth of the whole body of representatives. the states of connecticut, however, only sends five delegates to congress; and the thirty-one others sit for the new western states. if these thirty-one individuals had remained in connecticut, it is probable that instead of becoming rich landowners they would have remained humble laborers, that they would have lived in obscurity without being able to rise into public life, and that, far from becoming useful members of the legislature, they might have been unruly citizens. these reflections do not escape the observation of the americans any more than of ourselves. "it cannot be doubted," says chancellor kent in his "treatise on american law," "that the division of landed estates must produce great evils when it is carried to such excess as that each parcel of land is insufficient to support a family; but these disadvantages have never been felt in the united states, and many generations must elapse before they can be felt. the extent of our inhabited territory, the abundance of adjacent land, and the continual stream of emigration flowing from the shores of the atlantic towards the interior of the country, suffice as yet, and will long suffice, to prevent the parcelling out of estates." it is difficult to describe the rapacity with which the american rushes forward to secure the immense booty which fortune proffers to him. in the pursuit he fearlessly braves the arrow of the indian and the distempers of the forest; he is unimpressed by the silence of the woods; the approach of beasts of prey does not disturb him; for he is goaded onwards by a passion more intense than the love of life. before him lies a boundless continent, and he urges onwards as if time pressed, and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions. i have spoken of the emigration from the older states, but how shall i describe that which takes place from the more recent ones? fifty years have scarcely elapsed since that of ohio was founded; the greater part of its inhabitants were not born within its confines; its capital has only been built thirty years, and its territory is still covered by an immense extent of uncultivated fields; nevertheless the population of ohio is already proceeding westward, and most of the settlers who descend to the fertile savannahs of illinois are citizens of ohio. these men left their first country to improve their condition; they quit their resting-place to ameliorate it still more; fortune awaits them everywhere, but happiness they cannot attain. the desire of prosperity is become an ardent and restless passion in their minds which grows by what it gains. they early broke the ties which bound them to their natal earth, and they have contracted no fresh ones on their way. emigration was at first necessary to them as a means of subsistence; and it soon becomes a sort of game of chance, which they pursue for the emotions it excites as much as for the gain it procures. sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him. the woods stoop to give him a passage, and spring up again when he has passed. it is not uncommon in crossing the new states of the west to meet with deserted dwellings in the midst of the wilds; the traveller frequently discovers the vestiges of a log house in the most solitary retreats, which bear witness to the power, and no less to the inconstancy of man. in these abandoned fields, and over these ruins of a day, the primeval forest soon scatters a fresh vegetation, the beasts resume the haunts which were once their own, and nature covers the traces of man's path with branches and with flowers, which obliterate his evanescent track. i remember that, in crossing one of the woodland districts which still cover the state of new york, i reached the shores of a lake embosomed in forests coeval with the world. a small island, covered with woods whose thick foliage concealed its banks, rose from the centre of the waters. upon the shores of the lake no object attested the presence of man except a column of smoke which might be seen on the horizon rising from the tops of the trees to the clouds, and seeming to hang from heaven rather than to be mounting to the sky. an indian shallop was hauled up on the sand, which tempted me to visit the islet that had first attracted my attention, and in a few minutes i set foot upon its banks. the whole island formed one of those delicious solitudes of the new world which almost lead civilized man to regret the haunts of the savage. a luxuriant vegetation bore witness to the incomparable fruitfulness of the soil. the deep silence which is common to the wilds of north america was only broken by the hoarse cooing of the wood-pigeon, and the tapping of the woodpecker upon the bark of trees. i was far from supposing that this spot had ever been inhabited, so completely did nature seem to be left to her own caprices; but when i reached the centre of the isle i thought that i discovered some traces of man. i then proceeded to examine the surrounding objects with care, and i soon perceived that a european had undoubtedly been led to seek a refuge in this retreat. yet what changes had taken place in the scene of his labors! the logs which he had hastily hewn to build himself a shed had sprouted afresh; the very props were intertwined with living verdure, and his cabin was transformed into a bower. in the midst of these shrubs a few stones were to be seen, blackened with fire and sprinkled with thin ashes; here the hearth had no doubt been, and the chimney in falling had covered it with rubbish. i stood for some time in silent admiration of the exuberance of nature and the littleness of man: and when i was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, i exclaimed with melancholy, "are ruins, then, already here?" in europe we are wont to look upon a restless disposition, an unbounded desire of riches, and an excessive love of independence, as propensities very formidable to society. yet these are the very elements which ensure a long and peaceful duration to the republics of america. without these unquiet passions the population would collect in certain spots, and would soon be subject to wants like those of the old world, which it is difficult to satisfy; for such is the present good fortune of the new world, that the vices of its inhabitants are scarcely less favorable to society than their virtues. these circumstances exercise a great influence on the estimation in which human actions are held in the two hemispheres. the americans frequently term what we should call cupidity a laudable industry; and they blame as faint-heartedness what we consider to be the virtue of moderate desires. in france, simple tastes, orderly manners, domestic affections, and the attachments which men feel to the place of their birth, are looked upon as great guarantees of the tranquillity and happiness of the state. but in america nothing seems to be more prejudicial to society than these virtues. the french canadians, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of their pristine manners, are already embarrassed for room upon their small territory; and this little community, which has so recently begun to exist, will shortly be a prey to the calamities incident to old nations. in canada, the most enlightened, patriotic, and humane inhabitants make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content it. there, the seductions of wealth are vaunted with as much zeal as the charms of an honest but limited income in the old world, and more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. if we listen to their eulogies, we shall hear that nothing is more praiseworthy than to exchange the pure and homely pleasures which even the poor man tastes in his own country for the dull delights of prosperity under a foreign sky; to leave the patrimonial hearth and the turf beneath which his forefathers sleep; in short, to abandon the living and the dead in quest of fortune. at the present time america presents a field for human effort far more extensive than any sum of labor which can be applied to work it. in america too much knowledge cannot be diffused; for all knowledge, whilst it may serve him who possesses it, turns also to the advantage of those who are without it. new wants are not to be feared, since they can be satisfied without difficulty; the growth of human passions need not be dreaded, since all passions may find an easy and a legitimate object; nor can men be put in possession of too much freedom, since they are scarcely ever tempted to misuse their liberties. the american republics of the present day are like companies of adventurers formed to explore in common the waste lands of the new world, and busied in a flourishing trade. the passions which agitate the americans most deeply are not their political but their commercial passions; or, to speak more correctly, they introduce the habits they contract in business into their political life. they love order, without which affairs do not prosper; and they set an especial value upon a regular conduct, which is the foundation of a solid business; they prefer the good sense which amasses large fortunes to that enterprising spirit which frequently dissipates them; general ideas alarm their minds, which are accustomed to positive calculations, and they hold practice in more honor than theory. it is in america that one learns to understand the influence which physical prosperity exercises over political actions, and even over opinions which ought to acknowledge no sway but that of reason; and it is more especially amongst strangers that this truth is perceptible. most of the european emigrants to the new world carry with them that wild love of independence and of change which our calamities are so apt to engender. i sometimes met with europeans in the united states who had been obliged to leave their own country on account of their political opinions. they all astonished me by the language they held, but one of them surprised me more than all the rest. as i was crossing one of the most remote districts of pennsylvania i was benighted, and obliged to beg for hospitality at the gate of a wealthy planter, who was a frenchman by birth. he bade me sit down beside his fire, and we began to talk with that freedom which befits persons who meet in the backwoods, two thousand leagues from their native country. i was aware that my host had been a great leveller and an ardent demagogue forty years ago, and that his name was not unknown to fame. i was, therefore, not a little surprised to hear him discuss the rights of property as an economist or a landowner might have done: he spoke of the necessary gradations which fortune establishes among men, of obedience to established laws, of the influence of good morals in commonwealths, and of the support which religious opinions give to order and to freedom; he even went to far as to quote an evangelical authority in corroboration of one of his political tenets. i listened, and marvelled at the feebleness of human reason. a proposition is true or false, but no art can prove it to be one or the other, in the midst of the uncertainties of science and the conflicting lessons of experience, until a new incident disperses the clouds of doubt; i was poor, i become rich, and i am not to expect that prosperity will act upon my conduct, and leave my judgment free; my opinions change with my fortune, and the happy circumstances which i turn to my advantage furnish me with that decisive argument which was before wanting. the influence of prosperity acts still more freely upon the american than upon strangers. the american has always seen the connection of public order and public prosperity, intimately united as they are, go on before his eyes; he does not conceive that one can subsist without the other; he has therefore nothing to forget; nor has he, like so many europeans, to unlearn the lessons of his early education. chapter xvii: principal causes maintaining the democratic republic--part ii influence of the laws upon the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states three principal causes of the maintenance of the democratic republic--federal constitutions--municipal institutions--judicial power. the principal aim of this book has been to make known the laws of the united states; if this purpose has been accomplished, the reader is already enabled to judge for himself which are the laws that really tend to maintain the democratic republic, and which endanger its existence. if i have not succeeded in explaining this in the whole course of my work, i cannot hope to do so within the limits of a single chapter. it is not my intention to retrace the path i have already pursued, and a very few lines will suffice to recapitulate what i have previously explained. three circumstances seem to me to contribute most powerfully to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states. the first is that federal form of government which the americans have adopted, and which enables the union to combine the power of a great empire with the security of a small state. the second consists in those municipal institutions which limit the despotism of the majority, and at the same time impart a taste for freedom and a knowledge of the art of being free to the people. the third is to be met with in the constitution of the judicial power. i have shown in what manner the courts of justice serve to repress the excesses of democracy, and how they check and direct the impulses of the majority without stopping its activity. influence of manners upon the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states i have previously remarked that the manners of the people may be considered as one of the general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic in the united states is attributable. i here used the word manners with the meaning which the ancients attached to the word mores, for i apply it not only to manners in their proper sense of what constitutes the character of social intercourse, but i extend it to the various notions and opinions current among men, and to the mass of those ideas which constitute their character of mind. i comprise, therefore, under this term the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people. my intention is not to draw a picture of american manners, but simply to point out such features of them as are favorable to the maintenance of political institutions. religion considered as a political institution, which powerfully contributes to the maintenance of the democratic republic amongst the americans north america peopled by men who professed a democratic and republican christianity--arrival of the catholics--for what reason the catholics form the most democratic and the most republican class at the present time. every religion is to be found in juxtaposition to a political opinion which is connected with it by affinity. if the human mind be left to follow its own bent, it will regulate the temporal and spiritual institutions of society upon one uniform principle; and man will endeavor, if i may use the expression, to harmonize the state in which he lives upon earth with the state which he believes to await him in heaven. the greatest part of british america was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy; they brought with them into the new world a form of christianity which i cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion. this sect contributed powerfully to the establishment of a democracy and a republic, and from the earliest settlement of the emigrants politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved. about fifty years ago ireland began to pour a catholic population into the united states; on the other hand, the catholics of america made proselytes, and at the present moment more than a million of christians professing the truths of the church of rome are to be met with in the union. *d the catholics are faithful to the observances of their religion; they are fervent and zealous in the support and belief of their doctrines. nevertheless they constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the united states; and although this fact may surprise the observer at first, the causes by which it is occasioned may easily be discovered upon reflection. [footnote d: [it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy the amount of the roman catholic population of the united states, but in an able writer in the "edinburgh review" (vol. cxxvii. p. ) affirmed that the whole catholic population of the united states was then about , , , divided into dioceses, with , churches, under the care of bishops and , clergymen. but this rapid increase is mainly supported by immigration from the catholic countries of europe.]] i think that the catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as the natural enemy of democracy. amongst the various sects of christians, catholicism seems to me, on the contrary, to be one of those which are most favorable to the equality of conditions. in the catholic church, the religious community is composed of only two elements, the priest and the people. the priest alone rises above the rank of his flock, and all below him are equal. on doctrinal points the catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise and ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the same creed; it imposes the same observances upon the rich and needy, it inflicts the same austerities upon the strong and the weak, it listens to no compromise with mortal man, but, reducing all the human race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society at the foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight of god. if catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare them for inequality; but the contrary may be said of protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent, more than to render them equal. catholicism is like an absolute monarchy; if the sovereign be removed, all the other classes of society are more equal than they are in republics. it has not unfrequently occurred that the catholic priest has left the service of the altar to mix with the governing powers of society, and to take his place amongst the civil gradations of men. this religious influence has sometimes been used to secure the interests of that political state of things to which he belonged. at other times catholics have taken the side of aristocracy from a spirit of religion. but no sooner is the priesthood entirely separated from the government, as is the case in the united states, than is found that no class of men are more naturally disposed than the catholics to transfuse the doctrine of the equality of conditions into the political world. if, then, the catholic citizens of the united states are not forcibly led by the nature of their tenets to adopt democratic and republican principles, at least they are not necessarily opposed to them; and their social position, as well as their limited number, obliges them to adopt these opinions. most of the catholics are poor, and they have no chance of taking a part in the government unless it be open to all the citizens. they constitute a minority, and all rights must be respected in order to insure to them the free exercise of their own privileges. these two causes induce them, unconsciously, to adopt political doctrines, which they would perhaps support with less zeal if they were rich and preponderant. the catholic clergy of the united states has never attempted to oppose this political tendency, but it seeks rather to justify its results. the priests in america have divided the intellectual world into two parts: in the one they place the doctrines of revealed religion, which command their assent; in the other they leave those truths which they believe to have been freely left open to the researches of political inquiry. thus the catholics of the united states are at the same time the most faithful believers and the most zealous citizens. it may be asserted that in the united states no religious doctrine displays the slightest hostility to democratic and republican institutions. the clergy of all the different sects hold the same language, their opinions are consonant to the laws, and the human intellect flows onwards in one sole current. i happened to be staying in one of the largest towns in the union, when i was invited to attend a public meeting which had been called for the purpose of assisting the poles, and of sending them supplies of arms and money. i found two or three thousand persons collected in a vast hall which had been prepared to receive them. in a short time a priest in his ecclesiastical robes advanced to the front of the hustings: the spectators rose, and stood uncovered, whilst he spoke in the following terms:-- "almighty god! the god of armies! thou who didst strengthen the hearts and guide the arms of our fathers when they were fighting for the sacred rights of national independence; thou who didst make them triumph over a hateful oppression, and hast granted to our people the benefits of liberty and peace; turn, o lord, a favorable eye upon the other hemisphere; pitifully look down upon that heroic nation which is even now struggling as we did in the former time, and for the same rights which we defended with our blood. thou, who didst create man in the likeness of the same image, let not tyranny mar thy work, and establish inequality upon the earth. almighty god! do thou watch over the destiny of the poles, and render them worthy to be free. may thy wisdom direct their councils, and may thy strength sustain their arms! shed forth thy terror over their enemies, scatter the powers which take counsel against them; and vouchsafe that the injustice which the world has witnessed for fifty years, be not consummated in our time. o lord, who holdest alike the hearts of nations and of men in thy powerful hand; raise up allies to the sacred cause of right; arouse the french nation from the apathy in which its rulers retain it, that it go forth again to fight for the liberties of the world. "lord, turn not thou thy face from us, and grant that we may always be the most religious as well as the freest people of the earth. almighty god, hear our supplications this day. save the poles, we beseech thee, in the name of thy well-beloved son, our lord jesus christ, who died upon the cross for the salvation of men. amen." the whole meeting responded "amen!" with devotion. indirect influence of religious opinions upon political society in the united states christian morality common to all sects--influence of religion upon the manners of the americans--respect for the marriage tie--in what manner religion confines the imagination of the americans within certain limits, and checks the passion of innovation--opinion of the americans on the political utility of religion--their exertions to extend and secure its predominance. i have just shown what the direct influence of religion upon politics is in the united states, but its indirect influence appears to me to be still more considerable, and it never instructs the americans more fully in the art of being free than when it says nothing of freedom. the sects which exist in the united states are innumerable. they all differ in respect to the worship which is due from man to his creator, but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man. each sect adores the deity in its own peculiar manner, but all the sects preach the same moral law in the name of god. if it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same. society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and provided the citizens profess a religion, the peculiar tenets of that religion are of very little importance to its interests. moreover, almost all the sects of the united states are comprised within the great unity of christianity, and christian morality is everywhere the same. it may be believed without unfairness that a certain number of americans pursue a peculiar form of worship, from habit more than from conviction. in the united states the sovereign authority is religious, and consequently hypocrisy must be common; but there is no country in the whole world in which the christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in america; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth. i have remarked that the members of the american clergy in general, without even excepting those who do not admit religious liberty, are all in favor of civil freedom; but they do not support any particular political system. they keep aloof from parties and from public affairs. in the united states religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion, but it directs the manners of the community, and by regulating domestic life it regulates the state. i do not question that the great austerity of manners which is observable in the united states, arises, in the first instance, from religious faith. religion is often unable to restrain man from the numberless temptations of fortune; nor can it check that passion for gain which every incident of his life contributes to arouse, but its influence over the mind of woman is supreme, and women are the protectors of morals. there is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is so much respected as in america, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated. in europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. to despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home, is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires. agitated by the tumultuous passions which frequently disturb his dwelling, the european is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact. but when the american retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace. there his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; and as he finds that an orderly life is the surest path to happiness, he accustoms himself without difficulty to moderate his opinions as well as his tastes. whilst the european endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the american derives from his own home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs. in the united states the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people. amongst the anglo-americans, there are some who profess the doctrines of christianity from a sincere belief in them, and others who do the same because they are afraid to be suspected of unbelief. christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as i have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates and the experiments of men. thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field; and, whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount. before it can perpetrate innovation, certain primal and immutable principles are laid down, and the boldest conceptions of human device are subjected to certain forms which retard and stop their completion. the imagination of the americans, even in its greatest flights, is circumspect and undecided; its impulses are checked, and its works unfinished. these habits of restraint recur in political society, and are singularly favorable both to the tranquillity of the people and to the durability of the institutions it has established. nature and circumstances concurred to make the inhabitants of the united states bold men, as is sufficiently attested by the enterprising spirit with which they seek for fortune. if the mind of the americans were free from all trammels, they would very shortly become the most daring innovators and the most implacable disputants in the world. but the revolutionists of america are obliged to profess an ostensible respect for christian morality and equity, which does not easily permit them to violate the laws that oppose their designs; nor would they find it easy to surmount the scruples of their partisans, even if they were able to get over their own. hitherto no one in the united states has dared to advance the maxim, that everything is permissible with a view to the interests of society; an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all the tyrants of future ages. thus whilst the law permits the americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust. religion in america takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions. indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the united states themselves look upon religious belief. i do not know whether all the americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? but i am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. this opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society. in the united states, if a political character attacks a sect, this may not prevent even the partisans of that very sect from supporting him; but if he attacks all the sects together, everyone abandons him, and he remains alone. whilst i was in america, a witness, who happened to be called at the assizes of the county of chester (state of new york), declared that he did not believe in the existence of god, or in the immortality of the soul. the judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say. *e the newspapers related the fact without any further comment. [footnote e: the new york "spectator" of august , , relates the fact in the following terms:--"the court of common pleas of chester county (new york) a few days since rejected a witness who declared his disbelief in the existence of god. the presiding judge remarked that he had not before been aware that there was a man living who did not believe in the existence of god; that this belief constituted the sanction of all testimony in a court of justice, and that he knew of no cause in a christian country where a witness had been permitted to testify without such belief."] the americans combine the notions of christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live. i have known of societies formed by the americans to send out ministers of the gospel into the new western states to found schools and churches there, lest religion should be suffered to die away in those remote settlements, and the rising states be less fitted to enjoy free institutions than the people from which they emanated. i met with wealthy new englanders who abandoned the country in which they were born in order to lay the foundations of christianity and of freedom on the banks of the missouri, or in the prairies of illinois. thus religious zeal is perpetually stimulated in the united states by the duties of patriotism. these men do not act from an exclusive consideration of the promises of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion to the cause; and if you converse with these missionaries of christian civilization, you will be surprised to find how much value they set upon the goods of this world, and that you meet with a politician where you expected to find a priest. they will tell you that "all the american republics are collectively involved with each other; if the republics of the west were to fall into anarchy, or to be mastered by a despot, the republican institutions which now flourish upon the shores of the atlantic ocean would be in great peril. it is, therefore, our interest that the new states should be religious, in order to maintain our liberties." such are the opinions of the americans, and if any hold that the religious spirit which i admire is the very thing most amiss in america, and that the only element wanting to the freedom and happiness of the human race is to believe in some blind cosmogony, or to assert with cabanis the secretion of thought by the brain, i can only reply that those who hold this language have never been in america, and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation. when they return from their expedition, we shall hear what they have to say. there are persons in france who look upon republican institutions as a temporary means of power, of wealth, and distinction; men who are the condottieri of liberty, and who fight for their own advantage, whatever be the colors they wear: it is not to these that i address myself. but there are others who look forward to the republican form of government as a tranquil and lasting state, towards which modern society is daily impelled by the ideas and manners of the time, and who sincerely desire to prepare men to be free. when these men attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions to the prejudice of their interests. despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; and it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. how is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie be not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? and what can be done with a people which is its own master, if it be not submissive to the divinity? chapter xvii: principal causes maintaining the democratic republic--part iii principal causes which render religion powerful in america care taken by the americans to separate the church from the state--the laws, public opinion, and even the exertions of the clergy concur to promote this end--influence of religion upon the mind in the united states attributable to this cause--reason of this--what is the natural state of men with regard to religion at the present time--what are the peculiar and incidental causes which prevent men, in certain countries, from arriving at this state. the philosophers of the eighteenth century explained the gradual decay of religious faith in a very simple manner. religious zeal, said they, must necessarily fail, the more generally liberty is established and knowledge diffused. unfortunately, facts are by no means in accordance with their theory. there are certain populations in europe whose unbelief is only equalled by their ignorance and their debasement, whilst in america one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world fulfils all the outward duties of religious fervor. upon my arrival in the united states, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer i stayed there the more did i perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which i was unaccustomed. in france i had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in america i found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. my desire to discover the causes of this phenomenon increased from day to day. in order to satisfy it i questioned the members of all the different sects; and i more especially sought the society of the clergy, who are the depositaries of the different persuasions, and who are more especially interested in their duration. as a member of the roman catholic church i was more particularly brought into contact with several of its priests, with whom i became intimately acquainted. to each of these men i expressed my astonishment and i explained my doubts; i found that they differed upon matters of detail alone; and that they mainly attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country to the separation of church and state. i do not hesitate to affirm that during my stay in america i did not meet with a single individual, of the clergy or of the laity, who was not of the same opinion upon this point. this led me to examine more attentively than i had hitherto done, the station which the american clergy occupy in political society. i learned with surprise that they filled no public appointments; *f not one of them is to be met with in the administration, and they are not even represented in the legislative assemblies. in several states *g the law excludes them from political life, public opinion in all. and when i came to inquire into the prevailing spirit of the clergy i found that most of its members seemed to retire of their own accord from the exercise of power, and that they made it the pride of their profession to abstain from politics. [footnote f: unless this term be applied to the functions which many of them fill in the schools. almost all education is entrusted to the clergy.] [footnote g: see the constitution of new york, art. , section :-- "and whereas the ministers of the gospel are, by their profession, dedicated to the service of god and the care of souls, and ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their functions: therefore no minister of the gospel, or priest of any denomination whatsoever, shall at any time hereafter, under any pretence or description whatever, be eligible to, or capable of holding, any civil or military office or place within this state." see also the constitutions of north carolina, art. ; virginia; south carolina, art. i, section ; kentucky, art. , section ; tennessee, art. , section i; louisiana, art. , section .] i heard them inveigh against ambition and deceit, under whatever political opinions these vices might chance to lurk; but i learned from their discourses that men are not guilty in the eye of god for any opinions concerning political government which they may profess with sincerity, any more than they are for their mistakes in building a house or in driving a furrow. i perceived that these ministers of the gospel eschewed all parties with the anxiety attendant upon personal interest. these facts convinced me that what i had been told was true; and it then became my object to investigate their causes, and to inquire how it happened that the real authority of religion was increased by a state of things which diminished its apparent force: these causes did not long escape my researches. the short space of threescore years can never content the imagination of man; nor can the imperfect joys of this world satisfy his heart. man alone, of all created beings, displays a natural contempt of existence, and yet a boundless desire to exist; he scorns life, but he dreads annihilation. these different feelings incessantly urge his soul to the contemplation of a future state, and religion directs his musings thither. religion, then, is simply another form of hope; and it is no less natural to the human heart than hope itself. men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect, and a sort of violent distortion of their true natures; but they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments; for unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind. if we only consider religious institutions in a purely human point of view, they may be said to derive an inexhaustible element of strength from man himself, since they belong to one of the constituent principles of human nature. i am aware that at certain times religion may strengthen this influence, which originates in itself, by the artificial power of the laws, and by the support of those temporal institutions which direct society. religions, intimately united to the governments of the earth, have been known to exercise a sovereign authority derived from the twofold source of terror and of faith; but when a religion contracts an alliance of this nature, i do not hesitate to affirm that it commits the same error as a man who should sacrifice his future to his present welfare; and in obtaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks that authority which is rightfully its own. when a religion founds its empire upon the desire of immortality which lives in every human heart, it may aspire to universal dominion; but when it connects itself with a government, it must necessarily adopt maxims which are only applicable to certain nations. thus, in forming an alliance with a political power, religion augments its authority over a few, and forfeits the hope of reigning over all. as long as a religion rests upon those sentiments which are the consolation of all affliction, it may attract the affections of mankind. but if it be mixed up with the bitter passions of the world, it may be constrained to defend allies whom its interests, and not the principle of love, have given to it; or to repel as antagonists men who are still attached to its own spirit, however opposed they may be to the powers to which it is allied. the church cannot share the temporal power of the state without being the object of a portion of that animosity which the latter excites. the political powers which seem to be most firmly established have frequently no better guarantee for their duration than the opinions of a generation, the interests of the time, or the life of an individual. a law may modify the social condition which seems to be most fixed and determinate; and with the social condition everything else must change. the powers of society are more or less fugitive, like the years which we spend upon the earth; they succeed each other with rapidity, like the fleeting cares of life; and no government has ever yet been founded upon an invariable disposition of the human heart, or upon an imperishable interest. as long as a religion is sustained by those feelings, propensities, and passions which are found to occur under the same forms, at all the different periods of history, it may defy the efforts of time; or at least it can only be destroyed by another religion. but when religion clings to the interests of the world, it becomes almost as fragile a thing as the powers of earth. it is the only one of them all which can hope for immortality; but if it be connected with their ephemeral authority, it shares their fortunes, and may fall with those transient passions which supported them for a day. the alliance which religion contracts with political powers must needs be onerous to itself; since it does not require their assistance to live, and by giving them its assistance to live, and by giving them its assistance it may be exposed to decay. the danger which i have just pointed out always exists, but it is not always equally visible. in some ages governments seem to be imperishable; in others, the existence of society appears to be more precarious than the life of man. some constitutions plunge the citizens into a lethargic somnolence, and others rouse them to feverish excitement. when governments appear to be so strong, and laws so stable, men do not perceive the dangers which may accrue from a union of church and state. when governments display so much weakness, and laws so much inconstancy, the danger is self-evident, but it is no longer possible to avoid it; to be effectual, measures must be taken to discover its approach. in proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition of society, and as communities display democratic propensities, it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions; for the time is coming when authority will be bandied from hand to hand, when political theories will succeed each other, and when men, laws, and constitutions will disappear, or be modified from day to day, and this, not for a season only, but unceasingly. agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and inertness are the law of absolute monarchies. if the americans, who change the head of the government once in four years, who elect new legislators every two years, and renew the provincial officers every twelvemonth; if the americans, who have abandoned the political world to the attempts of innovators, had not placed religion beyond their reach, where could it abide in the ebb and flow of human opinions? where would that respect which belongs to it be paid, amidst the struggles of faction? and what would become of its immortality, in the midst of perpetual decay? the american clergy were the first to perceive this truth, and to act in conformity with it. they saw that they must renounce their religious influence, if they were to strive for political power; and they chose to give up the support of the state, rather than to share its vicissitudes. in america, religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been at certain periods in the history of certain peoples; but its influence is more lasting. it restricts itself to its own resources, but of those none can deprive it: its circle is limited to certain principles, but those principles are entirely its own, and under its undisputed control. on every side in europe we hear voices complaining of the absence of religious faith, and inquiring the means of restoring to religion some remnant of its pristine authority. it seems to me that we must first attentively consider what ought to be the natural state of men with regard to religion at the present time; and when we know what we have to hope and to fear, we may discern the end to which our efforts ought to be directed. the two great dangers which threaten the existence of religions are schism and indifference. in ages of fervent devotion, men sometimes abandon their religion, but they only shake it off in order to adopt another. their faith changes the objects to which it is directed, but it suffers no decline. the old religion then excites enthusiastic attachment or bitter enmity in either party; some leave it with anger, others cling to it with increased devotedness, and although persuasions differ, irreligion is unknown. such, however, is not the case when a religious belief is secretly undermined by doctrines which may be termed negative, since they deny the truth of one religion without affirming that of any other. progidious revolutions then take place in the human mind, without the apparent co-operation of the passions of man, and almost without his knowledge. men lose the objects of their fondest hopes, as if through forgetfulness. they are carried away by an imperceptible current which they have not the courage to stem, but which they follow with regret, since it bears them from a faith they love, to a scepticism that plunges them into despair. in ages which answer to this description, men desert their religious opinions from lukewarmness rather than from dislike; they do not reject them, but the sentiments by which they were once fostered disappear. but if the unbeliever does not admit religion to be true, he still considers it useful. regarding religious institutions in a human point of view, he acknowledges their influence upon manners and legislation. he admits that they may serve to make men live in peace with one another, and to prepare them gently for the hour of death. he regrets the faith which he has lost; and as he is deprived of a treasure which he has learned to estimate at its full value, he scruples to take it from those who still possess it. on the other hand, those who continue to believe are not afraid openly to avow their faith. they look upon those who do not share their persuasion as more worthy of pity than of opposition; and they are aware that to acquire the esteem of the unbelieving, they are not obliged to follow their example. they are hostile to no one in the world; and as they do not consider the society in which they live as an arena in which religion is bound to face its thousand deadly foes, they love their contemporaries, whilst they condemn their weaknesses and lament their errors. as those who do not believe, conceal their incredulity; and as those who believe, display their faith, public opinion pronounces itself in favor of religion: love, support, and honor are bestowed upon it, and it is only by searching the human soul that we can detect the wounds which it has received. the mass of mankind, who are never without the feeling of religion, do not perceive anything at variance with the established faith. the instinctive desire of a future life brings the crowd about the altar, and opens the hearts of men to the precepts and consolations of religion. but this picture is not applicable to us: for there are men amongst us who have ceased to believe in christianity, without adopting any other religion; others who are in the perplexities of doubt, and who already affect not to believe; and others, again, who are afraid to avow that christian faith which they still cherish in secret. amidst these lukewarm partisans and ardent antagonists a small number of believers exist, who are ready to brave all obstacles and to scorn all dangers in defence of their faith. they have done violence to human weakness, in order to rise superior to public opinion. excited by the effort they have made, they scarcely knew where to stop; and as they know that the first use which the french made of independence was to attack religion, they look upon their contemporaries with dread, and they recoil in alarm from the liberty which their fellow-citizens are seeking to obtain. as unbelief appears to them to be a novelty, they comprise all that is new in one indiscriminate animosity. they are at war with their age and country, and they look upon every opinion which is put forth there as the necessary enemy of the faith. such is not the natural state of men with regard to religion at the present day; and some extraordinary or incidental cause must be at work in france to prevent the human mind from following its original propensities and to drive it beyond the limits at which it ought naturally to stop. i am intimately convinced that this extraordinary and incidental cause is the close connection of politics and religion. the unbelievers of europe attack the christians as their political opponents, rather than as their religious adversaries; they hate the christian religion as the opinion of a party, much more than as an error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because they are the representatives of the divinity than because they are the allies of authority. in europe, christianity has been intimately united to the powers of the earth. those powers are now in decay, and it is, as it were, buried under their ruins. the living body of religion has been bound down to the dead corpse of superannuated polity: cut but the bonds which restrain it, and that which is alive will rise once more. i know not what could restore the christian church of europe to the energy of its earlier days; that power belongs to god alone; but it may be the effect of human policy to leave the faith in the full exercise of the strength which it still retains. how the instruction, the habits, and the practical experience of the americans promote the success of their democratic institutions what is to be understood by the instruction of the american people--the human mind more superficially instructed in the united states than in europe--no one completely uninstructed--reason of this--rapidity with which opinions are diffused even in the uncultivated states of the west--practical experience more serviceable to the americans than book-learning. i have but little to add to what i have already said concerning the influence which the instruction and the habits of the americans exercise upon the maintenance of their political institutions. america has hitherto produced very few writers of distinction; it possesses no great historians, and not a single eminent poet. the inhabitants of that country look upon what are properly styled literary pursuits with a kind of disapprobation; and there are towns of very second-rate importance in europe in which more literary works are annually published than in the twenty-four states of the union put together. the spirit of the americans is averse to general ideas; and it does not seek theoretical discoveries. neither politics nor manufactures direct them to these occupations; and although new laws are perpetually enacted in the united states, no great writers have hitherto inquired into the general principles of their legislation. the americans have lawyers and commentators, but no jurists; *h and they furnish examples rather than lessons to the world. the same observation applies to the mechanical arts. in america, the inventions of europe are adopted with sagacity; they are perfected, and adapted with admirable skill to the wants of the country. manufactures exist, but the science of manufacture is not cultivated; and they have good workmen, but very few inventors. fulton was obliged to proffer his services to foreign nations for a long time before he was able to devote them to his own country. [footnote h: [this cannot be said with truth of the country of kent, story, and wheaton.]] the observer who is desirous of forming an opinion on the state of instruction amongst the anglo-americans must consider the same object from two different points of view. if he only singles out the learned, he will be astonished to find how rare they are; but if he counts the ignorant, the american people will appear to be the most enlightened community in the world. the whole population, as i observed in another place, is situated between these two extremes. in new england, every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its constitution. in the states of connecticut and massachusetts, it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon. when i compare the greek and roman republics with these american states; the manuscript libraries of the former, and their rude population, with the innumerable journals and the enlightened people of the latter; when i remember all the attempts which are made to judge the modern republics by the assistance of those of antiquity, and to infer what will happen in our time from what took place two thousand years ago, i am tempted to burn my books, in order to apply none but novel ideas to so novel a condition of society. what i have said of new england must not, however, be applied indistinctly to the whole union; as we advance towards the west or the south, the instruction of the people diminishes. in the states which are adjacent to the gulf of mexico, a certain number of individuals may be found, as in our own countries, who are devoid of the rudiments of instruction. but there is not a single district in the united states sunk in complete ignorance; and for a very simple reason: the peoples of europe started from the darkness of a barbarous condition, to advance toward the light of civilization; their progress has been unequal; some of them have improved apace, whilst others have loitered in their course, and some have stopped, and are still sleeping upon the way. *i [footnote i: [in the northern states the number of persons destitute of instruction is inconsiderable, the largest number being , in the state of new york (according to spaulding's "handbook of american statistics" for ); but in the south no less than , , whites and , , colored persons are returned as "illiterate."]] such has not been the case in the united states. the anglo-americans settled in a state of civilization, upon that territory which their descendants occupy; they had not to begin to learn, and it was sufficient for them not to forget. now the children of these same americans are the persons who, year by year, transport their dwellings into the wilds; and with their dwellings their acquired information and their esteem for knowledge. education has taught them the utility of instruction, and has enabled them to transmit that instruction to their posterity. in the united states society has no infancy, but it is born in man's estate. the americans never use the word "peasant," because they have no idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved amongst them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization. at the extreme borders of the confederate states, upon the confines of society and of the wilderness, a population of bold adventurers have taken up their abode, who pierce the solitudes of the american woods, and seek a country there, in order to escape that poverty which awaited them in their native provinces. as soon as the pioneer arrives upon the spot which is to serve him for a retreat, he fells a few trees and builds a loghouse. nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings. the traveller who approaches one of them towards nightfall, sees the flicker of the hearth-flame through the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees. who would not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and ignorance? yet no sort of comparison can be drawn between the pioneer and the dwelling which shelters him. everything about him is primitive and unformed, but he is himself the result of the labor and the experience of eighteen centuries. he wears the dress, and he speaks the language of cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious of the future, and ready for argument upon the present; he is, in short, a highly civilized being, who consents, for a time, to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the new world with the bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers. it is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which public opinion circulates in the midst of these deserts. *j i do not think that so much intellectual intercourse takes place in the most enlightened and populous districts of france. *k it cannot be doubted that, in the united states, the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of a democratic republic; and such must always be the case, i believe, where instruction which awakens the understanding is not separated from moral education which amends the heart. but i by no means exaggerate this benefit, and i am still further from thinking, as so many people do think in europe, that men can be instantaneously made citizens by teaching them to read and write. true information is mainly derived from experience; and if the americans had not been gradually accustomed to govern themselves, their book-learning would not assist them much at the present day. [footnote j: i travelled along a portion of the frontier of the united states in a sort of cart which was termed the mail. we passed, day and night, with great rapidity along the roads which were scarcely marked out, through immense forests; when the gloom of the woods became impenetrable the coachman lighted branches of fir, and we journeyed along by the light they cast. from time to time we came to a hut in the midst of the forest, which was a post-office. the mail dropped an enormous bundle of letters at the door of this isolated dwelling, and we pursued our way at full gallop, leaving the inhabitants of the neighboring log houses to send for their share of the treasure. [when the author visited america the locomotive and the railroad were scarcely invented, and not yet introduced in the united states. it is superfluous to point out the immense effect of those inventions in extending civilization and developing the resources of that vast continent. in there were miles of railway in the united states; in there were , miles of railway.]] [footnote k: in each inhabitant of michigan paid a sum equivalent to fr. cent. (french money) to the post-office revenue, and each inhabitant of the floridas paid fr. cent. (see "national calendar," , p. .) in the same year each inhabitant of the departement du nord paid fr. cent. to the revenue of the french post-office. (see the "compte rendu de l'administration des finances," , p. .) now the state of michigan only contained at that time inhabitants per square league and florida only : the public instruction and the commercial activity of these districts is inferior to that of most of the states in the union, whilst the departement du nord, which contains , inhabitants per square league, is one of the most enlightened and manufacturing parts of france.] i have lived a great deal with the people in the united states, and i cannot express how much i admire their experience and their good sense. an american should never be allowed to speak of europe; for he will then probably display a vast deal of presumption and very foolish pride. he will take up with those crude and vague notions which are so useful to the ignorant all over the world. but if you question him respecting his own country, the cloud which dimmed his intelligence will immediately disperse; his language will become as clear and as precise as his thoughts. he will inform you what his rights are, and by what means he exercises them; he will be able to point out the customs which obtain in the political world. you will find that he is well acquainted with the rules of the administration, and that he is familiar with the mechanism of the laws. the citizen of the united states does not acquire his practical science and his positive notions from books; the instruction he has acquired may have prepared him for receiving those ideas, but it did not furnish them. the american learns to know the laws by participating in the act of legislation; and he takes a lesson in the forms of government from governing. the great work of society is ever going on beneath his eyes, and, as it were, under his hands. in the united states politics are the end and aim of education; in europe its principal object is to fit men for private life. the interference of the citizens in public affairs is too rare an occurrence for it to be anticipated beforehand. upon casting a glance over society in the two hemispheres, these differences are indicated even by its external aspect. in europe we frequently introduce the ideas and the habits of private life into public affairs; and as we pass at once from the domestic circle to the government of the state, we may frequently be heard to discuss the great interests of society in the same manner in which we converse with our friends. the americans, on the other hand, transfuse the habits of public life into their manners in private; and in their country the jury is introduced into the games of schoolboys, and parliamentary forms are observed in the order of a feast. chapter xvii: principal causes maintaining the democratic republic--part iv the laws contribute more to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the united states than the physical circumstances of the country, and the manners more than the laws all the nations of america have a democratic state of society--yet democratic institutions only subsist amongst the anglo-americans--the spaniards of south america, equally favored by physical causes as the anglo-americans, unable to maintain a democratic republic--mexico, which has adopted the constitution of the united states, in the same predicament--the anglo-americans of the west less able to maintain it than those of the east--reason of these different results. i have remarked that the maintenance of democratic institutions in the united states is attributable to the circumstances, the laws, and the manners of that country. *l most europeans are only acquainted with the first of these three causes, and they are apt to give it a preponderating importance which it does not really possess. [footnote l: i remind the reader of the general signification which i give to the word "manners," namely, the moral and intellectual characteristics of social man taken collectively.] it is true that the anglo-saxons settled in the new world in a state of social equality; the low-born and the noble were not to be found amongst them; and professional prejudices were always as entirely unknown as the prejudices of birth. thus, as the condition of society was democratic, the empire of democracy was established without difficulty. but this circumstance is by no means peculiar to the united states; almost all the trans-atlantic colonies were founded by men equal amongst themselves, or who became so by inhabiting them. in no one part of the new world have europeans been able to create an aristocracy. nevertheless, democratic institutions prosper nowhere but in the united states. the american union has no enemies to contend with; it stands in the wilds like an island in the ocean. but the spaniards of south america were no less isolated by nature; yet their position has not relieved them from the charge of standing armies. they make war upon each other when they have no foreign enemies to oppose; and the anglo-american democracy is the only one which has hitherto been able to maintain itself in peace. *m [footnote m: [a remark which, since the great civil war of - , ceases to be applicable.]] the territory of the union presents a boundless field to human activity, and inexhaustible materials for industry and labor. the passion of wealth takes the place of ambition, and the warmth of faction is mitigated by a sense of prosperity. but in what portion of the globe shall we meet with more fertile plains, with mightier rivers, or with more unexplored and inexhaustible riches than in south america? nevertheless, south america has been unable to maintain democratic institutions. if the welfare of nations depended on their being placed in a remote position, with an unbounded space of habitable territory before them, the spaniards of south america would have no reason to complain of their fate. and although they might enjoy less prosperity than the inhabitants of the united states, their lot might still be such as to excite the envy of some nations in europe. there are, however, no nations upon the face of the earth more miserable than those of south america. thus, not only are physical causes inadequate to produce results analogous to those which occur in north america, but they are unable to raise the population of south america above the level of european states, where they act in a contrary direction. physical causes do not, therefore, affect the destiny of nations so much as has been supposed. i have met with men in new england who were on the point of leaving a country, where they might have remained in easy circumstances, to go to seek their fortune in the wilds. not far from that district i found a french population in canada, which was closely crowded on a narrow territory, although the same wilds were at hand; and whilst the emigrant from the united states purchased an extensive estate with the earnings of a short term of labor, the canadian paid as much for land as he would have done in france. nature offers the solitudes of the new world to europeans; but they are not always acquainted with the means of turning her gifts to account. other peoples of america have the same physical conditions of prosperity as the anglo-americans, but without their laws and their manners; and these peoples are wretched. the laws and manners of the anglo-americans are therefore that efficient cause of their greatness which is the object of my inquiry. i am far from supposing that the american laws are preeminently good in themselves; i do not hold them to be applicable to all democratic peoples; and several of them seem to be dangerous, even in the united states. nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the american legislation, taken collectively, is extremely well adapted to the genius of the people and the nature of the country which it is intended to govern. the american laws are therefore good, and to them must be attributed a large portion of the success which attends the government of democracy in america: but i do not believe them to be the principal cause of that success; and if they seem to me to have more influence upon the social happiness of the americans than the nature of the country, on the other hand there is reason to believe that their effect is still inferior to that produced by the manners of the people. the federal laws undoubtedly constitute the most important part of the legislation of the united states. mexico, which is not less fortunately situated than the anglo-american union, has adopted the same laws, but is unable to accustom itself to the government of democracy. some other cause is therefore at work, independently of those physical circumstances and peculiar laws which enable the democracy to rule in the united states. another still more striking proof may be adduced. almost all the inhabitants of the territory of the union are the descendants of a common stock; they speak the same language, they worship god in the same manner, they are affected by the same physical causes, and they obey the same laws. whence, then, do their characteristic differences arise? why, in the eastern states of the union, does the republican government display vigor and regularity, and proceed with mature deliberation? whence does it derive the wisdom and the durability which mark its acts, whilst in the western states, on the contrary, society seems to be ruled by the powers of chance? there, public business is conducted with an irregularity and a passionate and feverish excitement, which does not announce a long or sure duration. i am no longer comparing the anglo-american states to foreign nations; but i am contrasting them with each other, and endeavoring to discover why they are so unlike. the arguments which are derived from the nature of the country and the difference of legislation are here all set aside. recourse must be had to some other cause; and what other cause can there be except the manners of the people? it is in the eastern states that the anglo-americans have been longest accustomed to the government of democracy, and that they have adopted the habits and conceived the notions most favorable to its maintenance. democracy has gradually penetrated into their customs, their opinions, and the forms of social intercourse; it is to be found in all the details of daily life equally as in the laws. in the eastern states the instruction and practical education of the people have been most perfected, and religion has been most thoroughly amalgamated with liberty. now these habits, opinions, customs, and convictions are precisely the constituent elements of that which i have denominated manners. in the western states, on the contrary, a portion of the same advantages is still wanting. many of the americans of the west were born in the woods, and they mix the ideas and the customs of savage life with the civilization of their parents. their passions are more intense; their religious morality less authoritative; and their convictions less secure. the inhabitants exercise no sort of control over their fellow-citizens, for they are scarcely acquainted with each other. the nations of the west display, to a certain extent, the inexperience and the rude habits of a people in its infancy; for although they are composed of old elements, their assemblage is of recent date. the manners of the americans of the united states are, then, the real cause which renders that people the only one of the american nations that is able to support a democratic government; and it is the influence of manners which produces the different degrees of order and of prosperity that may be distinguished in the several anglo-american democracies. thus the effect which the geographical position of a country may have upon the duration of democratic institutions is exaggerated in europe. too much importance is attributed to legislation, too little to manners. these three great causes serve, no doubt, to regulate and direct the american democracy; but if they were to be classed in their proper order, i should say that the physical circumstances are less efficient than the laws, and the laws very subordinate to the manners of the people. i am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a country; whilst the latter may turn the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws to some advantage. the importance of manners is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention. it may be regarded as a central point in the range of human observation, and the common termination of all inquiry. so seriously do i insist upon this head, that if i have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence which i attribute to the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, to the manners of the americans, upon the maintenance of their institutions, i have failed in the principal object of my work. whether laws and manners are sufficient to maintain democratic institutions in other countries besides america the anglo-americans, if transported into europe, would be obliged to modify their laws--distinction to be made between democratic institutions and american institutions--democratic laws may be conceived better than, or at least different from, those which the american democracy has adopted--the example of america only proves that it is possible to regulate democracy by the assistance of manners and legislation. i have asserted that the success of democratic institutions in the united states is more intimately connected with the laws themselves, and the manners of the people, than with the nature of the country. but does it follow that the same causes would of themselves produce the same results, if they were put into operation elsewhere; and if the country is no adequate substitute for laws and manners, can laws and manners in their turn prove a substitute for the country? it will readily be understood that the necessary elements of a reply to this question are wanting: other peoples are to be found in the new world besides the anglo-americans, and as these people are affected by the same physical circumstances as the latter, they may fairly be compared together. but there are no nations out of america which have adopted the same laws and manners, being destitute of the physical advantages peculiar to the anglo-americans. no standard of comparison therefore exists, and we can only hazard an opinion upon this subject. it appears to me, in the first place, that a careful distinction must be made between the institutions of the united states and democratic institutions in general. when i reflect upon the state of europe, its mighty nations, its populous cities, its formidable armies, and the complex nature of its politics, i cannot suppose that even the anglo-americans, if they were transported to our hemisphere, with their ideas, their religion, and their manners, could exist without considerably altering their laws. but a democratic nation may be imagined, organized differently from the american people. it is not impossible to conceive a government really established upon the will of the majority; but in which the majority, repressing its natural propensity to equality, should consent, with a view to the order and the stability of the state, to invest a family or an individual with all the prerogatives of the executive. a democratic society might exist, in which the forces of the nation would be more centralized than they are in the united states; the people would exercise a less direct and less irresistible influence upon public affairs, and yet every citizen invested with certain rights would participate, within his sphere, in the conduct of the government. the observations i made amongst the anglo-americans induce me to believe that democratic institutions of this kind, prudently introduced into society, so as gradually to mix with the habits and to be interfused with the opinions of the people, might subsist in other countries besides america. if the laws of the united states were the only imaginable democratic laws, or the most perfect which it is possible to conceive, i should admit that the success of those institutions affords no proof of the success of democratic institutions in general, in a country less favored by natural circumstances. but as the laws of america appear to me to be defective in several respects, and as i can readily imagine others of the same general nature, the peculiar advantages of that country do not prove that democratic institutions cannot succeed in a nation less favored by circumstances, if ruled by better laws. if human nature were different in america from what it is elsewhere; or if the social condition of the americans engendered habits and opinions amongst them different from those which originate in the same social condition in the old world, the american democracies would afford no means of predicting what may occur in other democracies. if the americans displayed the same propensities as all other democratic nations, and if their legislators had relied upon the nature of the country and the favor of circumstances to restrain those propensities within due limits, the prosperity of the united states would be exclusively attributable to physical causes, and it would afford no encouragement to a people inclined to imitate their example, without sharing their natural advantages. but neither of these suppositions is borne out by facts. in america the same passions are to be met with as in europe; some originating in human nature, others in the democratic condition of society. thus in the united states i found that restlessness of heart which is natural to men, when all ranks are nearly equal and the chances of elevation are the same to all. i found the democratic feeling of envy expressed under a thousand different forms. i remarked that the people frequently displayed, in the conduct of affairs, a consummate mixture of ignorance and presumption; and i inferred that in america, men are liable to the same failings and the same absurdities as amongst ourselves. but upon examining the state of society more attentively, i speedily discovered that the americans had made great and successful efforts to counteract these imperfections of human nature, and to correct the natural defects of democracy. their divers municipal laws appeared to me to be a means of restraining the ambition of the citizens within a narrow sphere, and of turning those same passions which might have worked havoc in the state, to the good of the township or the parish. the american legislators have succeeded to a certain extent in opposing the notion of rights to the feelings of envy; the permanence of the religious world to the continual shifting of politics; the experience of the people to its theoretical ignorance; and its practical knowledge of business to the impatience of its desires. the americans, then, have not relied upon the nature of their country to counterpoise those dangers which originate in their constitution and in their political laws. to evils which are common to all democratic peoples they have applied remedies which none but themselves had ever thought of before; and although they were the first to make the experiment, they have succeeded in it. the manners and laws of the americans are not the only ones which may suit a democratic people; but the americans have shown that it would be wrong to despair of regulating democracy by the aid of manners and of laws. if other nations should borrow this general and pregnant idea from the americans, without however intending to imitate them in the peculiar application which they have made of it; if they should attempt to fit themselves for that social condition, which it seems to be the will of providence to impose upon the generations of this age, and so to escape from the despotism or the anarchy which threatens them; what reason is there to suppose that their efforts would not be crowned with success? the organization and the establishment of democracy in christendom is the great political problem of the time. the americans, unquestionably, have not resolved this problem, but they furnish useful data to those who undertake the task. importance of what precedes with respect to the state of europe it may readily be discovered with what intention i undertook the foregoing inquiries. the question here discussed is interesting not only to the united states, but to the whole world; it concerns, not a nation, but all mankind. if those nations whose social condition is democratic could only remain free as long as they are inhabitants of the wilds, we could not but despair of the future destiny of the human race; for democracy is rapidly acquiring a more extended sway, and the wilds are gradually peopled with men. if it were true that laws and manners are insufficient to maintain democratic institutions, what refuge would remain open to the nations, except the despotism of a single individual? i am aware that there are many worthy persons at the present time who are not alarmed at this latter alternative, and who are so tired of liberty as to be glad of repose, far from those storms by which it is attended. but these individuals are ill acquainted with the haven towards which they are bound. they are so deluded by their recollections, as to judge the tendency of absolute power by what it was formerly, and not by what it might become at the present time. if absolute power were re-established amongst the democratic nations of europe, i am persuaded that it would assume a new form, and appear under features unknown to our forefathers. there was a time in europe when the laws and the consent of the people had invested princes with almost unlimited authority; but they scarcely ever availed themselves of it. i do not speak of the prerogatives of the nobility, of the authority of supreme courts of justice, of corporations and their chartered rights, or of provincial privileges, which served to break the blows of the sovereign authority, and to maintain a spirit of resistance in the nation. independently of these political institutions--which, however opposed they might be to personal liberty, served to keep alive the love of freedom in the mind of the public, and which may be esteemed to have been useful in this respect--the manners and opinions of the nation confined the royal authority within barriers which were not less powerful, although they were less conspicuous. religion, the affections of the people, the benevolence of the prince, the sense of honor, family pride, provincial prejudices, custom, and public opinion limited the power of kings, and restrained their authority within an invisible circle. the constitution of nations was despotic at that time, but their manners were free. princes had the right, but they had neither the means nor the desire, of doing whatever they pleased. but what now remains of those barriers which formerly arrested the aggressions of tyranny? since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary which divided good from evil is overthrown; the very elements of the moral world are indeterminate; the princes and the peoples of the earth are guided by chance, and none can define the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license. long revolutions have forever destroyed the respect which surrounded the rulers of the state; and since they have been relieved from the burden of public esteem, princes may henceforward surrender themselves without fear to the seductions of arbitrary power. when kings find that the hearts of their subjects are turned towards them, they are clement, because they are conscious of their strength, and they are chary of the affection of their people, because the affection of their people is the bulwark of the throne. a mutual interchange of good-will then takes place between the prince and the people, which resembles the gracious intercourse of domestic society. the subjects may murmur at the sovereign's decree, but they are grieved to displease him; and the sovereign chastises his subjects with the light hand of parental affection. but when once the spell of royalty is broken in the tumult of revolution; when successive monarchs have crossed the throne, so as alternately to display to the people the weakness of their right and the harshness of their power, the sovereign is no longer regarded by any as the father of the state, and he is feared by all as its master. if he be weak, he is despised; if he be strong, he is detested. he himself is full of animosity and alarm; he finds that he is as a stranger in his own country, and he treats his subjects like conquered enemies. when the provinces and the towns formed so many different nations in the midst of their common country, each of them had a will of its own, which was opposed to the general spirit of subjection; but now that all the parts of the same empire, after having lost their immunities, their customs, their prejudices, their traditions, and their names, are subjected and accustomed to the same laws, it is not more difficult to oppress them collectively than it was formerly to oppress them singly. whilst the nobles enjoyed their power, and indeed long after that power was lost, the honor of aristocracy conferred an extraordinary degree of force upon their personal opposition. they afford instances of men who, notwithstanding their weakness, still entertained a high opinion of their personal value, and dared to cope single-handed with the efforts of the public authority. but at the present day, when all ranks are more and more confounded, when the individual disappears in the throng, and is easily lost in the midst of a common obscurity, when the honor of monarchy has almost lost its empire without being succeeded by public virtue, and when nothing can enable man to rise above himself, who shall say at what point the exigencies of power and the servility of weakness will stop? as long as family feeling was kept alive, the antagonist of oppression was never alone; he looked about him, and found his clients, his hereditary friends, and his kinsfolk. if this support was wanting, he was sustained by his ancestors and animated by his posterity. but when patrimonial estates are divided, and when a few years suffice to confound the distinctions of a race, where can family feeling be found? what force can there be in the customs of a country which has changed and is still perpetually changing, its aspect; in which every act of tyranny has a precedent, and every crime an example; in which there is nothing so old that its antiquity can save it from destruction, and nothing so unparalleled that its novelty can prevent it from being done? what resistance can be offered by manners of so pliant a make that they have already often yielded? what strength can even public opinion have retained, when no twenty persons are connected by a common tie; when not a man, nor a family, nor chartered corporation, nor class, nor free institution, has the power of representing or exerting that opinion; and when every citizen--being equally weak, equally poor, and equally dependent--has only his personal impotence to oppose to the organized force of the government? the annals of france furnish nothing analogous to the condition in which that country might then be thrown. but it may more aptly be assimilated to the times of old, and to those hideous eras of roman oppression, when the manners of the people were corrupted, their traditions obliterated, their habits destroyed, their opinions shaken, and freedom, expelled from the laws, could find no refuge in the land; when nothing protected the citizens, and the citizens no longer protected themselves; when human nature was the sport of man, and princes wearied out the clemency of heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects. those who hope to revive the monarchy of henry iv or of louis xiv, appear to me to be afflicted with mental blindness; and when i consider the present condition of several european nations--a condition to which all the others tend--i am led to believe that they will soon be left with no other alternative than democratic liberty, or the tyranny of the caesars. *n [footnote n: [this prediction of the return of france to imperial despotism, and of the true character of that despotic power, was written in , and realized to the letter in .]] and indeed it is deserving of consideration, whether men are to be entirely emancipated or entirely enslaved; whether their rights are to be made equal, or wholly taken away from them. if the rulers of society were reduced either gradually to raise the crowd to their own level, or to sink the citizens below that of humanity, would not the doubts of many be resolved, the consciences of many be healed, and the community prepared to make great sacrifices with little difficulty? in that case, the gradual growth of democratic manners and institutions should be regarded, not as the best, but as the only means of preserving freedom; and without liking the government of democracy, it might be adopted as the most applicable and the fairest remedy for the present ills of society. it is difficult to associate a people in the work of government; but it is still more difficult to supply it with experience, and to inspire it with the feelings which it requires in order to govern well. i grant that the caprices of democracy are perpetual; its instruments are rude; its laws imperfect. but if it were true that soon no just medium would exist between the empire of democracy and the dominion of a single arm, should we not rather incline towards the former than submit voluntarily to the latter? and if complete equality be our fate, is it not better to be levelled by free institutions than by despotic power? those who, after having read this book, should imagine that my intention in writing it has been to propose the laws and manners of the anglo-americans for the imitation of all democratic peoples, would commit a very great mistake; they must have paid more attention to the form than to the substance of my ideas. my aim has been to show, by the example of america, that laws, and especially manners, may exist which will allow a democratic people to remain free. but i am very far from thinking that we ought to follow the example of the american democracy, and copy the means which it has employed to attain its ends; for i am well aware of the influence which the nature of a country and its political precedents exercise upon a constitution; and i should regard it as a great misfortune for mankind if liberty were to exist all over the world under the same forms. but i am of opinion that if we do not succeed in gradually introducing democratic institutions into france, and if we despair of imparting to the citizens those ideas and sentiments which first prepare them for freedom, and afterwards allow them to enjoy it, there will be no independence at all, either for the middling classes or the nobility, for the poor or for the rich, but an equal tyranny over all; and i foresee that if the peaceable empire of the majority be not founded amongst us in time, we shall sooner or later arrive at the unlimited authority of a single despot. chapter xviii: future condition of three races in the united states--part i the present and probable future condition of the three races which inhabit the territory of the united states the principal part of the task which i had imposed upon myself is now performed. i have shown, as far as i was able, the laws and the manners of the american democracy. here i might stop; but the reader would perhaps feel that i had not satisfied his expectations. the absolute supremacy of democracy is not all that we meet with in america; the inhabitants of the new world may be considered from more than one point of view. in the course of this work my subject has often led me to speak of the indians and the negroes; but i have never been able to stop in order to show what place these two races occupy in the midst of the democratic people whom i was engaged in describing. i have mentioned in what spirit, and according to what laws, the anglo-american union was formed; but i could only glance at the dangers which menace that confederation, whilst it was equally impossible for me to give a detailed account of its chances of duration, independently of its laws and manners. when speaking of the united republican states, i hazarded no conjectures upon the permanence of republican forms in the new world, and when making frequent allusion to the commercial activity which reigns in the union, i was unable to inquire into the future condition of the americans as a commercial people. these topics are collaterally connected with my subject without forming a part of it; they are american without being democratic; and to portray democracy has been my principal aim. it was therefore necessary to postpone these questions, which i now take up as the proper termination of my work. the territory now occupied or claimed by the american union spreads from the shores of the atlantic to those of the pacific ocean. on the east and west its limits are those of the continent itself. on the south it advances nearly to the tropic, and it extends upwards to the icy regions of the north. the human beings who are scattered over this space do not form, as in europe, so many branches of the same stock. three races, naturally distinct, and, i might almost say, hostile to each other, are discoverable amongst them at the first glance. almost insurmountable barriers had been raised between them by education and by law, as well as by their origin and outward characteristics; but fortune has brought them together on the same soil, where, although they are mixed, they do not amalgamate, and each race fulfils its destiny apart. amongst these widely differing families of men, the first which attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power and in enjoyment, is the white or european, the man pre-eminent; and in subordinate grades, the negro and the indian. these two unhappy races have nothing in common; neither birth, nor features, nor language, nor habits. their only resemblance lies in their misfortunes. both of them occupy an inferior rank in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate, at any rate, with the same authors. if we reasoned from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the european is to the other races of mankind, what man is to the lower animals;--he makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them. oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. the negro of the united states has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to africa, without acquiring any claim to european privileges. but he remains half way between the two communities; sold by the one, repulsed by the other; finding not a spot in the universe to call by the name of country, except the faint image of a home which the shelter of his master's roof affords. the negro has no family; woman is merely the temporary companion of his pleasures, and his children are upon an equality with himself from the moment of their birth. am i to call it a proof of god's mercy or a visitation of his wrath, that man in certain states appears to be insensible to his extreme wretchedness, and almost affects, with a depraved taste, the cause of his misfortunes? the negro, who is plunged in this abyss of evils, scarcely feels his own calamitous situation. violence made him a slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him: his understanding is degraded to the level of his soul. the negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born: nay, he may have been purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery before he began his existence. equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to himself, he learns, with his first notions of existence, that he is the property of another, who has an interest in preserving his life, and that the care of it does not devolve upon himself; even the power of thought appears to him a useless gift of providence, and he quietly enjoys the privileges of his debasement. if he becomes free, independence is often felt by him to be a heavier burden than slavery; for having learned, in the course of his life, to submit to everything except reason, he is too much unacquainted with her dictates to obey them. a thousand new desires beset him, and he is destitute of the knowledge and energy necessary to resist them: these are masters which it is necessary to contend with, and he has learnt only to submit and obey. in short, he sinks to such a depth of wretchedness, that while servitude brutalizes, liberty destroys him. oppression has been no less fatal to the indian than to the negro race, but its effects are different. before the arrival of white men in the new world, the inhabitants of north america lived quietly in their woods, enduring the vicissitudes and practising the virtues and vices common to savage nations. the europeans, having dispersed the indian tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering life full of inexpressible sufferings. savage nations are only controlled by opinion and by custom. when the north american indians had lost the sentiment of attachment to their country; when their families were dispersed, their traditions obscured, and the chain of their recollections broken; when all their habits were changed, and their wants increased beyond measure, european tyranny rendered them more disorderly and less civilized than they were before. the moral and physical condition of these tribes continually grew worse, and they became more barbarous as they became more wretched. nevertheless, the europeans have not been able to metamorphose the character of the indians; and though they have had power to destroy them, they have never been able to make them submit to the rules of civilized society. the lot of the negro is placed on the extreme limit of servitude, while that of the indian lies on the uttermost verge of liberty; and slavery does not produce more fatal effects upon the first, than independence upon the second. the negro has lost all property in his own person, and he cannot dispose of his existence without committing a sort of fraud: but the savage is his own master as soon as he is able to act; parental authority is scarcely known to him; he has never bent his will to that of any of his kind, nor learned the difference between voluntary obedience and a shameful subjection; and the very name of law is unknown to him. to be free, with him, signifies to escape from all the shackles of society. as he delights in this barbarous independence, and would rather perish than sacrifice the least part of it, civilization has little power over him. the negro makes a thousand fruitless efforts to insinuate himself amongst men who repulse him; he conforms to the tastes of his oppressors, adopts their opinions, and hopes by imitating them to form a part of their community. having been told from infancy that his race is naturally inferior to that of the whites, he assents to the proposition and is ashamed of his own nature. in each of his features he discovers a trace of slavery, and, if it were in his power, he would willingly rid himself of everything that makes him what he is. the indian, on the contrary, has his imagination inflated with the pretended nobility of his origin, and lives and dies in the midst of these dreams of pride. far from desiring to conform his habits to ours, he loves his savage life as the distinguishing mark of his race, and he repels every advance to civilization, less perhaps from the hatred which he entertains for it, than from a dread of resembling the europeans. *a while he has nothing to oppose to our perfection in the arts but the resources of the desert, to our tactics nothing but undisciplined courage; whilst our well-digested plans are met by the spontaneous instincts of savage life, who can wonder if he fails in this unequal contest? [footnote a: the native of north america retains his opinions and the most insignificant of his habits with a degree of tenacity which has no parallel in history. for more than two hundred years the wandering tribes of north america have had daily intercourse with the whites, and they have never derived from them either a custom or an idea. yet the europeans have exercised a powerful influence over the savages: they have made them more licentious, but not more european. in the summer of i happened to be beyond lake michigan, at a place called green bay, which serves as the extreme frontier between the united states and the indians on the north-western side. here i became acquainted with an american officer, major h., who, after talking to me at length on the inflexibility of the indian character, related the following fact:--"i formerly knew a young indian," said he, "who had been educated at a college in new england, where he had greatly distinguished himself, and had acquired the external appearance of a member of civilized society. when the war broke out between ourselves and the english in , i saw this young man again; he was serving in our army, at the head of the warriors of his tribe, for the indians were admitted amongst the ranks of the americans, upon condition that they would abstain from their horrible custom of scalping their victims. on the evening of the battle of . . ., c. came and sat himself down by the fire of our bivouac. i asked him what had been his fortune that day: he related his exploits; and growing warm and animated by the recollection of them, he concluded by suddenly opening the breast of his coat, saying, 'you must not betray me--see here!' and i actually beheld," said the major, "between his body and his shirt, the skin and hair of an english head, still dripping with gore."] the negro, who earnestly desires to mingle his race with that of the european, cannot effect if; while the indian, who might succeed to a certain extent, disdains to make the attempt. the servility of the one dooms him to slavery, the pride of the other to death. i remember that while i was travelling through the forests which still cover the state of alabama, i arrived one day at the log house of a pioneer. i did not wish to penetrate into the dwelling of the american, but retired to rest myself for a while on the margin of a spring, which was not far off, in the woods. while i was in this place (which was in the neighborhood of the creek territory), an indian woman appeared, followed by a negress, and holding by the hand a little white girl of five or six years old, whom i took to be the daughter of the pioneer. a sort of barbarous luxury set off the costume of the indian; rings of metal were hanging from her nostrils and ears; her hair, which was adorned with glass beads, fell loosely upon her shoulders; and i saw that she was not married, for she still wore that necklace of shells which the bride always deposits on the nuptial couch. the negress was clad in squalid european garments. they all three came and seated themselves upon the banks of the fountain; and the young indian, taking the child in her arms, lavished upon her such fond caresses as mothers give; while the negress endeavored by various little artifices to attract the attention of the young creole. the child displayed in her slightest gestures a consciousness of superiority which formed a strange contrast with her infantine weakness; as if she received the attentions of her companions with a sort of condescension. the negress was seated on the ground before her mistress, watching her smallest desires, and apparently divided between strong affection for the child and servile fear; whilst the savage displayed, in the midst of her tenderness, an air of freedom and of pride which was almost ferocious. i had approached the group, and i contemplated them in silence; but my curiosity was probably displeasing to the indian woman, for she suddenly rose, pushed the child roughly from her, and giving me an angry look plunged into the thicket. i had often chanced to see individuals met together in the same place, who belonged to the three races of men which people north america. i had perceived from many different results the preponderance of the whites. but in the picture which i have just been describing there was something peculiarly touching; a bond of affection here united the oppressors with the oppressed, and the effort of nature to bring them together rendered still more striking the immense distance placed between them by prejudice and by law. the present and probable future condition of the indian tribes which inhabit the territory possessed by the union gradual disappearance of the native tribes--manner in which it takes place--miseries accompanying the forced migrations of the indians--the savages of north america had only two ways of escaping destruction; war or civilization--they are no longer able to make war--reasons why they refused to become civilized when it was in their power, and why they cannot become so now that they desire it--instance of the creeks and cherokees--policy of the particular states towards these indians--policy of the federal government. none of the indian tribes which formerly inhabited the territory of new england--the naragansetts, the mohicans, the pecots--have any existence but in the recollection of man. the lenapes, who received william penn, a hundred and fifty years ago, upon the banks of the delaware, have disappeared; and i myself met with the last of the iroquois, who were begging alms. the nations i have mentioned formerly covered the country to the sea-coast; but a traveller at the present day must penetrate more than a hundred leagues into the interior of the continent to find an indian. not only have these wild tribes receded, but they are destroyed; *b and as they give way or perish, an immense and increasing people fills their place. there is no instance upon record of so prodigious a growth, or so rapid a destruction: the manner in which the latter change takes place is not difficult to describe. [footnote b: in the thirteen original states there are only , indians remaining. (see legislative documents, th congress, no. , p. .) [the decrease in now far greater, and is verging on extinction. see page of this volume.]] when the indians were the sole inhabitants of the wilds from whence they have since been expelled, their wants were few. their arms were of their own manufacture, their only drink was the water of the brook, and their clothes consisted of the skins of animals, whose flesh furnished them with food. the europeans introduced amongst the savages of north america fire-arms, ardent spirits, and iron: they taught them to exchange for manufactured stuffs, the rough garments which had previously satisfied their untutored simplicity. having acquired new tastes, without the arts by which they could be gratified, the indians were obliged to have recourse to the workmanship of the whites; but in return for their productions the savage had nothing to offer except the rich furs which still abounded in his woods. hence the chase became necessary, not merely to provide for his subsistence, but in order to procure the only objects of barter which he could furnish to europe. *c whilst the wants of the natives were thus increasing, their resources continued to diminish. [footnote c: messrs. clarke and cass, in their report to congress on february , , p. , expressed themselves thus:--"the time when the indians generally could supply themselves with food and clothing, without any of the articles of civilized life, has long since passed away. the more remote tribes, beyond the mississippi, who live where immense herds of buffalo are yet to be found and who follow those animals in their periodical migrations, could more easily than any others recur to the habits of their ancestors, and live without the white man or any of his manufactures. but the buffalo is constantly receding. the smaller animals, the bear, the deer, the beaver, the otter, the muskrat, etc., principally minister to the comfort and support of the indians; and these cannot be taken without guns, ammunition, and traps. among the northwestern indians particularly, the labor of supplying a family with food is excessive. day after day is spent by the hunter without success, and during this interval his family must subsist upon bark or roots, or perish. want and misery are around them and among them. many die every winter from actual starvation." the indians will not live as europeans live, and yet they can neither subsist without them, nor exactly after the fashion of their fathers. this is demonstrated by a fact which i likewise give upon official authority. some indians of a tribe on the banks of lake superior had killed a european; the american government interdicted all traffic with the tribe to which the guilty parties belonged, until they were delivered up to justice. this measure had the desired effect.] from the moment when a european settlement is formed in the neighborhood of the territory occupied by the indians, the beasts of chase take the alarm. *d thousands of savages, wandering in the forests and destitute of any fixed dwelling, did not disturb them; but as soon as the continuous sounds of european labor are heard in their neighborhood, they begin to flee away, and retire to the west, where their instinct teaches them that they will find deserts of immeasurable extent. "the buffalo is constantly receding," say messrs. clarke and cass in their report of the year ; "a few years since they approached the base of the alleghany; and a few years hence they may even be rare upon the immense plains which extend to the base of the rocky mountains." i have been assured that this effect of the approach of the whites is often felt at two hundred leagues' distance from their frontier. their influence is thus exerted over tribes whose name is unknown to them; and who suffer the evils of usurpation long before they are acquainted with the authors of their distress. *e [footnote d: "five years ago," (says volney in his "tableau des etats-unis," p. ) "in going from vincennes to kaskaskia, a territory which now forms part of the state of illinois, but which at the time i mention was completely wild ( ), you could not cross a prairie without seeing herds of from four to five hundred buffaloes. there are now none remaining; they swam across the mississippi to escape from the hunters, and more particularly from the bells of the american cows."] [footnote e: the truth of what i here advance may be easily proved by consulting the tabular statement of indian tribes inhabiting the united states and their territories. (legislative documents, th congress, no. , pp. - .) it is there shown that the tribes in the centre of america are rapidly decreasing, although the europeans are still at a considerable distance from them.] bold adventurers soon penetrate into the country the indians have deserted, and when they have advanced about fifteen or twenty leagues from the extreme frontiers of the whites, they begin to build habitations for civilized beings in the midst of the wilderness. this is done without difficulty, as the territory of a hunting-nation is ill-defined; it is the common property of the tribe, and belongs to no one in particular, so that individual interests are not concerned in the protection of any part of it. a few european families, settled in different situations at a considerable distance from each other, soon drive away the wild animals which remain between their places of abode. the indians, who had previously lived in a sort of abundance, then find it difficult to subsist, and still more difficult to procure the articles of barter which they stand in need of. to drive away their game is to deprive them of the means of existence, as effectually as if the fields of our agriculturists were stricken with barrenness; and they are reduced, like famished wolves, to prowl through the forsaken woods in quest of prey. their instinctive love of their country attaches them to the soil which gave them birth, *f even after it has ceased to yield anything but misery and death. at length they are compelled to acquiesce, and to depart: they follow the traces of the elk, the buffalo, and the beaver, and are guided by these wild animals in the choice of their future country. properly speaking, therefore, it is not the europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of america; it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted to modern discovery! [footnote f: "the indians," say messrs. clarke and cass in their report to congress, p. , "are attached to their country by the same feelings which bind us to ours; and, besides, there are certain superstitious notions connected with the alienation of what the great spirit gave to their ancestors, which operate strongly upon the tribes who have made few or no cessions, but which are gradually weakened as our intercourse with them is extended. 'we will not sell the spot which contains the bones of our fathers,' is almost always the first answer to a proposition for a sale."] it is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which attend these forced emigrations. they are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which receive them with jealous hostility. hunger is in the rear; war awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. in the hope of escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each individual endeavors to procure the means of supporting his existence in solitude and secrecy, living in the immensity of the desert like an outcast in civilized society. the social tie, which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they have lost their country, and their people soon desert them: their very families are obliterated; the names they bore in common are forgotten, their language perishes, and all traces of their origin disappear. their nation has ceased to exist, except in the recollection of the antiquaries of america and a few of the learned of europe. i should be sorry to have my reader suppose that i am coloring the picture too highly; i saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery which i have been describing; and i was the witness of sufferings which i have not the power to portray. at the end of the year , whilst i was on the left bank of the mississippi at a place named by europeans, memphis, there arrived a numerous band of choctaws (or chactas, as they are called by the french in louisiana). these savages had left their country, and were endeavoring to gain the right bank of the mississippi, where they hoped to find an asylum which had been promised them by the american government. it was then the middle of winter, and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice. the indians had their families with them; and they brought in their train the wounded and sick, with children newly born, and old men upon the verge of death. they possessed neither tents nor wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. i saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance. no cry, no sob was heard amongst the assembled crowd; all were silent. their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. the indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. as soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they set up a dismal howl, and, plunging all together into the icy waters of the mississippi, they swam after the boat. the ejectment of the indians very often takes place at the present day, in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. when the european population begins to approach the limit of the desert inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the united states usually dispatches envoys to them, who assemble the indians in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with them, accost them in the following manner: "what have you to do in the land of your fathers? before long, you must dig up their bones in order to live. in what respect is the country you inhabit better than another? are there no woods, marshes, or prairies, except where you dwell? and can you live nowhere but under your own sun? beyond those mountains which you see at the horizon, beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the west, there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found in great abundance; sell your lands to us, and go to live happily in those solitudes." after holding this language, they spread before the eyes of the indians firearms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, earrings, and looking-glasses. *g if, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their required consent, and that the government itself will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights. what are they to do? half convinced, and half compelled, they go to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not let them remain ten years in tranquillity. in this manner do the americans obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of europe could not purchase. *h [footnote g: see, in the legislative documents of congress (doc. ), the narrative of what takes place on these occasions. this curious passage is from the above-mentioned report, made to congress by messrs. clarke and cass in february, . mr. cass is now the secretary of war. "the indians," says the report, "reach the treaty-ground poor and almost naked. large quantities of goods are taken there by the traders, and are seen and examined by the indians. the women and children become importunate to have their wants supplied, and their influence is soon exerted to induce a sale. their improvidence is habitual and unconquerable. the gratification of his immediate wants and desires is the ruling passion of an indian. the expectation of future advantages seldom produces much effect. the experience of the past is lost, and the prospects of the future disregarded. it would be utterly hopeless to demand a cession of land, unless the means were at hand of gratifying their immediate wants; and when their condition and circumstances are fairly considered, it ought not to surprise us that they are so anxious to relieve themselves."] [footnote h: on may , , mr. edward everett affirmed before the house of representatives, that the americans had already acquired by treaty, to the east and west of the mississippi, , , of acres. in the osages gave up , , acres for an annual payment of $ , . in the quapaws yielded up , , acres for $ , . they reserved for themselves a territory of , , acres for a hunting-ground. a solemn oath was taken that it should be respected: but before long it was invaded like the rest. mr. bell, in his report of the committee on indian affairs, february , , has these words:--"to pay an indian tribe what their ancient hunting-grounds are worth to them, after the game is fled or destroyed, as a mode of appropriating wild lands claimed by indians, has been found more convenient, and certainly it is more agreeable to the forms of justice, as well as more merciful, than to assert the possession of them by the sword. thus the practice of buying indian titles is but the substitute which humanity and expediency have imposed, in place of the sword, in arriving at the actual enjoyment of property claimed by the right of discovery, and sanctioned by the natural superiority allowed to the claims of civilized communities over those of savage tribes. up to the present time so invariable has been the operation of certain causes, first in diminishing the value of forest lands to the indians, and secondly in disposing them to sell readily, that the plan of buying their right of occupancy has never threatened to retard, in any perceptible degree, the prosperity of any of the states." (legislative documents, st congress, no. , p. .)] chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part ii these are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable. i believe that the indian nations of north america are doomed to perish; and that whenever the europeans shall be established on the shores of the pacific ocean, that race of men will be no more. *i the indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the europeans or become their equals. [footnote i: this seems, indeed, to be the opinion of almost all american statesmen. "judging of the future by the past," says mr. cass, "we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their numbers, and their eventual extinction, unless our border should become stationary, and they be removed beyond it, or unless some radical change should take place in the principles of our intercourse with them, which it is easier to hope for than to expect."] at the first settlement of the colonies they might have found it possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the small bodies of strangers who landed on their continent. *j they several times attempted to do it, and were on the point of succeeding; but the disproportion of their resources, at the present day, when compared with those of the whites, is too great to allow such an enterprise to be thought of. nevertheless, there do arise from time to time among the indians men of penetration, who foresee the final destiny which awaits the native population, and who exert themselves to unite all the tribes in common hostility to the europeans; but their efforts are unavailing. those tribes which are in the neighborhood of the whites, are too much weakened to offer an effectual resistance; whilst the others, giving way to that childish carelessness of the morrow which characterizes savage life, wait for the near approach of danger before they prepare to meet it; some are unable, the others are unwilling, to exert themselves. [footnote j: amongst other warlike enterprises, there was one of the wampanaogs, and other confederate tribes, under metacom in , against the colonists of new england; the english were also engaged in war in virginia in .] it is easy to foresee that the indians will never conform to civilization; or that it will be too late, whenever they may be inclined to make the experiment. civilization is the result of a long social process which takes place in the same spot, and is handed down from one generation to another, each one profiting by the experience of the last. of all nations, those submit to civilization with the most difficulty which habitually live by the chase. pastoral tribes, indeed, often change their place of abode; but they follow a regular order in their migrations, and often return again to their old stations, whilst the dwelling of the hunter varies with that of the animals he pursues. several attempts have been made to diffuse knowledge amongst the indians, without controlling their wandering propensities; by the jesuits in canada, and by the puritans in new england; *k but none of these endeavors were crowned by any lasting success. civilization began in the cabin, but it soon retired to expire in the woods. the great error of these legislators of the indians was their not understanding that, in order to succeed in civilizing a people, it is first necessary to fix it; which cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil; the indians ought in the first place to have been accustomed to agriculture. but not only are they destitute of this indispensable preliminary to civilization, they would even have great difficulty in acquiring it. men who have once abandoned themselves to the restless and adventurous life of the hunter, feel an insurmountable disgust for the constant and regular labor which tillage requires. we see this proved in the bosom of our own society; but it is far more visible among peoples whose partiality for the chase is a part of their national character. [footnote k: see the "histoire de la nouvelle france," by charlevoix, and the work entitled "lettres edifiantes."] independently of this general difficulty, there is another, which applies peculiarly to the indians; they consider labor not merely as an evil, but as a disgrace; so that their pride prevents them from becoming civilized, as much as their indolence. *l [footnote l: "in all the tribes," says volney, in his "tableau des etats-unis," p. , "there still exists a generation of old warriors, who cannot forbear, when they see their countrymen using the hoe, from exclaiming against the degradation of ancient manners, and asserting that the savages owe their decline to these innovations; adding, that they have only to return to their primitive habits in order to recover their power and their glory."] there is no indian so wretched as not to retain under his hut of bark a lofty idea of his personal worth; he considers the cares of industry and labor as degrading occupations; he compares the husbandman to the ox which traces the furrow; and even in our most ingenious handicraft, he can see nothing but the labor of slaves. not that he is devoid of admiration for the power and intellectual greatness of the whites; but although the result of our efforts surprises him, he contemns the means by which we obtain it; and while he acknowledges our ascendancy, he still believes in his superiority. war and hunting are the only pursuits which appear to him worthy to be the occupations of a man. *m the indian, in the dreary solitude of his woods, cherishes the same ideas, the same opinions as the noble of the middle ages in his castle, and he only requires to become a conqueror to complete the resemblance; thus, however strange it may seem, it is in the forests of the new world, and not amongst the europeans who people its coasts, that the ancient prejudices of europe are still in existence. [footnote m: the following description occurs in an official document: "until a young man has been engaged with an enemy, and has performed some acts of valor, he gains no consideration, but is regarded nearly as a woman. in their great war-dances all the warriors in succession strike the post, as it is called, and recount their exploits. on these occasions their auditory consists of the kinsmen, friends, and comrades of the narrator. the profound impression which his discourse produces on them is manifested by the silent attention it receives, and by the loud shouts which hail its termination. the young man who finds himself at such a meeting without anything to recount is very unhappy; and instances have sometimes occurred of young warriors, whose passions had been thus inflamed, quitting the war-dance suddenly, and going off alone to seek for trophies which they might exhibit, and adventures which they might be allowed to relate."] more than once, in the course of this work, i have endeavored to explain the prodigious influence which the social condition appears to exercise upon the laws and the manners of men; and i beg to add a few words on the same subject. when i perceive the resemblance which exists between the political institutions of our ancestors, the germans, and of the wandering tribes of north america; between the customs described by tacitus, and those of which i have sometimes been a witness, i cannot help thinking that the same cause has brought about the same results in both hemispheres; and that in the midst of the apparent diversity of human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be discovered, from which all the others are derived. in what we usually call the german institutions, then, i am inclined only to perceive barbarian habits; and the opinions of savages in what we style feudal principles. however strongly the vices and prejudices of the north american indians may be opposed to their becoming agricultural and civilized, necessity sometimes obliges them to it. several of the southern nations, and amongst others the cherokees and the creeks, *n were surrounded by europeans, who had landed on the shores of the atlantic; and who, either descending the ohio or proceeding up the mississippi, arrived simultaneously upon their borders. these tribes have not been driven from place to place, like their northern brethren; but they have been gradually enclosed within narrow limits, like the game within the thicket, before the huntsmen plunge into the interior. the indians who were thus placed between civilization and death, found themselves obliged to live by ignominious labor like the whites. they took to agriculture, and without entirely forsaking their old habits or manners, sacrificed only as much as was necessary to their existence. [footnote n: these nations are now swallowed up in the states of georgia, tennessee, alabama, and mississippi. there were formerly in the south four great nations (remnants of which still exist), the choctaws, the chickasaws, the creeks, and the cherokees. the remnants of these four nations amounted, in , to about , individuals. it is computed that there are now remaining in the territory occupied or claimed by the anglo-american union about , indians. (see proceedings of the indian board in the city of new york.) the official documents supplied to congress make the number amount to , . the reader who is curious to know the names and numerical strength of all the tribes which inhabit the anglo-american territory should consult the documents i refer to. (legislative documents, th congress, no. , pp. - .) [in the census of it is stated that the indian population of the united states is only , , of whom , are in california.]] the cherokees went further; they created a written language; established a permanent form of government; and as everything proceeds rapidly in the new world, before they had all of them clothes, they set up a newspaper. *o [footnote o: i brought back with me to france one or two copies of this singular publication.] the growth of european habits has been remarkably accelerated among these indians by the mixed race which has sprung up. *p deriving intelligence from their father's side, without entirely losing the savage customs of the mother, the half-blood forms the natural link between civilization and barbarism. wherever this race has multiplied the savage state has become modified, and a great change has taken place in the manners of the people. *q [footnote p: see in the report of the committee on indian affairs, st congress, no. , p. , the reasons for the multiplication of indians of mixed blood among the cherokees. the principal cause dates from the war of independence. many anglo-americans of georgia, having taken the side of england, were obliged to retreat among the indians, where they married.] [footnote q: unhappily the mixed race has been less numerous and less influential in north america than in any other country. the american continent was peopled by two great nations of europe, the french and the english. the former were not slow in connecting themselves with the daughters of the natives, but there was an unfortunate affinity between the indian character and their own: instead of giving the tastes and habits of civilized life to the savages, the french too often grew passionately fond of the state of wild freedom they found them in. they became the most dangerous of the inhabitants of the desert, and won the friendship of the indian by exaggerating his vices and his virtues. m. de senonville, the governor of canada, wrote thus to louis xiv in : "it has long been believed that in order to civilize the savages we ought to draw them nearer to us. but there is every reason to suppose we have been mistaken. those which have been brought into contact with us have not become french, and the french who have lived among them are changed into savages, affecting to dress and live like them." ("history of new france," by charlevoix, vol. ii., p. .) the englishman, on the contrary, continuing obstinately attached to the customs and the most insignificant habits of his forefathers, has remained in the midst of the american solitudes just what he was in the bosom of european cities; he would not allow of any communication with savages whom he despised, and avoided with care the union of his race with theirs. thus while the french exercised no salutary influence over the indians, the english have always remained alien from them.] the success of the cherokees proves that the indians are capable of civilization, but it does not prove that they will succeed in it. this difficulty which the indians find in submitting to civilization proceeds from the influence of a general cause, which it is almost impossible for them to escape. an attentive survey of history demonstrates that, in general, barbarous nations have raised themselves to civilization by degrees, and by their own efforts. whenever they derive knowledge from a foreign people, they stood towards it in the relation of conquerors, and not of a conquered nation. when the conquered nation is enlightened, and the conquerors are half savage, as in the case of the invasion of rome by the northern nations or that of china by the mongols, the power which victory bestows upon the barbarian is sufficient to keep up his importance among civilized men, and permit him to rank as their equal, until he becomes their rival: the one has might on his side, the other has intelligence; the former admires the knowledge and the arts of the conquered, the latter envies the power of the conquerors. the barbarians at length admit civilized man into their palaces, and he in turn opens his schools to the barbarians. but when the side on which the physical force lies, also possesses an intellectual preponderance, the conquered party seldom become civilized; it retreats, or is destroyed. it may therefore be said, in a general way, that savages go forth in arms to seek knowledge, but that they do not receive it when it comes to them. if the indian tribes which now inhabit the heart of the continent could summon up energy enough to attempt to civilize themselves, they might possibly succeed. superior already to the barbarous nations which surround them, they would gradually gain strength and experience, and when the europeans should appear upon their borders, they would be in a state, if not to maintain their independence, at least to assert their right to the soil, and to incorporate themselves with the conquerors. but it is the misfortune of indians to be brought into contact with a civilized people, which is also (it must be owned) the most avaricious nation on the globe, whilst they are still semi-barbarian: to find despots in their instructors, and to receive knowledge from the hand of oppression. living in the freedom of the woods, the north american indian was destitute, but he had no feeling of inferiority towards anyone; as soon, however, as he desires to penetrate into the social scale of the whites, he takes the lowest rank in society, for he enters, ignorant and poor, within the pale of science and wealth. after having led a life of agitation, beset with evils and dangers, but at the same time filled with proud emotions, *r he is obliged to submit to a wearisome, obscure, and degraded state; and to gain the bread which nourishes him by hard and ignoble labor; such are in his eyes the only results of which civilization can boast: and even this much he is not sure to obtain. [footnote r: there is in the adventurous life of the hunter a certain irresistible charm, which seizes the heart of man and carries him away in spite of reason and experience. this is plainly shown by the memoirs of tanner. tanner is a european who was carried away at the age of six by the indians, and has remained thirty years with them in the woods. nothing can be conceived more appalling that the miseries which he describes. he tells us of tribes without a chief, families without a nation to call their own, men in a state of isolation, wrecks of powerful tribes wandering at random amid the ice and snow and desolate solitudes of canada. hunger and cold pursue them; every day their life is in jeopardy. amongst these men, manners have lost their empire, traditions are without power. they become more and more savage. tanner shared in all these miseries; he was aware of his european origin; he was not kept away from the whites by force; on the contrary, he came every year to trade with them, entered their dwellings, and witnessed their enjoyments; he knew that whenever he chose to return to civilized life he was perfectly able to do so--and he remained thirty years in the deserts. when he came into civilized society he declared that the rude existence which he described, had a secret charm for him which he was unable to define: he returned to it again and again: at length he abandoned it with poignant regret; and when he was at length fixed among the whites, several of his children refused to share his tranquil and easy situation. i saw tanner myself at the lower end of lake superior; he seemed to me to be more like a savage than a civilized being. his book is written without either taste or order; but he gives, even unconsciously, a lively picture of the prejudices, the passions, the vices, and, above all, of the destitution in which he lived.] when the indians undertake to imitate their european neighbors, and to till the earth like the settlers, they are immediately exposed to a very formidable competition. the white man is skilled in the craft of agriculture; the indian is a rough beginner in an art with which he is unacquainted. the former reaps abundant crops without difficulty, the latter meets with a thousand obstacles in raising the fruits of the earth. the european is placed amongst a population whose wants he knows and partakes. the savage is isolated in the midst of a hostile people, with whose manners, language, and laws he is imperfectly acquainted, but without whose assistance he cannot live. he can only procure the materials of comfort by bartering his commodities against the goods of the european, for the assistance of his countrymen is wholly insufficient to supply his wants. when the indian wishes to sell the produce of his labor, he cannot always meet with a purchaser, whilst the european readily finds a market; and the former can only produce at a considerable cost that which the latter vends at a very low rate. thus the indian has no sooner escaped those evils to which barbarous nations are exposed, than he is subjected to the still greater miseries of civilized communities; and he finds is scarcely less difficult to live in the midst of our abundance, than in the depth of his own wilderness. he has not yet lost the habits of his erratic life; the traditions of his fathers and his passion for the chase are still alive within him. the wild enjoyments which formerly animated him in the woods, painfully excite his troubled imagination; and his former privations appear to be less keen, his former perils less appalling. he contrasts the independence which he possessed amongst his equals with the servile position which he occupies in civilized society. on the other hand, the solitudes which were so long his free home are still at hand; a few hours' march will bring him back to them once more. the whites offer him a sum, which seems to him to be considerable, for the ground which he has begun to clear. this money of the europeans may possibly furnish him with the means of a happy and peaceful subsistence in remoter regions; and he quits the plough, resumes his native arms, and returns to the wilderness forever. *s the condition of the creeks and cherokees, to which i have already alluded, sufficiently corroborates the truth of this deplorable picture. [footnote s: the destructive influence of highly civilized nations upon others which are less so, has been exemplified by the europeans themselves. about a century ago the french founded the town of vincennes up on the wabash, in the middle of the desert; and they lived there in great plenty until the arrival of the american settlers, who first ruined the previous inhabitants by their competition, and afterwards purchased their lands at a very low rate. at the time when m. de volney, from whom i borrow these details, passed through vincennes, the number of the french was reduced to a hundred individuals, most of whom were about to pass over to louisiana or to canada. these french settlers were worthy people, but idle and uninstructed: they had contracted many of the habits of savages. the americans, who were perhaps their inferiors, in a moral point of view, were immeasurably superior to them in intelligence: they were industrious, well informed, rich, and accustomed to govern their own community. i myself saw in canada, where the intellectual difference between the two races is less striking, that the english are the masters of commerce and manufacture in the canadian country, that they spread on all sides, and confine the french within limits which scarcely suffice to contain them. in like manner, in louisiana, almost all activity in commerce and manufacture centres in the hands of the anglo-americans. but the case of texas is still more striking: the state of texas is a part of mexico, and lies upon the frontier between that country and the united states. in the course of the last few years the anglo-americans have penetrated into this province, which is still thinly peopled; they purchase land, they produce the commodities of the country, and supplant the original population. it may easily be foreseen that if mexico takes no steps to check this change, the province of texas will very shortly cease to belong to that government. if the different degrees--comparatively so slight--which exist in european civilization produce results of such magnitude, the consequences which must ensue from the collision of the most perfect european civilization with indian savages may readily be conceived.] the indians, in the little which they have done, have unquestionably displayed as much natural genius as the peoples of europe in their most important designs; but nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence and their zeal. whilst the savages were engaged in the work of civilization, the europeans continued to surround them on every side, and to confine them within narrower limits; the two races gradually met, and they are now in immediate juxtaposition to each other. the indian is already superior to his barbarous parent, but he is still very far below his white neighbor. with their resources and acquired knowledge, the europeans soon appropriated to themselves most of the advantages which the natives might have derived from the possession of the soil; they have settled in the country, they have purchased land at a very low rate or have occupied it by force, and the indians have been ruined by a competition which they had not the means of resisting. they were isolated in their own country, and their race only constituted a colony of troublesome aliens in the midst of a numerous and domineering people. *t [footnote t: see in the legislative documents ( st congress, no. ) instances of excesses of every kind committed by the whites upon the territory of the indians, either in taking possession of a part of their lands, until compelled to retire by the troops of congress, or carrying off their cattle, burning their houses, cutting down their corn, and doing violence to their persons. it appears, nevertheless, from all these documents that the claims of the natives are constantly protected by the government from the abuse of force. the union has a representative agent continually employed to reside among the indians; and the report of the cherokee agent, which is among the documents i have referred to, is almost always favorable to the indians. "the intrusion of whites," he says, "upon the lands of the cherokees would cause ruin to the poor, helpless, and inoffensive inhabitants." and he further remarks upon the attempt of the state of georgia to establish a division line for the purpose of limiting the boundaries of the cherokees, that the line drawn having been made by the whites, and entirely upon ex parte evidence of their several rights, was of no validity whatever.] washington said in one of his messages to congress, "we are more enlightened and more powerful than the indian nations, we are therefore bound in honor to treat them with kindness and even with generosity." but this virtuous and high-minded policy has not been followed. the rapacity of the settlers is usually backed by the tyranny of the government. although the cherokees and the creeks are established upon the territory which they inhabited before the settlement of the europeans, and although the americans have frequently treated with them as with foreign nations, the surrounding states have not consented to acknowledge them as independent peoples, and attempts have been made to subject these children of the woods to anglo-american magistrates, laws, and customs. *u destitution had driven these unfortunate indians to civilization, and oppression now drives them back to their former condition: many of them abandon the soil which they had begun to clear, and return to their savage course of life. [footnote u: in the state of alabama divided the creek territory into counties, and subjected the indian population to the power of european magistrates. chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part iii in the state of mississippi assimilated the choctaws and chickasaws to the white population, and declared that any of them that should take the title of chief would be punished by a fine of $ , and a year's imprisonment. when these laws were enforced upon the choctaws, who inhabited that district, the tribe assembled, their chief communicated to them the intentions of the whites, and read to them some of the laws to which it was intended that they should submit; and they unanimously declared that it was better at once to retreat again into the wilds.] if we consider the tyrannical measures which have been adopted by the legislatures of the southern states, the conduct of their governors, and the decrees of their courts of justice, we shall be convinced that the entire expulsion of the indians is the final result to which the efforts of their policy are directed. the americans of that part of the union look with jealousy upon the aborigines, *v they are aware that these tribes have not yet lost the traditions of savage life, and before civilization has permanently fixed them to the soil, it is intended to force them to recede by reducing them to despair. the creeks and cherokees, oppressed by the several states, have appealed to the central government, which is by no means insensible to their misfortunes, and is sincerely desirous of saving the remnant of the natives, and of maintaining them in the free possession of that territory, which the union is pledged to respect. *w but the several states oppose so formidable a resistance to the execution of this design, that the government is obliged to consent to the extirpation of a few barbarous tribes in order not to endanger the safety of the american union. [footnote v: the georgians, who are so much annoyed by the proximity of the indians, inhabit a territory which does not at present contain more than seven inhabitants to the square mile. in france there are one hundred and sixty-two inhabitants to the same extent of country.] [footnote w: in congress appointed commissioners to visit the arkansas territory, accompanied by a deputation of creeks, choctaws, and chickasaws. this expedition was commanded by messrs. kennerly, m'coy, wash hood, and john bell. see the different reports of the commissioners, and their journal, in the documents of congress, no. , house of representatives.] but the federal government, which is not able to protect the indians, would fain mitigate the hardships of their lot; and, with this intention, proposals have been made to transport them into more remote regions at the public cost. between the thirty-third and thirty-seventh degrees of north latitude, a vast tract of country lies, which has taken the name of arkansas, from the principal river that waters its extent. it is bounded on the one side by the confines of mexico, on the other by the mississippi. numberless streams cross it in every direction; the climate is mild, and the soil productive, but it is only inhabited by a few wandering hordes of savages. the government of the union wishes to transport the broken remnants of the indigenous population of the south to the portion of this country which is nearest to mexico, and at a great distance from the american settlements. we were assured, towards the end of the year , that , indians had already gone down to the shores of the arkansas; and fresh detachments were constantly following them; but congress has been unable to excite a unanimous determination in those whom it is disposed to protect. some, indeed, are willing to quit the seat of oppression, but the most enlightened members of the community refuse to abandon their recent dwellings and their springing crops; they are of opinion that the work of civilization, once interrupted, will never be resumed; they fear that those domestic habits which have been so recently contracted, may be irrevocably lost in the midst of a country which is still barbarous, and where nothing is prepared for the subsistence of an agricultural people; they know that their entrance into those wilds will be opposed by inimical hordes, and that they have lost the energy of barbarians, without acquiring the resources of civilization to resist their attacks. moreover, the indians readily discover that the settlement which is proposed to them is merely a temporary expedient. who can assure them that they will at length be allowed to dwell in peace in their new retreat? the united states pledge themselves to the observance of the obligation; but the territory which they at present occupy was formerly secured to them by the most solemn oaths of anglo-american faith. *x the american government does not indeed rob them of their lands, but it allows perpetual incursions to be made on them. in a few years the same white population which now flocks around them, will track them to the solitudes of the arkansas; they will then be exposed to the same evils without the same remedies, and as the limits of the earth will at last fail them, their only refuge is the grave. [footnote x: the fifth article of the treaty made with the creeks in august, , is in the following words:--"the united states solemnly guarantee to the creek nation all their land within the limits of the united states." the seventh article of the treaty concluded in with the cherokees says:--"the united states solemnly guarantee to the cherokee nation all their lands not hereby ceded." the following article declared that if any citizen of the united states or other settler not of the indian race should establish himself upon the territory of the cherokees, the united states would withdraw their protection from that individual, and give him up to be punished as the cherokee nation should think fit.] the union treats the indians with less cupidity and rigor than the policy of the several states, but the two governments are alike destitute of good faith. the states extend what they are pleased to term the benefits of their laws to the indians, with a belief that the tribes will recede rather than submit; and the central government, which promises a permanent refuge to these unhappy beings is well aware of its inability to secure it to them. *y [footnote y: this does not prevent them from promising in the most solemn manner to do so. see the letter of the president addressed to the creek indians, march , (proceedings of the indian board, in the city of new york, p. ): "beyond the great river mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. there your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows, or the water runs, in peace and plenty. it will be yours forever." the secretary of war, in a letter written to the cherokees, april , , (see the same work, p. ), declares to them that they cannot expect to retain possession of the lands at that time occupied by them, but gives them the most positive assurance of uninterrupted peace if they would remove beyond the mississippi: as if the power which could not grant them protection then, would be able to afford it them hereafter!] thus the tyranny of the states obliges the savages to retire, the union, by its promises and resources, facilitates their retreat; and these measures tend to precisely the same end. *z "by the will of our father in heaven, the governor of the whole world," said the cherokees in their petition to congress, *a "the red man of america has become small, and the white man great and renowned. when the ancestors of the people of these united states first came to the shores of america they found the red man strong: though he was ignorant and savage, yet he received them kindly, and gave them dry land to rest their weary feet. they met in peace, and shook hands in token of friendship. whatever the white man wanted and asked of the indian, the latter willingly gave. at that time the indian was the lord, and the white man the suppliant. but now the scene has changed. the strength of the red man has become weakness. as his neighbors increased in numbers his power became less and less, and now, of the many and powerful tribes who once covered these united states, only a few are to be seen--a few whom a sweeping pestilence has left. the northern tribes, who were once so numerous and powerful, are now nearly extinct. thus it has happened to the red man of america. shall we, who are remnants, share the same fate?" [footnote z: to obtain a correct idea of the policy pursued by the several states and the union with respect to the indians, it is necessary to consult, st, "the laws of the colonial and state governments relating to the indian inhabitants." (see the legislative documents, st congress, no. .) d, the laws of the union on the same subject, and especially that of march , . (see story's "laws of the united states.") d, the report of mr. cass, secretary of war, relative to indian affairs, november , .] [footnote a: december , .] "the land on which we stand we have received as an inheritance from our fathers, who possessed it from time immemorial, as a gift from our common father in heaven. they bequeathed it to us as their children, and we have sacredly kept it, as containing the remains of our beloved men. this right of inheritance we have never ceded nor ever forfeited. permit us to ask what better right can the people have to a country than the right of inheritance and immemorial peaceable possession? we know it is said of late by the state of georgia and by the executive of the united states, that we have forfeited this right; but we think this is said gratuitously. at what time have we made the forfeit? what great crime have we committed, whereby we must forever be divested of our country and rights? was it when we were hostile to the united states, and took part with the king of great britain, during the struggle for independence? if so, why was not this forfeiture declared in the first treaty of peace between the united states and our beloved men? why was not such an article as the following inserted in the treaty:--'the united states give peace to the cherokees, but, for the part they took in the late war, declare them to be but tenants at will, to be removed when the convenience of the states, within whose chartered limits they live, shall require it'? that was the proper time to assume such a possession. but it was not thought of, nor would our forefathers have agreed to any treaty whose tendency was to deprive them of their rights and their country." such is the language of the indians: their assertions are true, their forebodings inevitable. from whichever side we consider the destinies of the aborigines of north america, their calamities appear to be irremediable: if they continue barbarous, they are forced to retire; if they attempt to civilize their manners, the contact of a more civilized community subjects them to oppression and destitution. they perish if they continue to wander from waste to waste, and if they attempt to settle they still must perish; the assistance of europeans is necessary to instruct them, but the approach of europeans corrupts and repels them into savage life; they refuse to change their habits as long as their solitudes are their own, and it is too late to change them when they are constrained to submit. the spaniards pursued the indians with bloodhounds, like wild beasts; they sacked the new world with no more temper or compassion than a city taken by storm; but destruction must cease, and frenzy be stayed; the remnant of the indian population which had escaped the massacre mixed with its conquerors, and adopted in the end their religion and their manners. *b the conduct of the americans of the united states towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. provided that the indians retain their barbarous condition, the americans take no part in their affairs; they treat them as independent nations, and do not possess themselves of their hunting grounds without a treaty of purchase; and if an indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon its territory, they afford it brotherly assistance in transporting it to a grave sufficiently remote from the land of its fathers. [footnote b: the honor of this result is, however, by no means due to the spaniards. if the indian tribes had not been tillers of the ground at the time of the arrival of the europeans, they would unquestionably have been destroyed in south as well as in north america.] the spaniards were unable to exterminate the indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the americans of the united states have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. *c it is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity. [footnote c: see, amongst other documents, the report made by mr. bell in the name of the committee on indian affairs, february , , in which is most logically established and most learnedly proved, that "the fundamental principle that the indians had no right by virtue of their ancient possession either of will or sovereignty, has never been abandoned either expressly or by implication." in perusing this report, which is evidently drawn up by an experienced hand, one is astonished at the facility with which the author gets rid of all arguments founded upon reason and natural right, which he designates as abstract and theoretical principles. the more i contemplate the difference between civilized and uncivilized man with regard to the principles of justice, the more i observe that the former contests the justice of those rights which the latter simply violates.] [i leave this chapter wholly unchanged, for it has always appeared to me to be one of the most eloquent and touching parts of this book. but it has ceased to be prophetic; the destruction of the indian race in the united states is already consummated. in there remained but , indians in the whole territory of the union, and of these by far the largest part exist in california, michigan, wisconsin, dakota, and new mexico and nevada. in new england, pennsylvania, and new york the race is extinct; and the predictions of m. de tocqueville are fulfilled. --translator's note.] situation of the black population in the united states, and dangers with which its presence threatens the whites why it is more difficult to abolish slavery, and to efface all vestiges of it amongst the moderns than it was amongst the ancients--in the united states the prejudices of the whites against the blacks seem to increase in proportion as slavery is abolished--situation of the negroes in the northern and southern states--why the americans abolish slavery--servitude, which debases the slave, impoverishes the master--contrast between the left and the right bank of the ohio--to what attributable--the black race, as well as slavery, recedes towards the south--explanation of this fact--difficulties attendant upon the abolition of slavery in the south--dangers to come--general anxiety--foundation of a black colony in africa--why the americans of the south increase the hardships of slavery, whilst they are distressed at its continuance. the indians will perish in the same isolated condition in which they have lived; but the destiny of the negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the europeans. these two races are attached to each other without intermingling, and they are alike unable entirely to separate or to combine. the most formidable of all the ills which threaten the future existence of the union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments or of the future dangers of the united states, the observer is invariably led to consider this as a primary fact. the permanent evils to which mankind is subjected are usually produced by the vehement or the increasing efforts of men; but there is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely distinguishable amidst the ordinary abuses of power; it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved; it was wafted like some accursed germ upon a portion of the soil, but it afterwards nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spreads naturally with the society to which it belongs. i need scarcely add that this calamity is slavery. christianity suppressed slavery, but the christians of the sixteenth century re-established it--as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, was at the same time rendered far more difficult of cure. it is important to make an accurate distinction between slavery itself and its consequences. the immediate evils which are produced by slavery were very nearly the same in antiquity as they are amongst the moderns; but the consequences of these evils were different. the slave, amongst the ancients, belonged to the same race as his master, and he was often the superior of the two in education *d and instruction. freedom was the only distinction between them; and when freedom was conferred they were easily confounded together. the ancients, then, had a very simple means of avoiding slavery and its evil consequences, which was that of affranchisement; and they succeeded as soon as they adopted this measure generally. not but, in ancient states, the vestiges of servitude subsisted for some time after servitude itself was abolished. there is a natural prejudice which prompts men to despise whomsoever has been their inferior long after he is become their equal; and the real inequality which is produced by fortune or by law is always succeeded by an imaginary inequality which is implanted in the manners of the people. nevertheless, this secondary consequence of slavery was limited to a certain term amongst the ancients, for the freedman bore so entire a resemblance to those born free, that it soon became impossible to distinguish him from amongst them. [footnote d: it is well known that several of the most distinguished authors of antiquity, and amongst them aesop and terence, were, or had been slaves. slaves were not always taken from barbarous nations, and the chances of war reduced highly civilized men to servitude.] the greatest difficulty in antiquity was that of altering the law; amongst the moderns it is that of altering the manners; and, as far as we are concerned, the real obstacles begin where those of the ancients left off. this arises from the circumstance that, amongst the moderns, the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united to the physical and permanent fact of color. the tradition of slavery dishonors the race, and the peculiarity of the race perpetuates the tradition of slavery. no african has ever voluntarily emigrated to the shores of the new world; whence it must be inferred, that all the blacks who are now to be found in that hemisphere are either slaves or freedmen. thus the negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, god alone can obliterate the traces of its existence. the modern slave differs from his master not only in his condition, but in his origin. you may set the negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the european. nor is this all; we scarcely acknowledge the common features of mankind in this child of debasement whom slavery has brought amongst us. his physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes. *e the moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color. [footnote e: to induce the whites to abandon the opinion they have conceived of the moral and intellectual inferiority of their former slaves, the negroes must change; but as long as this opinion subsists, to change is impossible.] it is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born amongst men like ourselves by nature, and equal to ourselves by law, to conceive the irreconcilable differences which separate the negro from the european in america. but we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. france was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority; nothing more contrary to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions which had been established between beings evidently similar. nevertheless these divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and on all sides they have left imaginary vestiges, which time alone can efface. if it be so difficult to root out an inequality which solely originates in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which seem to be based upon the immutable laws of nature herself? when i remember the extreme difficulty with which aristocratic bodies, of whatever nature they may be, are commingled with the mass of the people; and the exceeding care which they take to preserve the ideal boundaries of their caste inviolate, i despair of seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs. those who hope that the europeans will ever mix with the negroes, appear to me to delude themselves; and i am not led to any such conclusion by my own reason, or by the evidence of facts. hitherto, wherever the whites have been the most powerful, they have maintained the blacks in a subordinate or a servile position; wherever the negroes have been strongest they have destroyed the whites; such has been the only retribution which has ever taken place between the two races. i see that in a certain portion of the territory of the united states at the present day, the legal barrier which separated the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country; slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. whosoever has inhabited the united states must have perceived that in those parts of the union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. on the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the states which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known. it is true, that in the north of the union, marriages may be legally contracted between negroes and whites; but public opinion would stigmatize a man who should connect himself with a negress as infamous, and it would be difficult to meet with a single instance of such a union. the electoral franchise has been conferred upon the negroes in almost all the states in which slavery has been abolished; but if they come forward to vote, their lives are in danger. if oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites amongst their judges; and although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repulses them from that office. the same schools do not receive the child of the black and of the european. in the theatres, gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and although they are allowed to invoke the same divinity as the whites, it must be at a different altar, and in their own churches, with their own clergy. the gates of heaven are not closed against these unhappy beings; but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of the other world; when the negro is defunct, his bones are cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death. the negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death. in the south, where slavery still exists, the negroes are less carefully kept apart; they sometimes share the labor and the recreations of the whites; the whites consent to intermix with them to a certain extent, and although the legislation treats them more harshly, the habits of the people are more tolerant and compassionate. in the south the master is not afraid to raise his slave to his own standing, because he knows that he can in a moment reduce him to the dust at pleasure. in the north the white no longer distinctly perceives the barrier which separates him from the degraded race, and he shuns the negro with the more pertinacity, since he fears lest they should some day be confounded together. amongst the americans of the south, nature sometimes reasserts her rights, and restores a transient equality between the blacks and the whites; but in the north pride restrains the most imperious of human passions. the american of the northern states would perhaps allow the negress to share his licentious pleasures, if the laws of his country did not declare that she may aspire to be the legitimate partner of his bed; but he recoils with horror from her who might become his wife. thus it is, in the united states, that the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and inequality is sanctioned by the manners whilst it is effaced from the laws of the country. but if the relative position of the two races which inhabit the united states is such as i have described, it may be asked why the americans have abolished slavery in the north of the union, why they maintain it in the south, and why they aggravate its hardships there? the answer is easily given. it is not for the good of the negroes, but for that of the whites, that measures are taken to abolish slavery in the united states. the first negroes were imported into virginia about the year . *f in america, therefore, as well as in the rest of the globe, slavery originated in the south. thence it spread from one settlement to another; but the number of slaves diminished towards the northern states, and the negro population was always very limited in new england. *g [footnote f: see beverley's "history of virginia." see also in jefferson's "memoirs" some curious details concerning the introduction of negroes into virginia, and the first act which prohibited the importation of them in .] [footnote g: the number of slaves was less considerable in the north, but the advantages resulting from slavery were not more contested there than in the south. in , the legislature of the state of new york declared that the direct importation of slaves ought to be encouraged as much as possible, and smuggling severely punished in order not to discourage the fair trader. (kent's "commentaries," vol. ii. p. .) curious researches, by belknap, upon slavery in new england, are to be found in the "historical collection of massachusetts," vol. iv. p. . it appears that negroes were introduced there in , but that the legislation and manners of the people were opposed to slavery from the first; see also, in the same work, the manner in which public opinion, and afterwards the laws, finally put an end to slavery.] a century had scarcely elapsed since the foundation of the colonies, when the attention of the planters was struck by the extraordinary fact, that the provinces which were comparatively destitute of slaves, increased in population, in wealth, and in prosperity more rapidly than those which contained the greatest number of negroes. in the former, however, the inhabitants were obliged to cultivate the soil themselves, or by hired laborers; in the latter they were furnished with hands for which they paid no wages; yet although labor and expenses were on the one side, and ease with economy on the other, the former were in possession of the most advantageous system. this consequence seemed to be the more difficult to explain, since the settlers, who all belonged to the same european race, had the same habits, the same civilization, the same laws, and their shades of difference were extremely slight. time, however, continued to advance, and the anglo-americans, spreading beyond the coasts of the atlantic ocean, penetrated farther and farther into the solitudes of the west; they met with a new soil and an unwonted climate; the obstacles which opposed them were of the most various character; their races intermingled, the inhabitants of the south went up towards the north, those of the north descended to the south; but in the midst of all these causes, the same result occurred at every step, and in general, the colonies in which there were no slaves became more populous and more rich than those in which slavery flourished. the more progress was made, the more was it shown that slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master. chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part iv but this truth was most satisfactorily demonstrated when civilization reached the banks of the ohio. the stream which the indians had distinguished by the name of ohio, or beautiful river, waters one of the most magnificent valleys that has ever been made the abode of man. undulating lands extend upon both shores of the ohio, whose soil affords inexhaustible treasures to the laborer; on either bank the air is wholesome and the climate mild, and each of them forms the extreme frontier of a vast state: that which follows the numerous windings of the ohio upon the left is called kentucky, that upon the right bears the name of the river. these two states only differ in a single respect; kentucky has admitted slavery, but the state of ohio has prohibited the existence of slaves within its borders. *h [footnote h: not only is slavery prohibited in ohio, but no free negroes are allowed to enter the territory of that state, or to hold property in it. see the statutes of ohio.] thus the traveller who floats down the current of the ohio to the spot where that river falls into the mississippi, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude; and a transient inspection of the surrounding objects will convince him as to which of the two is most favorable to mankind. upon the left bank of the stream the population is rare; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half-desert fields; the primaeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. from the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests, the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborer, and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labor. *i [footnote i: the activity of ohio is not confined to individuals, but the undertakings of the state are surprisingly great; a canal has been established between lake erie and the ohio, by means of which the valley of the mississippi communicates with the river of the north, and the european commodities which arrive at new york may be forwarded by water to new orleans across five hundred leagues of continent.] the state of kentucky was founded in , the state of ohio only twelve years later; but twelve years are more in america than half a century in europe, and, at the present day, the population of ohio exceeds that of kentucky by two hundred and fifty thousand souls. *j these opposite consequences of slavery and freedom may readily be understood, and they suffice to explain many of the differences which we remark between the civilization of antiquity and that of our own time. [footnote j: the exact numbers given by the census of were: kentucky, ,- ; ohio, , . [in the population of ohio was , , , that of kentucky, , , .]] upon the left bank of the ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honored; on the former territory no white laborers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm; whilst those who are active and enlightened either do nothing or pass over into the state of ohio, where they may work without dishonor. it is true that in kentucky the planters are not obliged to pay wages to the slaves whom they employ; but they derive small profits from their labor, whilst the wages paid to free workmen would be returned with interest in the value of their services. the free workman is paid, but he does his work quicker than the slave, and rapidity of execution is one of the great elements of economy. the white sells his services, but they are only purchased at the times at which they may be useful; the black can claim no remuneration for his toil, but the expense of his maintenance is perpetual; he must be supported in his old age as well as in the prime of manhood, in his profitless infancy as well as in the productive years of youth. payment must equally be made in order to obtain the services of either class of men: the free workman receives his wages in money, the slave in education, in food, in care, and in clothing. the money which a master spends in the maintenance of his slaves goes gradually and in detail, so that it is scarcely perceived; the salary of the free workman is paid in a round sum, which appears only to enrich the individual who receives it, but in the end the slave has cost more than the free servant, and his labor is less productive. *k [footnote k: independently of these causes, which, wherever free workmen abound, render their labor more productive and more economical than that of slaves, another cause may be pointed out which is peculiar to the united states: the sugar-cane has hitherto been cultivated with success only upon the banks of the mississippi, near the mouth of that river in the gulf of mexico. in louisiana the cultivation of the sugar-cane is exceedingly lucrative, and nowhere does a laborer earn so much by his work, and, as there is always a certain relation between the cost of production and the value of the produce, the price of slaves is very high in louisiana. but louisiana is one of the confederated states, and slaves may be carried thither from all parts of the union; the price given for slaves in new orleans consequently raises the value of slaves in all the other markets. the consequence of this is, that in the countries where the land is less productive, the cost of slave labor is still very considerable, which gives an additional advantage to the competition of free labor.] the influence of slavery extends still further; it affects the character of the master, and imparts a peculiar tendency to his ideas and his tastes. upon both banks of the ohio, the character of the inhabitants is enterprising and energetic; but this vigor is very differently exercised in the two states. the white inhabitant of ohio, who is obliged to subsist by his own exertions, regards temporal prosperity as the principal aim of his existence; and as the country which he occupies presents inexhaustible resources to his industry and ever-varying lures to his activity, his acquisitive ardor surpasses the ordinary limits of human cupidity: he is tormented by the desire of wealth, and he boldly enters upon every path which fortune opens to him; he becomes a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, or a laborer with the same indifference, and he supports, with equal constancy, the fatigues and the dangers incidental to these various professions; the resources of his intelligence are astonishing, and his avidity in the pursuit of gain amounts to a species of heroism. but the kentuckian scorns not only labor, but all the undertakings which labor promotes; as he lives in an idle independence, his tastes are those of an idle man; money loses a portion of its value in his eyes; he covets wealth much less than pleasure and excitement; and the energy which his neighbor devotes to gain, turns with him to a passionate love of field sports and military exercises; he delights in violent bodily exertion, he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat. thus slavery not only prevents the whites from becoming opulent, but even from desiring to become so. as the same causes have been continually producing opposite effects for the last two centuries in the british colonies of north america, they have established a very striking difference between the commercial capacity of the inhabitants of the south and those of the north. at the present day it is only the northern states which are in possession of shipping, manufactures, railroads, and canals. this difference is perceptible not only in comparing the north with the south, but in comparing the several southern states. almost all the individuals who carry on commercial operations, or who endeavor to turn slave labor to account in the most southern districts of the union, have emigrated from the north. the natives of the northern states are constantly spreading over that portion of the american territory where they have less to fear from competition; they discover resources there which escaped the notice of the inhabitants; and, as they comply with a system which they do not approve, they succeed in turning it to better advantage than those who first founded and who still maintain it. were i inclined to continue this parallel, i could easily prove that almost all the differences which may be remarked between the characters of the americans in the southern and in the northern states have originated in slavery; but this would divert me from my subject, and my present intention is not to point out all the consequences of servitude, but those effects which it has produced upon the prosperity of the countries which have admitted it. the influence of slavery upon the production of wealth must have been very imperfectly known in antiquity, as slavery then obtained throughout the civilized world; and the nations which were unacquainted with it were barbarous. and indeed christianity only abolished slavery by advocating the claims of the slave; at the present time it may be attacked in the name of the master, and, upon this point, interest is reconciled with morality. as these truths became apparent in the united states, slavery receded before the progress of experience. servitude had begun in the south, and had thence spread towards the north; but it now retires again. freedom, which started from the north, now descends uninterruptedly towards the south. amongst the great states, pennsylvania now constitutes the extreme limit of slavery to the north: but even within those limits the slave system is shaken: maryland, which is immediately below pennsylvania, is preparing for its abolition; and virginia, which comes next to maryland, is already discussing its utility and its dangers. *l [footnote l: a peculiar reason contributes to detach the two last-mentioned states from the cause of slavery. the former wealth of this part of the union was principally derived from the cultivation of tobacco. this cultivation is specially carried on by slaves; but within the last few years the market-price of tobacco has diminished, whilst the value of the slaves remains the same. thus the ratio between the cost of production and the value of the produce is changed. the natives of maryland and virginia are therefore more disposed than they were thirty years ago, to give up slave labor in the cultivation of tobacco, or to give up slavery and tobacco at the same time.] no great change takes place in human institutions without involving amongst its causes the law of inheritance. when the law of primogeniture obtained in the south, each family was represented by a wealthy individual, who was neither compelled nor induced to labor; and he was surrounded, as by parasitic plants, by the other members of his family who were then excluded by law from sharing the common inheritance, and who led the same kind of life as himself. the very same thing then occurred in all the families of the south as still happens in the wealthy families of some countries in europe, namely, that the younger sons remain in the same state of idleness as their elder brother, without being as rich as he is. this identical result seems to be produced in europe and in america by wholly analogous causes. in the south of the united states the whole race of whites formed an aristocratic body, which was headed by a certain number of privileged individuals, whose wealth was permanent, and whose leisure was hereditary. these leaders of the american nobility kept alive the traditional prejudices of the white race in the body of which they were the representatives, and maintained the honor of inactive life. this aristocracy contained many who were poor, but none who would work; its members preferred want to labor, consequently no competition was set on foot against negro laborers and slaves, and, whatever opinion might be entertained as to the utility of their efforts, it was indispensable to employ them, since there was no one else to work. no sooner was the law of primogeniture abolished than fortunes began to diminish, and all the families of the country were simultaneously reduced to a state in which labor became necessary to procure the means of subsistence: several of them have since entirely disappeared, and all of them learned to look forward to the time at which it would be necessary for everyone to provide for his own wants. wealthy individuals are still to be met with, but they no longer constitute a compact and hereditary body, nor have they been able to adopt a line of conduct in which they could persevere, and which they could infuse into all ranks of society. the prejudice which stigmatized labor was in the first place abandoned by common consent; the number of needy men was increased, and the needy were allowed to gain a laborious subsistence without blushing for their exertions. thus one of the most immediate consequences of the partible quality of estates has been to create a class of free laborers. as soon as a competition was set on foot between the free laborer and the slave, the inferiority of the latter became manifest, and slavery was attacked in its fundamental principle, which is the interest of the master. as slavery recedes, the black population follows its retrograde course, and returns with it towards those tropical regions from which it originally came. however singular this fact may at first appear to be, it may readily be explained. although the americans abolish the principle of slavery, they do not set their slaves free. to illustrate this remark, i will quote the example of the state of new york. in , the state of new york prohibited the sale of slaves within its limits, which was an indirect method of prohibiting the importation of blacks. thenceforward the number of negroes could only increase according to the ratio of the natural increase of population. but eight years later a more decisive measure was taken, and it was enacted that all children born of slave parents after july , , should be free. no increase could then take place, and although slaves still existed, slavery might be said to be abolished. from the time at which a northern state prohibited the importation of slaves, no slaves were brought from the south to be sold in its markets. on the other hand, as the sale of slaves was forbidden in that state, an owner was no longer able to get rid of his slave (who thus became a burdensome possession) otherwise than by transporting him to the south. but when a northern state declared that the son of the slave should be born free, the slave lost a large portion of his market value, since his posterity was no longer included in the bargain, and the owner had then a strong interest in transporting him to the south. thus the same law prevents the slaves of the south from coming to the northern states, and drives those of the north to the south. the want of free hands is felt in a state in proportion as the number of slaves decreases. but in proportion as labor is performed by free hands, slave labor becomes less productive; and the slave is then a useless or onerous possession, whom it is important to export to those southern states where the same competition is not to be feared. thus the abolition of slavery does not set the slave free, but it merely transfers him from one master to another, and from the north to the south. the emancipated negroes, and those born after the abolition of slavery, do not, indeed, migrate from the north to the south; but their situation with regard to the europeans is not unlike that of the aborigines of america; they remain half civilized, and deprived of their rights in the midst of a population which is far superior to them in wealth and in knowledge; where they are exposed to the tyranny of the laws *m and the intolerance of the people. on some accounts they are still more to be pitied than the indians, since they are haunted by the reminiscence of slavery, and they cannot claim possession of a single portion of the soil: many of them perish miserably, *n and the rest congregate in the great towns, where they perform the meanest offices, and lead a wretched and precarious existence. [footnote m: the states in which slavery is abolished usually do what they can to render their territory disagreeable to the negroes as a place of residence; and as a kind of emulation exists between the different states in this respect, the unhappy blacks can only choose the least of the evils which beset them.] [footnote n: there is a very great difference between the mortality of the blacks and of the whites in the states in which slavery is abolished; from to only one out of forty-two individuals of the white population died in philadelphia; but one negro out of twenty-one individuals of the black population died in the same space of time. the mortality is by no means so great amongst the negroes who are still slaves. (see emerson's "medical statistics," p. .)] but even if the number of negroes continued to increase as rapidly as when they were still in a state of slavery, as the number of whites augments with twofold rapidity since the abolition of slavery, the blacks would soon be, as it were, lost in the midst of a strange population. a district which is cultivated by slaves is in general more scantily peopled than a district cultivated by free labor: moreover, america is still a new country, and a state is therefore not half peopled at the time when it abolishes slavery. no sooner is an end put to slavery than the want of free labor is felt, and a crowd of enterprising adventurers immediately arrive from all parts of the country, who hasten to profit by the fresh resources which are then opened to industry. the soil is soon divided amongst them, and a family of white settlers takes possession of each tract of country. besides which, european emigration is exclusively directed to the free states; for what would be the fate of a poor emigrant who crosses the atlantic in search of ease and happiness if he were to land in a country where labor is stigmatized as degrading? thus the white population grows by its natural increase, and at the same time by the immense influx of emigrants; whilst the black population receives no emigrants, and is upon its decline. the proportion which existed between the two races is soon inverted. the negroes constitute a scanty remnant, a poor tribe of vagrants, which is lost in the midst of an immense people in full possession of the land; and the presence of the blacks is only marked by the injustice and the hardships of which they are the unhappy victims. in several of the western states the negro race never made its appearance, and in all the northern states it is rapidly declining. thus the great question of its future condition is confined within a narrow circle, where it becomes less formidable, though not more easy of solution. the more we descend towards the south, the more difficult does it become to abolish slavery with advantage: and this arises from several physical causes which it is important to point out. the first of these causes is the climate; it is well known that in proportion as europeans approach the tropics they suffer more from labor. many of the americans even assert that within a certain latitude the exertions which a negro can make without danger are fatal to them; *o but i do not think that this opinion, which is so favorable to the indolence of the inhabitants of southern regions, is confirmed by experience. the southern parts of the union are not hotter than the south of italy and of spain; *p and it may be asked why the european cannot work as well there as in the two latter countries. if slavery has been abolished in italy and in spain without causing the destruction of the masters, why should not the same thing take place in the union? i cannot believe that nature has prohibited the europeans in georgia and the floridas, under pain of death, from raising the means of subsistence from the soil, but their labor would unquestionably be more irksome and less productive to them than to the inhabitants of new england. as the free workman thus loses a portion of his superiority over the slave in the southern states, there are fewer inducements to abolish slavery. [footnote o: this is true of the spots in which rice is cultivated; rice-grounds, which are unwholesome in all countries, are particularly dangerous in those regions which are exposed to the beams of a tropical sun. europeans would not find it easy to cultivate the soil in that part of the new world if it must be necessarily be made to produce rice; but may they not subsist without rice-grounds?] [footnote p: these states are nearer to the equator than italy and spain, but the temperature of the continent of america is very much lower than that of europe. the spanish government formerly caused a certain number of peasants from the acores to be transported into a district of louisiana called attakapas, by way of experiment. these settlers still cultivate the soil without the assistance of slaves, but their industry is so languid as scarcely to supply their most necessary wants.] all the plants of europe grow in the northern parts of the union; the south has special productions of its own. it has been observed that slave labor is a very expensive method of cultivating corn. the farmer of corn land in a country where slavery is unknown habitually retains a small number of laborers in his service, and at seed-time and harvest he hires several additional hands, who only live at his cost for a short period. but the agriculturist in a slave state is obliged to keep a large number of slaves the whole year round, in order to sow his fields and to gather in his crops, although their services are only required for a few weeks; but slaves are unable to wait till they are hired, and to subsist by their own labor in the mean time like free laborers; in order to have their services they must be bought. slavery, independently of its general disadvantages, is therefore still more inapplicable to countries in which corn is cultivated than to those which produce crops of a different kind. the cultivation of tobacco, of cotton, and especially of the sugar-cane, demands, on the other hand, unremitting attention: and women and children are employed in it, whose services are of but little use in the cultivation of wheat. thus slavery is naturally more fitted to the countries from which these productions are derived. tobacco, cotton, and the sugar-cane are exclusively grown in the south, and they form one of the principal sources of the wealth of those states. if slavery were abolished, the inhabitants of the south would be constrained to adopt one of two alternatives: they must either change their system of cultivation, and then they would come into competition with the more active and more experienced inhabitants of the north; or, if they continued to cultivate the same produce without slave labor, they would have to support the competition of the other states of the south, which might still retain their slaves. thus, peculiar reasons for maintaining slavery exist in the south which do not operate in the north. but there is yet another motive which is more cogent than all the others: the south might indeed, rigorously speaking, abolish slavery; but how should it rid its territory of the black population? slaves and slavery are driven from the north by the same law, but this twofold result cannot be hoped for in the south. the arguments which i have adduced to show that slavery is more natural and more advantageous in the south than in the north, sufficiently prove that the number of slaves must be far greater in the former districts. it was to the southern settlements that the first africans were brought, and it is there that the greatest number of them have always been imported. as we advance towards the south, the prejudice which sanctions idleness increases in power. in the states nearest to the tropics there is not a single white laborer; the negroes are consequently much more numerous in the south than in the north. and, as i have already observed, this disproportion increases daily, since the negroes are transferred to one part of the union as soon as slavery is abolished in the other. thus the black population augments in the south, not only by its natural fecundity, but by the compulsory emigration of the negroes from the north; and the african race has causes of increase in the south very analogous to those which so powerfully accelerate the growth of the european race in the north. in the state of maine there is one negro in inhabitants; in massachusetts, one in ; in new york, two in ; in pennsylvania, three in the same number; in maryland, thirty-four; in virginia, forty-two; and lastly, in south carolina *q fifty-five per cent. such was the proportion of the black population to the whites in the year . but this proportion is perpetually changing, as it constantly decreases in the north and augments in the south. [footnote q: we find it asserted in an american work, entitled "letters on the colonization society," by mr. carey, , "that for the last forty years the black race has increased more rapidly than the white race in the state of south carolina; and that if we take the average population of the five states of the south into which slaves were first introduced, viz., maryland, virginia, south carolina, north carolina, and georgia, we shall find that from to the whites have augmented in the proportion of to , and the blacks in that of to ." in the united states, in , the population of the two races stood as follows:-- states where slavery is abolished, , , whites; , blacks. slave states, , , whites; , , blacks. [in the united states contained a population of , , whites, and , , negroes.]] it is evident that the most southern states of the union cannot abolish slavery without incurring very great dangers, which the north had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population. we have already shown the system by which the northern states secure the transition from slavery to freedom, by keeping the present generation in chains, and setting their descendants free; by this means the negroes are gradually introduced into society; and whilst the men who might abuse their freedom are kept in a state of servitude, those who are emancipated may learn the art of being free before they become their own masters. but it would be difficult to apply this method in the south. to declare that all the negroes born after a certain period shall be free, is to introduce the principle and the notion of liberty into the heart of slavery; the blacks whom the law thus maintains in a state of slavery from which their children are delivered, are astonished at so unequal a fate, and their astonishment is only the prelude to their impatience and irritation. thenceforward slavery loses, in their eyes, that kind of moral power which it derived from time and habit; it is reduced to a mere palpable abuse of force. the northern states had nothing to fear from the contrast, because in them the blacks were few in number, and the white population was very considerable. but if this faint dawn of freedom were to show two millions of men their true position, the oppressors would have reason to tremble. after having affranchised the children of their slaves the europeans of the southern states would very shortly be obliged to extend the same benefit to the whole black population. chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part v in the north, as i have already remarked, a twofold migration ensues upon the abolition of slavery, or even precedes that event when circumstances have rendered it probable; the slaves quit the country to be transported southwards; and the whites of the northern states, as well as the emigrants from europe, hasten to fill up their place. but these two causes cannot operate in the same manner in the southern states. on the one hand, the mass of slaves is too great for any expectation of their ever being removed from the country to be entertained; and on the other hand, the europeans and anglo-americans of the north are afraid to come to inhabit a country in which labor has not yet been reinstated in its rightful honors. besides, they very justly look upon the states in which the proportion of the negroes equals or exceeds that of the whites, as exposed to very great dangers; and they refrain from turning their activity in that direction. thus the inhabitants of the south would not be able, like their northern countrymen, to initiate the slaves gradually into a state of freedom by abolishing slavery; they have no means of perceptibly diminishing the black population, and they would remain unsupported to repress its excesses. so that in the course of a few years, a great people of free negroes would exist in the heart of a white nation of equal size. the same abuses of power which still maintain slavery, would then become the source of the most alarming perils which the white population of the south might have to apprehend. at the present time the descendants of the europeans are the sole owners of the land; the absolute masters of all labor; and the only persons who are possessed of wealth, knowledge, and arms. the black is destitute of all these advantages, but he subsists without them because he is a slave. if he were free, and obliged to provide for his own subsistence, would it be possible for him to remain without these things and to support life? or would not the very instruments of the present superiority of the white, whilst slavery exists, expose him to a thousand dangers if it were abolished? as long as the negro remains a slave, he may be kept in a condition not very far removed from that of the brutes; but, with his liberty, he cannot but acquire a degree of instruction which will enable him to appreciate his misfortunes, and to discern a remedy for them. moreover, there exists a singular principle of relative justice which is very firmly implanted in the human heart. men are much more forcibly struck by those inequalities which exist within the circle of the same class, than with those which may be remarked between different classes. it is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness. in the north the population of freed negroes feels these hardships and resents these indignities; but its numbers and its powers are small, whilst in the south it would be numerous and strong. as soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two alien communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. i have already expressed the conviction which i entertain as to the latter event. *r i do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. but i believe the difficulty to be still greater in the united states than elsewhere. an isolated individual may surmount the prejudices of religion, of his country, or of his race, and if this individual is a king he may effect surprising changes in society; but a whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself. a despot who should subject the americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as the american democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the united states becomes, the more isolated will it remain. *s [footnote r: this opinion is sanctioned by authorities infinitely weightier than anything that i can say: thus, for instance, it is stated in the "memoirs of jefferson" (as collected by m. conseil), "nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same government, so insurmountable are the barriers which nature, habit, and opinions have established between them."] [footnote s: if the british west india planters had governed themselves, they would assuredly not have passed the slave emancipation bill which the mother-country has recently imposed upon them.] i have previously observed that the mixed race is the true bond of union between the europeans and the indians; just so the mulattoes are the true means of transition between the white and the negro; so that wherever mulattoes abound, the intermixture of the two races is not impossible. in some parts of america, the european and the negro races are so crossed by one another, that it is rare to meet with a man who is entirely black, or entirely white: when they are arrived at this point, the two races may really be said to be combined; or rather to have been absorbed in a third race, which is connected with both without being identical with either. of all the europeans the english are those who have mixed least with the negroes. more mulattoes are to be seen in the south of the union than in the north, but still they are infinitely more scarce than in any other european colony: mulattoes are by no means numerous in the united states; they have no force peculiar to themselves, and when quarrels originating in differences of color take place, they generally side with the whites; just as the lackeys of the great, in europe, assume the contemptuous airs of nobility to the lower orders. the pride of origin, which is natural to the english, is singularly augmented by the personal pride which democratic liberty fosters amongst the americans: the white citizen of the united states is proud of his race, and proud of himself. but if the whites and the negroes do not intermingle in the north of the union, how should they mix in the south? can it be supposed for an instant, that an american of the southern states, placed, as he must forever be, between the white man with all his physical and moral superiority and the negro, will ever think of preferring the latter? the americans of the southern states have two powerful passions which will always keep them aloof; the first is the fear of being assimilated to the negroes, their former slaves; and the second the dread of sinking below the whites, their neighbors. if i were called upon to predict what will probably occur at some future time, i should say, that the abolition of slavery in the south will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white population for the men of color. i found this opinion upon the analogous observation which i already had occasion to make in the north. i there remarked that the white inhabitants of the north avoid the negroes with increasing care, in proportion as the legal barriers of separation are removed by the legislature; and why should not the same result take place in the south? in the north, the whites are deterred from intermingling with the blacks by the fear of an imaginary danger; in the south, where the danger would be real, i cannot imagine that the fear would be less general. if, on the one hand, it be admitted (and the fact is unquestionable) that the colored population perpetually accumulates in the extreme south, and that it increases more rapidly than that of the whites; and if, on the other hand, it be allowed that it is impossible to foresee a time at which the whites and the blacks will be so intermingled as to derive the same benefits from society; must it not be inferred that the blacks and the whites will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the southern states of the union? but if it be asked what the issue of the struggle is likely to be, it will readily be understood that we are here left to form a very vague surmise of the truth. the human mind may succeed in tracing a wide circle, as it were, which includes the course of future events; but within that circle a thousand various chances and circumstances may direct it in as many different ways; and in every picture of the future there is a dim spot, which the eye of the understanding cannot penetrate. it appears, however, to be extremely probable that in the west indian islands the white race is destined to be subdued, and the black population to share the same fate upon the continent. in the west india islands the white planters are surrounded by an immense black population; on the continent, the blacks are placed between the ocean and an innumerable people, which already extends over them in a dense mass, from the icy confines of canada to the frontiers of virginia, and from the banks of the missouri to the shores of the atlantic. if the white citizens of north america remain united, it cannot be supposed that the negroes will escape the destruction with which they are menaced; they must be subdued by want or by the sword. but the black population which is accumulated along the coast of the gulf of mexico, has a chance of success if the american union is dissolved when the struggle between the two races begins. if the federal tie were broken, the citizens of the south would be wrong to rely upon any lasting succor from their northern countrymen. the latter are well aware that the danger can never reach them; and unless they are constrained to march to the assistance of the south by a positive obligation, it may be foreseen that the sympathy of color will be insufficient to stimulate their exertions. yet, at whatever period the strife may break out, the whites of the south, even if they are abandoned to their own resources, will enter the lists with an immense superiority of knowledge and of the means of warfare; but the blacks will have numerical strength and the energy of despair upon their side, and these are powerful resources to men who have taken up arms. the fate of the white population of the southern states will, perhaps, be similar to that of the moors in spain. after having occupied the land for centuries, it will perhaps be forced to retire to the country whence its ancestors came, and to abandon to the negroes the possession of a territory, which providence seems to have more peculiarly destined for them, since they can subsist and labor in it more easily that the whites. the danger of a conflict between the white and the black inhabitants of the southern states of the union--a danger which, however remote it may be, is inevitable--perpetually haunts the imagination of the americans. the inhabitants of the north make it a common topic of conversation, although they have no direct injury to fear from the struggle; but they vainly endeavor to devise some means of obviating the misfortunes which they foresee. in the southern states the subject is not discussed: the planter does not allude to the future in conversing with strangers; the citizen does not communicate his apprehensions to his friends; he seeks to conceal them from himself; but there is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the south, than in the clamorous fears of the northern states. this all-pervading disquietude has given birth to an undertaking which is but little known, but which may have the effect of changing the fate of a portion of the human race. from apprehension of the dangers which i have just been describing, a certain number of american citizens have formed a society for the purpose of exporting to the coast of guinea, at their own expense, such free negroes as may be willing to escape from the oppression to which they are subject. *t in , the society to which i allude formed a settlement in africa, upon the seventh degree of north latitude, which bears the name of liberia. the most recent intelligence informs us that , negroes are collected there; they have introduced the democratic institutions of america into the country of their forefathers; and liberia has a representative system of government, negro jurymen, negro magistrates, and negro priests; churches have been built, newspapers established, and, by a singular change in the vicissitudes of the world, white men are prohibited from sojourning within the settlement. *u [footnote t: this society assumed the name of "the society for the colonization of the blacks." see its annual reports; and more particularly the fifteenth. see also the pamphlet, to which allusion has already been made, entitled "letters on the colonization society, and on its probable results," by mr. carey, philadelphia, .] [footnote u: this last regulation was laid down by the founders of the settlement; they apprehended that a state of things might arise in africa similar to that which exists on the frontiers of the united states, and that if the negroes, like the indians, were brought into collision with a people more enlightened than themselves, they would be destroyed before they could be civilized.] this is indeed a strange caprice of fortune. two hundred years have now elapsed since the inhabitants of europe undertook to tear the negro from his family and his home, in order to transport him to the shores of north america; at the present day, the european settlers are engaged in sending back the descendants of those very negroes to the continent from which they were originally taken; and the barbarous africans have been brought into contact with civilization in the midst of bondage, and have become acquainted with free political institutions in slavery. up to the present time africa has been closed against the arts and sciences of the whites; but the inventions of europe will perhaps penetrate into those regions, now that they are introduced by africans themselves. the settlement of liberia is founded upon a lofty and a most fruitful idea; but whatever may be its results with regard to the continent of africa, it can afford no remedy to the new world. in twelve years the colonization society has transported , negroes to africa; in the same space of time about , blacks were born in the united states. if the colony of liberia were so situated as to be able to receive thousands of new inhabitants every year, and if the negroes were in a state to be sent thither with advantage; if the union were to supply the society with annual subsidies, *v and to transport the negroes to africa in the vessels of the state, it would still be unable to counterpoise the natural increase of population amongst the blacks; and as it could not remove as many men in a year as are born upon its territory within the same space of time, it would fail in suspending the growth of the evil which is daily increasing in the states. *w the negro race will never leave those shores of the american continent, to which it was brought by the passions and the vices of europeans; and it will not disappear from the new world as long as it continues to exist. the inhabitants of the united states may retard the calamities which they apprehend, but they cannot now destroy their efficient cause. [footnote v: nor would these be the only difficulties attendant upon the undertaking; if the union undertook to buy up the negroes now in america, in order to transport them to africa, the price of slaves, increasing with their scarcity, would soon become enormous; and the states of the north would never consent to expend such great sums for a purpose which would procure such small advantages to themselves. if the union took possession of the slaves in the southern states by force, or at a rate determined by law, an insurmountable resistance would arise in that part of the country. both alternatives are equally impossible.] [footnote w: in there were in the united states , , slaves and , free blacks, in all , , negroes: which formed about one-fifth of the total population of the united states at that time.] i am obliged to confess that i do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the united states. the negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies. in the north everything contributed to facilitate the emancipation of the slaves; and slavery was abolished, without placing the free negroes in a position which could become formidable, since their number was too small for them ever to claim the exercise of their rights. but such is not the case in the south. the question of slavery was a question of commerce and manufacture for the slave-owners in the north; for those of the south, it is a question of life and death. god forbid that i should seek to justify the principle of negro slavery, as has been done by some american writers! but i only observe that all the countries which formerly adopted that execrable principle are not equally able to abandon it at the present time. when i contemplate the condition of the south, i can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those states; viz., either to emancipate the negroes, and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. all intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or other of the two races. such is the view which the americans of the south take of the question, and they act consistently with it. as they are determined not to mingle with the negroes, they refuse to emancipate them. not that the inhabitants of the south regard slavery as necessary to the wealth of the planter, for on this point many of them agree with their northern countrymen in freely admitting that slavery is prejudicial to their interest; but they are convinced that, however prejudicial it may be, they hold their lives upon no other tenure. the instruction which is now diffused in the south has convinced the inhabitants that slavery is injurious to the slave-owner, but it has also shown them, more clearly than before, that no means exist of getting rid of its bad consequences. hence arises a singular contrast; the more the utility of slavery is contested, the more firmly is it established in the laws; and whilst the principle of servitude is gradually abolished in the north, that self-same principle gives rise to more and more rigorous consequences in the south. the legislation of the southern states with regard to slaves, presents at the present day such unparalleled atrocities as suffice to show how radically the laws of humanity have been perverted, and to betray the desperate position of the community in which that legislation has been promulgated. the americans of this portion of the union have not, indeed, augmented the hardships of slavery; they have, on the contrary, bettered the physical condition of the slaves. the only means by which the ancients maintained slavery were fetters and death; the americans of the south of the union have discovered more intellectual securities for the duration of their power. they have employed their despotism and their violence against the human mind. in antiquity, precautions were taken to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; at the present day measures are adopted to deprive him even of the desire of freedom. the ancients kept the bodies of their slaves in bondage, but they placed no restraint upon the mind and no check upon education; and they acted consistently with their established principle, since a natural termination of slavery then existed, and one day or other the slave might be set free, and become the equal of his master. but the americans of the south, who do not admit that the negroes can ever be commingled with themselves, have forbidden them to be taught to read or to write, under severe penalties; and as they will not raise them to their own level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that of the brutes. the hope of liberty had always been allowed to the slave to cheer the hardships of his condition. but the americans of the south are well aware that emancipation cannot but be dangerous, when the freed man can never be assimilated to his former master. to give a man his freedom, and to leave him in wretchedness and ignominy, is nothing less than to prepare a future chief for a revolt of the slaves. moreover, it has long been remarked that the presence of a free negro vaguely agitates the minds of his less fortunate brethren, and conveys to them a dim notion of their rights. the americans of the south have consequently taken measures to prevent slave-owners from emancipating their slaves in most cases; not indeed by a positive prohibition, but by subjecting that step to various forms which it is difficult to comply with. i happened to meet with an old man, in the south of the union, who had lived in illicit intercourse with one of his negresses, and had had several children by her, who were born the slaves of their father. he had indeed frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their liberty; but years had elapsed without his being able to surmount the legal obstacles to their emancipation, and in the mean while his old age was come, and he was about to die. he pictured to himself his sons dragged from market to market, and passing from the authority of a parent to the rod of the stranger, until these horrid anticipations worked his expiring imagination into frenzy. when i saw him he was a prey to all the anguish of despair, and he made me feel how awful is the retribution of nature upon those who have broken her laws. these evils are unquestionably great; but they are the necessary and foreseen consequence of the very principle of modern slavery. when the europeans chose their slaves from a race differing from their own, which many of them considered as inferior to the other races of mankind, and which they all repelled with horror from any notion of intimate connection, they must have believed that slavery would last forever; since there is no intermediate state which can be durable between the excessive inequality produced by servitude and the complete equality which originates in independence. the europeans did imperfectly feel this truth, but without acknowledging it even to themselves. whenever they have had to do with negroes, their conduct has either been dictated by their interest and their pride, or by their compassion. they first violated every right of humanity by their treatment of the negro and they afterwards informed him that those rights were precious and inviolable. they affected to open their ranks to the slaves, but the negroes who attempted to penetrate into the community were driven back with scorn; and they have incautiously and involuntarily been led to admit of freedom instead of slavery, without having the courage to be wholly iniquitous, or wholly just. if it be impossible to anticipate a period at which the americans of the south will mingle their blood with that of the negroes, can they allow their slaves to become free without compromising their own security? and if they are obliged to keep that race in bondage in order to save their own families, may they not be excused for availing themselves of the means best adapted to that end? the events which are taking place in the southern states of the union appear to me to be at once the most horrible and the most natural results of slavery. when i see the order of nature overthrown, and when i hear the cry of humanity in its vain struggle against the laws, my indignation does not light upon the men of our own time who are the instruments of these outrages; but i reserve my execration for those who, after a thousand years of freedom, brought back slavery into the world once more. whatever may be the efforts of the americans of the south to maintain slavery, they will not always succeed. slavery, which is now confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, which is attacked by christianity as unjust, and by political economy as prejudicial; and which is now contrasted with democratic liberties and the information of our age, cannot survive. by the choice of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue. if liberty be refused to the negroes of the south, they will in the end seize it for themselves by force; if it be given, they will abuse it ere long. *x [footnote x: [this chapter is no longer applicable to the condition of the negro race in the united states, since the abolition of slavery was the result, though not the object, of the great civil war, and the negroes have been raised to the condition not only of freedmen, but of citizens; and in some states they exercise a preponderating political power by reason of their numerical majority. thus, in south carolina there were in , , whites and , blacks. but the emancipation of the slaves has not solved the problem, how two races so different and so hostile are to live together in peace in one country on equal terms. that problem is as difficult, perhaps more difficult than ever; and to this difficulty the author's remarks are still perfectly applicable.]] chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part vi what are the chances in favor of the duration of the american union, and what dangers threaten it *y [footnote y: [this chapter is one of the most curious and interesting portions of the work, because it embraces almost all the constitutional and social questions which were raised by the great secession of the south and decided by the results of the civil war. but it must be confessed that the sagacity of the author is sometimes at fault in these speculations, and did not save him from considerable errors, which the course of events has since made apparent. he held that "the legislators of the constitution of were not appointed to constitute the government of a single people, but to regulate the association of several states; that the union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states, and in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people." whence he inferred that "if one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so; and that the federal government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly, either by force or by right." this is the southern theory of the constitution, and the whole case of the south in favor of secession. to many europeans, and to some american (northern) jurists, this view appeared to be sound; but it was vigorously resisted by the north, and crushed by force of arms. the author of this book was mistaken in supposing that the "union was a vast body which presents no definite object to patriotic feeling." when the day of trial came, millions of men were ready to lay down their lives for it. he was also mistaken in supposing that the federal executive is so weak that it requires the free consent of the governed to enable it to subsist, and that it would be defeated in a struggle to maintain the union against one or more separate states. in nine states, with a population of , , , seceded, and maintained for four years a resolute but unequal contest for independence, but they were defeated. lastly, the author was mistaken in supposing that a community of interests would always prevail between north and south sufficiently powerful to bind them together. he overlooked the influence which the question of slavery must have on the union the moment that the majority of the people of the north declared against it. in , when the author visited america, the anti-slavery agitation had scarcely begun; and the fact of southern slavery was accepted by men of all parties, even in the states where there were no slaves: and that was unquestionably the view taken by all the states and by all american statesmen at the time of the adoption of the constitution, in . but in the course of thirty years a great change took place, and the north refused to perpetuate what had become the "peculiar institution" of the south, especially as it gave the south a species of aristocratic preponderance. the result was the ratification, in december, , of the celebrated th article or amendment of the constitution, which declared that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude--except as a punishment for crime--shall exist within the united states." to which was soon afterwards added the th article, "the right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the united states, or by any state, on account of race, color, or previous servitude." the emancipation of several millions of negro slaves without compensation, and the transfer to them of political preponderance in the states in which they outnumber the white population, were acts of the north totally opposed to the interests of the south, and which could only have been carried into effect by conquest.--translator's note.]] reason for which the preponderating force lies in the states rather than in the union--the union will only last as long as all the states choose to belong to it--causes which tend to keep them united--utility of the union to resist foreign enemies, and to prevent the existence of foreigners in america--no natural barriers between the several states--no conflicting interests to divide them--reciprocal interests of the northern, southern, and western states--intellectual ties of union--uniformity of opinions--dangers of the union resulting from the different characters and the passions of its citizens--character of the citizens in the south and in the north--the rapid growth of the union one of its greatest dangers--progress of the population to the northwest--power gravitates in the same direction--passions originating from sudden turns of fortune--whether the existing government of the union tends to gain strength, or to lose it--various signs of its decrease--internal improvements--waste lands--indians--the bank--the tariff--general jackson. the maintenance of the existing institutions of the several states depends in some measure upon the maintenance of the union itself. it is therefore important in the first instance to inquire into the probable fate of the union. one point may indeed be assumed at once: if the present confederation were dissolved, it appears to me to be incontestable that the states of which it is now composed would not return to their original isolated condition, but that several unions would then be formed in the place of one. it is not my intention to inquire into the principles upon which these new unions would probably be established, but merely to show what the causes are which may effect the dismemberment of the existing confederation. with this object i shall be obliged to retrace some of the steps which i have already taken, and to revert to topics which i have before discussed. i am aware that the reader may accuse me of repetition, but the importance of the matter which still remains to be treated is my excuse; i had rather say too much, than say too little to be thoroughly understood, and i prefer injuring the author to slighting the subject. the legislators who formed the constitution of endeavored to confer a distinct and preponderating authority upon the federal power. but they were confined by the conditions of the task which they had undertaken to perform. they were not appointed to constitute the government of a single people, but to regulate the association of several states; and, whatever their inclinations might be, they could not but divide the exercise of sovereignty in the end. in order to understand the consequences of this division, it is necessary to make a short distinction between the affairs of the government. there are some objects which are national by their very nature, that is to say, which affect the nation as a body, and can only be intrusted to the man or the assembly of men who most completely represent the entire nation. amongst these may be reckoned war and diplomacy. there are other objects which are provincial by their very nature, that is to say, which only affect certain localities, and which can only be properly treated in that locality. such, for instance, is the budget of a municipality. lastly, there are certain objects of a mixed nature, which are national inasmuch as they affect all the citizens who compose the nation, and which are provincial inasmuch as it is not necessary that the nation itself should provide for them all. such are the rights which regulate the civil and political condition of the citizens. no society can exist without civil and political rights. these rights therefore interest all the citizens alike; but it is not always necessary to the existence and the prosperity of the nation that these rights should be uniform, nor, consequently, that they should be regulated by the central authority. there are, then, two distinct categories of objects which are submitted to the direction of the sovereign power; and these categories occur in all well-constituted communities, whatever the basis of the political constitution may otherwise be. between these two extremes the objects which i have termed mixed may be considered to lie. as these objects are neither exclusively national nor entirely provincial, they may be obtained by a national or by a provincial government, according to the agreement of the contracting parties, without in any way impairing the contract of association. the sovereign power is usually formed by the union of separate individuals, who compose a people; and individual powers or collective forces, each representing a very small portion of the sovereign authority, are the sole elements which are subjected to the general government of their choice. in this case the general government is more naturally called upon to regulate, not only those affairs which are of essential national importance, but those which are of a more local interest; and the local governments are reduced to that small share of sovereign authority which is indispensable to their prosperity. but sometimes the sovereign authority is composed of preorganized political bodies, by virtue of circumstances anterior to their union; and in this case the provincial governments assume the control, not only of those affairs which more peculiarly belong to their province, but of all, or of a part of the mixed affairs to which allusion has been made. for the confederate nations which were independent sovereign states before their union, and which still represent a very considerable share of the sovereign power, have only consented to cede to the general government the exercise of those rights which are indispensable to the union. when the national government, independently of the prerogatives inherent in its nature, is invested with the right of regulating the affairs which relate partly to the general and partly to the local interests, it possesses a preponderating influence. not only are its own rights extensive, but all the rights which it does not possess exist by its sufferance, and it may be apprehended that the provincial governments may be deprived of their natural and necessary prerogatives by its influence. when, on the other hand, the provincial governments are invested with the power of regulating those same affairs of mixed interest, an opposite tendency prevails in society. the preponderating force resides in the province, not in the nation; and it may be apprehended that the national government may in the end be stripped of the privileges which are necessary to its existence. independent nations have therefore a natural tendency to centralization, and confederations to dismemberment. it now only remains for us to apply these general principles to the american union. the several states were necessarily possessed of the right of regulating all exclusively provincial affairs. moreover these same states retained the rights of determining the civil and political competency of the citizens, or regulating the reciprocal relations of the members of the community, and of dispensing justice; rights which are of a general nature, but which do not necessarily appertain to the national government. we have shown that the government of the union is invested with the power of acting in the name of the whole nation in those cases in which the nation has to appear as a single and undivided power; as, for instance, in foreign relations, and in offering a common resistance to a common enemy; in short, in conducting those affairs which i have styled exclusively national. in this division of the rights of sovereignty, the share of the union seems at first sight to be more considerable than that of the states; but a more attentive investigation shows it to be less so. the undertakings of the government of the union are more vast, but their influence is more rarely felt. those of the provincial governments are comparatively small, but they are incessant, and they serve to keep alive the authority which they represent. the government of the union watches the general interests of the country; but the general interests of a people have a very questionable influence upon individual happiness, whilst provincial interests produce a most immediate effect upon the welfare of the inhabitants. the union secures the independence and the greatness of the nation, which do not immediately affect private citizens; but the several states maintain the liberty, regulate the rights, protect the fortune, and secure the life and the whole future prosperity of every citizen. the federal government is very far removed from its subjects, whilst the provincial governments are within the reach of them all, and are ready to attend to the smallest appeal. the central government has upon its side the passions of a few superior men who aspire to conduct it; but upon the side of the provincial governments are the interests of all those second-rate individuals who can only hope to obtain power within their own state, and who nevertheless exercise the largest share of authority over the people because they are placed nearest to its level. the americans have therefore much more to hope and to fear from the states than from the union; and, in conformity with the natural tendency of the human mind, they are more likely to attach themselves to the former than to the latter. in this respect their habits and feelings harmonize with their interests. when a compact nation divides its sovereignty, and adopts a confederate form of government, the traditions, the customs, and the manners of the people are for a long time at variance with their legislation; and the former tend to give a degree of influence to the central government which the latter forbids. when a number of confederate states unite to form a single nation, the same causes operate in an opposite direction. i have no doubt that if france were to become a confederate republic like that of the united states, the government would at first display more energy than that of the union; and if the union were to alter its constitution to a monarchy like that of france, i think that the american government would be a long time in acquiring the force which now rules the latter nation. when the national existence of the anglo-americans began, their provincial existence was already of long standing; necessary relations were established between the townships and the individual citizens of the same states; and they were accustomed to consider some objects as common to them all, and to conduct other affairs as exclusively relating to their own special interests. the union is a vast body which presents no definite object to patriotic feeling. the forms and limits of the state are distinct and circumscribed; since it represents a certain number of objects which are familiar to the citizens and beloved by all. it is identified with the very soil, with the right of property and the domestic affections, with the recollections of the past, the labors of the present, and the hopes of the future. patriotism, then, which is frequently a mere extension of individual egotism, is still directed to the state, and is not excited by the union. thus the tendency of the interests, the habits, and the feelings of the people is to centre political activity in the states, in preference to the union. it is easy to estimate the different forces of the two governments, by remarking the manner in which they fulfil their respective functions. whenever the government of a state has occasion to address an individual or an assembly of individuals, its language is clear and imperative; and such is also the tone of the federal government in its intercourse with individuals, but no sooner has it anything to do with a state than it begins to parley, to explain its motives and to justify its conduct, to argue, to advise, and, in short, anything but to command. if doubts are raised as to the limits of the constitutional powers of each government, the provincial government prefers its claim with boldness, and takes prompt and energetic steps to support it. in the mean while the government of the union reasons; it appeals to the interests, to the good sense, to the glory of the nation; it temporizes, it negotiates, and does not consent to act until it is reduced to the last extremity. at first sight it might readily be imagined that it is the provincial government which is armed with the authority of the nation, and that congress represents a single state. the federal government is, therefore, notwithstanding the precautions of those who founded it, naturally so weak that it more peculiarly requires the free consent of the governed to enable it to subsist. it is easy to perceive that its object is to enable the states to realize with facility their determination of remaining united; and, as long as this preliminary condition exists, its authority is great, temperate, and effective. the constitution fits the government to control individuals, and easily to surmount such obstacles as they may be inclined to offer; but it was by no means established with a view to the possible separation of one or more of the states from the union. if the sovereignty of the union were to engage in a struggle with that of the states at the present day, its defeat may be confidently predicted; and it is not probable that such a struggle would be seriously undertaken. as often as a steady resistance is offered to the federal government it will be found to yield. experience has hitherto shown that whenever a state has demanded anything with perseverance and resolution, it has invariably succeeded; and that if a separate government has distinctly refused to act, it was left to do as it thought fit. *z [footnote z: see the conduct of the northern states in the war of . "during that war," says jefferson in a letter to general lafayette, "four of the eastern states were only attached to the union, like so many inanimate bodies to living men."] but even if the government of the union had any strength inherent in itself, the physical situation of the country would render the exercise of that strength very difficult. *a the united states cover an immense territory; they are separated from each other by great distances; and the population is disseminated over the surface of a country which is still half a wilderness. if the union were to undertake to enforce the allegiance of the confederate states by military means, it would be in a position very analogous to that of england at the time of the war of independence. [footnote a: the profound peace of the union affords no pretext for a standing army; and without a standing army a government is not prepared to profit by a favorable opportunity to conquer resistance, and take the sovereign power by surprise. [this note, and the paragraph in the text which precedes, have been shown by the results of the civil war to be a misconception of the writer.]] however strong a government may be, it cannot easily escape from the consequences of a principle which it has once admitted as the foundation of its constitution. the union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and, in uniting together, they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. if one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so; and the federal government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly, either by force or by right. in order to enable the federal government easily to conquer the resistance which may be offered to it by any one of its subjects, it would be necessary that one or more of them should be specially interested in the existence of the union, as has frequently been the case in the history of confederations. if it be supposed that amongst the states which are united by the federal tie there are some which exclusively enjoy the principal advantages of union, or whose prosperity depends on the duration of that union, it is unquestionable that they will always be ready to support the central government in enforcing the obedience of the others. but the government would then be exerting a force not derived from itself, but from a principle contrary to its nature. states form confederations in order to derive equal advantages from their union; and in the case just alluded to, the federal government would derive its power from the unequal distribution of those benefits amongst the states. if one of the confederate states have acquired a preponderance sufficiently great to enable it to take exclusive possession of the central authority, it will consider the other states as subject provinces, and it will cause its own supremacy to be respected under the borrowed name of the sovereignty of the union. great things may then be done in the name of the federal government, but in reality that government will have ceased to exist. *b in both these cases, the power which acts in the name of the confederation becomes stronger the more it abandons the natural state and the acknowledged principles of confederations. [footnote b: thus the province of holland in the republic of the low countries, and the emperor in the germanic confederation, have sometimes put themselves in the place of the union, and have employed the federal authority to their own advantage.] in america the existing union is advantageous to all the states, but it is not indispensable to any one of them. several of them might break the federal tie without compromising the welfare of the others, although their own prosperity would be lessened. as the existence and the happiness of none of the states are wholly dependent on the present constitution, they would none of them be disposed to make great personal sacrifices to maintain it. on the other hand, there is no state which seems hitherto to have its ambition much interested in the maintenance of the existing union. they certainly do not all exercise the same influence in the federal councils, but no one of them can hope to domineer over the rest, or to treat them as its inferiors or as its subjects. it appears to me unquestionable that if any portion of the union seriously desired to separate itself from the other states, they would not be able, nor indeed would they attempt, to prevent it; and that the present union will only last as long as the states which compose it choose to continue members of the confederation. if this point be admitted, the question becomes less difficult; and our object is, not to inquire whether the states of the existing union are capable of separating, but whether they will choose to remain united. amongst the various reasons which tend to render the existing union useful to the americans, two principal causes are peculiarly evident to the observer. although the americans are, as it were, alone upon their continent, their commerce makes them the neighbors of all the nations with which they trade. notwithstanding their apparent isolation, the americans require a certain degree of strength, which they cannot retain otherwise than by remaining united to each other. if the states were to split, they would not only diminish the strength which they are now able to display towards foreign nations, but they would soon create foreign powers upon their own territory. a system of inland custom-houses would then be established; the valleys would be divided by imaginary boundary lines; the courses of the rivers would be confined by territorial distinctions; and a multitude of hindrances would prevent the americans from exploring the whole of that vast continent which providence has allotted to them for a dominion. at present they have no invasion to fear, and consequently no standing armies to maintain, no taxes to levy. if the union were dissolved, all these burdensome measures might ere long be required. the americans are then very powerfully interested in the maintenance of their union. on the other hand, it is almost impossible to discover any sort of material interest which might at present tempt a portion of the union to separate from the other states. when we cast our eyes upon the map of the united states, we perceive the chain of the alleghany mountains, running from the northeast to the southwest, and crossing nearly one thousand miles of country; and we are led to imagine that the design of providence was to raise between the valley of the mississippi and the coast of the atlantic ocean one of those natural barriers which break the mutual intercourse of men, and form the necessary limits of different states. but the average height of the alleghanies does not exceed , feet; their greatest elevation is not above , feet; their rounded summits, and the spacious valleys which they conceal within their passes, are of easy access from several sides. besides which, the principal rivers which fall into the atlantic ocean--the hudson, the susquehanna, and the potomac--take their rise beyond the alleghanies, in an open district, which borders upon the valley of the mississippi. these streams quit this tract of country, make their way through the barrier which would seem to turn them westward, and as they wind through the mountains they open an easy and natural passage to man. no natural barrier exists in the regions which are now inhabited by the anglo-americans; the alleghanies are so far from serving as a boundary to separate nations, that they do not even serve as a frontier to the states. new york, pennsylvania, and virginia comprise them within their borders, and they extend as much to the west as to the east of the line. the territory now occupied by the twenty-four states of the union, and the three great districts which have not yet acquired the rank of states, although they already contain inhabitants, covers a surface of , , square miles, *c which is about equal to five times the extent of france. within these limits the qualities of the soil, the temperature, and the produce of the country, are extremely various. the vast extent of territory occupied by the anglo-american republics has given rise to doubts as to the maintenance of their union. here a distinction must be made; contrary interests sometimes arise in the different provinces of a vast empire, which often terminate in open dissensions; and the extent of the country is then most prejudicial to the power of the state. but if the inhabitants of these vast regions are not divided by contrary interests, the extent of the territory may be favorable to their prosperity; for the unity of the government promotes the interchange of the different productions of the soil, and increases their value by facilitating their consumption. [footnote c: see "darby's view of the united states," p. . [in the number of states and territories had increased to , the population to , , , and the area of the states, , , square miles. this does not include the philippine islands, hawaii, or porto rico. a conservative estimate of the population of the philippine islands is , , ; that of hawaii, by the census of , was given at , ; and the present estimated population of porto rico is , . the area of the philippine islands is about , square miles, that of hawaii is , square miles, and the area of porto rico is about , square miles.]] it is indeed easy to discover different interests in the different parts of the union, but i am unacquainted with any which are hostile to each other. the southern states are almost exclusively agricultural. the northern states are more peculiarly commercial and manufacturing. the states of the west are at the same time agricultural and manufacturing. in the south the crops consist of tobacco, of rice, of cotton, and of sugar; in the north and the west, of wheat and maize. these are different sources of wealth; but union is the means by which these sources are opened to all, and rendered equally advantageous to the several districts. the north, which ships the produce of the anglo-americans to all parts of the world, and brings back the produce of the globe to the union, is evidently interested in maintaining the confederation in its present condition, in order that the number of american producers and consumers may remain as large as possible. the north is the most natural agent of communication between the south and the west of the union on the one hand, and the rest of the world upon the other; the north is therefore interested in the union and prosperity of the south and the west, in order that they may continue to furnish raw materials for its manufactures, and cargoes for its shipping. the south and the west, on their side, are still more directly interested in the preservation of the union, and the prosperity of the north. the produce of the south is, for the most part, exported beyond seas; the south and the west consequently stand in need of the commercial resources of the north. they are likewise interested in the maintenance of a powerful fleet by the union, to protect them efficaciously. the south and the west have no vessels, but they cannot refuse a willing subsidy to defray the expenses of the navy; for if the fleets of europe were to blockade the ports of the south and the delta of the mississippi, what would become of the rice of the carolinas, the tobacco of virginia, and the sugar and cotton which grow in the valley of the mississippi? every portion of the federal budget does therefore contribute to the maintenance of material interests which are common to all the confederate states. independently of this commercial utility, the south and the west of the union derive great political advantages from their connection with the north. the south contains an enormous slave population; a population which is already alarming, and still more formidable for the future. the states of the west lie in the remotest parts of a single valley; and all the rivers which intersect their territory rise in the rocky mountains or in the alleghanies, and fall into the mississippi, which bears them onwards to the gulf of mexico. the western states are consequently entirely cut off, by their position, from the traditions of europe and the civilization of the old world. the inhabitants of the south, then, are induced to support the union in order to avail themselves of its protection against the blacks; and the inhabitants of the west in order not to be excluded from a free communication with the rest of the globe, and shut up in the wilds of central america. the north cannot but desire the maintenance of the union, in order to remain, as it now is, the connecting link between that vast body and the other parts of the world. the temporal interests of all the several parts of the union are, then, intimately connected; and the same assertion holds true respecting those opinions and sentiments which may be termed the immaterial interests of men. chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part vii the inhabitants of the united states talk a great deal of their attachment to their country; but i confess that i do not rely upon that calculating patriotism which is founded upon interest, and which a change in the interests at stake may obliterate. nor do i attach much importance to the language of the americans, when they manifest, in their daily conversations, the intention of maintaining the federal system adopted by their forefathers. a government retains its sway over a great number of citizens, far less by the voluntary and rational consent of the multitude, than by that instinctive, and to a certain extent involuntary agreement, which results from similarity of feelings and resemblances of opinion. i will never admit that men constitute a social body, simply because they obey the same head and the same laws. society can only exist when a great number of men consider a great number of things in the same point of view; when they hold the same opinions upon many subjects, and when the same occurrences suggest the same thoughts and impressions to their minds. the observer who examines the present condition of the united states upon this principle, will readily discover, that although the citizens are divided into twenty-four distinct sovereignties, they nevertheless constitute a single people; and he may perhaps be led to think that the state of the anglo-american union is more truly a state of society than that of certain nations of europe which live under the same legislation and the same prince. although the anglo-americans have several religious sects, they all regard religion in the same manner. they are not always agreed upon the measures which are most conducive to good government, and they vary upon some of the forms of government which it is expedient to adopt; but they are unanimous upon the general principles which ought to rule human society. from maine to the floridas, and from the missouri to the atlantic ocean, the people is held to be the legitimate source of all power. the same notions are entertained respecting liberty and equality, the liberty of the press, the right of association, the jury, and the responsibility of the agents of government. if we turn from their political and religious opinions to the moral and philosophical principles which regulate the daily actions of life and govern their conduct, we shall still find the same uniformity. the anglo-americans *d acknowledge the absolute moral authority of the reason of the community, as they acknowledge the political authority of the mass of citizens; and they hold that public opinion is the surest arbiter of what is lawful or forbidden, true or false. the majority of them believe that a man will be led to do what is just and good by following his own interest rightly understood. they hold that every man is born in possession of the right of self-government, and that no one has the right of constraining his fellow-creatures to be happy. they have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man; they are of opinion that the effects of the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better-to-morrow. i do not give all these opinions as true, but i quote them as characteristic of the americans. [footnote d: it is scarcely necessary for me to observe that by the expression anglo-americans, i only mean to designate the great majority of the nation; for a certain number of isolated individuals are of course to be met with holding very different opinions.] the anglo-americans are not only united together by these common opinions, but they are separated from all other nations by a common feeling of pride. for the last fifty years no pains have been spared to convince the inhabitants of the united states that they constitute the only religious, enlightened, and free people. they perceive that, for the present, their own democratic institutions succeed, whilst those of other countries fail; hence they conceive an overweening opinion of their superiority, and they are not very remote from believing themselves to belong to a distinct race of mankind. the dangers which threaten the american union do not originate in the diversity of interests or of opinions, but in the various characters and passions of the americans. the men who inhabit the vast territory of the united states are almost all the issue of a common stock; but the effects of the climate, and more especially of slavery, have gradually introduced very striking differences between the british settler of the southern states and the british settler of the north. in europe it is generally believed that slavery has rendered the interests of one part of the union contrary to those of another part; but i by no means remarked this to be the case: slavery has not created interests in the south contrary to those of the north, but it has modified the character and changed the habits of the natives of the south. i have already explained the influence which slavery has exercised upon the commercial ability of the americans in the south; and this same influence equally extends to their manners. the slave is a servant who never remonstrates, and who submits to everything without complaint. he may sometimes assassinate, but he never withstands, his master. in the south there are no families so poor as not to have slaves. the citizen of the southern states of the union is invested with a sort of domestic dictatorship, from his earliest years; the first notion he acquires in life is that he is born to command, and the first habit which he contracts is that of being obeyed without resistance. his education tends, then, to give him the character of a supercilious and a hasty man; irascible, violent, and ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt. the american of the northern states is surrounded by no slaves in his childhood; he is even unattended by free servants, and is usually obliged to provide for his own wants. no sooner does he enter the world than the idea of necessity assails him on every side: he soon learns to know exactly the natural limit of his authority; he never expects to subdue those who withstand him, by force; and he knows that the surest means of obtaining the support of his fellow-creatures, is to win their favor. he therefore becomes patient, reflecting, tolerant, slow to act, and persevering in his designs. in the southern states the more immediate wants of life are always supplied; the inhabitants of those parts are not busied in the material cares of life, which are always provided for by others; and their imagination is diverted to more captivating and less definite objects. the american of the south is fond of grandeur, luxury, and renown, of gayety, of pleasure, and above all of idleness; nothing obliges him to exert himself in order to subsist; and as he has no necessary occupations, he gives way to indolence, and does not even attempt what would be useful. but the equality of fortunes, and the absence of slavery in the north, plunge the inhabitants in those same cares of daily life which are disdained by the white population of the south. they are taught from infancy to combat want, and to place comfort above all the pleasures of the intellect or the heart. the imagination is extinguished by the trivial details of life, and the ideas become less numerous and less general, but far more practical and more precise. as prosperity is the sole aim of exertion, it is excellently well attained; nature and mankind are turned to the best pecuniary advantage, and society is dexterously made to contribute to the welfare of each of its members, whilst individual egotism is the source of general happiness. the citizen of the north has not only experience, but knowledge: nevertheless he sets but little value upon the pleasures of knowledge; he esteems it as the means of attaining a certain end, and he is only anxious to seize its more lucrative applications. the citizen of the south is more given to act upon impulse; he is more clever, more frank, more generous, more intellectual, and more brilliant. the former, with a greater degree of activity, of common-sense, of information, and of general aptitude, has the characteristic good and evil qualities of the middle classes. the latter has the tastes, the prejudices, the weaknesses, and the magnanimity of all aristocracies. if two men are united in society, who have the same interests, and to a certain extent the same opinions, but different characters, different acquirements, and a different style of civilization, it is probable that these men will not agree. the same remark is applicable to a society of nations. slavery, then, does not attack the american union directly in its interests, but indirectly in its manners. [footnote e: census of , , , ; , , , ; , , , ; , , , ; , , , .] the states which gave their assent to the federal contract in were thirteen in number; the union now consists of thirty-four members. the population, which amounted to nearly , , in , had more than tripled in the space of forty years; and in it amounted to nearly , , . *e changes of such magnitude cannot take place without some danger. a society of nations, as well as a society of individuals, derives its principal chances of duration from the wisdom of its members, their individual weakness, and their limited number. the americans who quit the coasts of the atlantic ocean to plunge into the western wilderness, are adventurers impatient of restraint, greedy of wealth, and frequently men expelled from the states in which they were born. when they arrive in the deserts they are unknown to each other, and they have neither traditions, family feeling, nor the force of example to check their excesses. the empire of the laws is feeble amongst them; that of morality is still more powerless. the settlers who are constantly peopling the valley of the mississippi are, then, in every respect very inferior to the americans who inhabit the older parts of the union. nevertheless, they already exercise a great influence in its councils; and they arrive at the government of the commonwealth before they have learnt to govern themselves. *f [footnote f: this indeed is only a temporary danger. i have no doubt that in time society will assume as much stability and regularity in the west as it has already done upon the coast of the atlantic ocean.] the greater the individual weakness of each of the contracting parties, the greater are the chances of the duration of the contract; for their safety is then dependent upon their union. when, in , the most populous of the american republics did not contain , inhabitants, *g each of them felt its own insignificance as an independent people, and this feeling rendered compliance with the federal authority more easy. but when one of the confederate states reckons, like the state of new york, , , of inhabitants, and covers an extent of territory equal in surface to a quarter of france, *h it feels its own strength; and although it may continue to support the union as advantageous to its prosperity, it no longer regards that body as necessary to its existence, and as it continues to belong to the federal compact, it soon aims at preponderance in the federal assemblies. the probable unanimity of the states is diminished as their number increases. at present the interests of the different parts of the union are not at variance; but who is able to foresee the multifarious changes of the future, in a country in which towns are founded from day to day, and states almost from year to year? [footnote g: pennsylvania contained , inhabitants in [and , , in .]] [footnote h: the area of the state of new york is , square miles. [see u. s. census report of .]] since the first settlement of the british colonies, the number of inhabitants has about doubled every twenty-two years. i perceive no causes which are likely to check this progressive increase of the anglo-american population for the next hundred years; and before that space of time has elapsed, i believe that the territories and dependencies of the united states will be covered by more than , , of inhabitants, and divided into forty states. *i i admit that these , , of men have no hostile interests. i suppose, on the contrary, that they are all equally interested in the maintenance of the union; but i am still of opinion that where there are , , of men, and forty distinct nations, unequally strong, the continuance of the federal government can only be a fortunate accident. [footnote i: if the population continues to double every twenty-two years, as it has done for the last two hundred years, the number of inhabitants in the united states in will be twenty millions; in , forty-eight millions; and in , ninety-six millions. this may still be the case even if the lands on the western slope of the rocky mountains should be found to be unfit for cultivation. the territory which is already occupied can easily contain this number of inhabitants. one hundred millions of men disseminated over the surface of the twenty-four states, and the three dependencies, which constitute the union, would only give inhabitants to the square league; this would be far below the mean population of france, which is , to the square league; or of england, which is , ; and it would even be below the population of switzerland, for that country, notwithstanding its lakes and mountains, contains inhabitants to the square league. see "malte brun," vol. vi. p. . [the actual result has fallen somewhat short of these calculations, in spite of the vast territorial acquisitions of the united states: but in the population is probably about eighty-seven millions, including the population of the philippines, hawaii, and porto rico.]] whatever faith i may have in the perfectibility of man, until human nature is altered, and men wholly transformed, i shall refuse to believe in the duration of a government which is called upon to hold together forty different peoples, disseminated over a territory equal to one-half of europe in extent; to avoid all rivalry, ambition, and struggles between them, and to direct their independent activity to the accomplishment of the same designs. but the greatest peril to which the union is exposed by its increase arises from the continual changes which take place in the position of its internal strength. the distance from lake superior to the gulf of mexico extends from the th to the th degree of latitude, a distance of more than , miles as the bird flies. the frontier of the united states winds along the whole of this immense line, sometimes falling within its limits, but more frequently extending far beyond it, into the waste. it has been calculated that the whites advance every year a mean distance of seventeen miles along the whole of his vast boundary. *j obstacles, such as an unproductive district, a lake or an indian nation unexpectedly encountered, are sometimes met with. the advancing column then halts for a while; its two extremities fall back upon themselves, and as soon as they are reunited they proceed onwards. this gradual and continuous progress of the european race towards the rocky mountains has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onwards by the hand of god. [footnote j: see legislative documents, th congress, no. , p. .] within this first line of conquering settlers towns are built, and vast states founded. in there were only a few thousand pioneers sprinkled along the valleys of the mississippi; and at the present day these valleys contain as many inhabitants as were to be found in the whole union in . their population amounts to nearly , , . *k the city of washington was founded in , in the very centre of the union; but such are the changes which have taken place, that it now stands at one of the extremities; and the delegates of the most remote western states are already obliged to perform a journey as long as that from vienna to paris. *l [footnote k: , , --census of .] [footnote l: the distance from jefferson, the capital of the state of missouri, to washington is , miles. ("american almanac," , p. .)] all the states are borne onwards at the same time in the path of fortune, but of course they do not all increase and prosper in the same proportion. to the north of the union the detached branches of the alleghany chain, which extend as far as the atlantic ocean, form spacious roads and ports, which are constantly accessible to vessels of the greatest burden. but from the potomac to the mouth of the mississippi the coast is sandy and flat. in this part of the union the mouths of almost all the rivers are obstructed; and the few harbors which exist amongst these lagoons afford much shallower water to vessels, and much fewer commercial advantages than those of the north. this first natural cause of inferiority is united to another cause proceeding from the laws. we have already seen that slavery, which is abolished in the north, still exists in the south; and i have pointed out its fatal consequences upon the prosperity of the planter himself. the north is therefore superior to the south both in commerce *m and manufacture; the natural consequence of which is the more rapid increase of population and of wealth within its borders. the states situate upon the shores of the atlantic ocean are already half-peopled. most of the land is held by an owner; and these districts cannot therefore receive so many emigrants as the western states, where a boundless field is still open to their exertions. the valley of the mississippi is far more fertile than the coast of the atlantic ocean. this reason, added to all the others, contributes to drive the europeans westward--a fact which may be rigorously demonstrated by figures. it is found that the sum total of the population of all the united states has about tripled in the course of forty years. but in the recent states adjacent to the mississippi, the population has increased thirty-one-fold, within the same space of time. *n [footnote m: the following statements will suffice to show the difference which exists between the commerce of the south and that of the north:-- in the tonnage of all the merchant vessels belonging to virginia, the two carolinas, and georgia (the four great southern states), amounted to only , tons. in the same year the tonnage of the vessels of the state of massachusetts alone amounted to , tons. (see legislative documents, st congress, d session, no. , p. .) thus the state of massachusetts had three times as much shipping as the four above-mentioned states. nevertheless the area of the state of massachusetts is only , square miles, and its population amounts to , inhabitants [ , , in ]; whilst the area of the four other states i have quoted is , square miles, and their population , , . thus the area of the state of massachusetts forms only one-thirtieth part of the area of the four states; and its population is five times smaller than theirs. (see "darby's view of the united states.") slavery is prejudicial to the commercial prosperity of the south in several different ways; by diminishing the spirit of enterprise amongst the whites, and by preventing them from meeting with as numerous a class of sailors as they require. sailors are usually taken from the lowest ranks of the population. but in the southern states these lowest ranks are composed of slaves, and it is very difficult to employ them at sea. they are unable to serve as well as a white crew, and apprehensions would always be entertained of their mutinying in the middle of the ocean, or of their escaping in the foreign countries at which they might touch.] [footnote n: "darby's view of the united states," p. .] the relative position of the central federal power is continually displaced. forty years ago the majority of the citizens of the union was established upon the coast of the atlantic, in the environs of the spot upon which washington now stands; but the great body of the people is now advancing inland and to the north, so that in twenty years the majority will unquestionably be on the western side of the alleghanies. if the union goes on to subsist, the basin of the mississippi is evidently marked out, by its fertility and its extent, as the future centre of the federal government. in thirty or forty years, that tract of country will have assumed the rank which naturally belongs to it. it is easy to calculate that its population, compared to that of the coast of the atlantic, will be, in round numbers, as to . in a few years the states which founded the union will lose the direction of its policy, and the population of the valley of the mississippi will preponderate in the federal assemblies. this constant gravitation of the federal power and influence towards the northwest is shown every ten years, when a general census of the population is made, and the number of delegates which each state sends to congress is settled afresh. *o in virginia had nineteen representatives in congress. this number continued to increase until the year , when it reached to twenty-three; from that time it began to decrease, and in virginia elected only twenty-one representatives. *p during the same period the state of new york progressed in the contrary direction: in it had ten representatives in congress; in , twenty-seven; in , thirty-four; and in , forty. the state of ohio had only one representative in , and in it had already nineteen. [footnote o: it may be seen that in the course of the last ten years ( - ) the population of one district, as, for instance, the state of delaware, has increased in the proportion of five per cent.; whilst that of another, as the territory of michigan, has increased per cent. thus the population of virginia had augmented thirteen per cent., and that of the border state of ohio sixty-one per cent., in the same space of time. the general table of these changes, which is given in the "national calendar," displays a striking picture of the unequal fortunes of the different states.] [footnote p: it has just been said that in the course of the last term the population of virginia has increased thirteen per cent.; and it is necessary to explain how the number of representatives for a state may decrease, when the population of that state, far from diminishing, is actually upon the increase. i take the state of virginia, to which i have already alluded, as my term of comparison. the number of representatives of virginia in was proportionate to the total number of the representatives of the union, and to the relation which the population bore to that of the whole union: in the number of representatives of virginia was likewise proportionate to the total number of the representatives of the union, and to the relation which its population, augmented in the course of ten years, bore to the augmented population of the union in the same space of time. the new number of virginian representatives will then be to the old numver, on the one hand, as the new numver of all the representatives is to the old number; and, on the other hand, as the augmentation of the population of virginia is to that of the whole population of the country. thus, if the increase of the population of the lesser country be to that of the greater in an exact inverse ratio of the proportion between the new and the old numbers of all the representatives, the number of the representatives of virginia will remain stationary; and if the increase of the virginian population be to that of the whole union in a feeblerratio than the new number of the representatives of the union to the old number, the number of the representatives of virginia must decrease. [thus, to the th congress in , virginia and west virginia send only fourteen representatives.]] chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part viii it is difficult to imagine a durable union of a people which is rich and strong with one which is poor and weak, even if it were proved that the strength and wealth of the one are not the causes of the weakness and poverty of the other. but union is still more difficult to maintain at a time at which one party is losing strength, and the other is gaining it. this rapid and disproportionate increase of certain states threatens the independence of the others. new york might perhaps succeed, with its , , of inhabitants and its forty representatives, in dictating to the other states in congress. but even if the more powerful states make no attempt to bear down the lesser ones, the danger still exists; for there is almost as much in the possibility of the act as in the act itself. the weak generally mistrust the justice and the reason of the strong. the states which increase less rapidly than the others look upon those which are more favored by fortune with envy and suspicion. hence arise the deep-seated uneasiness and ill-defined agitation which are observable in the south, and which form so striking a contrast to the confidence and prosperity which are common to other parts of the union. i am inclined to think that the hostile measures taken by the southern provinces upon a recent occasion are attributable to no other cause. the inhabitants of the southern states are, of all the americans, those who are most interested in the maintenance of the union; they would assuredly suffer most from being left to themselves; and yet they are the only citizens who threaten to break the tie of confederation. but it is easy to perceive that the south, which has given four presidents, washington, jefferson, madison, and monroe, to the union, which perceives that it is losing its federal influence, and that the number of its representatives in congress is diminishing from year to year, whilst those of the northern and western states are increasing; the south, which is peopled with ardent and irascible beings, is becoming more and more irritated and alarmed. the citizens reflect upon their present position and remember their past influence, with the melancholy uneasiness of men who suspect oppression: if they discover a law of the union which is not unequivocally favorable to their interests, they protest against it as an abuse of force; and if their ardent remonstrances are not listened to, they threaten to quit an association which loads them with burdens whilst it deprives them of their due profits. "the tariff," said the inhabitants of carolina in , "enriches the north, and ruins the south; for if this were not the case, to what can we attribute the continually increasing power and wealth of the north, with its inclement skies and arid soil; whilst the south, which may be styled the garden of america, is rapidly declining?" *q [footnote q: see the report of its committee to the convention which proclaimed the nullification of the tariff in south carolina.] if the changes which i have described were gradual, so that each generation at least might have time to disappear with the order of things under which it had lived, the danger would be less; but the progress of society in america is precipitate, and almost revolutionary. the same citizen may have lived to see his state take the lead in the union, and afterwards become powerless in the federal assemblies; and an anglo-american republic has been known to grow as rapidly as a man passing from birth and infancy to maturity in the course of thirty years. it must not be imagined, however, that the states which lose their preponderance, also lose their population or their riches: no stop is put to their prosperity, and they even go on to increase more rapidly than any kingdom in europe. *r but they believe themselves to be impoverished because their wealth does not augment as rapidly as that of their neighbors; any they think that their power is lost, because they suddenly come into collision with a power greater than their own: *s thus they are more hurt in their feelings and their passions than in their interests. but this is amply sufficient to endanger the maintenance of the union. if kings and peoples had only had their true interests in view ever since the beginning of the world, the name of war would scarcely be known among mankind. [footnote r: the population of a country assuredly constitutes the first element of its wealth. in the ten years ( - ) during which virginia lost two of its representatives in congress, its population increased in the proportion of . per cent.; that of carolina in the proportion of fifteen per cent.; and that of georgia, . per cent. (see the "american almanac," , p. ) but the population of russia, which increases more rapidly than that of any other european country, only augments in ten years at the rate of . per cent.; in france, at the rate of seven per cent.; and in europe in general, at the rate of . per cent. (see "malte brun," vol. vi. p. )] [footnote s: it must be admitted, however, that the depreciation which has taken place in the value of tobacco, during the last fifty years, has notably diminished the opulence of the southern planters: but this circumstance is as independent of the will of their northern brethren as it is of their own.] thus the prosperity of the united states is the source of the most serious dangers that threaten them, since it tends to create in some of the confederate states that over-excitement which accompanies a rapid increase of fortune; and to awaken in others those feelings of envy, mistrust, and regret which usually attend upon the loss of it. the americans contemplate this extraordinary and hasty progress with exultation; but they would be wiser to consider it with sorrow and alarm. the americans of the united states must inevitably become one of the greatest nations in the world; their offset will cover almost the whole of north america; the continent which they inhabit is their dominion, and it cannot escape them. what urges them to take possession of it so soon? riches, power, and renown cannot fail to be theirs at some future time, but they rush upon their fortune as if but a moment remained for them to make it their own. i think that i have demonstrated that the existence of the present confederation depends entirely on the continued assent of all the confederates; and, starting from this principle, i have inquired into the causes which may induce the several states to separate from the others. the union may, however, perish in two different ways: one of the confederate states may choose to retire from the compact, and so forcibly to sever the federal tie; and it is to this supposition that most of the remarks that i have made apply: or the authority of the federal government may be progressively entrenched on by the simultaneous tendency of the united republics to resume their independence. the central power, successively stripped of all its prerogatives, and reduced to impotence by tacit consent, would become incompetent to fulfil its purpose; and the second union would perish, like the first, by a sort of senile inaptitude. the gradual weakening of the federal tie, which may finally lead to the dissolution of the union, is a distinct circumstance, that may produce a variety of minor consequences before it operates so violent a change. the confederation might still subsist, although its government were reduced to such a degree of inanition as to paralyze the nation, to cause internal anarchy, and to check the general prosperity of the country. after having investigated the causes which may induce the anglo-americans to disunite, it is important to inquire whether, if the union continues to subsist, their government will extend or contract its sphere of action, and whether it will become more energetic or more weak. the americans are evidently disposed to look upon their future condition with alarm. they perceive that in most of the nations of the world the exercise of the rights of sovereignty tends to fall under the control of a few individuals, and they are dismayed by the idea that such will also be the case in their own country. even the statesmen feel, or affect to feel, these fears; for, in america, centralization is by no means popular, and there is no surer means of courting the majority than by inveighing against the encroachments of the central power. the americans do not perceive that the countries in which this alarming tendency to centralization exists are inhabited by a single people; whilst the fact of the union being composed of different confederate communities is sufficient to baffle all the inferences which might be drawn from analogous circumstances. i confess that i am inclined to consider the fears of a great number of americans as purely imaginary; and far from participating in their dread of the consolidation of power in the hands of the union, i think that the federal government is visibly losing strength. to prove this assertion i shall not have recourse to any remote occurrences, but to circumstances which i have myself witnessed, and which belong to our own time. an attentive examination of what is going on in the united states will easily convince us that two opposite tendencies exist in that country, like two distinct currents flowing in contrary directions in the same channel. the union has now existed for forty-five years, and in the course of that time a vast number of provincial prejudices, which were at first hostile to its power, have died away. the patriotic feeling which attached each of the americans to his own native state is become less exclusive; and the different parts of the union have become more intimately connected the better they have become acquainted with each other. the post, *t that great instrument of intellectual intercourse, now reaches into the backwoods; and steamboats have established daily means of communication between the different points of the coast. an inland navigation of unexampled rapidity conveys commodities up and down the rivers of the country. *u and to these facilities of nature and art may be added those restless cravings, that busy-mindedness, and love of pelf, which are constantly urging the american into active life, and bringing him into contact with his fellow-citizens. he crosses the country in every direction; he visits all the various populations of the land; and there is not a province in france in which the natives are so well known to each other as the , , of men who cover the territory of the united states. [footnote t: in , the district of michigan, which only contains , inhabitants, and is still an almost unexplored wilderness, possessed miles of mail-roads. the territory of arkansas, which is still more uncultivated, was already intersected by , miles of mail-roads. (see the report of the general post office, november , .) the postage of newspapers alone in the whole union amounted to $ , .] [footnote u: in the course of ten years, from to , steamboats have been launched upon the rivers which water the valley of the mississippi alone. in steamboats existed in the united states. (see legislative documents, no. , p. .)] but whilst the americans intermingle, they grow in resemblance of each other; the differences resulting from their climate, their origin, and their institutions, diminish; and they all draw nearer and nearer to the common type. every year, thousands of men leave the north to settle in different parts of the union: they bring with them their faith, their opinions, and their manners; and as they are more enlighthned than the men amongst whom they are about to dwell, they soon rise to the head of affairs, and they adapt society to their own advantage. this continual emigration of the north to the south is peculiarly favorable to the fusion of all the different provincial characters into one national character. the civilization of the north appears to be the common standard, to which the whole nation will one day be assimilated. the commercial ties which unite the confederate states are strengthened by the increasing manufactures of the americans; and the union which began to exist in their opinions, gradually forms a part of their habits: the course of time has swept away the bugbear thoughts which haunted the imaginations of the citizens in . the federal power is not become oppressive; it has not destroyed the independence of the states; it has not subjected the confederates to monarchial institutions; and the union has not rendered the lesser states dependent upon the larger ones; but the confederation has continued to increase in population, in wealth, and in power. i am therefore convinced that the natural obstacles to the continuance of the american union are not so powerful at the present time as they were in ; and that the enemies of the union are not so numerous. nevertheless, a careful examination of the history of the united states for the last forty-five years will readily convince us that the federal power is declining; nor is it difficult to explain the causes of this phenomenon. *v when the constitution of was promulgated, the nation was a prey to anarchy; the union, which succeeded this confusion, excited much dread and much animosity; but it was warmly supported because it satisfied an imperious want. thus, although it was more attacked than it is now, the federal power soon reached the maximum of its authority, as is usually the case with a government which triumphs after having braced its strength by the struggle. at that time the interpretation of the constitution seemed to extend, rather than to repress, the federal sovereignty; and the union offered, in several respects, the appearance of a single and undivided people, directed in its foreign and internal policy by a single government. but to attain this point the people had risen, to a certain extent, above itself. [footnote v: [since the movement is certainly in the opposite direction, and the federal power has largely increased, and tends to further increase.]] the constitution had not destroyed the distinct sovereignty of the states; and all communities, of whatever nature they may be, are impelled by a secret propensity to assert their independence. this propensity is still more decided in a country like america, in which every village forms a sort of republic accustomed to conduct its own affairs. it therefore cost the states an effort to submit to the federal supremacy; and all efforts, however successful they may be, necessarily subside with the causes in which they originated. as the federal government consolidated its authority, america resumed its rank amongst the nations, peace returned to its frontiers, and public credit was restored; confusion was succeeded by a fixed state of things, which was favorable to the full and free exercise of industrious enterprise. it was this very prosperity which made the americans forget the cause to which it was attributable; and when once the danger was passed, the energy and the patriotism which had enabled them to brave it disappeared from amongst them. no sooner were they delivered from the cares which oppressed them, than they easily returned to their ordinary habits, and gave themselves up without resistance to their natural inclinations. when a powerful government no longer appeared to be necessary, they once more began to think it irksome. the union encouraged a general prosperity, and the states were not inclined to abandon the union; but they desired to render the action of the power which represented that body as light as possible. the general principle of union was adopted, but in every minor detail there was an actual tendency to independence. the principle of confederation was every day more easily admitted, and more rarely applied; so that the federal government brought about its own decline, whilst it was creating order and peace. as soon as this tendency of public opinion began to be manifested externally, the leaders of parties, who live by the passions of the people, began to work it to their own advantage. the position of the federal government then became exceedingly critical. its enemies were in possession of the popular favor; and they obtained the right of conducting its policy by pledging themselves to lessen its influence. from that time forwards the government of the union has invariably been obliged to recede, as often as it has attempted to enter the lists with the governments of the states. and whenever an interpretation of the terms of the federal constitution has been called for, that interpretation has most frequently been opposed to the union, and favorable to the states. the constitution invested the federal government with the right of providing for the interests of the nation; and it had been held that no other authority was so fit to superintend the "internal improvements" which affected the prosperity of the whole union; such, for instance, as the cutting of canals. but the states were alarmed at a power, distinct from their own, which could thus dispose of a portion of their territory; and they were afraid that the central government would, by this means, acquire a formidable extent of patronage within their own confines, and exercise a degree of influence which they intended to reserve exclusively to their own agents. the democratic party, which has constantly been opposed to the increase of the federal authority, then accused the congress of usurpation, and the chief magistrate of ambition. the central government was intimidated by the opposition; and it soon acknowledged its error, promising exactly to confine its influence for the future within the circle which was prescribed to it. the constitution confers upon the union the right of treating with foreign nations. the indian tribes, which border upon the frontiers of the united states, had usually been regarded in this light. as long as these savages consented to retire before the civilized settlers, the federal right was not contested: but as soon as an indian tribe attempted to fix its dwelling upon a given spot, the adjacent states claimed possession of the lands and the rights of sovereignty over the natives. the central government soon recognized both these claims; and after it had concluded treaties with the indians as independent nations, it gave them up as subjects to the legislative tyranny of the states. *w [footnote w: see in the legislative documents, already quoted in speaking of the indians, the letter of the president of the united states to the cherokees, his correspondence on this subject with his agents, and his messages to congress.] some of the states which had been founded upon the coast of the atlantic, extended indefinitely to the west, into wild regions where no european had ever penetrated. the states whose confines were irrevocably fixed, looked with a jealous eye upon the unbounded regions which the future would enable their neighbors to explore. the latter then agreed, with a view to conciliate the others, and to facilitate the act of union, to lay down their own boundaries, and to abandon all the territory which lay beyond those limits to the confederation at large. *x thenceforward the federal government became the owner of all the uncultivated lands which lie beyond the borders of the thirteen states first confederated. it was invested with the right of parcelling and selling them, and the sums derived from this source were exclusively reserved to the public treasure of the union, in order to furnish supplies for purchasing tracts of country from the indians, for opening roads to the remote settlements, and for accelerating the increase of civilization as much as possible. new states have, however, been formed in the course of time, in the midst of those wilds which were formerly ceded by the inhabitants of the shores of the atlantic. congress has gone on to sell, for the profit of the nation at large, the uncultivated lands which those new states contained. but the latter at length asserted that, as they were now fully constituted, they ought to enjoy the exclusive right of converting the produce of these sales to their own use. as their remonstrances became more and more threatening, congress thought fit to deprive the union of a portion of the privileges which it had hitherto enjoyed; and at the end of it passed a law by which the greatest part of the revenue derived from the sale of lands was made over to the new western republics, although the lands themselves were not ceded to them. *y [footnote x: the first act of session was made by the state of new york in ; virginia, massachusetts, connecticut, south and north carolina, followed this example at different times, and lastly, the act of cession of georgia was made as recently as .] [footnote y: it is true that the president refused his assent to this law; but he completely adopted it in principle. (see message of december , .)] the slightest observation in the united states enables one to appreciate the advantages which the country derives from the bank. these advantages are of several kinds, but one of them is peculiarly striking to the stranger. the banknotes of the united states are taken upon the borders of the desert for the same value as at philadelphia, where the bank conducts its operations. *z [footnote z: the present bank of the united states was established in , with a capital of $ , , ; its charter expires in . last year congress passed a law to renew it, but the president put his veto upon the bill. the struggle is still going on with great violence on either side, and the speedy fall of the bank may easily be foreseen. [it was soon afterwards extinguished by general jackson.]] the bank of the united states is nevertheless the object of great animosity. its directors have proclaimed their hostility to the president: and they are accused, not without some show of probability, of having abused their influence to thwart his election. the president therefore attacks the establishment which they represent with all the warmth of personal enmity; and he is encouraged in the pursuit of his revenge by the conviction that he is supported by the secret propensities of the majority. the bank may be regarded as the great monetary tie of the union, just as congress is the great legislative tie; and the same passions which tend to render the states independent of the central power, contribute to the overthrow of the bank. the bank of the united states always holds a great number of the notes issued by the provincial banks, which it can at any time oblige them to convert into cash. it has itself nothing to fear from a similar demand, as the extent of its resources enables it to meet all claims. but the existence of the provincial banks is thus threatened, and their operations are restricted, since they are only able to issue a quantity of notes duly proportioned to their capital. they submit with impatience to this salutary control. the newspapers which they have bought over, and the president, whose interest renders him their instrument, attack the bank with the greatest vehemence. they rouse the local passions and the blind democratic instinct of the country to aid their cause; and they assert that the bank directors form a permanent aristocratic body, whose influence must ultimately be felt in the government, and must affect those principles of equality upon which society rests in america. the contest between the bank and its opponents is only an incident in the great struggle which is going on in america between the provinces and the central power; between the spirit of democratic independence and the spirit of gradation and subordination. i do not mean that the enemies of the bank are identically the same individuals who, on other points, attack the federal government; but i assert that the attacks directed against the bank of the united states originate in the same propensities which militate against the federal government; and that the very numerous opponents of the former afford a deplorable symptom of the decreasing support of the latter. the union has never displayed so much weakness as in the celebrated question of the tariff. *a the wars of the french revolution and of had created manufacturing establishments in the north of the union, by cutting off all free communication between america and europe. when peace was concluded, and the channel of intercourse reopened by which the produce of europe was transmitted to the new world, the americans thought fit to establish a system of import duties, for the twofold purpose of protecting their incipient manufactures and of paying off the amount of the debt contracted during the war. the southern states, which have no manufactures to encourage, and which are exclusively agricultural, soon complained of this measure. such were the simple facts, and i do not pretend to examine in this place whether their complaints were well founded or unjust. [footnote a: see principally for the details of this affair, the legislative documents, d congress, d session, no. .] as early as the year , south carolina declared, in a petition to congress, that the tariff was "unconstitutional, oppressive, and unjust." and the states of georgia, virginia, north carolina, alabama, and mississippi subsequently remonstrated against it with more or less vigor. but congress, far from lending an ear to these complaints, raised the scale of tariff duties in the years and , and recognized anew the principle on which it was founded. a doctrine was then proclaimed, or rather revived, in the south, which took the name of nullification. i have shown in the proper place that the object of the federal constitution was not to form a league, but to create a national government. the americans of the united states form a sole and undivided people, in all the cases which are specified by that constitution; and upon these points the will of the nation is expressed, as it is in all constitutional nations, by the voice of the majority. when the majority has pronounced its decision, it is the duty of the minority to submit. such is the sound legal doctrine, and the only one which agrees with the text of the constitution, and the known intention of those who framed it. the partisans of nullification in the south maintain, on the contrary, that the intention of the americans in uniting was not to reduce themselves to the condition of one and the same people; that they meant to constitute a league of independent states; and that each state, consequently retains its entire sovereignty, if not de facto, at least de jure; and has the right of putting its own construction upon the laws of congress, and of suspending their execution within the limits of its own territory, if they are held to be unconstitutional and unjust. the entire doctrine of nullification is comprised in a sentence uttered by vice-president calhoun, the head of that party in the south, before the senate of the united states, in the year : could: "the constitution is a compact to which the states were parties in their sovereign capacity; now, whenever a compact is entered into by parties which acknowledge no tribunal above their authority to decide in the last resort, each of them has a right to judge for itself in relation to the nature, extent, and obligations of the instrument." it is evident that a similar doctrine destroys the very basis of the federal constitution, and brings back all the evils of the old confederation, from which the americans were supposed to have had a safe deliverance. when south carolina perceived that congress turned a deaf ear to its remonstrances, it threatened to apply the doctrine of nullification to the federal tariff bill. congress persisted in its former system; and at length the storm broke out. in the course of the citizens of south carolina, *b named a national convention, to consult upon the extraordinary measures which they were called upon to take; and on november th of the same year this convention promulgated a law, under the form of a decree, which annulled the federal law of the tariff, forbade the levy of the imposts which that law commands, and refused to recognize the appeal which might be made to the federal courts of law. *c this decree was only to be put in execution in the ensuing month of february, and it was intimated, that if congress modified the tariff before that period, south carolina might be induced to proceed no further with her menaces; and a vague desire was afterwards expressed of submitting the question to an extraordinary assembly of all the confederate states. [footnote b: that is to say, the majority of the people; for the opposite party, called the union party, always formed a very strong and active minority. carolina may contain about , electors; , were in favor of nullification, and , opposed to it.] [footnote c: this decree was preceded by a report of the committee by which it was framed, containing the explanation of the motives and object of the law. the following passage occurs in it, p. :--"when the rights reserved by the constitution to the different states are deliberately violated, it is the duty and the right of those states to interfere, in order to check the progress of the evil; to resist usurpation, and to maintain, within their respective limits, those powers and privileges which belong to them as independent sovereign states. if they were destitute of this right, they would not be sovereign. south carolina declares that she acknowledges no tribunal upon earth above her authority. she has indeed entered into a solemn compact of union with the other states; but she demands, and will exercise, the right of putting her own construction upon it; and when this compact is violated by her sister states, and by the government which they have created, she is determined to avail herself of the unquestionable right of judging what is the extent of the infraction, and what are the measures best fitted to obtain justice."] chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part ix in the meantime south carolina armed her militia, and prepared for war. but congress, which had slighted its suppliant subjects, listened to their complaints as soon as they were found to have taken up arms. *d a law was passed, by which the tariff duties were to be progressively reduced for ten years, until they were brought so low as not to exceed the amount of supplies necessary to the government. *e thus congress completely abandoned the principle of the tariff; and substituted a mere fiscal impost to a system of protective duties. *f the government of the union, in order to conceal its defeat, had recourse to an expedient which is very much in vogue with feeble governments. it yielded the point de facto, but it remained inflexible upon the principles in question; and whilst congress was altering the tariff law, it passed another bill, by which the president was invested with extraordinary powers, enabling him to overcome by force a resistance which was then no longer to be apprehended. [footnote d: congress was finally decided to take this step by the conduct of the powerful state of virginia, whose legislature offered to serve as mediator between the union and south carolina. hitherto the latter state had appeared to be entirely abandoned, even by the states which had joined in her remonstrances.] [footnote e: this law was passed on march , .] [footnote f: this bill was brought in by mr. clay, and it passed in four days through both houses of congress by an immense majority.] but south carolina did not consent to leave the union in the enjoyment of these scanty trophies of success: the same national convention which had annulled the tariff bill, met again, and accepted the proffered concession; but at the same time it declared it unabated perseverance in the doctrine of nullification: and to prove what it said, it annulled the law investing the president with extraordinary powers, although it was very certain that the clauses of that law would never be carried into effect. almost all the controversies of which i have been speaking have taken place under the presidency of general jackson; and it cannot be denied that in the question of the tariff he has supported the claims of the union with vigor and with skill. i am, however, of opinion that the conduct of the individual who now represents the federal government may be reckoned as one of the dangers which threaten its continuance. some persons in europe have formed an opinion of the possible influence of general jackson upon the affairs of his country, which appears highly extravagant to those who have seen more of the subject. we have been told that general jackson has won sundry battles, that he is an energetic man, prone by nature and by habit to the use of force, covetous of power, and a despot by taste. all this may perhaps be true; but the inferences which have been drawn from these truths are exceedingly erroneous. it has been imagined that general jackson is bent on establishing a dictatorship in america, on introducing a military spirit, and on giving a degree of influence to the central authority which cannot but be dangerous to provincial liberties. but in america the time for similar undertakings, and the age for men of this kind, is not yet come: if general jackson had entertained a hope of exercising his authority in this manner, he would infallibly have forfeited his political station, and compromised his life; accordingly he has not been so imprudent as to make any such attempt. far from wishing to extend the federal power, the president belongs to the party which is desirous of limiting that power to the bare and precise letter of the constitution, and which never puts a construction upon that act favorable to the government of the union; far from standing forth as the champion of centralization, general jackson is the agent of all the jealousies of the states; and he was placed in the lofty station he occupies by the passions of the people which are most opposed to the central government. it is by perpetually flattering these passions that he maintains his station and his popularity. general jackson is the slave of the majority: he yields to its wishes, its propensities, and its demands; say rather, that he anticipates and forestalls them. whenever the governments of the states come into collision with that of the union, the president is generally the first to question his own rights: he almost always outstrips the legislature; and when the extent of the federal power is controverted, he takes part, as it were, against himself; he conceals his official interests, and extinguishes his own natural inclinations. not indeed that he is naturally weak or hostile to the union; for when the majority decided against the claims of the partisans of nullification, he put himself at its head, asserted the doctrines which the nation held distinctly and energetically, and was the first to recommend forcible measures; but general jackson appears to me, if i may use the american expressions, to be a federalist by taste, and a republican by calculation. general jackson stoops to gain the favor of the majority, but when he feels that his popularity is secure, he overthrows all obstacles in the pursuit of the objects which the community approves, or of those which it does not look upon with a jealous eye. he is supported by a power with which his predecessors were unacquainted; and he tramples on his personal enemies whenever they cross his path with a facility which no former president ever enjoyed; he takes upon himself the responsibility of measures which no one before him would have ventured to attempt: he even treats the national representatives with disdain approaching to insult; he puts his veto upon the laws of congress, and frequently neglects to reply to that powerful body. he is a favorite who sometimes treats his master roughly. the power of general jackson perpetually increases; but that of the president declines; in his hands the federal government is strong, but it will pass enfeebled into the hands of his successor. i am strangely mistaken if the federal government of the united states be not constantly losing strength, retiring gradually from public affairs, and narrowing its circle of action more and more. it is naturally feeble, but it now abandons even its pretensions to strength. on the other hand, i thought that i remarked a more lively sense of independence, and a more decided attachment to provincial government in the states. the union is to subsist, but to subsist as a shadow; it is to be strong in certain cases, and weak in all others; in time of warfare, it is to be able to concentrate all the forces of the nation and all the resources of the country in its hands; and in time of peace its existence is to be scarcely perceptible: as if this alternate debility and vigor were natural or possible. i do not foresee anything for the present which may be able to check this general impulse of public opinion; the causes in which it originated do not cease to operate with the same effect. the change will therefore go on, and it may be predicted that, unless some extraordinary event occurs, the government of the union will grow weaker and weaker every day. i think, however, that the period is still remote at which the federal power will be entirely extinguished by its inability to protect itself and to maintain peace in the country. the union is sanctioned by the manners and desires of the people; its results are palpable, its benefits visible. when it is perceived that the weakness of the federal government compromises the existence of the union, i do not doubt that a reaction will take place with a view to increase its strength. the government of the united states is, of all the federal governments which have hitherto been established, the one which is most naturally destined to act. as long as it is only indirectly assailed by the interpretation of its laws, and as long as its substance is not seriously altered, a change of opinion, an internal crisis, or a war, may restore all the vigor which it requires. the point which i have been most anxious to put in a clear light is simply this: many people, especially in france, imagine that a change in opinion is going on in the united states, which is favorable to a centralization of power in the hands of the president and the congress. i hold that a contrary tendency may distinctly be observed. so far is the federal government from acquiring strength, and from threatening the sovereignty of the states, as it grows older, that i maintain it to be growing weaker and weaker, and that the sovereignty of the union alone is in danger. such are the facts which the present time discloses. the future conceals the final result of this tendency, and the events which may check, retard, or accelerate the changes i have described; but i do not affect to be able to remove the veil which hides them from our sight. of the republican institutions of the united states, and what their chances of duration are the union is accidental--the republican institutions have more prospect of permanence--a republic for the present the natural state of the anglo-americans--reason of this--in order to destroy it, all the laws must be changed at the same time, and a great alteration take place in manners--difficulties experienced by the americans in creating an aristocracy. the dismemberment of the union, by the introduction of war into the heart of those states which are now confederate, with standing armies, a dictatorship, and a heavy taxation, might, eventually, compromise the fate of the republican institutions. but we ought not to confound the future prospects of the republic with those of the union. the union is an accident, which will only last as long as circumstances are favorable to its existence; but a republican form of government seems to me to be the natural state of the americans; which nothing but the continued action of hostile causes, always acting in the same direction, could change into a monarchy. the union exists principally in the law which formed it; one revolution, one change in public opinion, might destroy it forever; but the republic has a much deeper foundation to rest upon. what is understood by a republican government in the united states is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself. it is a regular state of things really founded upon the enlightened will of the people. it is a conciliatory government under which resolutions are allowed time to ripen; and in which they are deliberately discussed, and executed with mature judgment. the republicans in the united states set a high value upon morality, respect religious belief, and acknowledge the existence of rights. they profess to think that a people ought to be moral, religious, and temperate, in proportion as it is free. what is called the republic in the united states, is the tranquil rule of the majority, which, after having had time to examine itself, and to give proof of its existence, is the common source of all the powers of the state. but the power of the majority is not of itself unlimited. in the moral world humanity, justice, and reason enjoy an undisputed supremacy; in the political world vested rights are treated with no less deference. the majority recognizes these two barriers; and if it now and then overstep them, it is because, like individuals, it has passions, and, like them, it is prone to do what is wrong, whilst it discerns what is right. but the demagogues of europe have made strange discoveries. a republic is not, according to them, the rule of the majority, as has hitherto been thought, but the rule of those who are strenuous partisans of the majority. it is not the people who preponderates in this kind of government, but those who are best versed in the good qualities of the people. a happy distinction, which allows men to act in the name of nations without consulting them, and to claim their gratitude whilst their rights are spurned. a republican government, moreover, is the only one which claims the right of doing whatever it chooses, and despising what men have hitherto respected, from the highest moral obligations to the vulgar rules of common-sense. it had been supposed, until our time, that despotism was odious, under whatever form it appeared. but it is a discovery of modern days that there are such things as legitimate tyranny and holy injustice, provided they are exercised in the name of the people. the ideas which the americans have adopted respecting the republican form of government, render it easy for them to live under it, and insure its duration. if, in their country, this form be often practically bad, at least it is theoretically good; and, in the end, the people always acts in conformity to it. it was impossible at the foundation of the states, and it would still be difficult, to establish a central administration in america. the inhabitants are dispersed over too great a space, and separated by too many natural obstacles, for one man to undertake to direct the details of their existence. america is therefore pre-eminently the country of provincial and municipal government. to this cause, which was plainly felt by all the europeans of the new world, the anglo-americans added several others peculiar to themselves. at the time of the settlement of the north american colonies, municipal liberty had already penetrated into the laws as well as the manners of the english; and the emigrants adopted it, not only as a necessary thing, but as a benefit which they knew how to appreciate. we have already seen the manner in which the colonies were founded: every province, and almost every district, was peopled separately by men who were strangers to each other, or who associated with very different purposes. the english settlers in the united states, therefore, early perceived that they were divided into a great number of small and distinct communities which belonged to no common centre; and that it was needful for each of these little communities to take care of its own affairs, since there did not appear to be any central authority which was naturally bound and easily enabled to provide for them. thus, the nature of the country, the manner in which the british colonies were founded, the habits of the first emigrants, in short everything, united to promote, in an extraordinary degree, municipal and provincial liberties. in the united states, therefore, the mass of the institutions of the country is essentially republican; and in order permanently to destroy the laws which form the basis of the republic, it would be necessary to abolish all the laws at once. at the present day it would be even more difficult for a party to succeed in founding a monarchy in the united states than for a set of men to proclaim that france should henceforward be a republic. royalty would not find a system of legislation prepared for it beforehand; and a monarchy would then exist, really surrounded by republican institutions. the monarchical principle would likewise have great difficulty in penetrating into the manners of the americans. in the united states, the sovereignty of the people is not an isolated doctrine bearing no relation to the prevailing manners and ideas of the people: it may, on the contrary, be regarded as the last link of a chain of opinions which binds the whole anglo-american world. that providence has given to every human being the degree of reason necessary to direct himself in the affairs which interest him exclusively--such is the grand maxim upon which civil and political society rests in the united states. the father of a family applies it to his children; the master to his servants; the township to its officers; the province to its townships; the state to its provinces; the union to the states; and when extended to the nation, it becomes the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. thus, in the united states, the fundamental principle of the republic is the same which governs the greater part of human actions; republican notions insinuate themselves into all the ideas, opinions, and habits of the americans, whilst they are formerly recognized by the legislation: and before this legislation can be altered the whole community must undergo very serious changes. in the united states, even the religion of most of the citizens is republican, since it submits the truths of the other world to private judgment: as in politics the care of its temporal interests is abandoned to the good sense of the people. thus every man is allowed freely to take that road which he thinks will lead him to heaven; just as the law permits every citizen to have the right of choosing his government. it is evident that nothing but a long series of events, all having the same tendency, can substitute for this combination of laws, opinions, and manners, a mass of opposite opinions, manners, and laws. if republican principles are to perish in america, they can only yield after a laborious social process, often interrupted, and as often resumed; they will have many apparent revivals, and will not become totally extinct until an entirely new people shall have succeeded to that which now exists. now, it must be admitted that there is no symptom or presage of the approach of such a revolution. there is nothing more striking to a person newly arrived in the united states, than the kind of tumultuous agitation in which he finds political society. the laws are incessantly changing, and at first sight it seems impossible that a people so variable in its desires should avoid adopting, within a short space of time, a completely new form of government. such apprehensions are, however, premature; the instability which affects political institutions is of two kinds, which ought not to be confounded: the first, which modifies secondary laws, is not incompatible with a very settled state of society; the other shakes the very foundations of the constitution, and attacks the fundamental principles of legislation; this species of instability is always followed by troubles and revolutions, and the nation which suffers under it is in a state of violent transition. experience shows that these two kinds of legislative instability have no necessary connection; for they have been found united or separate, according to times and circumstances. the first is common in the united states, but not the second: the americans often change their laws, but the foundation of the constitution is respected. in our days the republican principle rules in america, as the monarchical principle did in france under louis xiv. the french of that period were not only friends of the monarchy, but they thought it impossible to put anything in its place; they received it as we receive the rays of the sun and the return of the seasons. amongst them the royal power had neither advocates nor opponents. in like manner does the republican government exist in america, without contention or opposition; without proofs and arguments, by a tacit agreement, a sort of consensus universalis. it is, however, my opinion that by changing their administrative forms as often as they do, the inhabitants of the united states compromise the future stability of their government. it may be apprehended that men, perpetually thwarted in their designs by the mutability of the legislation, will learn to look upon republican institutions as an inconvenient form of society; the evil resulting from the instability of the secondary enactments might then raise a doubt as to the nature of the fundamental principles of the constitution, and indirectly bring about a revolution; but this epoch is still very remote. it may, however, be foreseen even now, that when the americans lose their republican institutions they will speedily arrive at a despotic government, without a long interval of limited monarchy. montesquieu remarked, that nothing is more absolute than the authority of a prince who immediately succeeds a republic, since the powers which had fearlessly been intrusted to an elected magistrate are then transferred to a hereditary sovereign. this is true in general, but it is more peculiarly applicable to a democratic republic. in the united states, the magistrates are not elected by a particular class of citizens, but by the majority of the nation; they are the immediate representatives of the passions of the multitude; and as they are wholly dependent upon its pleasure, they excite neither hatred nor fear: hence, as i have already shown, very little care has been taken to limit their influence, and they are left in possession of a vast deal of arbitrary power. this state of things has engendered habits which would outlive itself; the american magistrate would retain his power, but he would cease to be responsible for the exercise of it; and it is impossible to say what bounds could then be set to tyranny. some of our european politicians expect to see an aristocracy arise in america, and they already predict the exact period at which it will be able to assume the reins of government. i have previously observed, and i repeat my assertion, that the present tendency of american society appears to me to become more and more democratic. nevertheless, i do not assert that the americans will not, at some future time, restrict the circle of political rights in their country, or confiscate those rights to the advantage of a single individual; but i cannot imagine that they will ever bestow the exclusive exercise of them upon a privileged class of citizens, or, in other words, that they will ever found an aristocracy. an aristocratic body is composed of a certain number of citizens who, without being very far removed from the mass of the people, are, nevertheless, permanently stationed above it: a body which it is easy to touch and difficult to strike; with which the people are in daily contact, but with which they can never combine. nothing can be imagined more contrary to nature and to the secret propensities of the human heart than a subjection of this kind; and men who are left to follow their own bent will always prefer the arbitrary power of a king to the regular administration of an aristocracy. aristocratic institutions cannot subsist without laying down the inequality of men as a fundamental principle, as a part and parcel of the legislation, affecting the condition of the human family as much as it affects that of society; but these are things so repugnant to natural equity that they can only be extorted from men by constraint. i do not think a single people can be quoted, since human society began to exist, which has, by its own free will and by its own exertions, created an aristocracy within its own bosom. all the aristocracies of the middle ages were founded by military conquest; the conqueror was the noble, the vanquished became the serf. inequality was then imposed by force; and after it had been introduced into the manners of the country it maintained its own authority, and was sanctioned by the legislation. communities have existed which were aristocratic from their earliest origin, owing to circumstances anterior to that event, and which became more democratic in each succeeding age. such was the destiny of the romans, and of the barbarians after them. but a people, having taken its rise in civilization and democracy, which should gradually establish an inequality of conditions, until it arrived at inviolable privileges and exclusive castes, would be a novelty in the world; and nothing intimates that america is likely to furnish so singular an example. reflection on the causes of the commercial prosperity of the of the united states the americans destined by nature to be a great maritime people--extent of their coasts--depth of their ports--size of their rivers--the commercial superiority of the anglo-americans less attributable, however, to physical circumstances than to moral and intellectual causes--reason of this opinion--future destiny of the anglo-americans as a commercial nation--the dissolution of the union would not check the maritime vigor of the states--reason of this--anglo-americans will naturally supply the wants of the inhabitants of south america--they will become, like the english, the factors of a great portion of the world. the coast of the united states, from the bay of fundy to the sabine river in the gulf of mexico, is more than two thousand miles in extent. these shores form an unbroken line, and they are all subject to the same government. no nation in the world possesses vaster, deeper, or more secure ports for shipping than the americans. the inhabitants of the united states constitute a great civilized people, which fortune has placed in the midst of an uncultivated country at a distance of three thousand miles from the central point of civilization. america consequently stands in daily need of european trade. the americans will, no doubt, ultimately succeed in producing or manufacturing at home most of the articles which they require; but the two continents can never be independent of each other, so numerous are the natural ties which exist between their wants, their ideas, their habits, and their manners. the union produces peculiar commodities which are now become necessary to us, but which cannot be cultivated, or can only be raised at an enormous expense, upon the soil of europe. the americans only consume a small portion of this produce, and they are willing to sell us the rest. europe is therefore the market of america, as america is the market of europe; and maritime commerce is no less necessary to enable the inhabitants of the united states to transport their raw materials to the ports of europe, than it is to enable us to supply them with our manufactured produce. the united states were therefore necessarily reduced to the alternative of increasing the business of other maritime nations to a great extent, if they had themselves declined to enter into commerce, as the spaniards of mexico have hitherto done; or, in the second place, of becoming one of the first trading powers of the globe. the anglo-americans have always displayed a very decided taste for the sea. the declaration of independence broke the commercial restrictions which united them to england, and gave a fresh and powerful stimulus to their maritime genius. ever since that time, the shipping of the union has increased in almost the same rapid proportion as the number of its inhabitants. the americans themselves now transport to their own shores nine-tenths of the european produce which they consume. *g and they also bring three-quarters of the exports of the new world to the european consumer. *h the ships of the united states fill the docks of havre and of liverpool; whilst the number of english and french vessels which are to be seen at new york is comparatively small. *i [footnote g: the total value of goods imported during the year which ended on september , , was $ , , . the value of the cargoes of foreign vessels did not amount to $ , , , or about one-tenth of the entire sum.] [footnote h: the value of goods exported during the same year amounted to $ , , ; the value of goods exported by foreign vessels amounted to $ , , , or about one quarter of the whole sum. (williams's "register," , p. .)] [footnote i: the tonnage of the vessels which entered all the ports of the union in the years , , and , amounted to , , tons, of which , tons were foreign vessels; they stood, therefore, to the american vessels in a ratio of about to . ("national calendar," , p. .) the tonnage of the english vessels which entered the ports of london, liverpool, and hull, in the years , , and , amounted to , tons. the foreign vessels which entered the same ports during the same years amounted to , tons. the ratio between them was, therefore, about to . ("companion to the almanac," , p. .) in the year the ratio between the foreign and british ships which entered the ports of great britain was to . [these statements relate to a condition of affairs which has ceased to exist; the civil war and the heavy taxation of the united states entirely altered the trade and navigation of the country.]] thus, not only does the american merchant face the competition of his own countrymen, but he even supports that of foreign nations in their own ports with success. this is readily explained by the fact that the vessels of the united states can cross the seas at a cheaper rate than any other vessels in the world. as long as the mercantile shipping of the united states preserves this superiority, it will not only retain what it has acquired, but it will constantly increase in prosperity. chapter xviii: future condition of three races--part x it is difficult to say for what reason the americans can trade at a lower rate than other nations; and one is at first led to attribute this circumstance to the physical or natural advantages which are within their reach; but this supposition is erroneous. the american vessels cost almost as much to build as our own; *j they are not better built, and they generally last for a shorter time. the pay of the american sailor is more considerable than the pay on board european ships; which is proved by the great number of europeans who are to be met with in the merchant vessels of the united states. but i am of opinion that the true cause of their superiority must not be sought for in physical advantages, but that it is wholly attributable to their moral and intellectual qualities. [footnote j: materials are, generally speaking, less expensive in america than in europe, but the price of labor is much higher.] the following comparison will illustrate my meaning. during the campaigns of the revolution the french introduced a new system of tactics into the art of war, which perplexed the oldest generals, and very nearly destroyed the most ancient monarchies in europe. they undertook (what had never before been attempted) to make shift without a number of things which had always been held to be indispensable in warfare; they required novel exertions on the part of their troops which no civilized nations had ever thought of; they achieved great actions in an incredibly short space of time; and they risked human life without hesitation to obtain the object in view. the french had less money and fewer men than their enemies; their resources were infinitely inferior; nevertheless they were constantly victorious, until their adversaries chose to imitate their example. the americans have introduced a similar system into their commercial speculations; and they do for cheapness what the french did for conquest. the european sailor navigates with prudence; he only sets sail when the weather is favorable; if an unforseen accident befalls him, he puts into port; at night he furls a portion of his canvas; and when the whitening billows intimate the vicinity of land, he checks his way, and takes an observation of the sun. but the american neglects these precautions and braves these dangers. he weighs anchor in the midst of tempestuous gales; by night and by day he spreads his sheets to the wind; he repairs as he goes along such damage as his vessel may have sustained from the storm; and when he at last approaches the term of his voyage, he darts onward to the shore as if he already descried a port. the americans are often shipwrecked, but no trader crosses the seas so rapidly. and as they perform the same distance in a shorter time, they can perform it at a cheaper rate. the european touches several times at different ports in the course of a long voyage; he loses a good deal of precious time in making the harbor, or in waiting for a favorable wind to leave it; and he pays daily dues to be allowed to remain there. the american starts from boston to go to purchase tea in china; he arrives at canton, stays there a few days, and then returns. in less than two years he has sailed as far as the entire circumference of the globe, and he has seen land but once. it is true that during a voyage of eight or ten months he has drunk brackish water and lived upon salt meat; that he has been in a continual contest with the sea, with disease, and with a tedious existence; but upon his return he can sell a pound of his tea for a half-penny less than the english merchant, and his purpose is accomplished. i cannot better explain my meaning than by saying that the americans affect a sort of heroism in their manner of trading. but the european merchant will always find it very difficult to imitate his american competitor, who, in adopting the system which i have just described, follows not only a calculation of his gain, but an impulse of his nature. the inhabitants of the united states are subject to all the wants and all the desires which result from an advanced stage of civilization; but as they are not surrounded by a community admirably adapted, like that of europe, to satisfy their wants, they are often obliged to procure for themselves the various articles which education and habit have rendered necessaries. in america it sometimes happens that the same individual tills his field, builds his dwelling, contrives his tools, makes his shoes, and weaves the coarse stuff of which his dress is composed. this circumstance is prejudicial to the excellence of the work; but it powerfully contributes to awaken the intelligence of the workman. nothing tends to materialize man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labor. in a country like america, where men devoted to special occupations are rare, a long apprenticeship cannot be required from anyone who embraces a profession. the americans, therefore, change their means of gaining a livelihood very readily; and they suit their occupations to the exigencies of the moment, in the manner most profitable to themselves. men are to be met with who have successively been barristers, farmers, merchants, ministers of the gospel, and physicians. if the american be less perfect in each craft than the european, at least there is scarcely any trade with which he is utterly unacquainted. his capacity is more general, and the circle of his intelligence is enlarged. the inhabitants of the united states are never fettered by the axioms of their profession; they escape from all the prejudices of their present station; they are not more attached to one line of operation than to another; they are not more prone to employ an old method than a new one; they have no rooted habits, and they easily shake off the influence which the habits of other nations might exercise upon their minds from a conviction that their country is unlike any other, and that its situation is without a precedent in the world. america is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion, and every movement seems an improvement. the idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration. no natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do. this perpetual change which goes on in the united states, these frequent vicissitudes of fortune, accompanied by such unforeseen fluctuations in private and in public wealth, serve to keep the minds of the citizens in a perpetual state of feverish agitation, which admirably invigorates their exertions, and keeps them in a state of excitement above the ordinary level of mankind. the whole life of an american is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle. as the same causes are continually in operation throughout the country, they ultimately impart an irresistible impulse to the national character. the american, taken as a chance specimen of his countrymen, must then be a man of singular warmth in his desires, enterprising, fond of adventure, and, above all, of innovation. the same bent is manifest in all that he does; he introduces it into his political laws, his religious doctrines, his theories of social economy, and his domestic occupations; he bears it with him in the depths of the backwoods, as well as in the business of the city. it is this same passion, applied to maritime commerce, which makes him the cheapest and the quickest trader in the world. as long as the sailors of the united states retain these inspiriting advantages, and the practical superiority which they derive from them, they will not only continue to supply the wants of the producers and consumers of their own country, but they will tend more and more to become, like the english, the factors of all other peoples. *k this prediction has already begun to be realized; we perceive that the american traders are introducing themselves as intermediate agents in the commerce of several european nations; *l and america will offer a still wider field to their enterprise. [footnote k: it must not be supposed that english vessels are exclusively employed in transporting foreign produce into england, or british produce to foreign countries; at the present day the merchant shipping of england may be regarded in the light of a vast system of public conveyances, ready to serve all the producers of the world, and to open communications between all peoples. the maritime genius of the americans prompts them to enter into competition with the english.] [footnote l: part of the commerce of the mediterranean is already carried on by american vessels.] the great colonies which were founded in south america by the spaniards and the portuguese have since become empires. civil war and oppression now lay waste those extensive regions. population does not increase, and the thinly scattered inhabitants are too much absorbed in the cares of self-defense even to attempt any amelioration of their condition. such, however, will not always be the case. europe has succeeded by her own efforts in piercing the gloom of the middle ages; south america has the same christian laws and christian manners as we have; she contains all the germs of civilization which have grown amidst the nations of europe or their offsets, added to the advantages to be derived from our example: why then should she always remain uncivilized? it is clear that the question is simply one of time; at some future period, which may be more or less remote, the inhabitants of south america will constitute flourishing and enlightened nations. but when the spaniards and portuguese of south america begin to feel the wants common to all civilized nations, they will still be unable to satisfy those wants for themselves; as the youngest children of civilization, they must perforce admit the superiority of their elder brethren. they will be agriculturists long before they succeed in manufactures or commerce, and they will require the mediation of strangers to exchange their produce beyond seas for those articles for which a demand will begin to be felt. it is unquestionable that the americans of the north will one day supply the wants of the americans of the south. nature has placed them in contiguity, and has furnished the former with every means of knowing and appreciating those demands, of establishing a permanent connection with those states, and of gradually filling their markets. the merchants of the united states could only forfeit these natural advantages if he were very inferior to the merchant of europe; to whom he is, on the contrary, superior in several respects. the americans of the united states already exercise a very considerable moral influence upon all the peoples of the new world. they are the source of intelligence, and all the nations which inhabit the same continent are already accustomed to consider them as the most enlightened, the most powerful, and the most wealthy members of the great american family. all eyes are therefore turned towards the union; and the states of which that body is composed are the models which the other communities try to imitate to the best of their power; it is from the united states that they borrow their political principles and their laws. the americans of the united states stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of south america as their fathers, the english, occupy with regard to the italians, the spaniards, the portuguese, and all those nations of europe which receive their articles of daily consumption from england, because they are less advanced in civilization and trade. england is at this time the natural emporium of almost all the nations which are within its reach; the american union will perform the same part in the other hemisphere; and every community which is founded, or which prospers in the new world, is founded and prospers to the advantage of the anglo-americans. if the union were to be dissolved, the commerce of the states which now compose it would undoubtedly be checked for a time; but this consequence would be less perceptible than is generally supposed. it is evident that, whatever may happen, the commercial states will remain united. they are all contiguous to each other; they have identically the same opinions, interests, and manners; and they are alone competent to form a very great maritime power. even if the south of the union were to become independent of the north, it would still require the services of those states. i have already observed that the south is not a commercial country, and nothing intimates that it is likely to become so. the americans of the south of the united states will therefore be obliged, for a long time to come, to have recourse to strangers to export their produce, and to supply them with the commodities which are requisite to satisfy their wants. but the northern states are undoubtedly able to act as their intermediate agents cheaper than any other merchants. they will therefore retain that employment, for cheapness is the sovereign law of commerce. national claims and national prejudices cannot resist the influence of cheapness. nothing can be more virulent than the hatred which exists between the americans of the united states and the english. but notwithstanding these inimical feelings, the americans derive the greater part of their manufactured commodities from england, because england supplies them at a cheaper rate than any other nation. thus the increasing prosperity of america turns, notwithstanding the grudges of the americans, to the advantage of british manufactures. reason shows and experience proves that no commercial prosperity can be durable if it cannot be united, in case of need, to naval force. this truth is as well understood in the united states as it can be anywhere else: the americans are already able to make their flag respected; in a few years they will be able to make it feared. i am convinced that the dismemberment of the union would not have the effect of diminishing the naval power of the americans, but that it would powerfully contribute to increase it. at the present time the commercial states are connected with others which have not the same interests, and which frequently yield an unwilling consent to the increase of a maritime power by which they are only indirectly benefited. if, on the contrary, the commercial states of the union formed one independent nation, commerce would become the foremost of their national interests; they would consequently be willing to make very great sacrifices to protect their shipping, and nothing would prevent them from pursuing their designs upon this point. nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years. when i contemplate the ardor with which the anglo-americans prosecute commercial enterprise, the advantages which befriend them, and the success of their undertakings, i cannot refrain from believing that they will one day become the first maritime power of the globe. they are born to rule the seas, as the romans were to conquer the world. conclusion i have now nearly reached the close of my inquiry; hitherto, in speaking of the future destiny of the united states, i have endeavored to divide my subject into distinct portions, in order to study each of them with more attention. my present object is to embrace the whole from one single point; the remarks i shall make will be less detailed, but they will be more sure. i shall perceive each object less distinctly, but i shall descry the principal facts with more certainty. a traveller who has just left the walls of an immense city, climbs the neighboring hill; as he goes father off he loses sight of the men whom he has so recently quitted; their dwellings are confused in a dense mass; he can no longer distinguish the public squares, and he can scarcely trace out the great thoroughfares; but his eye has less difficulty in following the boundaries of the city, and for the first time he sees the shape of the vast whole. such is the future destiny of the british race in north america to my eye; the details of the stupendous picture are overhung with shade, but i conceive a clear idea of the entire subject. the territory now occupied or possessed by the united states of america forms about one-twentieth part of the habitable earth. but extensive as these confines are, it must not be supposed that the anglo-american race will always remain within them; indeed, it has already far overstepped them. there was once a time at which we also might have created a great french nation in the american wilds, to counterbalance the influence of the english upon the destinies of the new world. france formerly possessed a territory in north america, scarcely less extensive than the whole of europe. the three greatest rivers of that continent then flowed within her dominions. the indian tribes which dwelt between the mouth of the st. lawrence and the delta of the mississippi were unaccustomed to any other tongue but ours; and all the european settlements scattered over that immense region recalled the traditions of our country. louisbourg, montmorency, duquesne, st. louis, vincennes, new orleans (for such were the names they bore) are words dear to france and familiar to our ears. but a concourse of circumstances, which it would be tedious to enumerate, *m have deprived us of this magnificent inheritance. wherever the french settlers were numerically weak and partially established, they have disappeared: those who remain are collected on a small extent of country, and are now subject to other laws. the , french inhabitants of lower canada constitute, at the present time, the remnant of an old nation lost in the midst of a new people. a foreign population is increasing around them unceasingly and on all sides, which already penetrates amongst the ancient masters of the country, predominates in their cities and corrupts their language. this population is identical with that of the united states; it is therefore with truth that i asserted that the british race is not confined within the frontiers of the union, since it already extends to the northeast. [footnote m: the foremost of these circumstances is, that nations which are accustomed to free institutions and municipal government are better able than any others to found prosperous colonies. the habit of thinking and governing for oneself is indispensable in a new country, where success necessarily depends, in a great measure, upon the individual exertions of the settlers.] to the northwest nothing is to be met with but a few insignificant russian settlements; but to the southwest, mexico presents a barrier to the anglo-americans. thus, the spaniards and the anglo-americans are, properly speaking, the only two races which divide the possession of the new world. the limits of separation between them have been settled by a treaty; but although the conditions of that treaty are exceedingly favorable to the anglo-americans, i do not doubt that they will shortly infringe this arrangement. vast provinces, extending beyond the frontiers of the union towards mexico, are still destitute of inhabitants. the natives of the united states will forestall the rightful occupants of these solitary regions. they will take possession of the soil, and establish social institutions, so that when the legal owner arrives at length, he will find the wilderness under cultivation, and strangers quietly settled in the midst of his inheritance. *n [footnote n: [this was speedily accomplished, and ere long both texas and california formed part of the united states. the russian settlements were acquired by purchase.]] the lands of the new world belong to the first occupant, and they are the natural reward of the swiftest pioneer. even the countries which are already peopled will have some difficulty in securing themselves from this invasion. i have already alluded to what is taking place in the province of texas. the inhabitants of the united states are perpetually migrating to texas, where they purchase land; and although they conform to the laws of the country, they are gradually founding the empire of their own language and their own manners. the province of texas is still part of the mexican dominions, but it will soon contain no mexicans; the same thing has occurred whenever the anglo-americans have come into contact with populations of a different origin. it cannot be denied that the british race has acquired an amazing preponderance over all the other european races in the new world; and that it is very superior to them in civilization, in industry, and in power. as long as it is only surrounded by desert or thinly peopled countries, as long as it encounters no dense populations upon its route, through which it cannot work its way, it will assuredly continue to spread. the lines marked out by treaties will not stop it; but it will everywhere transgress these imaginary barriers. the geographical position of the british race in the new world is peculiarly favorable to its rapid increase. above its northern frontiers the icy regions of the pole extend; and a few degrees below its southern confines lies the burning climate of the equator. the anglo-americans are, therefore, placed in the most temperate and habitable zone of the continent. it is generally supposed that the prodigious increase of population in the united states is posterior to their declaration of independence. but this is an error: the population increased as rapidly under the colonial system as it does at the present day; that is to say, it doubled in about twenty-two years. but this proportion which is now applied to millions, was then applied to thousands of inhabitants; and the same fact which was scarcely noticeable a century ago, is now evident to every observer. the british subjects in canada, who are dependent on a king, augment and spread almost as rapidly as the british settlers of the united states, who live under a republican government. during the war of independence, which lasted eight years, the population continued to increase without intermission in the same ratio. although powerful indian nations allied with the english existed at that time upon the western frontiers, the emigration westward was never checked. whilst the enemy laid waste the shores of the atlantic, kentucky, the western parts of pennsylvania, and the states of vermont and of maine were filling with inhabitants. nor did the unsettled state of the constitution, which succeeded the war, prevent the increase of the population, or stop its progress across the wilds. thus, the difference of laws, the various conditions of peace and war, of order and of anarchy, have exercised no perceptible influence upon the gradual development of the anglo-americans. this may be readily understood; for the fact is, that no causes are sufficiently general to exercise a simultaneous influence over the whole of so extensive a territory. one portion of the country always offers a sure retreat from the calamities which afflict another part; and however great may be the evil, the remedy which is at hand is greater still. it must not, then, be imagined that the impulse of the british race in the new world can be arrested. the dismemberment of the union, and the hostilities which might ensure, the abolition of republican institutions, and the tyrannical government which might succeed it, may retard this impulse, but they cannot prevent it from ultimately fulfilling the destinies to which that race is reserved. no power upon earth can close upon the emigrants that fertile wilderness which offers resources to all industry, and a refuge from all want. future events, of whatever nature they may be, will not deprive the americans of their climate or of their inland seas, of their great rivers or of their exuberant soil. nor will bad laws, revolutions, and anarchy be able to obliterate that love of prosperity and that spirit of enterprise which seem to be the distinctive characteristics of their race, or to extinguish that knowledge which guides them on their way. thus, in the midst of the uncertain future, one event at least is sure. at a period which may be said to be near (for we are speaking of the life of a nation), the anglo-americans will alone cover the immense space contained between the polar regions and the tropics, extending from the coasts of the atlantic to the shores of the pacific ocean. the territory which will probably be occupied by the anglo-americans at some future time, may be computed to equal three-quarters of europe in extent. *o the climate of the union is upon the whole preferable to that of europe, and its natural advantages are not less great; it is therefore evident that its population will at some future time be proportionate to our own. europe, divided as it is between so many different nations, and torn as it has been by incessant wars and the barbarous manners of the middle ages, has notwithstanding attained a population of inhabitants to the square league. *p what cause can prevent the united states from having as numerous a population in time? [footnote o: the united states already extend over a territory equal to one-half of europe. the area of europe is , square leagues, and its population , , of inhabitants. ("malte brun," liv. . vol. vi. p. .) [this computation is given in french leagues, which were in use when the author wrote. twenty years later, in , the superficial area of the united states had been extended to , , square miles of territory, which is about the area of europe.]] [footnote p: see "malte brun," liv. , vol. vi. p. .] many ages must elapse before the divers offsets of the british race in america cease to present the same homogeneous characteristics: and the time cannot be foreseen at which a permanent inequality of conditions will be established in the new world. whatever differences may arise, from peace or from war, from freedom or oppression, from prosperity or want, between the destinies of the different descendants of the great anglo-american family, they will at least preserve an analogous social condition, and they will hold in common the customs and the opinions to which that social condition has given birth. in the middle ages, the tie of religion was sufficiently powerful to imbue all the different populations of europe with the same civilization. the british of the new world have a thousand other reciprocal ties; and they live at a time when the tendency to equality is general amongst mankind. the middle ages were a period when everything was broken up; when each people, each province, each city, and each family, had a strong tendency to maintain its distinct individuality. at the present time an opposite tendency seems to prevail, and the nations seem to be advancing to unity. our means of intellectual intercourse unite the most remote parts of the earth; and it is impossible for men to remain strangers to each other, or to be ignorant of the events which are taking place in any corner of the globe. the consequence is that there is less difference, at the present day, between the europeans and their descendants in the new world, than there was between certain towns in the thirteenth century which were only separated by a river. if this tendency to assimilation brings foreign nations closer to each other, it must a fortiori prevent the descendants of the same people from becoming aliens to each other. the time will therefore come when one hundred and fifty millions of men will be living in north america, *q equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms. the rest is uncertain, but this is certain; and it is a fact new to the world--a fact fraught with such portentous consequences as to baffle the efforts even of the imagination. [footnote q: this would be a population proportionate to that of europe, taken at a mean rate of inhabitants to the square league.] there are, at the present time, two great nations in the world which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: i allude to the russians and the americans. both of them have grown up unnoticed; and whilst the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed a most prominent place amongst the nations; and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time. all other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and only to be charged with the maintenance of their power; but these are still in the act of growth; *r all the others are stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these are proceeding with ease and with celerity along a path to which the human eye can assign no term. the american struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the russian are men; the former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its weapons and its arts: the conquests of the one are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the other by the sword. the anglo-american relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common-sense of the citizens; the russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude. their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. [footnote r: russia is the country in the old world in which population increases most rapidly in proportion.] * * * * * +-----------------------------------------------------------+ | transcriber's note: | | | | inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. bold text is represented =like so=. | | superscripted text is represented like^{so}. | | | obvious typographical errors have been corrected. for | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * socialism and democracy in europe by samuel p. orth, ph.d. _author of "five american politicians" "centralization of administration in ohio," etc._ [illustration] new york henry holt and company copyright, by henry holt and company published january, the quinn & boden co. press rahway, n.j. preface it is becoming more and more evident that democracy has served only the first years of its apprenticeship. political problems have served only to introduce popular government. the economic problems now rushing upon us will bring the real test of democracy. the workingman has taken an advanced place in the struggle for the democratization of industry. he has done so, first, through the organization of labor unions; secondly, through the development of political parties--labor parties. the blend of politics and economics which he affects is loosely called socialism. the term is as indefinite in meaning as it is potent in influence. it has spread its unctuous doctrines over every industrial land, and its representatives sit in every important parliament, including our congress. such a movement requires careful consideration from every point of view. it is the object of this volume to trace briefly the growth of the movement in four leading european countries, and to attempt to determine the relation of economic and political socialism to democracy--a question of peculiar interest to the friends of the american republic at this time. in preparing this volume, the author has made extended visits to the countries studied. he has tried to catch the spirit of the movement by personal contact with the socialist leaders and their antagonists, and by many interviews with laboring men, the rank and file in every country visited. everywhere he was received with the greatest cordiality, and he wishes here to express his appreciation of these many kindnesses. he wishes especially to acknowledge his obligations to the following gentlemen: mr. graham wallas of the university of london; mr. w.g. towler of the london municipal society; mr. john hobson of london, and mr. j.s. middleton, assistant secretary of the labor party; to dr. robert herz and prof. charles gide of the university of paris; dr. albert thomas and m. adolphe landry of the chamber of deputies; m. jean longuet, editor of _l'humanité_; to dr. franz oppenheimer of the university of berlin; dr. südekum of the reichstag; dr. hilferding, editor of _vorwärts_; prof. t.h. norton, american consul at chemnitz; m. camille huysmans, secretary of the "international," brussels; as well as to many american friends for providing letters of introduction which opened many useful and congenial doorways. s.p.o. january, . contents chapter page i. why does socialism exist? ii. the development of socialism iii. the political awakening of socialism--the period of revolution iv. the political awakening of socialism--the international v. the socialist party of france vi. the belgian labor party vii. the german social democracy viii. german social democracy and labor unions ix. the english labor party x. conclusion appendix index socialism and democracy in europe chapter i introduction--why does socialism exist? the answer to this question will bring us nearer to the core of the social movement than any attempted definition. the french socialist program begins with the assertion, "socialism is a question of class." class distinction is the generator of socialism. the ordinary social triptych--upper, middle, and lower classes--will not suffice us in our inquiry. we must distinguish between the functions of the classes. the upper class is a remnant of the feudal days, of the manorial times, when land-holding brought with it social distinction and political prerogative. in this sense we have no upper class in america. the middle class is composed of the business and professional element, and the lower class of the wage-earning element. there are two words, as yet quite unfamiliar to american readers, which are met with constantly in european works on socialism and are heard on every hand in political discussions--_proletariat_ and _bourgeois_. the proletariat are the wage-earning class, the poor, the underlings. the bourgeois[ ] are roughly the middle class. the french divide them into _petits_ bourgeois and _grands_ bourgeois. werner sombart divides them into lower middle class, the manual laborers who represent the guild system, and bourgeoisie, the representatives of the capitalistic system.[ ] it will thus be seen that these divisions have a historical basis. the upper class reflect the days of feudalism, of governmental prerogative and aristocracy. the middle class are the representatives of the guild and mercantile systems, when hand labor and later business acumen brought power and wealth to the craftsman and adventurer. the lower class are the homologues of the slaves, the serfs, the toilers, whose reward has constantly been measured by the standard of bare existence. socialism arises consciously out of the efforts of this class to win for itself a share of the powers of the other classes. it is necessary to understand that while this class distinction is historic in origin it is essentially economic in fact. it is not "social"; a middle-class millionaire may be congenial to the social circles of the high-born. it is not political; a workingman may vote with any party he chooses. he may ally himself with the conservative center as he sometimes does in germany, or with the liberal party as he sometimes does in england, or with either of the old parties as he does in the united states. on the other hand, a bourgeois may be a socialist and vote with the proletarians. indeed, many of the socialist leaders belong to the well-to-do middle class. this class distinction, then, is economic. it is a distinction of function, the function of the capitalist and the function of the wage-earner. let us go one step further; it is a distinction in property. the possessor of private wealth can become a capitalist by investing his money in productive enterprise. he then becomes the employer of labor. there are all grades of capitalists, from the master wagon-maker who works by the side of his one or two workmen, to the "captain" of a vast industry that gives employment to thousands of men and turns out a wagon a minute. the institution of private property is the basis of socialism because it is the basis of capitalistic production. it places in one man's hands the power of owning raw material, machinery, land, factory, and finished product; and the power of hiring men to operate the machinery, and to convert the raw material into marketable wares. as long as this power was limited to hand industry the proletarian movement was abortive. when the industrial revolution linked the ingenuity of man to the power of nature it so multiplied the potency of the possessor that the proletarian movement by stress of circumstances became a great factor in industrial life. while the possession either of wealth or family tradition was always the basis of class distinction, the industrial revolution brought with it the enormously multiplied power of capital and the glorification of riches. the proletarians multiplied rapidly in number, and all the evils of sharp class distinction were heightened. in all lands where capitalistic production spread, the two classes grew farther apart, the distinction between possessor and wage-earner increased. it is not the mere possession of wealth, however, which forms the animus of the socialist movement. it is probably not even the abuse of this wealth, although this is a large factor in the problem. it is the psychological effect of the capitalist system that is the real enginery of socialism. it is the class feeling, the consciousness of the workingman that he is contributing muscle and blood and sweat to the perfection of an article whose possession he does not share. this feeling is aroused by the contrasts of life that the worker constantly sees around him. he feels that his own life energy has contributed to the magnificent equipages and the palatial luxuries of his employer. he compares his own lot and that of his family with the lot of the capitalist. this feeling of envy is not blunted by the kaleidoscopic suddenness with which changes of fortune can take place in america to-day. by some stroke of luck or piece of ingenious planning, a receiver of wages to-day may be the giver of wages to-morrow. nor does the spread of education and intelligence dull the contrasts. it greatly heightens them. the workman can now begin to analyze the conditions under which he lives. he ponders over the distinctions that are actual and contrasts them with his imagined utopia. to him the differences between employer and employee are not natural. he does not attribute them to any fault or shortcoming or inferiority of his own, nor of his master, but to a flaw in the organization of society. the social order is wrong. the workingman has become the critic. here you have the heart of socialism. whatever form its outward aspect may take, at heart it is a rebellion against things as they are. and whatever may be the syllogisms of its logic, or the formularies of its philosophy, they all begin with a grievance, that things as they are are wrong; and they all end in a hope for a better society of to-morrow where the inequalities shall somehow be made right. in his struggle toward a new economic ideal, the proletarian has achieved a class homogeneity and self-consciousness. the individuality that is denied him in industry he has sought and found among his own brethren. in the great factory he loses even his name and becomes number so-and-so. in his union and in his party he asserts his individuality with a grim and impressive stubbornness. the gravitation of common ideals and common protests draws these forgotten particles of industrialism into a massed consciousness that is to-day one of the world's great potencies. the very fact that we call this body of workers "the masses" is significant. we speak of them as a geologist speaks of his "basement complex." we recognize unconsciously that they form the foundation of our economic life. the class struggle, then, is between two clearly defined and self-conscious elements in modern industrial life that are the natural product of our machine industry. on the one hand is the business man pursuing with fevered energy the profits that are the goal of his activity; on the other hand are the workingmen who, more and more sullen in their discontent, are clamoring louder each year for a greater share of the wealth they believe their toil creates. there is some reason to believe that this class basis of socialism is vanishing. in england j. ramsay macdonald denies its significance.[ ] revisionists and progressive socialists, who are throwing aside the marxian dogmas, are also preaching the universality of the socialist conception. however, the economic factor based on class functions remains the essence of the social movement.[ ] what are the ideals of socialism? they are not merely economic or social, they embrace all life. after one has taken the pains to read the more important mass of socialist literature, books, pamphlets, and some current newspapers and magazines, and has listened to their orators and talked with their leaders, confusion still remains in the mind. the movement is so all-embracing that it has no clearly defined limits. the socialists are feeling their way from protest into practice. their heads are in the clouds; of this you are certain as you proceed through their books and listen to their speeches. but are their feet upon the earth? for a literature of protest against "suffering, misery, and injustice," as owen calls it, there is a wonderful buoyancy and hope in their words. it is one of the secrets of its power that socialism is not the energy of despair. it is the demand for the right to live fully, joyfully, and in comfort. the socialists demand ozone in their air, nutrition in their food, heartiness in their laughter, ease in their homes, and their days must have hours of relaxation. the awakening aspirations of the proletarian were expressed by one of their own number, william weitling, a tailor of magdeburg. he afterwards migrated to america and became one of our first socialist agitators. his book is called _garantieen der harmonie und freiheit_ (guaranties of harmony and liberty). the book is illogical, full of contradictions, and all of the errors of a child's reasoning. but it remains the workingman's classic philippic, one of the most trenchant recitals of social wrongs, because it blends, with the illogical terminology of sentimentalism, the assurance of hope. "property," he says, "is the root of all evil." gold is the symbol of this world of wrongs. "we have become as accustomed to our coppers as the devil to his hell." when the rule of gold shall cease, then "the teardrops which are the tokens of true brotherliness will return to the dry eyes of the selfish, the soul of the evildoer will be filled with noble and virtuous sentiments such as he had never known before, and the impious ones who have hitherto denied god will sing his praise." the humble tailor is assured that the reign of property will be terminated and the age of humanity begin, and he calls to the workingman, "forward, brethren; with the curse of mammon on our lips, let us await the hour of our emancipation, when our tears will be transmuted into pearls of dew, our earth transformed into a paradise, and all of mankind united into one happy family."[ ] nor is the closing cry of his book without an element of prophecy. he addresses the "mighty ones of this earth," admonishing them that they may secure the fame of alexander and napoleon by the deeds of emancipation which lie in their power. "but if you compel us (the proletarians) to undertake the task alone with our raw material, then it will be accomplished only after weary toil and pain to us and to you." let us turn to robert owen, who was at an early age the most successful cotton spinner in england. he adapted an old philosophy to a new humanitarianism. he saw that a "gradual increase in the number of our paupers has accompanied our increasing wealth."[ ] he began the series of experiments which made his name familiar in england and america and made him known in history as the greatest experimental communist. his experiments have failed. but his hopefulness persists. in his address delivered at the dedication of new lanark, , he said that he had found plenty of unhappiness and plenty of misery. "but from this day a change must take place; a new era must commence; the human intellect, through the whole extent of the earth, hitherto enveloped by the grossest ignorance and superstition, must begin to be released from its state of darkness; nor shall nourishment henceforth be given to the seeds of disunion and division among men. for the time has come when the means may be prepared to train all the nations of the world in that knowledge which shall _impel them not only to love but to be actively kind to each other in the whole of their conduct, without a single exception_." here is an all-inclusive hopefulness. its significance is not diminished by the fact that it was spoken of his own peculiar remedy by education and environment. this faith and hope runs through all their books like a golden song. excepting marx, he was the great gloomy one. even those who condemn modern society with the most scathing adjectives link with their denunciations the most sanguine sentences of hope. the christian socialism of kingsley is filled with optimism. "look up, my brother christians, open your eyes, the hour of a new crusade has struck."[ ] the song of the new crusade was sung by robert morris: "come, shoulder to shoulder ere the world grows older! help lies in naught but thee and me; hope is before us, the long years that bore us, bore leaders more than men may be. "let dead hearts tarry and trade and marry, and trembling nurse their dreams of mirth, while we, the living, our lives are giving to bring the bright new world to birth." this song of hope is sung to-day by thousands of marching socialists. their bitter experiences in parliaments and in strikes, and all the warfare of politics and trade, have not blighted their rosy hope. they are still looking forward to "the bright new world," in which a new social order shall reign. linked with this optimism is a certain prophetic tone, an elevation of spirit that lifts some of their books out of the commonplace. the sincerity of these prophets of socialism contributes this quality more than does their originality of mind. in their search for happiness the socialists see a great barrier in their way. the barrier is want, poverty. there are no greater contrasts, mental and temperamental, than between john stuart mill, the erudite economist and philosopher, and h.g. wells, the romancer and sentimental critic of things as they are. both begin their attacks upon the social order at the same point--the vulnerable spot, _poverty_. mill places it first in his category of existing evils. he asks, "what proportion of the population in the most civilized countries of europe enjoy, in their own person, anything worth naming of the benefits of property?" "suffice it to say that the condition of numbers in civilized europe, and even in england and france, is more wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are known to us."[ ] wells bases his racy criticism in his popular book, _new worlds for old_, on the facts revealed in the reports of various charity organizations in edinburgh, york, and london. to both the exacting economist and the popular expositor of socialism, poverty is the glaring fault of our social system. to wells poverty is an "atrocious failure in statesmanship."[ ] to mill it is "_pro tanto_ a failure of the social arrangement."[ ] these examples are typical. every school of socialism finds in poverty the curse, in private property the cause, of human misery, and in a readjusted machinery of social production the hope of human betterment. all socialists, learned and unlearned, agree that poverty is the stumbling-block in the pathway to better social conditions. they all agree as to the causes of poverty: first, private capitalistic production; second, competition. it is private capitalistic production that enables the employer to pocket all the profits; it is competition that enables him to buy labor in an open market at the lowest possible price, a price regulated by the necessities of bare existence. to the socialist, competition is anarchy, an anarchy that leaves "every man free to ruin himself so that he may ruin another."[ ] to do away with private capital and to abolish competition means bringing about a tremendous change in society. all socialists unhesitatingly and with boldness are ready, even eager, to make such a change. the problem is not insuperable to them. the three theories that underlie socialism permit the hope of the possibility of a social regeneration. these theories are, first, that god made the world good, hence all you need to do is to revert to this pristine goodness and the world is reformed. second, that society is what it is through evolution. if this is true then it is only necessary to control by environment the factors of evolution and the product will be preordained. third, that even if man is bad and has permitted pernicious institutions like private property to exist, he can remake society by a bold effort, i.e., by revolution, because all social power is vested in man and he can do as he likes. the ruling class can impose its social order upon all. when the socialist becomes the ruling class his social system will be adopted. this great change which the socialist has in mind means the substitution of co-operation for competition and the placing of productive property in the care of the state or of society, instead of letting it remain under the domination of individuals. to abolish private productive capital by making it public, to establish a communistic instead of a competitive society, that is the object. in the socialist's new order of society, where poverty will be unknown, there is to be a common bond. this bond is not possession, but work. with glowing exultation all the expositors and exhorters of the proletarian movement dwell upon the blessedness of toil. they glorify man, not through his inheritance of personality, certainly not through his possession of things, but through his achievements of toil. when all members of society work at useful occupations, then all the necessary things can be done in a few hours. six or four, or some even say two, hours a day will be sufficient to do all the drudgery and the essential things in a well-organized human beehive. there is to be nothing morose or despondent in this toil. it is all to be done to the melody of good cheer and willingness. how is this great change to come about, and what is to be the exact organization of society under this regime of work and co-operation? here unanimity ceases. as a criticism socialism is unanimous, as a method it is divided, as a reconstructive process it is hopelessly at sea. at first socialists were utopians, then they became revolutionists. this was natural. socialism was born in an air of revolution--the political revolutions of the bourgeois, and the infinitely greater industrial revolution. the tides of change and passion were rocking the foundations of state and industry. the evils in early industrialism were abhorrent. small children and their mothers were forced into factories, pauperism was thriving, the ugly machine-fed towns were replacing the quaint and cheerful villages, rulers were forgetting their duties in their greed for gain, and the state was persecuting men for their political and economic opinions. every face was turned against the preachers of the new order, and they naturally thought that the change could be brought about only by violence and revolution. louis blanc said "a social revolution ought to be tried: "firstly, because the present social system is too full of iniquity, misery, and turpitude to exist much longer. "secondly, because there is no one who is not interested, whatever his position, rank, and fortune, in the inauguration of a new social system. "thirdly, and lastly, because this revolution, so necessary, is possible, even easy to accomplish peacefully."[ ] these are the naïve words of a young man of thirty-seven, the youngest member of the ill-fated revolutionary government of france in . not every one thought that the revolution could be peacefully accomplished, and, it must be admitted, few seemed to care. in their "communist manifesto," the most noted of all socialist broadsides, marx and engels know of no peaceful revolution. they close with these virile words: "the communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. they openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. they have the world to win. workingmen of all countries, unite!" these words are often quoted even in these placid days of evolution that have replaced the red days of violence. the workingmen of all countries are uniting, as we shall see, not for bloody revolution nor for the violence of passion, but for the promulgation of peace. to-day the silent coercion of multitudes is taking the place of the eruptive methods of the ' 's and the ' 's. as to the ultimate form of organized society, there is nothing but confusion to be found in the mass of literature that has grown up around the subject. the earliest writers were cocksure of themselves; the latest ones bridge over the question with wide-arching generalities. i have asked many of their leaders to give me some hint as to what form their society of to-morrow will take. every one dodged. "no one can tell. it will be humanitarian and co-operative." if one could be assured of this! finally, all socialists agree in the instrument of change. it lies at hand as the greatest co-operative achievement of our race, the state. it is the common possession of all, and it is the one power that can lay its hands upon property and compel its obedience. the power of the state is to be the dynamo of change. this state is naturally to be democratic. the people shall hold the reins of power in their own hands. it must be remembered that every year sees a shifting in the socialist's attitude. as he has left the sphere of mere fault-finding and of dreaming, and has entered politics, entered the labor war through unions, and the business war through co-operative societies, he has been compelled to adapt himself to the necessities of things as they are. i have tried briefly to show that socialism originated as a class movement, a proletarian movement; that the classes, wage-earner and capitalist, are the natural outcome of machine production; that socialism is one of the natural products of the antagonistic relations that these two classes at present occupy; that socialism intends to eliminate this antagonism by eliminating the private employer. i have tried to show also that socialism is a criticism of the present social order placing the blame for the miseries of society upon the shoulders of private property and competition; that it is optimistic in spirit, buoyant in hope; and that its program of reconstruction is confused and immature. stripped of its glamour, our society is in a neck-to-neck race for things, for property. its hideousness has shocked the sensibilities of dreamers and humanitarians. our machine industry has produced a civilization that is ugly. it is natural that the esthetic and philanthropic members of this society should raise their protest. ruskin and anatole france and maeterlinck and carlyle and robert morris and emerson and grierson are read with increasing satisfaction. it is natural that the participants in this death race should utter their cries of alternate despair and hope. socialism is the cry of the toiler. it is not to be ignored. we in america have no conception of its potency. there are millions of hearts in europe hanging upon its precepts for the hope that makes life worth the fight. their utopia may be only a rainbow, a mirage in the mists on the horizon. but the energy which it has inspired is a reality. it has organized the largest body of human beings that the world has known. its international socialist movement has but one rival for homogeneity and zeal, the church, whose organization at one time embraced all kingdoms and enlisted the faithful service of princes and paupers. it is this reality in its political form which i hope to set forth in the following pages. we will try to discover what the socialist movement is doing in politics, how much of theory has been merged in political practice, what its everyday parliamentary drudgery is, and, if possible, to tell in what direction the movement is tending. before we do this it is necessary to state briefly the history of the underlying theories of the movement. footnotes: [ ] "by bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, and employers of wage-labor. by proletariat, the class of modern wage-laborers, who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."--frederick engels, _notes on the communist manifesto_, . [ ] see sombart, _socialism and the social movement_, introduction, for discussion of the class movement. [ ] _the socialist movement_, p. . [ ] the all-embracing character of socialism was eloquently phrased by millerand in : "in its large synthesis socialism embraces every manifestation of life, because nothing human is alien to it, because it alone offers to-day to our hunger for justice and happiness an ideal, purely human and apart from all dogma." see ensor, _modern socialism_, p. . [ ] _garantieen der harmonie und freiheit_, pp. - , edition of . [ ] letter i, addressed to david ricardo. [ ] tract no. iv. [ ] _socialism_, pp. - . [ ] wells, _new worlds for old_, p. . [ ] mill, _socialism_, p. . [ ] louis blanc, _the right to labor_, p. . [ ] _organization of labor_, p. , . chapter ii the development of socialism i socialism began in france, that yeast-pot of civilization. it began while the revolution was still filling men's minds with a turbulent optimism that knew no limit to human "progress." saint-simon (count henri de) may be considered the founder of french socialism. he was of noble lineage, born in , and died in . he took very little part in the french revolution, but was a soldier in our continental army, and always manifested a keen interest in american affairs. possessed of an inquiring mind, an ambitious spirit, and a heart full of sympathy for the oppressed, he devoted himself to the study of society for the purpose of elaborating a scheme for universal human betterment. before he began his special studies he amassed a modest fortune in land speculation. not that he loved money, he assures us, but because he wished independence and leisure to do his chosen work. this money was soon lost, through unfortunate experiments and an unfortunate marriage, and the most of his days were spent in penury. he attracted to himself a number of the most brilliant young men in france, among them de lesseps who subsequently carried out one of the plans of his master, the suez canal; and auguste comte, who embodied in his positivism the philosophical teachings of saint-simon. saint-simon believed that society needed to be entirely reorganized on a "scientific basis," and that "the whole of society ought to labor for the amelioration of the moral and physical condition of the poorest class. society ought to organize itself in the manner the most suitable for the attainment of this great end."[ ] the two counteracting motives or spirits in society are the spirit of antagonism and the spirit of association. hitherto the spirit of antagonism has prevailed, and misery has resulted. let the spirit of association rule, and the evils will vanish. under the rule of antagonism, property has become the possession of the few, poverty and misery the lot of the many. both property and poverty are inherited, therefore the state should abolish all laws of inheritance, take all property under its dominion, and let society be the sole proprietor of the instruments of labor and of the fund that labor creates. through the teachings of saint-simon runs a constant stream of religious fervor. in christianity he found the moral doctrine that gave sanction to his social views. he sought the primitive christianity, stripped of the dogmas and opinions of the centuries. in his principal work, _nouveau christianisme_ (new christianity), he subjects the teachings of catholicism and protestantism to ingenious criticism, and finds in the teachings of christ the essential moral elements necessary for a society based on the spirit of association. saint-simon was a humanitarian rather than a systematic thinker. his analysis of society is ingenious rather than constructive. his teachings were elaborated by his followers, who organized themselves into a school called the "sacred college of the apostles," with bazard and enfantin as their leaders. they were accused, in the chamber of deputies, of promulgating communism of property and wives. their defense, dated october, , and issued as a booklet, is the best exposition of their views. they said that: "we demand that land, capital, and all the instruments of labor shall become common property, and be so managed that each one's portion shall correspond to his capacity, and his reward to his labors." "like the early christians, we demand that one man should be united to one woman, but we teach that the wife should be the equal of the husband." on the question of marriage, however, the sect split soon after this defense was written. enfantin became a defender of free love, and inaugurated a fantastic sacerdotalism which drove bazard from the "sacred college."[ ] the second french social philosopher of the utopian school was françois marie charles fourier ( - ). he was a bourgeois, son of a draper, and brought as keen an intellect as did his noble fellow-countryman, saint-simon, to the analysis of society, and a much more practical experience. in his youth he had been employed in various business enterprises. he recalls, in his works, several experiences which he never forgot. as a lad, he was reproached for telling a prospective customer the truth about some goods in his father's shop. when a young man of twenty-seven he was sent to marseilles to superintend the destruction of great cargoes of rice that had been held for higher prices, during a period of scarcity of food when thousands of people were suffering from hunger. the rice had spoiled in the waiting. the event made so profound an impression upon his mind that he resolved to devote his life to the betterment of an economic system that allowed such wanton waste. to his mind the problem of rebuilding society was practical, not metaphysical. but underlying his practical solution was a fantastic cosmogony and psychology. he reduced everything to a mathematical system, and even computed the number of years the world would spin on its axis. he believed that god created a good world, and that man has desecrated it; that the function of the social reformer is to understand the design of the creator, and call mankind back to this original plan, back to the original impulses and passions, and primitive goodness. this could be done only under ideal environment. such an environment he proposed to create in huge caravansaries, which he called phalansteries. each group, or phalange, was composed of families, or , persons, living on a large square of land, where they could be self-contained and self-sufficient, like the manors in the feudal days. the phalanstery was built in the middle of the tract, and was merely a glorified apartment house. every one chose to do the work he liked best. agriculture and manufacture were to be happily blended, and individual freedom given full sway. each phalange was designed to be an ideal democracy, electing its officers and governing itself. the principle of freedom was to extend even to marriage and the relation of the sexes. it was fourier's belief that one such phalange once established would so impress the world with its superiority that society would be glad to imitate it. ere long there would be groups of phalanges co-operating with each other, and ultimately the whole world would be brought into one vast federation of phalanges, with their chief center at constantinople. the general plan of this apartment-house utopia lent itself to all sorts of fantastic details. it gained adherents among the learned, the eager, and even the rich, and a number of experiments were tried. all of these have failed, i think, excepting only the community at guise, founded by jean godin. here, however, the fantasies have been eliminated, and the strong controlling force of the founder has made it prosperous. there is no agriculture connected with the guise establishment. a number of fourier colonies, most of them modifications of his phalanstery idea, were started in the united states. of thirty-four such experiments tried in america all have failed. the most famous of these attempts was brook farm.[ ] robert owen ( - ) was the great english utopian. he was the son of a small trader. such was his business ability and tenacity of character that at nineteen years of age he was superintendent of a cotton mill that employed hands. his business acumen soon made him rich, his philanthropic impulses led him to study the conditions of the people who worked for him. in he took charge of the mills at new lanark. there he had under him as pitiful and miserable a group of workmen as can be imagined. the factory system made wretchedness the common lot of the english workingman of this period. the hours of labor were intolerably long, the homes of the working people unutterably squalid, women and tiny children worked all day under the most unwholesome conditions; vice, drunkenness, and ignorance were everywhere. owen began as a practical philanthropist. he improved the sanitary conditions of his mills and town, was the first employer to reasonably shorten the hours of work, founded primary schools, proposed factory legislation, and founded the co-operative movement that has grown to great strength in england. he was one of the powerful men of the island at this period. he had the enthusiastic support of the queen, of many nobles, of clergy and scholars. but in a great public meeting in london he went out of his way to denounce the accepted forms of religion and declare his independence of all creeds, an offense that the english people never forgive. by this time he had perfected his scheme for social reform. he proposed to establish communities of , to , persons on about , acres of land. they were to live in an enormous building in the form of a square, each family to have its own apartments, but kitchen and dining-room to be in common. every advantage of work, education, and leisure was planned for the inmates. a number of owenite communities were founded in england and america. the one at new harmony, ind., was the most pretentious, and in it owen sank a large portion of his fortune. none of the experiments survived their founder.[ ] the utopians were all optimists--the source of their optimism was the social philosophy that prevailed from the french revolution to the middle of the last century. it was the philosophy of an unbounded faith in the goodness of human nature. a good god made a good world, and made man capable of attaining goodness and harmony in all his relations. the evil in the world was contrary to god's plan. it was introduced by the perversity of society. the source of misery is the lack of knowledge. if humankind knew the right way of living, knew the original plan of the creator, then there would be no misery. you must find this knowledge, this science, and upon it build society. hence they are all seeking a "scientific state of society," and call their system "scientific." from rousseau to hegel, the theory prevailed that evil is collective, good is individual; society is bad, man is pure. cabet expresses it clearly. "god is perfection, infinite, all-powerful, is justice and goodness. god is our father, and it follows that all men are brethren and all are equal, as in one all-embracing family." "it is evident that, to the fathers of the church, christianity was communism. communism is nothing other than true christianity...." "the regnancy of god, through jesus, is the regnancy of perfection, of omniscience, of justice, of goodness, of paternal love; and, it follows, of fraternity, equality, and liberty; of the unity of community interests, that is of communism (of the general common welfare), in place of the individual."[ ] this edenesque logic was dear to fourier, who left more profound traces on modern thought than the fantastic saint-simonians.[ ] fourier began with god. "on beholding this mechanism (the world and human society), or even in making an estimate of its properties, it will be comprehended that god has done well all that he has done."[ ] man has only to find "god's design" in order to find the true basis of society; and man's system of industrially parceling out the good things of life among a few favored ones, is the "antipodes of god's design." the finding of this design is the function of "exact science"; man, who has stifled the voice of nature, must now "vindicate the creator."[ ] saint-simon's whole system rests on this principle: "god has said that men ought to act toward each other as brethren." this principle will regulate society, for "in accordance with this principle, which god has given to men for the rule of their conduct, they ought to organize society in the manner the most advantageous to the greatest number."[ ] the social philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century did not believe that this rightness should be brought about by violence. "what i should desire," says godwin, "is not by violence to change its institutions, but by discussion to change its ideas. i have no concern, if i would study merely the public good, with factions or intrigue; but simply to promulgate the truth, and to wait the tranquil progress of conviction. let us anxiously refrain from violence."[ ] owen, who lived a few decades later, came into contact with the theories of the succeeding school of thought. his utopianism remained, however, upon the older basis. he taught that the evils of society were not inherent in the nature of mankind. the natural state of the world and of man was good. but the evils "are all the necessary consequences of ignorance." therefore, by education and environment he could "accomplish with ease and certainty the herculean labor of forming a rational character in man, and that, too, chiefly before the child commences the ordinary course of education."[ ] the utopians are hopefully seeking the universal law which will re-form society. this was a natural view of things fundamental, to be taken by men who had witnessed the political emancipation of the third estate and had seen "liberty, equality, fraternity" carved over every public portal in france, and the abstract principles of justice debated in parliaments. a feeling of naïve simplicity runs through all their writings. just as civil liberty, they believed, had come by the application of an abstract principle of natural law, so social and economic freedom would come by the application of one universal abstract principle of human conduct. from this simplicity came a violent reaction, which reached its climax in the anarchy of proudhon. ii the utopian period of socialism may be said to end, and the revolutionary era to begin, with the year . the french revolution was a bourgeois uprising. but behind it was the grim and resolute background of the proletarian mass. when the third estate achieved its victory, it proceeded to monopolize the governmental powers to the exclusion of its lowly allies. from to the ferment of democratic discontent spread over europe and forced the demands of the workingman into the foreground. the first outbreak occurred in france, in , when the workingmen of lyons, during a period of distressing financial depression, marched under the banner, "live working, or die fighting," demanding bread for their families and work for themselves. this second chapter of the development of socialism begins with a red letter. louis blanc ( - ), the first philosopher of the new movement, struck out boldly for a democratic organization of the government. this differentiates him from fourier and saint-simon, and links him with the leading socialist writers of our day. he published his _organisation du travail_ (organization of labor) in . it immediately gave him an immense popularity with the working classes. it is a brilliant book, as fascinating in its phrases as it is forceful in its denunciation of existing society. he said that it is vain to talk of improving mankind morally without improving them materially. this improvement would not come from above, from the higher classes. it would come from below, from the working people themselves. therefore, a prerequisite of social reform was democracy. the proletarian must possess the power of the state in order to emancipate himself from the economic bondage that holds him in its grasp. this democratic state should then establish national workshops, or associations, which he called "social workshops," the capital to be provided by the state and the state to supervise their operation. he believed that, once established, they would soon become self-supporting and self-governing. the men would choose their own managers, dispose of their own profits, and take care that this beneficent system would spread to all communities. he was careful to explain that "genius should assert its legitimate empire"--there must be a hierarchy of ability. louis blanc believed in revolution as the method of social advancement. he was himself a leader in the abortive revolution of , the revolt of the people against a weak and careless monarch. as a member of the provisional government, he may be called the first socialist to hold cabinet honors. and, like his successors in modern cabinets, he accomplished very little towards the bringing in of a new social order. it is true that national workshops were built by the french government at his suggestion; but not according to his plans. his enemies saw to it that they served to bring discredit rather than honor to the system which he had so carefully elaborated.[ ] louis blanc did not entirely free himself of the earlier utopian conception that man was created good and innocent. he blames society for allowing the individual to do evil. but he does take a step toward the marxian materialistic conception when he affirms that man was created with certain endowments of strength and intellect and that these endowments should be spent in the welfare of society. the empire of service, not the "empire of tribute," should be the measure of man's greatness. the doctrine of revolt was carried to its logical extreme by proudhon ( - ). he was the son of a cooper and a peasant maid, and he never forgot that he sprang from the proletariat. he was a precocious lad, was a theologian, philologist, and linguist before he undertook the study of political economy. in he brought out his notable work, _qu'est-ce que la propriété?_ (what is property?), a novel question for that day, to which he gave an amazing answer, "property is theft," ergo "property holders are thieves." proudhon was a man with the brain of a savant and the adjectives of a peasant. his startling phrases, however, are merely spotlights thrown on a theory of society which he permeated with a genuine good will. he was puritanic in moral principle, loyal to his friends, and a despiser of cant and formalism. but his love for paradoxes carried him beyond the confines of logic. property is theft, he says, because it reaps without sowing and consumes without producing. what right has a capitalist to charge me eight per cent.? none. this eight per cent. does not represent anything of time or labor value put into the article i am buying. it is therefore robbery. private property, the stronghold of the individualist, is then to be abolished and a universal communism established? by no means. communism is as unnatural as property. proudhon had only contempt for the phalanstery and national workshop of his predecessors. they were impossible, artificial, reduced life to a monotonous dead level, and encouraged immorality. property is wrong because it is the exploitation of the weak by the strong; communism is equally wrong because it is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. to this ingenious juggler of paradoxes this was by no means a dilemma. he resorted to a formula that was later amplified into the most potent argument of socialism by marx. service pays service, one day's work balances another day's work, time-labor is the just measure of value. hour for hour, day for day, this should be the universal medium of exchange. proudhon was really directing his attacks against rent and profit rather than against property. he proposed, as a measure of reform, a national bank where every one could bring the product of his toil and receive a paper in exchange denoting the time value of his article. these slips of paper were to be the medium of exchange capable of purchasing equal time values. this glorified savage barter he even proposed to the constituent assembly, of which he was a member, and when it was rejected--only two votes were recorded for it--he tried to establish it upon private foundations. he failed to raise the necessary capital and his plan failed. proudhon is the father of modern anarchy. his exaltation of individualism led him to the suppression of government. government, he taught, is merely the dominance of one man over another, a form of intolerable oppression. "the highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy." for his bitter tirades against property he received the scorn of the bourgeois, for his attacks upon the government he served three years in prison, and some years later he escaped a second term for a similar cause by fleeing to brussels. the ultimate outcome of his individualism was equality, which he achieved in economics by his theory of time-labor and in politics by his theory of anarchy. one cannot escape the conviction that the outcome of all his brilliant rhetorical legerdemain is man in a cage. not man originally pure and good as the utopians would have him, but man wilful, egoistic, capable of enslaving his fellows, a very different being from the man of mercy and love crushed by the collective injustice of society. proudhon frees this man from his oppressor and his oppressiveness by creating a condition of equality through the destruction of property and of government. but in destroying property he retains possessions, and in establishing anarchy he maintains order. "free association, liberty--whose sole function is to maintain equality--in the means of production, and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society." "the government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy."[ ] proudhon has had a large influence on modern socialism. his trenchant invectives against property and society are widely copied. from his utterances on government the syndicalists of france, italy, and spain have drawn their doctrine. the general strike is the child of his paradoxes. he wrote as the motto for his most influential book, _what is property?_, "destruam et aedificabo" (i will destroy and i will build again). but, while he pointed the way to destruction, he failed to reveal a new and better order. the way to modern socialism was paved in germany. the teaching of hegel cleared the way for the political unrest that spread over europe in the ' 's. hegel was the proclaimer of the social revolution. he gave sanction to the tenets of destruction. everything that exists is worth destroying, may be taken as the primary postulate at which the young hegelians arrived. truth does not exist merely in a collection of institutions or dogmatic axioms that could be memorized like the alphabet; truth is in the process of being, of knowing, it has developed through the toilsome evolution of the race, it is found only in experience. nothing is sacred merely because it exists. existing institutions are only the prelude to other and better institutions that are to follow. this was roughly the formula that the radical hegelians blocked out for themselves when they split from the orthodox conservatives in the ' 's. in appeared feuerbach's _wesen des christentums_ (essence of christianity), putting the seal of materialism upon the precepts of the young hegelians.[ ] the god of the utopians was destroyed. things were not created in harmony and beauty and disordered by man. things as they are, are the result of evolution, of growth; nothing was created as it is, and even "religion is the dream of the human mind."[ ] out of this atmosphere of philosophical, religious, and political rebellion sprang the prophet of modern socialism, karl marx,[ ] a man whose intellectual endowments place him in the first ranks among socialists and link his name with other bold intellects of his age who have forced the current of human thought. there have been many books written on marx, and every phase of his theories has been subjected to academic and popular scrutiny. his treatise, _capital_, is the sacerdotal book of socialists. it displays a mass of learning, a diligence of research, and acumen in the marshaling of ideas, and a completeness of literary expression that insures it a lasting place in the literature of social philosophy. whatever may be said of the narrow dogmatism, of marx, of his persistence in making the facts fit his preconceived notions, of his materialistic conception of history, or of the technical flaws in his political economy, he will always be quoted as the founder of modern scientific socialism and the socialist historian of the capitalistic régime. i must content myself with a bare statement of his theories. the economic basis of marx is his well-known "theory of surplus value." it was not his theory in the sense that he originated it. economists like adam smith and especially ricardo, socialists like the owenites and the chartists in england, and proudhon in france, had enunciated it; and in germany rodbertus, a lawyer and scholar of great learning, had elaborated it in his first book, published in . marx, with german thoroughness, developed this theory in all its ramifications. all economic goods, he said, have value. they have a physical value, and a value given them by the labor expended on them. labor is the common factor of economic values. and the common denominator is the time that is consumed by the labor. labor-time, therefore, is the universal measure of value, the common medium that determines values. but this labor is acquired in the open labor market by the capitalist at the lowest possible price, a price whose utmost limit is the bare cost of living. the reward for his labor is called a wage. this wage does not by any means measure the value of his services. what, then, becomes of the "surplus value," the value over and above wages? the capitalist appropriates it. indeed, the great aim of the capitalist is to make this surplus value as big as possible. he measures his success by his profits. "surplus value," or profit, is, then, a species of robbery; it is ill-gotten gain, withholding from the workman that which by right of toil is his. how did it come about that society was so organized as to permit this wholesale wrong upon the largest and most defenseless of its classes? it is in answer to this question that marx makes his most notable contribution to socialistic theory. with great skill, and displaying a comprehensive knowledge of economic history, especially of english industrial history, he traces the development of modern industrial society. he follows the evolution of capital from the days of medieval paternalism through the period of commercial expansion when the voyages of discovery opened virgin fields of wealth to the trader, into the period of inventions when the industrial revolution changed the conditions of all classes and gave a sudden and princely power to capital, establishing the reign of "capitalistic production." always it was the man with capital who could take advantage of every new commercial and industrial opportunity, and the man without capital who was forced to succumb to the stress of new and cruel circumstances. in every stage of development it has been the constant aim of the capitalist to increase his profits and of the workingman to raise his standard of living. marx then declares that, in order to have a capitalist society, two classes are necessary: a capitalist and a non-capitalist class; a class that dominates, and one that succumbs. there have always been these two classes. originally labor was slave, then it was serf, and now it is free. but free labor to-day differs from serf-labor and slave-labor only in that it has a legal right to contract. the economic results are the same as they always have been: the capitalist still appropriates the surplus value. the method of production, however, is very different in our capitalistic era from the earlier eras. the industrial system herds the workmen into factories. property and labor is no longer individualistic; it is social, it is corporate. marx calls it "social production and capitalistic appropriation." here is the eternal antagonism between the classes, the large class of laborers and the small class of the "appropriators" of their common toil. these factories, where labor is herded, spring up willy-nilly wherever there is a capitalist who desires to enter business. they flood the markets, not by mutual consent or regulation, but by individual ambitions. each capitalist is ruled by self-interest; and self-interest impels him to make as many goods as he can and sell them at as big a profit as he can. result, economic anarchy, called "over-production" or "under-consumption" by the economists. this leads to panics and all their attendant woes--woes that are further heaped upon the proletarian by the fact that he must compete with machinery, which, being more and more perfected, forces him out of the labor market into the street. these crises have the tendency to concentrate industry in fewer and fewer hands; the weaker capitalist must succumb to the inevitable laws of struggle and survival. the survivors fatten on the corpses of their fallen competitors. thus the factories grow larger and larger, the number of capitalists fewer and fewer; the number of proletarian dependents multiplies; the middle class is crushed out of existence; the rich become richer and fewer, the poor more numerous and poorer. in this turmoil of social production, capitalistic appropriation, and anarchic distribution, there is discernible a reshaping of social potencies. the proletarian realizes the power of the state and sees how he may possess himself of that power and thereby gain control of the economic forces and reshape them to fit the needs of a better society. this will mean the appropriation of the means of production and distribution by society. private capital will vanish; surplus values will belong to the people who created them; the people will be master and servant, capitalist and laborer. this is the socialistic stage of society. it will be the result of the natural evolution of human industry. its immediate coming will be the result of a social revolution. this revolution, this social cataclysm, is written in the nature of things. man cannot prompt it, he cannot prevent it. he can only study the trend of things and "alleviate the birth-pangs" of the new time. of this new time, this society of to-morrow, marx gives us no glimpse. his function is not to prophesy, but to analyze. he is the natural historian of capital. he described the development of economic society and sought to ascertain its trend. in the first chapter of _capital_ he says: "let us imagine an association of free men, working with common means of production, and putting forth, consciously, their individual powers into one social labor power. the product of this association of laborers is a social product. a portion of this product serves in turn as a means of further production. it remains social property. the rest of this product is consumed by the members of the association as a means of living. it must consequently be distributed among them. the nature of this distribution will vary according to the particular nature of the organization of production and the corresponding grade of historical development of the producers." this is the only mention of the future made by marx. it is a dim and uncertain ray of light cast upon a vast object. the formulæ of this epoch-making study may be summarized as follows: . labor gives value to all economic goods. the laboring class is the producing class, but it is deprived of its just share of the products of its labor by the capitalistic class, which appropriates the "surplus value." . this is possible because of the capitalistic method of production, wherein private capital controls the processes of production and distribution. . this system of private capitalism is the result of a long and laborious process of evolution, hastened precipitately by the industrial revolution. . this industrial age is characterized (a) by anarchy in distribution, (b) private production, (c) the gradual disappearance of the middle class, (d) the development of a two-class system--capitalist and producer, (e) the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer. . this will not always continue. the producers are becoming fewer each year. presently they will become so powerful as to be unendurable. then society--the people--will appropriate private capital and all production and distribution will be socialized. it is necessary to keep in mind the leading events in the life of this remarkable man in order to understand the genesis of his theories. marx was born in treves in , of jewish parentage. his mother was of dutch descent, his father was german. when the lad was six years of age his parents embraced the christian faith. his father was a lawyer, but his ancestors for over two hundred years had been rabbis. the home was one of culture, where english and french as well as german literature and art were discussed by a circle of learned and congenial friends. marx studied at the universities of bonn and berlin. he took his doctorate in the law to please his father, but followed philosophy by natural bent, intending to become a university professor. the turmoil of revolution was in the air and in his blood. there was no curbing of his fiery temperament into the routine of scholastic life. in he joined the staff of the _rhenish gazette_ at cologne, an organ of extreme radicalism. his drastic editorials prompted the police to ask him to leave the country, and he went to paris, where he met frederick engels, who became his firm friend, partner of his views, and sharer of his labors. the prussian government demanded his removal from paris, and for a time he settled in brussels. he returned to germany to participate in the revolution of , and in he was driven to london, where, immune from prussian persecutions, he made his home until his death, in . in he married jennie von westphalen, a lady of refinement, courage, and loyalty, whose family was prominent in prussian politics. her brother was at one time a minister in the prussian cabinet. marx was an exile practically all his life, though he never gave up his german citizenship. he never forgot this fact. he concluded his preface to the first volume of _capital_, written in , with a bitter allusion to the "mushroom upstarts of the new, holy prussian german empire." he lived a life of heroic fortitude and struggle against want and disease. from his infancy he had been taught to take a world view, an international view, of human affairs. this gave him an immediate advantage over all other socialist writers of that day. at bonn he was caught in the current of heterodoxy that was then sweeping through the universities. this carried him far into the fields of materialism, whose philosophy of history he adopted and applied to the economic development of the race. he received not alone his philosophy from the "young hegelians," but his dialectics as well. it gave him a philosophy of evil which, blending with his bitter personal experiences, gave a melancholy bent to his reasoning, and revealed to him the misericordia of class war, the struggle of abject poverty contending with callous capital in a bloody social revolution. there are four points which gave marx an immense influence over the socialistic movement. in the first place, he put the socialistic movement on a historical basis; he made it inevitable. think what this means, what hope and spirit it inspires in the bosom of the workingman. but he did more than this: he made the proletarian the instrument of destiny for the emancipation of the race from economic thraldom. this was to be accomplished by class war and social revolution. marx imparts the zeal of fatalism to his socialism when he links it to the necessities of nature. by natural law a bourgeoisie developed; by natural law it oppresses the proletarian; by natural law, by the compulsion of inexorable processes, the proletarians alone can attain their freedom. capitalism becomes its own grave-digger. liebknecht said in his erfurt speech ( ): "the capitalistic state of the present begets against its will the state of the future." in the third place, marx gave a formula to the socialist movement. he defined socialism in one sentence: "the social ownership of the means of production and distribution." this was necessary. from among the vague and incoherent mass of utopian and revolutionary literature he coined the sentence that could be repeated with gusto and the flavor of scientific terminology. and finally, he refrained from detailing the new society. he laid down no program except war, he pointed to no utopia except co-operation. this offended no one and left socialists of all schools free to construct their own details. the marxian system was no sooner enunciated than it was shown to be fallible as an economic generalization; and the passing of several decades has proved that the tendencies he deemed inevitable are not taking place. the refutation of his theory of value by the austrian economist, adolph menger, is by economists considered complete and final. the materialistic conception of history, which is the soul of his work, lends itself more to the passion of a virile propaganda than to a sober interpretation of the facts. further, the two practical results that flow from the use of his theory of surplus value and his materialism--namely, the ever-increasing volume of poverty and the ever-decreasing number of capitalists--are not borne out by the facts. the number of capitalists is constantly increasing, in spite of the development of enormous trusts; the middle class is constantly being recruited from the lower class; there is no apparent realization of the two-class system. and finally, the method by revolution is being more and more discarded by socialists, as they see that intolerable conditions are being more and more alleviated, that "man's inhumanity to man" is a constantly diminishing factor in the bitter struggle for existence.[ ] footnotes: [ ] _new christianity_, p. , english edition, . [ ] saint-simon's principal writings are: _lettres d'un habitant de genève_, ; _l'organisateur_, ; _du système industriel_, ; _catéchisme des industriels_, ; _nouveau christianisme_, . see a.j. barth, _saint-simon and saint-simonism_, london, ; reybaud, _Études sur les réformateurs modernes_, paris, ; janet, _saint-simon et le saint-simonisme_, paris, . _new christianity_ was translated into english by rev. j.e. smith, london, . [ ] the best popular exposition of fourierism is gatti de gammont's _fourier et son système_. his most eminent commentator is victor considerant, whose _destinée sociale_ is the most complete analysis of fourier's system. [ ] it is interesting to note that the word "socialism" first became current in the meetings of owen's "association of all classes of all nations," organized by him in . [ ] _le vrai christianisme_, chap. xviii, edition of . [ ] an apt selection from the works of fourier has been made by prof. charles gide, prefaced by an illuminating introduction on the life and work of fourier. an english translation by julia franklin appeared in london, . [ ] _le nouveau monde_, vol. i, p. . [ ] _thème de l'unité universelle_, vol. ii, p. . [ ] _new christianity_, p. , english edition, . [ ] _political justice_, vol. ii, pp. , . [ ] _third essay on a new view of society_, pp. , . [ ] see Émile thomas, _history of the national workshops_. [ ] _what is property?_ collected works, vol. i, p. . [ ] in marx made this note on the work of feuerbach: "the point of view of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the point of view of the new materialism is human society or the unclassed humanity (vergesellschaftete menschheit). "philosophers have only differently _interpreted_ the world, but the point is to _alter_ the world." see frederick engels, _ludwig feuerbach und der ausgang der klassischen deutschen philosophie_, stuttgart, . [ ] _essence of christianity_, preface, p. xiii. [ ] for a concise statement of the development of marxian socialism out of the german philosophy of that period, see frederick engels, _die entwickelung des sozialismus von der utopie zur wissenschaft_, berlin, . it is the third chapter out of his _dühring, umwälzung_. [ ] for a criticism of the teachings of marx, see sombart, _socialism and the social movement_, chap. iv. chapter iii the political awakening of socialism--the period of revolution from the point of view of our inquiry the most significant event in the history of socialism is its entrance into politics. this endows the workingman with a new power and a great power; a power that will bring him farther on his way toward the goal he seeks than any other he possesses. because the modern state is democratic, and the democratic state bends in the direction of the mass. the revolutions attempted in the middle of the last century are child's play compared with the changes that can be wrought when constitutions and courts, parliaments and administrative systems, become the instruments of a determined, self-possessed, and united political consciousness. scarcely half a century elapsed between the french utopians and the time when the proletarians organized actual political parties, and arrayed themselves against the older orders in the struggle for political privilege. in the interval, revolution had its brief hour, and reaction its days of waiting. the french revolution was a necessary preliminary to the proletarian movement. it was the most powerful instrument for the propagation of those democratic ideas that were so attractively clothed by rousseau and so terribly distorted by the revolutionists. while this revolution was a bourgeois movement, not a proletarian uprising, not a revolution in the sense that marx, for instance, uses the word, it must not be forgotten that the proletarians were in the revolution. the dark and sullen background of that tragedy was the mass of unspeakably poor. they were not machine workers whose abjectness came from factory conditions, like the workmen of england a few decades later. they were proletarians without a class consciousness, but with a class grievance; proletarians in the literal sense of the word, poor, ragged, hungry, wretched. such democracy as was achieved by the revolution was bourgeois. the powers of monarchy were transferred from the "privileged" classes to the middle class, who, in turn, became the privileged ones. the day of middle-class government had come. the class that had financed the fleets of adventurers to new and unexploited continents, and had backed the inventions of arkwright and hargreaves, were now in power in politics as well as in commerce and industry. a unity of purpose between industry and statecraft was thus achieved; new ideals became dominant. the patriarchal precepts of the feudal manors were forgotten. the people were no longer children of a great household with their king at the head. the king, when he was retained, was shorn of his universal fatherhood, and remained a mere remnant of ermine and velvet, a royal trader in social distinctions. while the old ideal, the feudal ideal, prevailed, governing was the _duty_ of a class. the newer ideal made governing an incident in the activities of a class whose dominating impulse was the making of profits. these ideals are at polar points; one deals with things, the other with men. the change in the form of government was wrought while the people were talking about the glittering abstractions of equality, liberty, justice, as if they were commodities to be exchanged in the political markets. the newer form of government marked an advance on the older. it represented a step forward in human political experience. a larger group of citizens was drawn into the widening circle of governmental activities. it was an inevitable step. the discovery of the new world and the invention of machinery were making a new earth--an unattractive earth, but nevertheless a new one. the balance of power was shifting from hereditary privilege to commercial privilege, and nations were fulfilling the law of human nature, that the power of the state reposes in the hands of the dominant class. the dominant class is actuated by its dominant idea. in the aristocratic class it is politics, in the middle class it is trade. all this inevitably accentuated the proletarian's position in the state. under the older régime, as historians of our economic development have clearly shown, the antagonisms and grievances were fewer. the trader and the craftsman were overshadowed by the lord and the bishop. social, political, and economical values were distributed by custom and imposed by heredity, rather than by individual effort or individual capacity. when, therefore, this great change came over society, a change that would have been unthinkable in the days of charlemagne or of elizabeth,--a change that virtually destroyed the most powerful of the classes and put human beings onto a basis of competition rather than of birth, and shifted power from tradition to effort, and transferred values from prerogatives to gold,--then the whole class problem changed, and entirely new antagonisms were created. the first movements of the new proletarians were mob movements. actuated more by a desire to revenge themselves than to better themselves, they gather in the dark hours of the night and move sullenly upon the factories, to destroy their enemies, the machines. they pillage the buildings and threaten the house of their employer, whom they consider the agent of their undoing. in france and germany, and especially in england, these infuriated workmen try to undo by violence what has been achieved by invention. when their first fury is abated and they see new machinery taking the place of that which they have destroyed, and new factories built on the foundations of those they have burned, they see the impotence of their actions. in england a new movement begins. they try to re-enact the elizabethan statute of laborers, to bring back the days of handicrafts, of journeyman and apprentice. they soon learned that the old era had vanished, never to return. the workingman possessed neither the power nor the ingenuity to bring it back. he turned, next, to possess himself of the machinery of the state. political conditions paved the way. france, after her orgy, had fallen back into absolutism. germany and austria had remained feudal in the most distasteful sense of the word; the nobility retained their ancient privileges and forsook their ancient duties. the landlord class even retained jurisdiction over their tenants. the old industry had been destroyed by napoleon's campaigns; the new machine industry did not establish itself until after the enactment of protective tariffs and the creation "zollverein," in . this cemented the bourgeois interests. manufacturers, traders, and bankers achieved a homogeneity of interest and ambition which was antagonistic to the spirit of the _junker_ and the feudalist. the new bourgeoisie wanted laws favorable to trade expansion. they needed the law-making machinery to achieve this. by the upper middle class had become feverish for political power. they imbibed the doctrines of the literature of that period which preached a constitutional republicanism. hegel gave the weighty sanction of philosophy to the overthrow of absolute monarchy. the great mass of the people were, of course, workingmen, small traders, and shopkeepers, and the rural peasantry. the small trader was dependent upon the favors of the ruling class on the one hand, and of the banker and manufacturer on the other hand. when the interests of these two clashed he was alarmed, for he could neither remain neutral nor take sides. the peasants were abject subjects, little better than serfs. the laboring men, as we shall see presently, were achieving a mass consciousness. in germany frederick william, the romantic, was face to face with revolution. this was not an economic revolution. it was a political revolution. it was joined by the communists and the socialists. marx himself, was a leader in the revolt, and one of its most faithful chroniclers. in the weavers of silesia rose in revolt. there was rioting and bloodshed. this was followed by bread riots in various parts of germany. in the whole country was in the turmoil of revolution, a revolution led by the upper middle class, but prompted and fired by the zeal of the proletarians, who, in some of the cities, notably berlin, became the leading factor in the uprising. marx says: "there was then no separate republican party in germany. people were either constitutional monarchists or more or less clearly defined socialists or communists."[ ] in austria conditions were even more reactionary than in germany. metternich, the powerful representative of the ancient order of things, had a haughty contempt for the demands of the constitutional party. with the hauteur of absolutism he not only retained political power in the feudal class, but suppressed literature, censored learning, and rigorously superintended religion. a greater power than caste and tradition was slowly eating its way into this country, which had attempted to isolate itself from the rest of the world. this was the power of machine industry. it brought with it, as in every other country, a new class, the manufacturers, who, as soon as their business began to expand, sought favorable laws. this led them into political activity, which, in turn, brought friction with the feudalists. both sides took to the field. the revolution broke in vienna, march , , seventeen days after the revolutionists had driven louis philippe out of paris, and five days before the prussian king delivered himself into the hands of a berlin mob. it was in france that the revolution assumed its most virulent character. in paris the revolution was "carried on between the mass of the working people on the one hand and all the other classes of the parisian population, supported by the army, on the other."[ ] this parisian proletarian uprising was the red signal of warning to germany and austria. the bourgeois were now as anxious to rid themselves of the socialist contingent as they had been eager for its support when they began their struggle for political power. compromises between feudalists and commercialists were effected, and a sort of constitutionalism became the basis of the reconstructed governments. of these revolutions marx says: "in all cases the real fighting body of the insurgents, that body which first took up arms and gave battle to the troops, consisted of the working classes of the towns. a portion of the poorer country population, laborers and petty farmers, generally joined them after the outbreak of the conflict."[ ] they were not merely bourgeois uprisings. the parisian revolution was virtually a proletarian rebellion. here "the proletariat, because it dictated the republic to the provisional government, and through the provisional government to the whole of france, stepped at once forth as an independent, self-contained party; and it at once arrayed the entire bourgeoisie of france against itself.... marche, a workingman, dictated a decree wherein the newly formed provincial government pledged itself to secure the position of the workingman through work, to do away with bourgeois labor, etc. and as they seemed to forget this promise, a few days later , workingmen marched upon the hôtel de ville with the battle-cry, 'organization of labor! create a ministry of labor!' and after a prolonged debate the provisional government named a permanent special commission for the purpose of finding the means for bettering the conditions of the working classes."[ ] it is evident that marx considered the revolutions of - as a compound of proletarian and bourgeois uprisings against _feudal_ remnants in government. he is not always clear in his own mind as to the direction of these movements. but we now know that the direction was toward democracy. the french, or parisian, uprising was more "advanced" than the other continental attempts. the parisians had piled barricades before; they were experienced in the bloody business. they tried again in . this time the workingmen ruled paris for two months. it was a bloody, turbulent period. marx characterized it as "the glorious workingman's revolution of the th of march," and the commune "as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule." its acts of violence he extolled, its burning of public buildings was a "self-holocaust." this "workingman's paris, with its commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society."[ ] so the attempt to possess the state by revolution has been tried by the proletarian. the revolutions were all abortive. the socialists say they were ill-timed. writing in , frederick engels, the companion of marx, could see these uprisings in a different perspective. he acknowledged the mistake made by the socialists in believing that they could by violence somehow become the deciding factor in the government, and therefore in the economic arrangement of society. "history has shown us our error," he says. "time has made it clear that the status of economic development on the continent was far from ripe for the setting aside of the capitalistic régime."[ ] these revolutions were not merely bourgeois, as is so often affirmed. there was everywhere a large element of socialistic unrest. they were revolutions begun in the fever heat of youth--"young germany," "young austria," "young italy," were moved by "young hegelians" and "young communists." they embraced bourgeois tradesmen and proletarian workingmen, who, in their new-found delirium, thought that with "the overthrow of the reactionary governments, the kingdom of heaven would be realized on earth."[ ] "they had no idea," continues kautsky, who speaks on these questions with authority, "that the overthrow of these governments would not be the end, but the beginning of revolutions; that the newly won bourgeois freedom would be the battleground for the great class war between proletarian and bourgeois; that liberty did not bring social freedom, but social warfare." this is to-day the orthodox socialist view. it believes that these revolutions taught the proletarians the folly of ill-timed violence; revealed to them their friends and their enemies; and, above all, gave them a class consciousness. let us turn, for a moment, to a proletarian movement of a somewhat different type, the chartist movement in england. the flame of revolution that enveloped europe crossed the channel to england and ireland. but here revolution took a different course. in ireland it was the brilliant o'connell's agitation against the act of union; in england it was the workingman's protest against his exclusion from the reform act of , an act that itself had been born amidst the throes of mob violence and incipient revolution. the chartist movement was promulgated by the "workingmen's association." it was a workingman's protest. its organizers were carpenters, its orators were tailors and blacksmiths and weavers, surprising themselves and their audiences with their new-found eloquence, and its writers were cotton spinners. the reform bill had been a bitter disappointment to them. it gave the right of suffrage to the middle class, but withheld it from the working class. a few radical members of parliament met with representatives of the workingmen and drafted a bill. o'connell, as he handed the measure to the secretary of the association, said: "there is your charter"--and the "people's charter" it was called. its "six points" were: manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, election by ballot, abolition of property qualifications for election of members to parliament, payment of members of parliament, and equitably devised electoral districts. these are all political demands, all democratic. but economic conditions pressed them to the foreground. the "bread tax" was as much an issue as the ballot. they demanded the ballot so that they might remove the tax. "misery and discontent were its strongest inspirations," says mccarthy.[ ] carlyle saw the inwardness of the movement. "all along for the last five and twenty years it was curious to note how the internal discontent of england struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice; the poor patient, all sick from center to surface, complains now of this member, now of that: corn laws, currency laws, free trade, protection, want of free trade: the poor patient, tossing from side to side seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none." one of its own crude and forceful orators said on kersall moor to , turbulent workingmen of manchester: "chartism, my friends, is no mere political movement, where the main point is your getting the ballot. chartism is a knife and fork question. the charter means a good house, good food and drink, prosperity, and short working hours."[ ] the protest of this discontent became the nearest approach to a revolution england had encountered since charles i. monster meetings, for the first time called "mass meetings," were held in every county, and evenings, after working hours, enormous parades were organized, each participant carrying a torch, hence they were called "torchlight parades." these two spectacular features were soon adopted by american campaigners. a wild and desperate feeling seized the masses. "you see yonder factory with its towering chimney," cried one of its orators. "every brick in that factory is cemented with the blood of women and children." and again: "if the rights of the poor are trampled under foot, then down with the throne, down with aristocracy, down with the bishops, down with the clergy, burn the churches, down with all rank, all title, and all dignity."[ ] in their great petition to parliament, signed by several million people, the agitators said: "the reform act has effected a transfer of power from one domineering faction to another and left the people as helpless as before." "we demand universal suffrage. the suffrage, to be exempt from the corruption of the wealthy and the violence of the powerful, must be secret." the whole movement had all the aspects of a modern, violent general strike. its papers, _the poor man's guardian_, _the destructive_, and others, were full of tirades against wealth and privilege. when the agitation became an uprising in wales, there was a conflict between the chartists and the police in which a number were killed and wounded. in the industrial centers, soldiers were present at the meetings, and the outcry against the use of the military was the same that is heard to-day. a number of the leaders were tried for sedition, and the courts became the objects of abuse as they are to-day. it was a labor war for political privilege; a class war for economic advantages. summary of the period of revolution these revolutions were political in that they were a protest against existing governmental forms. the revolutionary proletarian was found in all of them. he not only stood under the standard of daniel manin in venice, when that patriot again proclaimed a republic in the ancient city, and shared with mazzini his triumph in rome, and fought with kossuth for the liberty of hungary; but he formed also the body of the revolutionary forces in germany, austria, and france. in all the continental countries the uprisings were directed against the arrogance and oppression of monarchism, and against the recrudescence of feudalistic ideals. in france louis philippe had attempted the part of a petty despot. he restricted the ballot to the propertied class, balanced his power on too narrow a base, and it became top-heavy. while the workingmen of germany and austria were taking up arms under command of the middle class against the feudal remnants, the workingmen of france were sacking their capital because of an attempted revival of monarchic privilege, and the workmen of england were marching and counter-marching in monster torchlight parades in protest against middle-class domination. the panorama of europe in these years of turmoil and blood thus exhibits every degree of revolt against governmental power, from the absolutism of prussian junkerdom and the oppression of the hungarians by foreign tyranny, to the dominance of the aristocratic and middle-class alliance in great britain. the bread-and-butter question was not wanting in any of these political uprisings. the unity of life makes their separation a myth. one is interwoven with the other. the social struggle is political, the political struggle is social. socialism is not merely an economic movement. it seeks to-day, and always has sought, the power of the state. the government is the only available instrument for effecting the change--the revolution--the socialists preach, the transfer of productive enterprise from private to public ownership. "political power our means, social happiness our end," was a chartist motto. that is the duality of socialism to-day. footnotes: [ ] marx, _revolution and counter-revolution in _. [ ] marx, _revolution and counter-revolution_, p. . [ ] _op. cit._, pp. - . [ ] marx, _die klassenkämpfe in frankreich_, pp. - . [ ] see the third address issued by the international workingmen's association on the franco-prussian war, - . the italian socialists in milan, june, , closed a rhetorical address to the parisian communards as follows: "to despotism they responded, we are free. "to the cannon and chassepots of the leagued reactionists they offered their bared breasts. "they fell, but fell like heroes. "to-day the reaction calls them bandits, places them under the ban of the human race. "shall we permit it? no! "workingmen! at the time when our brothers in paris are vanquished, hunted like fallow deer, are falling by hundreds under the blows of their murderers, let us say to them: come to us, we are here; our houses are open to you. we will protect you, until the day of revenge, a day not far distant. "workingmen! the principles of the commune of paris are ours: we accept the responsibility of its acts. long live the social republic!" see ed. villetard, _history of the international_, p. . this sentiment was also expressed in london and other centers. [ ] introduction to _die klassenkämpfe in frankreich_, p. . [ ] kautsky, _leben friedrich engels_, p. , berlin, . [ ] _the epoch of reform_, p. . [ ] engels, _condition of the working classes in _, p. . engels, who came to england at this time and was employed in manchester in his father's business, and was therefore in the heart of the movement, says that chartism was, after the anti-corn law league had been formed, "purely a workingman's cause." it was "the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie." "the demands hitherto made by him (the laborer), the ten-hours' bill, protection of the worker against the capitalist, good wages, a guaranteed position, repeal of the new poor law--all of these things belong to chartism quite as essentially as the 'six points.'"--_supra cit._, pp. , , . [ ] r.g. grummage, _history of the chartist movement_, - , p. , newcastle, . chapter iv the political awakening of socialism--the international with vanished, more or less rapidly, the revolutions of the old school. "the street fight and barricade, which up to was decisive, now grew antiquated," says engels.[ ] a new species of plotting and propaganda began. the exiled agitators and revolutionists met, naturally, in their cities of refuge for the discussion of their common grievances. they complained that "the proletarian has no fatherland," and internationalism became their patriotism. in paris a few of the ostracized socialists, in , founded "the league of the just," a communistic secret society.[ ] the group were compelled to leave paris because they were implicated in a riot, and when some of them met in london they invited other refugees to join them. among them was marx, and his presence soon bore fruit. their motto, "all men are brethren," was singularly paradoxical when contrasted with their methods of sinister conspiracy. marx, with his superior intellect, at once began to reshape their ideas, a reorganization was effected called "the communist league," and marx and engels were delegated to write a statement of principles for the league. that statement, written in , they called "the communist manifesto." the "manifesto" is the most influential of all socialist documents. it is at once a firebrand and a formulary. its formulæ are the well-known marxian principles; its energy is the youthful vigor and zeal of ardent revolutionists. nearly all the generalizations of _capital_ are found in the "manifesto." this is important, for it gave the sanction of a social theory to the socialist movement. hitherto there had been only utopian generalizations and keen denunciations of the existing order. it was of the greatest importance that early in the development of the movement it was given an economic theory expressed in such lucid terms, with the gusto of youth, and in the terminology of science, that it remains to-day the best synopsis of marx's "scientific socialism." as a piece of campaign literature it is unexcelled. combined with its clearness of statement, its economic reasoning, its terrific arraignment of modern industrial society, there is a lofty zeal and power that placed it in the front rank of propagandist literature. engels, the surviving partner of the marxian movement, wrote in the preface of the edition of : "the 'manifesto' being our joint production, i consider myself bound to say that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus belongs to marx." that proposition embraced the materialistic theory of social evolution, that "the whole history of mankind has been a history of class struggles ... in which nowadays a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed classes--the proletariat--cannot attain their emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling classes--the bourgeoisie--without at the same time and once for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions, and class struggles." this liberation was, of course, to be accomplished by revolution. the "manifesto" closes with these spirited and oft-quoted words: "the communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. they openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. let the ruling class tremble at a communist revolution. the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have a world to win. workingmen of all countries, unite." this was the language and the spirit of the times. the "manifesto" was published only a few days before the february revolution of . for a moment the ruling class did tremble; but the ill-timed uprisings were promptly suppressed and the days of reaction set in. soon the workingmen of different countries were busy with the stupendous development of industry which followed in the wake of the wars and revolutions that had harassed the continent for over fifty years. the revival of industry brought a renewal of international trade. this was followed by a wider exchange of views and greater international intimacy. in the first international exposition was held. before we proceed with the development of the "old international," as it is now called, let us notice three points about the "manifesto." first, it was not called the "socialist manifesto," although adopted by socialists the world over. engels, in his preface of , tells us why. "when it was written we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. by socialist, in , were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various utopian systems; owenites in england, fourierists in france, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances; in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the 'educated' classes for support. whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion then called itself communist. it was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the utopian communism in france of cabet, and in germany of weitling. this socialism was, in , a middle-class movement; communism a working-class movement. socialism was, on the continent at least, 'respectable'; communism was the very opposite." it would be interesting to know how engels would define socialism to-day. second, it is important for us to know that the "manifesto" recognized the necessity of using the government as the instrument for achieving the new society. "the immediate aim of the communists," it recites, "is the conquest of political power by the proletariat"; to "labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries." the governmental organization of the communists' state was to be democratic. thirdly, a provisional program of such a politico-socio-democratic party is suggested in the "manifesto." its principal points are: " . abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. " . a heavy progressive or graduated income tax. " . abolition of all rights of inheritance. " . confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. " . centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. " . centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. " . extension of factories and the instruments of production owned by the state: the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally, in accordance with a common plan. " . equal liability of all labor. establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. " . combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country. " . free education for all children in public schools, combination of education with industrial production," _etc._ though the "manifesto" was written in , neither marx, who lived until , nor engels, who died in , made any alteration in it, on the ground that it had become "a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter."[ ] "however much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this manifesto are, on the whole, as correct to-day as ever."[ ] on one very important point, however, they could not refrain from further comment. the revolutionary language in the original draft would be radically mollified if written at the time of the joint preface in . the example of the paris commune was disheartening. it demonstrated that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes."[ ] these, then, were the principles of the international movement of which the "manifesto" was the supreme expression. when labor had revived from its first stupor, after the hard blows it received in the years of revolution, the "manifesto" was translated into several continental languages. with the revival of internationalism, it has been translated into every language of the industrial world, and i am told a japanese and a turkish edition have been issued. this is a gauge of the spread of international socialism. in a number of french workingmen, visiting the international exhibition in london, were entertained by the socialist exiles, and the question of reviving an international movement was discussed. two years later, in st. martin's hall, london, workingmen from various countries organized a meeting and selected mazzini, the italian patriot, to draw up a constitution. but the south european view of class war was out of accord with the german and french views, and mazzini's proposals were rejected. marx then undertook the writing of the address. he succeeded remarkably well in avoiding the giving of offense to the four different elements present, namely, the trade unionists of england, who, being englishmen, were averse to revolutions; the followers of proudhon in france, who were then establishing free co-operative societies; the followers of lassalle in germany and louis blanc in france, who glorified state aid in co-operation; and the less easily satisfied contingent of mazzini from spain and italy. marx's diplomacy and his international vocabulary stood him in good stead. he began the "address" by a clever rhetorical parallelism. gladstone, whose splendor then filled the political heavens, had just delivered a great speech in which he had gloried in the wonderful increase in britain's trade and wealth. marx contrasted this growth in riches with the misery and poverty and wretchedness of the english working classes. gladstone's small army of rich bourgeois were adroitly compared with marx's large army of miserably poor. the growth of wealth, he said, brought no amelioration to the needy. but in this picture of gloom were two points of hope: first, the ten-hour working day had been achieved through great struggles, and it showed what the proletarian can do if he persists in fighting for his rights. second, marx alluded to the co-operative achievements of france and germany as a proof that the laboring man could organize and carry on great industries without the intervention of capitalists. with these two elements of hope before them, the laborers should be of good cheer. marx admonished them that they had _numbers_ on their side, and all that is necessary for complete victory is organization. in closing he repeats the battle-cry of ' : "workingmen of all lands, unite!" the "statutes," or by-laws[ ] were also drawn by marx. the preamble is a second "manifesto," in which he reiterates the necessity for international co-operation among workingmen, and concludes: "the first international labor congress declares that the international workingmen's association, and all societies and individuals belonging to it, recognize truth, right, and morality as the basis of their conduct towards one another and their fellowmen, without respect to color, creed, or nationality. this congress regards it as the duty of man to demand the rights of a man and citizen, not only for himself, but for every one who does his duty. no rights without duties, no duties without rights." the "address" and the "statutes" were adopted by the association at its first congress, held in geneva in september, , where sixty delegates represented the new movement. with the vicissitudes of marx's international we are not especially concerned here. it met annually in various cities until , when its last meeting was held at geneva. marx had successfully avoided offense to the various elements in his masterly address and preamble. but the organization contained irreconcilable elements more or less jealous of one another. the two extremes were the anarchists, led by the russian bakunin, and the english labor unions. the anarchists believed in overthrowing everything, the english laborists abhorred violence. between these two extremes stood marx's doctrine of evolutionary revolution, as distasteful to the english as it was despised by the anarchists. when the congress met at the hague, in september, , marx was one of the sixty-five delegates. he had hitherto held himself aloof from the meetings. but here even his magnetic presence could not prevent the breach with bakunin.[ ] there were stormy scenes. the anarchists were expelled, and the seat of the general council was transferred to new york, where it could die an unobserved death. before the final adjournment a meeting was held in amsterdam. here marx delivered a powerful speech characterized by all the arts of expression of which he was master. he compared these humble "assizes of labor" with the royal conferences of "kings and potentates" who in centuries past had been wont to meet at the hague "to discuss the interests of their dynasties." he admitted that in england, the united states, and maybe in holland, "the workmen might attain their goal by peaceful means. but in most european countries force must be the lever of revolution, and to force they must appeal when the time comes." these were his last personal words to his international, the crystallization of his lifelong endeavor to lead the workingmen's cause. there was one more meeting at geneva, in ; then it perished. bakunin's following, renamed the international alliance of social democracy, meanwhile went the way of all violent revolutionists. they took part in the uprisings in spain in ; the rebellion was promptly suppressed, and the alliance came to an end. during its brief existence the international was the red bogey-man of european courts. the most violent and bloodthirsty ambitions were ascribed to it. such conservative and careful newspapers as the london _times_ indulged in the most extreme editorials and news items about the sinister organization that was soon to "bathe the thrones of europe in blood" and "despoil property of its rights" and "human society of its blessings." in the light of history, these fears appear ridiculous. the poor, struggling organization that could summon scarcely one hundred members to an international convention was powerful only in the possession of an idea, the conviction of international solidarity. its plotting handful of anarchists were a great hindrance to it, and the events of the commune put the stamp of veracity on the dire things the public press had foretold of its ambitions. the programs discussed at the various meetings are of more importance to us because they reveal whatever was practical in marx's organization. for the second meeting, , the following outline was sent out by the general council from london. it was unquestionably prepared by marx himself. " . organization of the international association; its ends; its means of action. " . workingmen's societies--their past, present, and future: stoppage, strikes--means of remedying them; primary and professional instruction. " . work of women and children in factories, from a moral and sanitary point of view. " . reduction of working hours--its end, bearing, and moral consequences; obligation of labor for all. " . association--its principle, its application; co-operation as distinguished from association proper. " . relation of capital and labor; foreign competition; commercial treaties. " . direct and indirect taxes. " . international institutions--mutual credit, paper money, weights, measures, coins, and language. " . necessity of abolishing the russian influence in europe by the application of the principle of the right of the people to govern themselves; and the reconstitution of poland upon a democratic and social basis. " . standing armies and their relation to production. " . religious ideas--their influence upon the social, political, and intellectual movements. " . establishment of a society for mutual help; aid, moral and material, given to the orphans of the association." this reads more like the agenda of a sophomore debating society than the outline of work for an international congress of workingmen. the discussions of the congress were desultory, quite impractical, and often tinged with the factional spirit that ultimately ruptured the association. at its first meeting the discussion of the eight-hour day, the limitation of work for women and children, and the establishing of better free schools took a modern turn. but the french delegates brought forward a proposal to confine the membership in the association to "hand workers." this was to get rid of marx and engels, who were "brain workers." socialism was evidently no more clearly defined then than it is to-day. occasionally practical subjects were debated, as the acquiring by the state of all the means of transportation, of mines, forests, and land. but their time was largely taken up in the discussion of general principles, such as "labor must have its full rights and entire rewards." or they resolved, as at brussels in , that producers could gain control of machines and factories only through an indefinite extension of co-operative societies and a system of mutual credit; or, as at basle the following year, that society had a right to abolish private property in land. it is apparent to any one who reads the reports of their meetings that very little practical advance had been made since the "manifesto." socialism was still in the vapor of speculation. it had absorbed some practical aspects from the english unions. these were at first interested in the international, and at their national conference in sheffield, , they even urged the local unions to join it. this interest waned rapidly as they saw the continental contingent veer towards the commune. however, the beginnings of a new movement, a "new socialism," were distinctly seen in the questions that the english element introduced: the length of the working day, factory legislation, work of women and children. these had been the subject of rigid governmental inquiry. marx was thoroughly familiar with these parliamentary findings. they are no small part of the fortifications he built around his theory of social development. but his german training inclined him to the continental, not the anglo-saxon, view of social progress and of politics. the "old international," then, was an attempt to spread marxian doctrines into all lands. as such an attempt it is noteworthy. the marxian _modus_, however, did not fit the world. some socialist writers attribute its failure to the fact that the time was not ripe for marx's methods. the time will never be ripe for the marxian method. marx tried to move everything from one center. he was a german dogmatist. his council was a centralized autocracy, issuing mandates like a general to an army. this is an impossible method of international organization. the center must be supported by the periphery, not the periphery by the center. there could be no proletarian internationalism until there was an organized proletarian nationalism. its conceptions of its detailed duties were even cruder than its machinery. the discussions were a blending of pedantic declamation and phosphoric denunciation. its programs were a mixture of english trade-union realities and continental vagaries. such a movement had neither wings nor legs. but it had an influence, nevertheless, and a very important one. it was the means of bringing the new generation of leaders together, the men who were to make socialism a practical political force. even the fact that an international laboring men's society could meet was important. it realized the central idea of marx, that the labor problem is international. that is the important point. human solidarity is not ethnic, but inter-ethnic. the "old international" was a faltering step toward that solidarity of humanity that has been advanced so rapidly by inventions, by international arbitrations, by treaties of commerce, and every other movement that makes international hostilities every year more difficult. on socialism the "international" had at least one beneficial effect. it cleared its atmosphere of the anarchistic thunder clouds and prepared the way for the present more practical movement. this was largely due to the influence of the english trade unions. they were not inclined toward philosophical dissertations like the germans, nor brilliant speculative vagaries like the french. their stolid forms were always on the earth. that marx was anxious for their support is apparent, and he drove them out of the movement by his indiscreet utterances on the parisian commune of . the "old international" was a revival of the "society of the just," tempered with english trade-unionism and tinged with anarchism; it was also a connecting link between the old and the new socialism. the characteristics of the "new socialism" cropped out at the first meeting of the "new international," as it is called. in the first place, the co-operative movement and the trade-union movement were both amply represented at the paris meetings, where the "new international" was formed in . this is indicative of the new direction that the economic phase of socialism has since taken. in the second place, the socialist congress split into two parties, ostensibly over the question of the credentials of certain delegates, but really over the question that divides socialists in all countries to-day: shall socialists co-operate with other political parties or remain isolated? the marxian dogmatists believed in isolation; the opportunists or possibilists believed in co-operating with other parties. there were two congresses. the marxian congress had french delegates and about from other countries. the possibilist convention was composed of foreign and french delegates. it was virtually a labor union convention, for over unions were represented. it is of great significance that these two meetings, which divided on a question of political policy, discussed virtually the same questions. they were against war, believed in collectivism, demanded international labor legislation, the eight-hour day, the "day of rest," etc.[ ] liebknecht, the distinguished german socialist, who was one of the chairmen of the marxian convention, wrote in his preface to the german edition of the _proceedings_ that the paris meeting began a new era, "and indicated a break with the past." he told the delegates at the convention, "the old international lives in us to-day." there was a continuity of proletarian ambition. in this respect the old movement was resurrected in the new. but in every other respect the old movement was dead. the abstractions about property and the rights of individuals did not interest the new generation. they were more concerned with wages than wage theories, and in the purchasing power of their wages than in a theory of values. even the spirit of the class consciousness had changed. marx's organization was the source of the old; national consciousness was the source of the new. the present internationalism is the result of nationalism. the delegates at paris were representatives; they represented nationalities. one of the rules of the marxian congress was that votes should be counted "by the head," unless a delegation from any country should unanimously demand "voting by nationalities." in the twenty years that had elapsed since bakunin and his conspiracy-loving following had disrupted the "old international" by their preaching of violence against nationalism, labor had increased with the rapid strides of the increasing industry and commerce of the world. this labor had organized itself into unions and all manner of co-operative and protective associations. it had done this by natural compulsion from within, not by a superimposed force from without. they had thereby found their national homogeneity, and were ready to go forward into a great and universal international homogeneity. the international workingmen's association now embraces the labor movement of all the leading countries of the world. at the last congress, held in copenhagen, , reports were received from the following organizations: the british labor party, the fabian society, the social democratic federation of england, the social democratic party of germany, the social democratic labor party of austria, the commission of trade unions of austria, the social democratic labor party of bohemia, the social democratic party of hungary, the socialist party of france, the socialist party of italy, the revolutionary socialist party of russia, the social democratic party of lettland, the social democratic party of finland, the socialist party of norway, the social democratic labor party of sweden, the danish social democracy, the social democratic party of holland, the belgian labor party, the socialist labor party of the united states, the social democratic party of servia, and the bulgarian laborers' social democratic party.[ ] these names indicate the threefold nature of the modern movement. it is a labor movement, it is democratic, and it is socialistic. and the list of countries shows that it is international. at brussels a permanent international socialist bureau is maintained, with a permanent secretary, who is in constant touch with the movement in all countries. there are two directions in which this remarkable co-operation of millions of workingmen of all lands may have a practical effect on international affairs. in the first place, there is an effort being made to internationalize labor unions. in europe this has been done, to some extent, among the transportation workers. they have an international committee of their own, and keep each other informed of labor conditions and movements. the great railway strike in england, in the summer of , was planned on the continent, as well as in london and liverpool, and there was a sympathetic restlessness with the strikers in various countries adjacent to the channel that threatened to break out in violence. during the post-office strike in france the strikers attempted to persuade english and belgian railway employees to refuse to handle french mail. the syndicalists confidently look forward to the day when an international labor organization will be able to compel a universal general strike. in the second place, the new international organization will have a far-reaching influence on militarism. this is due to two causes: first, the recruit himself is filled with the discontent of the socialist before he dons the uniform. in france, germany, belgium, austria, and other countries the anti-military virus has been long at work. but more potent than this is the feeling of international solidarity that binds these recruits into a brotherhood of labor who are unwilling to fight each other for purposes that do not appeal to the socialist heart. warfare, to the laboring man, is merely one phase of the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the capitalist, and patriotism an excuse to hide the real purposes of war. at st. quentin, in , the french socialists denounced the war in morocco as an exploitation of human lives for the purposes of capitalistic gain. the german social democracy has always opposed the colonial policy of the chancellors on the same ground, and the belgian labor party has been the severest censor of the belgian congo campaigns. during the summer of the morocco incident threatened a war between france and germany, with england involved, and the other great powers more than interested. in august and september the situation became so acute that england and germany were popularly said to have been "within two weeks of war." a profound sense of danger and an intense restlessness possessed the people. during this period of excitement the french socialists held anti-war demonstrations. the german social democrats met in their annual convention at jena and passed a resolution condemning the german morocco policy, and herr bebel made a notable speech, detailing the horrors of war with grim exactness, and arraigning a civilization that would resort to the "monstrous miseries" of war for gaining a few acres of land. this speech was quoted at length by the great european dailies, and made a deep impression upon the people. in england the leaders of the labor party admonished the government that, while they were patriots and believed in national solidarity, the english workingman would never cease to consider the german and the french workingman as a fellow-laborer and brother. the international socialist bureau met in zurich to discuss the situation and to consider how the organizations of labor might make their protests against war most effective. it is difficult to measure the influence of such an international protest against the powers of governments and of armies. that the protest was made, that it was sincere, rational and free from the hyperbola of passion, is the significant fact. forty years ago such action on the part of labor would have been ridiculed. to-day it is respected. disarmament, when it comes, will be due to the influences exerted by the recruit rather than to the benevolent impulses of governments and commanders. footnotes: [ ] introduction to _klassenkämpfe_, p. . [ ] see engels, introduction to marx's _enthüllungen über den kommunisten process zu köln_. [ ] joint-preface of edition of . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] see "address of the general council of the workingmen's association on the civil war in france." [ ] many of the original documents, and extensive excerpts from others are given in dr. eugen jÄger's _der moderne socialismus_, berlin, , and in dr. r. meyer's _der emancipations-kampf des vierten standes_, nd edition, vol. i, berlin, . both of these works give a fairly detailed account of the development of the international and of its annual meetings. [ ] see _ein complot gegen die international arbeiter association_, a compilation of documents and descriptions of bakunin's organization. the work was first issued in french and translated into german by s. koksky. [ ] the possibilists declared for an eight-hour day; a day of rest each week; abolition of night work; abolition of work for women and children; special protection for children - years of age; workshop inspectors elected by the workmen; equal wages for foreign and domestic labor; a fixed minimum wage; compulsory education; repeal of the laws against the international. the marxian program included: an eight-hour day; children under years forbidden to work, and work confined to six hours a day for youth - years of age, except in certain cases; prohibition of work for women dangerous to their health; hours of continuous rest each week; abolition of "payment in kind"; abolition of employment bureaus; inspectors of workshops to be selected by workmen; equal pay for both sexes; absolute liberty of association. for the first meeting of the "new international," see weil, _histoire internationale de france_, pp. et seq. [ ] see appendix, p. . for list of countries that maintain socialist organizations and the political strength of same. chapter v the socialist party of france i the commune abruptly put an end to socialism in france. the caldron boiled over and put out the fire. thiers, in his last official message as president, claimed that socialism, living and thriving in germany, was absolutely dead in france. it was, however, to be revived in a newer and more vital form. the exiled communards, in england and elsewhere, came in contact with marxianism, and in , when a general amnesty was declared, they brought to paris a new and virile propaganda. the leader of the new marxian movement was jules guesde, a tireless zealot, burning with the fire that kindles enthusiasm. the "affaire boulanger" absorbed attention at this time, and guesde, in his newspapers, _la révolution française_ and _Égalité_, supported the republic. but he was also insisting upon "le minimum d'état et la maximum de liberté" (a minimum of government and a maximum of liberty). this may be taken as the political maxim of the socialists at that time, although it leads them into the embarrassing anomaly of using their own slave as their master. meantime a political labor party had arisen. in paris, in , a workingman became a candidate for the municipal council, and he headed his program with the words "_parti ouvrier_"--labor party. this is the first time the words were used with a political significance.[ ] it was a small beginning, his votes were few, and the newspaper that espoused the workingman's cause, _le prolétaire_, was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy for want of proletarian support. in other cities the political labor movement began, and in a labor conference was held in marseilles. the two movements, labor and socialist, drew together in at a general conference of workingmen at havre. here there were three groups which found it impossible to coalesce: the anarchists, under blanqui, formed the "parti socialiste révolutionnaire"--the revolutionary socialist party; the co-operativists, calling themselves the republican socialist alliance, included the opportunist element of the socialists; and the guesdists, who were in the majority, organized the "parti ouvrier français"--the french labor party--and adopted a marxian program. the guesdists entered the campaign with characteristic zeal. they polled only , votes in paris and , in the departments for their municipal tickets, and , in the entire country for their legislative ticket. from the first the socialists in france have been rent by petty factions. we will hastily review these constantly shifting groups before proceeding to the larger inquiry. in the guesdists split, and brousse formed the "fédération des travailleurs socialistes de france"--the federation of socialist workingmen of france. in malon formed a group for the study of the social problems, "société d'Économie sociale"--society of social economics--which rapidly developed into the important group of independent socialists--"parti socialiste indépendent." the labor movement was stimulated by the act of , and in the "fédération des syndicats"--federation of labor unions--was organized at lyons, and in the paris labor exchange--"bourse du travail"--was opened. in allemane seceded from the broussists to found a faction of his own, the revolutionary socialist labor party of france--"parti ouvrier socialiste révolutionnaire français." in the first confederation of the labor exchanges (bourses) was held, and the first conspicuous victory at the polls achieved. in an effort was made to unify the warring factions, and a committee representing every shade of socialistic faith was appointed. it was called the general committee--"comité général socialiste." within the year the guesdists withdrew on account of the rigorous quelling of the strike riots by the government at châlons-sur-saône. in the blanquists withdrew and, coalescing with the guesdists, formed the socialist party of france--"parti socialiste de france." this movement was soon followed by the uniting of the jaurèsites and the independents, who called themselves the french socialist party--"parti socialiste français." after the expulsion of millerand, the two parties united in at rouen. this unity was achieved at the suggestion of the international congress held at amsterdam, . the "united party" is officially known as the french section of the international workingmen's association--"section française de l'internationale ouvrière." the united party, after its years of ridiculous factionalism, is the most compact and disciplined group in the chamber of deputies, and this in spite of the fact that the guesdists and jaurèsites have not forgotten their ancient differences. the french people are not amenable to discipline and party rigor as are the germans and the anglo-saxons. at the last election ( ) the united party elected deputies in a chamber of members. there are to-day two other groups that are more or less socialistic but are not in "the party." the independent socialists, numbering thirty-four members in the chamber, are men who, either because of their intellectualism or because of their political ambitions, have a repugnance to hard and fast organization. this group includes a number of college professors and journalists; also briand, viviani, and millerand, former ministers. they are not committed to any definite political program, take a leading part in all social reform measures, and are accused by the "united ones" of using the name socialist merely as a bait for votes. the other group is the socialist-radical party, numbering about members in the chamber. in most countries their radicalism would be called socialism. but in france they are only the connecting link between socialists and liberal republicans.[ ] ii the "social questions" were slow in entering parliament. in a bonapartist deputy, known for his charities, interpolated the government, asking what inquiries were being made toward securing the moral and material betterment of "the greatest number," and amidst the cheers of his followers the prime minister replied that the government's duty was comprehended in securing to the country "liberty, security, and education." this was the old idea of the functions of government. the new social movement had not yet gathered momentum. with the development of the workingman's political party, interest and sympathy for his problems suddenly increased. in the republicans adopted a resolution in favor of freedom of association. at this time labor unions were illegal. in the government removed the restrictions that had been placed on the press. in the following year it extended the primary schools into every commune, and gambetta did everything in his power to promulgate what he termed "an alliance of the proletariat and the bourgeois." social science, he said, was the solvent of social ills. the socialists, however, believed that politics, not "social science," was the solvent. it was not until , while waldeck-rousseau was minister of the interior, that labor was given the legal right to organize. immediately unions--called _syndicats_ by the french--sprang up everywhere. article of the act declared that these unions had for their exclusive object "the study and the promulgation of their interests, economic, industrial, commercial, and agricultural." they were not given the liberal legal powers that english and american unions have. the social movement now invaded french politics in full battle array. a government commission was intrusted with the study of the co-operative movement. in several deputies, calling themselves socialists, began to interpellate the ministry on the labor questions. the government brought in two proposals, one pertaining to communal and industrial organizations, the other to the arbitration of industrial disputes. both were tabled. in a man appeared in the chamber ready to debate the social questions with the keenest and the ablest. this was jean jaurès, a professor of philosophy, whose profound knowledge and superb oratory immediately commanded attention. he was joined by another new deputy, m. millerand, scarcely less proficient in debate, and even more extreme in his convictions. both were considered members of the radical party. but they soon formed the nucleus of a new group, the independent socialists, that grew rapidly in influence and power. the social question was forced on the public from yet another direction. the anarchists, who had been expelled from the havre conference, remained passive until the organization of trade unions. they then began to promulgate the doctrine of the general strike. the unionists began not only to compel their employers to accede to their demands, but to coerce workingmen to join the unions. it was during this agitation that the government established an elaborate system of labor exchanges--"bourse du travail." from the labor unions the doctrine of the general strike was insinuated into socialist circles. in it was proposed as a practical measure for enforcing the demand for an eight-hour day among the miners. in the departmental congress of workingmen at tours passed a resolution favoring the general strike, and it was discussed a few days later in a general convention of the unions, at the suggestion of aristide briand, a socialist who was destined to play an important rôle in the development of the theory and practice of general strikes. the government could no longer dodge the social question. millerand announced his conversion to socialism and became the leader of a small parliamentary coterie who pressed the issue daily. in a signed statement to the unions they said: "the republic has given the ballot into your hand, now give the republic your instructions."[ ] the parliamentary _entente_ of the liberal socialists with the radical left dates from this time. the campaign spread with surprising fervor. labor unions and parliamentary socialists joined their forces. in they elected forty socialists to the chamber of deputies. among them were jaurès, who now espoused the cause of the socialist opportunists; millerand, conspicuous as leader of the independent group; guesde, the vehement marxian; and vaillant, a communard and socialist of the older type. now began the actual parliamentary socialism in france. jaurès, in introducing the group--they were scarcely a party--to the chamber, affirmed their allegiance to the republic and their devotion to the cause of humanity. the misery of the people had awakened, he said, after right of association had been granted. labor had, through strikes, gained certain minor improvements. it was now prepared to conquer public authority. but so much of their time was spent in quarreling with each other, and debating whether they should vote with the radicals, that very little substantial work was accomplished by the socialists. finally, encouraged by their unusual success in the municipal elections of , the leaders of the various factions met at saint-mandé to celebrate their victory. they were tiring of their quarrels and were ready to unite. at least they agreed that each group could name its own candidate for the first ballot; on the second ballot they should all support the socialist who polled the most votes on the first ballot.[ ] but who is a socialist? here for the first time a political definition was attempted. millerand, a parisian lawyer who, we have seen, made his political début with jaurès, as a member of the radical left, attempted the answer. it was made in the presence of guesde, vaillant, and jaurès, and many local leaders from various parts of france. so, for the moment and for the occasion of rejoicing, there was a united socialism. and it gave assent, with varying enthusiasm, to the general definition and program outlined by millerand. he defined the ground to be covered as follows: "is not the socialistic idea completely summed up in the earnest desire to secure for every being in the bosom of society the unimpaired development of his personality? that implies two necessary conditions of which one is a factor of the other: first, individual appropriation of things necessary for the security and development of the individual, i.e., property; secondly, liberty, which is only a sounding and hollow word if it is not based on and safeguarded by property." he then accepted _in toto_ the marxian theory that capitalistic society bears within itself the enginery of its own doom. "men do not and will not set up collectivism; it is setting itself up daily; it is, if i may be allowed the phrase, being secreted by the capitalistic régime. here i seem to have my finger on the characteristic feature of the socialist program. in my view, whoever does not admit the necessary and progressive replacement of capitalistic property by social property is not a socialist." millerand was not satisfied with merely including banking, railroads, and mining in the list of "socialized" property. he believed that as industries become "ripe" they should be taken over by the state, and cites sugar refining as an example of a monopoly that is "incontestably ripe." millerand also laid great stress on municipal activities, and hastened to guarantee to the small property owner his modest possessions. all this taking over by the state was to be done gradually. "no socialist ever dreamed of transforming the capitalistic régime instantaneously by magic wand." the method of this gradual absorption by the state must be constitutional. "we appeal only to universal suffrage. to realize the immediate reforms capable of relieving the lot of the working class, and thus fitting it to win its own freedom, and to begin, as conditioned by the nature of things, the socialization of the means of production, it is necessary and sufficient for the socialist party to endeavor to capture the government through universal suffrage."[ ] this mild formulary, which places the "socialized society" far into the dim future, was accepted as long as it was rhetorical. but when millerand himself became a member of the cabinet in the waldeck-rousseau coalition, and began to translate his words into deeds, a rupture followed. in the meantime occurred the dreyfus affair, which shifted all the political forces of the republic. at first the guesdists remained indifferent, while jaurès, with great energy, threw himself into the contest in behalf of dreyfus. but when the affair took an anti-republican turn and democracy was threatened, then all the socialists united, with no lack of energy and zeal, in the defense of the republic. on june , , millerand was spokesman in the chamber of deputies for the socialist group, which now held the balance of power. with threats of violence against the republic in the air, he assured the deputies that his comrades were united for "the honor, the splendor, and the safety of the fatherland" (l'honneur, la grandeur, et la sécurité de la patrie). and this was part of the price of their adhesion: old-age pensions, a fixed eight-hour day, factory legislation protecting the life and health of the workman, military service reduced to two years, and an income tax. the radical left adopted this "minimum program" of the socialists, and the famous "bloc" was formed. jaurès was made vice-president of the chamber and soon proved himself master of the coalition. now for the first time in history the socialists were in political power, and what occurred is of the greatest interest to us. iii and now for the first time a socialist becomes a cabinet member. in waldeck-rousseau appointed millerand minister of commerce, to the consternation of the conservatives and the division of the socialists. jaurès congratulated his colleague on his courage in assuming responsibility. but while the independents were jubilant over the elevation of one of their number, the guesdists and blanquists withdrew from the "bloc." they issued a manifesto setting forth their reasons. they did not wish further alliances with a "pretended socialist." they were tired of "compromises and deviations," which for too long a time had been forced on them as "a substitute for the class war, for revolution, and the socialism of the militant proletariat."[ ] to them the war of the classes forbade their entrance into a bourgeois ministry; and the conquest of political power did not imply collaboration with a government whose duty it was to defend property. jaurès proposed to put the question up to the party congress, and in at paris a bilateral compromise resolution was adopted. guesde, however, restless and dissatisfied, compelled the congress to vote first upon the question, "does the war of the classes permit the entrance of a socialist into a bourgeois government?" the answer was "no," "yes." jaurès' compromise was then adopted, , to .[ ] the international congress held in paris, september, , adopted kautsky's resolution declaring that the acceptance of office by a single socialist in a bourgeois government "could not be deemed the normal commencement of the conquest for political power, but only an expedient called forth by transitory and exceptional conditions." at the bordeaux congress, april, , the whole time was given over to this perplexing question. the congress was composed largely of friends of millerand and jaurès. by this time the socialist minister had had three years' experience in the cabinet. the waldeck-rousseau premiership had given way to combes, who was also dependent upon the socialists for his power. millerand had especially offended the socialists by voting against his party on three separate occasions: first, on a resolution abolishing state support for public worship; second, on a resolution to prosecute certain anti-militarists for publishing a book that tended to destroy military discipline; and, third, on a resolution asking the minister of foreign affairs to invite proposals for international disarmament. he had further offended the socialists by officially receiving the czar on his visit to paris. the debate, then, was disciplinary rather than doctrinal. but it was political discipline, evidence therefore that a party consciousness of some sort had been achieved. this meeting is significant because it tried to fix definite limits for socialistic action and committed jaurès to the narrowing, not to the expanding, policy of the party. m. sarrante expressed the millerand idea when he told the delegates that they were to judge "an entire policy," the policy of "democratic socialism, which gains ground daily on the revolutionary socialism, a policy which citizen millerand did not start, which he has merely developed and defined, and which forces itself upon us more and more in our republican country." the test of socialism, he said, was just this "contact of theory with facts." jaurès found himself in logical difficulty when he endeavored to reconcile both sides for the sake of party unity. he said that sarrante was wrong "when he thinks it enough to lay down the principle of democracy in order to resolve, in a sort of automatic fashion, the antagonisms of society.... the enthronement of political democracy and universal suffrage by no means suppresses the profound antagonism of classes.... sarrante errs in positing democracy without noting that it is modified, adulterated, thwarted by the antagonism of classes and the economic preponderance of one class. just as guesde errs in positing the class war apart from democracy." to jaurès the problem was to "penetrate" this democracy with the ideas of socialism until the "proletarian and socialistic state has replaced the oligarchic and bourgeois state." this can be brought about, he said, by "a policy which consists in at once collaborating with all democrats, yet vigorously distinguishing one's self from them." jaurès acknowledged the awkwardness of this policy, which required a superhuman legerdemain never yet accomplished by any party in the history of politics. guesde's motion to oust millerand from the party was lost. and a compromise offered by jaurès censuring him for his votes, but permitting him to remain in the party fold, was adopted by to votes, fifteen delegates abstaining from voting. this was a very close margin, and in spite of millerand's promise that he would in the future be more careful of his party allegiance he was expelled the following year from the federation of the seine. the stumbling-block was removed.[ ] more important than the party discipline is the question of the economic measures attempted by millerand. in general he followed the outlines laid down in his saint-mandé program.[ ] his experience carried him farther away from the guesdists every year until he repudiated the class war and adhered to social solidarity; substituted the method by evolution for the method by revolution, still espoused by guesde; and placed the national interests upon as high a plane of duty as the international and the personal. his program of labor legislation was comprehensive, and he succeeded in getting some of it passed into law. these were his leading proposals: . regulating the hours of labor and creating a normal working day of ten hours. he began the reduction at eleven hours, reducing it to ten and a half, and then to ten within three years. in the public works of his own department he reduced the working day at once to eight hours. . in public contracts he introduced clauses favorable to workingmen. these clauses embraced the number of hours in a normal work day, the minimum wage for every class of workmen, prohibition of piece-work, guarantee of no work on sunday, and the per cent. of foreign workmen allowed on the job. he arranged that the workingmen should unite with the employer in fixing the wages and the hours of labor before the contract was signed. in these contracts, furthermore, the state reserved the right to indemnify the workmen out of the funds due to the contractor. . an accident insurance law. . the abolition of private employment agencies, with their many abuses, and replacing them with communal labor bureaus free to all. the voluntary federations of the trade unions were put on a similar footing with the communal labor exchanges, and were encouraged to co-operate with them. millerand took great care to perfect the organization of trade unions. he introduced amendments to the old law of , giving greater scope and elasticity to the unions, granting them greater corporate powers, and making the dismissal of a workman because he belonged to a union ground for a civil suit for damages. he began a movement to secure the co-operation between the unions and the state workshop inspectors. there had been a great deal of abuse in the operation of the inspection laws by the employers. an attempt was now made to define strictly the rights and duties of the inspectors. . his pet scheme was the establishing of labor councils (conseils du travail). on these councils labor and employer were to have equal representation. the duty of the councils embraced the adjudication of all disputes arising between employer and employee, suggesting improvements, and keeping vigilance over all local labor conditions. in a supreme labor council had been established. to this millerand added lay and official members and greatly increased its efficiency. he tried to make it a central vigilance bureau, keeping in close touch with local conditions all over the land. . he elaborated a plan for regulating industrial disputes. this was to be effected by a permanent organization in each establishment employing more than fifty men, a sort of committee of grievance to which all matters of dispute might be referred. in case of failure to settle their difficulties an appeal to the local labor council was provided. by this democratic representative machinery millerand hoped to solve the labor problem. it will be seen that millerand's plan was an attempt, by law, to project the working class, not into politics but into the capitalist class. he would do this by compelling the employer to share the responsibility of ownership with his employees. this would mark the beginning of a revolution very different from the revolution ordinarily preached by propagandists, because this revolution would substitute class peace in place of our present incessant economic class war. the socialists made it plain that millerand's procedure was not socialism. when millerand was first asked to take a cabinet portfolio his friend jaurès told him to accept. when he had perfected his practical procedure, and the bulk of the proletarians evinced their disappointment and chagrin that the elevation of a socialist had not brought utopia, jaurès gradually slipped away from his former alliance and finally left the reformist group. jaurès also had his day of power. the dreyfus affair presented the issue in tangible form--the old traditions, religious, political, social, against the new ideas of society, property, and government. it was the heroic period of modern french socialism. red and black flags were borne by enthusiastic multitudes through the streets of paris. the "_université populaire_" was inaugurated by students for the purpose of instructing the common people in the issues that were at stake. the flame of eager anticipation spread over the republic. as master of the "bloc" in the chamber, jaurès became the first real head in the first french democracy. two great reforms were undertaken: the disestablishment of the church, carrying with it the secularization of education and the reorganization of the army. the old royalist families had continued to send their sons into the army and navy. many of the officers were suspected of royalist sympathies. an elaborate system of espionage was instituted, and the suspects weeded out. the last vestige of the old monarchy has now disappeared from french officialdom. france has a bourgeois army, a bourgeois school system, a bourgeois bureaucracy, thanks to the power of the proletarian socialists led by jaurès in the days of the republic's danger. jaurès remained orthodox; millerand became heretic. the millerand episode left a deep impression on the public mind. the first socialist minister shaped not only a program but an entire policy. in , when a new cabinet was formed, millerand declined a portfolio, but two other socialists accepted cabinet honors; viviani, a well-known parisian lawyer, held the newly created ministry of labor and social prevision (prévoyance sociale), and aristide briand became minister of public instruction and worship, and later minister of justice. the public regarded the elevation of two socialists to the cabinet as a matter of course. millerand's activity had taken the fear out of their hearts. even the marxian socialists failed to notice the event. they had written into their party by-laws that no socialist could accept office, so the new ministers, by their own acts, ceased to be "socialists." clémenceau, the new premier, ushered in the next period of social adventure by a brilliant debate in the chamber with jaurès in which the philosophical basis of individualism was reviewed with great skill and some of the social questions discussed.[ ] jaurès claimed for the socialists a dominant share in the great victory won by the friends of the republic during the dreyfus turmoil, and made much of the multitudes of workingmen to whom the republic was now under great obligation. these workingmen, the proletariat, were the force now to be dealt with. "if you really wish society to evolve, if you wish it really to be transformed, there is the force you must deal with, and that you must neither repress nor rebuff." the parliamentary experience of socialism jaurès passed over lightly; it added nothing new, he thought, to the theory or the arguments of the socialists. his opponent, however, in a single sentence laid bare the weakness of the socialist's logic: "the truth is that it is necessary to distinguish between two different elements of the social organization, between the man and the system." clémenceau read the socialists' program upon which they had won their victory. it embraced: the eight-hour day, giving state employees the right to form unions, sickness and unemployment insurance; a progressive income tax; ballot reform (scrutin de liste) and proportional representation, and "restoration to the nation of the monopolies in which capital has its strongest fortress." "what a terribly bourgeois program!" exclaimed clémenceau. "m. jaurès, after expounding his program, challenged me to produce my own. i had very great difficulty in restraining the temptation to reply: 'you know my program very well. you have it in your pocket. you stole it from me.'" this debate was significant, not in what was said, but in the fact that it was possible to enlist the prime minister, the cleverest of french statesmen, and jaurès, the greatest of french orators, in a discussion of socialism from the tribune of the chamber of deputies. the whole country listened. during this brilliant tilt clémenceau taunted jaurès that his socialism was impractical, a dream. "you are a visionary, i am a realist; you have dreams, i have facts." jaurès replied with great fervor that he would prove to the people of france that socialism is not impracticable and that within a year he would produce a plan for the new social order. the "unified" socialist party, built up largely on jaurès' abandonment of his former colleague and his earlier liberal convictions, may be considered a part of the fulfilment of this promise. the other part, the plans and specifications for the new society, is not yet before the world. its introduction, properly its prelude, is the volume published by jaurès in , _l'armée nouvelle_, containing suggestions for reorganizing the state defense along lines of voluntary militia and cadets.[ ] iv clémenceau's régime was destined to test the socialist policy in a new direction. the law of gave state employees the right to form associations, but not to federate or organize _syndicats_. a great many organizations were formed, especially among the postal employees and teachers. they were mutual benefit societies, "friendly" associations, and the government recognized them to the extent of discussing their grievances and questions of mutual interest with them. among the workmen in the navy yards and the national match, tobacco, and porcelain works similar organizations existed. the syndicalists would not let the matter rest there. they demanded that these organizations become members of the c.g.t. (general confederation of workingmen). the government objected because that would give the men the right to strike, a dangerous anomaly giving to the state's servants the right to make government nugatory. this extreme doctrine found ready advocates in the chamber among the socialists. in march, , the post-office clerks and telegraph operators went out on strike. the government promptly discharged thirty-eight of the ringleaders and arrested eight of the strikers in paris on the charge of resisting the police. in the course of a few days over out of , employees were discharged. soldiers were introduced into the service, and with the help of local chambers of commerce and other civic bodies the postal service was renewed. the strikers were then willing to make terms. they stipulated that the dismissed employees be reinstated and that m. simyan, the under-secretary of posts and telegraphs, be dismissed. the first request was conceded, the second was denied. the ostensible cause of the strike had been the attitude of the under-secretary; the men asserted that he was arbitrary and had imposed petty political exactions upon them. the government refused to allow the men to dictate its affairs, the under-secretary remained, and the men went back to work. the socialists censured the government for not being considerate with the men, and placed the entire blame upon the ministry for refusing the national employees a right to organize as other workmen. to this simyan replied: "we are in the presence of an organized revolutionary agitation ... this is blackmail by strike." the minister of public works said: "over our heads these officials have revolted against you and against the entire nation. these are serious hours when the government needs perfect facilities of communication with its ambassadors and consuls [the balkan question was in the pot], and in such hours a strike is an attack upon the national sovereignty. in these circumstances i cannot re-enter into negotiations with the general postal association. if i did so that would mean abdication."[ ] the socialist deputies voted against the government's resolution "not to tolerate strikes of functionaries." the general strike committee was not discharged when the men returned to work. when it became evident that the government did not intend to ask the under-secretary for his resignation the post-office employees organized a trade union, unauthorized by law. the government refused to meet representatives of this union, on the ground that state employees had organized for one purpose only, namely, to have the right to strike, and the government would not concede that right. on may a second general post-office strike was called. the government immediately dismissed over two hundred of the strikers. the socialists in the chamber began a demonstration against the government. one of their number started the "internationale," the socialist war-song. after the first blush of indignation had passed, the whole chamber sprang to its feet, there were shouts of protest, a republican started the marseillaise, and the two revolutionary hymns, bourgeois and proletarian, were blended for the first time in a parliamentary chamber. now the general confederation of labor (c.g.t.) took charge of the strike, and soon plots began to be carried out in various parts of the country. there were indications of violence everywhere. the general committee of the c.g.t. declared a general strike. the situation threatened to become serious, but the soldiers distributed over the affected territory had a tranquilizing effect. men in other trades were reluctant to follow the orders of the committee. a few electric workers succeeded in cutting some wires in paris, leaving the city in darkness a few hours. there were desultory acts of _sabotage_, but there was more terror than enthusiasm, and in two days the general strike was over.[ ] here was an attempt to place the , french state employees into the revolutionary current of the c.g.t. the real question at issue was this: is striking an act of mutiny? barthou, a member of the ministry, said in the chamber of deputies that "the more solemnly you denounce the strike as a crime against the state, the greater the victory of the syndicalists." the syndicalist journal, _le voix du peuple_, the day after the first strike was settled proclaimed "the victory which our comrades of the postal proletariat have won over their employer the state." this, they said, showed that the state conceded the main contention of syndicalism--that it is not different from a private employer. and the syndicalists gloried in the fact that the government, instead of treating the strikers as mutineers, parleyed with them and reinstated them. clémenceau brought in a bill designed to relieve the situation by fixing the status of the state employees. the men were to be given the right of association for "professional" purposes only,--i.e., for improving their efficiency,--but were absolutely prohibited from striking and from joining other unions. a comprehensive civil-service reform was embodied in the bill, aimed to prevent the men from becoming victims of political abuse. before the bill could be thoroughly considered the clémenceau ministry fell and a new prime minister was called to the helm. this was none other than aristide briand, the first socialist prime minister in european history. his former comrades had long before this disowned him, and he was soon to participate in events that would forever alienate them. he had been a furious socialist, an anti-militarist, and defender of the general strike. in the socialist congress at paris, , he said: "the general strike has the seductive advantage that it is nothing but the practice of an intangible right. it is a revolution which arises within the law. the workingman refuses to carry the yoke of misery any farther and begins the revolution in the field of his legal rights. the illegality must begin with the capitalist class, if it allows itself to be provoked into destroying a right which they themselves have professed to be holy." at the same meeting he expressed himself on the soldiery as follows: "if the command to fire is given, if the officers are stubborn enough to try to force the soldiers against their will, then the guns might be fired, but perhaps not in the direction the officers thought." briand repeated these sentiments at the amsterdam congress in . this was the man whom destiny had chosen to lead the french government against the organized revolt of government employees. on assuming the premiership he announced his program: . parliamentary and electoral reform, he said, were of the first necessity, but he deemed it best to experiment with the new methods of balloting locally before adopting a national system of reform. . a graduated income tax. . fixing the legal status of state servants. . old-age pension. october , , the men employed on the northern railway went out on strike. before they did so they had a conference with the prime minister and the minister of public works, millerand, requesting that they try to arrange a meeting between the men and the officials of the railway. the ministry offered its services to the railway directors, but they refused to meet the strikers, although briand had volunteered to preside at such a meeting. the prime minister told the men firmly that the government could not tolerate a suspension of railway service, that it would exert its authority to prevent it, and that it relied on the common sense and patriotism of the men to prevent it. however, the strike spread to other lines, including the state railway. the men's demands were three: . a minimum wage of five francs a day. . a revision of the railway pension act making the pensions retroactive. . a weekly day of rest--the men had been excluded from the "rest day" act when it was passed. briand at once characterized the strike as political in motive and revolutionary in character. in his mind the strike ceased to be merely a question of the right to strike, but was a criminal outbreak, an act of rebellion planned by a few revolutionary leaders and submitted to by the rank and file without their even voting on the question. he was greatly incensed at the sudden calling out of the men after the government had received their representatives, and especially since the railway companies had granted their request for a minimum wage and had taken under advisement the other demands of the men. five of the ringleaders were promptly arrested under dramatic circumstances. they were attending a meeting in the office of _l'humanité_,[ ] attended by jaurès and vaillant and other leaders of the party. they were arrested under color of sections and of the law of dealing with railway traffic.[ ] this law proved a powerful factor in checking the strike. arrests were made far and near. the energetic prime minister did not wait for acts of violence; he anticipated them. briand called out the reserves (militia), and nearly all of the strikers were compelled to put on the uniform. if they refused they were guilty of a serious offense; if they obeyed they could no longer strike. the railways were run as in times of war, under military rigor. in spite of these precautions acts of violence occurred, and _sabotage_ was reported from various railway centers.[ ] in one week the soldiery, under the determined minister, had done its work. the strike was over. the government refused to reinstate about , men employed on the state railway. the strike committee issued a manifesto excusing the failure of the strike, assuming the full responsibility for calling it, and affirming that the government had "lowered itself to the level of the most barbarous employer." the strike was hastily conceived, never had the sympathy of the public, and the destruction of property was deplored even by the labor unions, which, when it was all over, passed resolutions condemning _sabotage_. the leaders of the syndicalists, the plotters of the strike, no doubt believed that the time was opportune. the prime minister and two of his cabinet, viviani and millerand, were socialists, and a third member, barthou, was a radical who had as a private member of the chamber, a short time before his appointment to the cabinet, vigorously defended the railway men's "right to strike." but official responsibility had its usual effect.[ ] now began a series of dramatic events in the chamber. the united socialists maintained that the men had a legal right to strike and that the government had denied to french citizens their legal privileges. briand replied (october ) that the strike had nothing to do with the labor problem. the government, had been confronted with "an enterprise designed to ruin the country, an anarchistic movement with civil war for its aim, and violence and organized destruction for its method"; and he had treated it as a rebellion, not as a strike. the government, he said, had evidence of a well-laid plot for _sabotage_; and the syndicalist idea of liberty he characterized as a "hideous figure of license." millerand (october ) characterized the strike as a "criminal enterprise," and the _saboteurs_ as "criminals" guilty of "a revolutionary mobilization with a political object." for the socialists bouveri, a miner, replied. he defended bomb-throwing and _sabotage_; asked the minister of war if, in case of invasion by a foreign foe, he would not blow up the bridges; and said the strikers were engaged in a social war and had the same excuse for destroying property. the climax of the debate came october , when briand, turning to the socialists, said: "i am going to tell you something that will make you jump (que vous faire bondir). if the government had not found in the law that which enabled it to remain master of the frontiers of france and master of its railways, which are the indispensable instruments of the national defense; if, in a word, the government had found it necessary to resort to illegality, it would have done so." no words can describe the disorder of the scene that followed this challenge. cries of "dictator!" "resign!" were mingled with catcalls and hisses. finally jaurès was heard in bitter rebuke of his former comrade. viviani answered jaurès; they had fought together the battles of the workingman and would do so still "if socialism had not adopted the methods of _sabotage_, of anti-patriotism, and of anarchy." a few weeks later briand and his cabinet resigned, although sustained by a majority of the chamber. but president fallières immediately requested the dauntless prime minister to form a new cabinet. in his new program he included measures that would greatly strengthen the arms of the government in times of strikes, punishing _sabotage_ by heavy fines and penalties, penalizing the public railway servant for striking, and contemplating an elaborate system of conciliation boards patterned after millerand's plan. these rigorous suggestions increased the flame of hatred against him, and his life was threatened. nothing daunted, he proceeded in his warfare against the c.g.t., which he denounced as a handful of plotters exercising a wicked tyranny over socialists and workingmen. finally, february , , he resigned, refusing to hold office by the sufferance of the reactionary right. the socialists voted with their enemies to dethrone their first premier, whom they considered a traitor to the course.[ ] so ended one of the most significant episodes of modern political history. every government, especially every democratic government, will within the next few decades be compelled to meet the railway problem and the question of the relation of the government to its state servants. two important details in the briand affair are of especial interest. first, the prime minister's attempt to project the authority of the state into the contract relations of the railway employees and the companies. instead of hostility, briand's plan might well have deserved the support of the socialists. for he was expanding the functions of the state, was enlisting the power of society in behalf of a contract that is of universal interest. secondly, briand's bill making it unlawful for a railway servant to strike was quite as revolutionary as the c.g.t.'s contention that the state had no right to interfere. here, too, briand was the socialist and the socialists were the individualists; the one recognized the paramount interests of society, the other saw only the interests of the individual worker. put to this test, french socialism failed as signally in theory as the violence, _sabotage_, and insubordination of the c.g.t. failed in practice.[ ] v who were these revolutionary labor leaders, this small handful of plotters to whom briand constantly alluded?[ ] in order to understand the socialist movement in any country, both politically and industrially, it is necessary to understand the organization of labor. socialism began as a class movement, and in every country it is endeavoring to capture the labor organizations.[ ] in no two countries are the relations quite the same. in the united states the unions have traditionally kept out of politics altogether. in great britain they refused to be busied with politics until a few years ago, when the labor party was organized. since then a number of union men have identified themselves rather loosely with socialism. in germany there is the closest co-operation between the party and the unions, but not any organic unity. in belgium the political and economic organizations are virtually merged. in france the most interesting development has taken place. from the revolution until no labor organizations were allowed. the national assembly abolished all the trade guilds and corporations. the _loi le chappelier_ forbade unions of workers and of masters, and the _code napoléon_ imposed a penalty of imprisonment on those engaging in unlawful combinations. in the criminal laws were revised, and unions of twenty members were allowed. the law of left the way untrammeled for their development.[ ] within a few years unions were formed everywhere.[ ] in the guesdists organized the national federation of trade unions, a socialist body of workers subordinated to the workingman's party. soon thereafter the municipal socialists, the broussists, founded the paris labor exchange, built a large clubhouse for if, and succeeded in getting an appropriation of , francs a year from the city for its maintenance. within ten years about fifty of these exchanges were formed in as many cities, and about seventy per cent. of the union members belonged to them. the object of these exchanges was educational and benevolent. but they were soon made the hotbeds of socialistic politics. in they were all federated in the federation of labor exchanges (fédération du bourse du travail). in guesde's political adjunct, the national federation of trade unions, became extinct. the blanquists then organized a new federation, the notorious general confederation of labor (confédération générale du travail), commonly called the c.g.t. these two bodies were bitter rivals, after the french fashion, until, in , they amalgamated, retaining the name c.g.t.[ ] the organization is dual, retaining the benevolent activities of the local exchanges and the trade activities of the local unions. these activities are federated into national councils. the union of these councils forms the central governing body of c.g.t. the organization allows a great deal of local autonomy, but the central control is none the less effective. in the c.g.t. claimed , members, in it reported , . this body of workmen is known for its violence. within its ranks has spread the doctrine known as revolutionary syndicalism, a resurrection of the spirit of proudhonism in the body of labor unionism. briefly stated, it is class war in its most violent form without the aid of parliaments and politics; with the enginery of the general strike, and the spirit of universal upheaval and anarchy. it is the most effective outbreak of anarchism since the days of bakunin. the intellectual revival of the doctrine of violence may be dated from the appearance of georges sorel's book, _the socialist future of trade unions_, in , and the culmination of the tide in his volume _reflections upon violence_, in . for a movement so young syndicalism has had a peculiarly expansive literature, written by professors and journalists of the bourgeois class, who live on respectable streets, receive you in comfortable drawing-rooms, and from their upholstered ease display a fine zeal for the oppressed proletariat.[ ] it is not easy to classify syndicalism, for it refuses to be called anarchism, repudiates the leadership of socialism, and scorns to be merely trade-unionism. the following are its principal characteristics: . it is disheartened with socialism because, it says, socialists have lost their ideals in the race for political power. law-making is useless, because no laws can emancipate the workingmen. it therefore despises governments and abjures parliaments. but its ideals are socialistic; it believes "in reorganizing society on a communistic basis, so that, with a minimum of productive effort, the maximum of well-being will be obtained."[ ] . but repudiating governments and parliaments, they say, does not make them anarchists. syndicalists believe in local or communal government. their state is a glorified trade union whose activities are confined to economic functions, their nation is a collection of federated communal trade societies. when i went among them they were especially solicitous that they should not be regarded as "mere anarchists." . syndicalism is not trade-unionism pure and simple, because its method is violence and its ideal the industrial unit, not the trade or craft unit. the weapon of syndicalism is the general strike. a circular issued by the executive committee in defined the general strike as "the cessation of work, which would place the country in the rigor of death, whose terrible and incalculable consequences would force the government to capitulate at once. if it refused, the proletariat, in revolt from one end of france to the other, would be able to compel it." sorel says that "revolutionary syndicalism nourishes in the masses the desire to strike, and it can thrive only in places where great strikes, occupied with acts of violence, have taken place."[ ] the strike committee of the c.g.t. in proclaimed the general strike as "the only practical method through which the working class can fully liberate itself from the capitalistic and governmental yoke." the general strike includes the boycott, _sabotage_, and all kindred forms of violence.[ ] . syndicalism revives the old revolutionary methods of conspiracy, of a dominant minority swinging the masses into line; "a conscious minority, which, through its example, sets the masses in motion and drives them on."[ ] there are plots, underground manoeuvers, and sudden outbursts. an air of mystery pervades their spectacular uprisings. in order to accomplish their purpose there must be a solidarity of labor. but this unity is the result of the energy of the "conscious few," not of the assertive many. . finally, syndicalism proclaims that democracy is a "fraud" perpetrated upon the workingmen by the property-owning bourgeois; representative government and majority rule is to them merely a polite form of tyranny, and patriotism a farce. potaud says: "patriotism can only be explained by the fact that all patriots without distinction own a part of the social property, and nothing is more absurd than a patriot without a patrimony." "we workingmen will have none of these little fatherlands! our country is the international world!" cried yvetot to the post-office strikers in paris. they regard the soldiers with enmity. at the national congress at amiens, , they resolved that the "anti-military and anti-patriotic propaganda should be promulgated with the greatest zeal and audacity."[ ] syndicalism is the extreme pessimism of the laboring class. it reached its height about - . portions of france were terrorized, more by its extravagant language than by its overt acts. there was no limit to their superlatives. "rip up the bourgeois!" "turn your rifles on your officers!" "cut buttonholes in the skins of the bourgeois!" were familiar battle-cries. there was so much talk about putting vitriol into coffee, ground glass into bread, pulling the fire-plug out of engines, that finally language came to mean nothing. the "new commune" thought it was coming into reality with the post-office and railway strikes. we have seen how these outbreaks were met by a radical government. since then their ardor has cooled, and their adjectives grown flabby. they are now devoting themselves to organization. anti-militarism does not mean merely opposition to standing armies. all socialists are opposed to the maintenance of armaments. anti-militarism is opposition to all force used by the state to assert its sovereignty. this includes the police and constabulary as well as the army, and courts and parliaments as well as the navy. since soldiers and policemen are servants of the state, and since the state is the expression of nationalism, the anti-militarist concludes that his supreme enemy is the nation, the master of the soldier. anti-militarism is the forerunner of anti-patriotism. in this doctrine was so rampant that, on may day, an uprising was feared in paris. a prophet had arisen, proclaiming the most extreme doctrines of anti-patriotism. this was gustave hervé, a teacher of history from auxerre. he had spoken the suitable word, and became famous overnight: "the french flag arose from dirt!"; and to the peasantry he shouted, "plant your country's flag in the barnyard dung-heaps!" he came to paris and started a daily paper, _la guerre sociale_. syndicalists and socialists flocked to his standard, and even jaurès was compelled to acknowledge his influence.[ ] hervé has a simple remedy for militarism: "the way to stop war is to refuse to fight." he exhorts his fellow-socialists to join the army, but fire on their commanders, not on their comrades. he was arrested several times for these utterances and the overt acts that they aroused. some years ago a parisian workingman was arrested for an offense against public morals. he protested his innocence and, when released, in revenge killed a policeman. he was promptly executed. hervé used the occasion for an onslaught upon the government in his paper. he said: "if the working class would display one-tenth of the energy that this workman displayed, the social revolution would not be long in coming." for his imprudence he was imprisoned for a term of four years.[ ] his influence is waning, but the words he and his following have planted in the hearts of the conscripts may bear some strange fruit.[ ] vi while the french socialists have been prolific in the developing of factions and theories, they have been slow at achieving practical results. as early as they acquired considerable power in paris. they contented themselves with establishing a labor exchange and extending a few municipal charities. the local program, as outlined at lyons, included: the feeding of school children; an eight-hour day and a fixed minimum wage for municipal employees; the abolition of the "_octroi_"; sanitary regulations for workshops and factories; abolition of private employment bureaus; establishment of homes for the aged; maternity hospitals; free medical attendance for the poor; free public baths; sanitaria for children of workmen; free legal advice for workingmen; pensions for municipal employees; and the publication of a municipal bulletin giving record of all the votes cast by the councilors.[ ] in a number of important cities were won by the socialists, and in september of that year the first convention of socialist municipal councilors was held at saint-ouen. the discussions were filled with revolutionary phraseology. in a few years the ideas of violence were discarded for more practical issues. in , when the municipal convention met at paris, the time was largely given over to the question of organizing the municipal public service, public hygiene, etc. in lille the socialists began their administration of local affairs by raising the budget from , francs in to , , francs in . free industrial education was established for the working people; a municipal theater was opened; school children were fed and clothed; and an attempt was made to regulate the length of the working day and fix a minimum wage for municipal employees. at dijon the feeding and clothing of school children was regulated by the amount of wages earned by the parents. free medical aid was provided, and a drug-store was induced to sell medicines to the poor at reduced cost. the local labor exchange was voted an appropriation from public funds. these illustrations show the general trend of municipal socialism in france. the results are not numerous. but the french socialists justify their meager practical results by pointing to the centralized system of administration which enables the prefect and other administrative officers to veto many of the acts of the municipal councils. the first thing that the socialists attempted to do in their towns was the readjustment of the finances for the benefit of the working classes. their acts were vetoed on the ground that they were _ultra vires_. the attempt to fix a minimum wage for municipal employees met the same fate. then the municipalities petitioned the central government for greater financial autonomy. this was denied. in roubaix the opening of a municipal drug-store was disallowed by the prefect on the ground that the corporations act does not grant that power to municipalities. municipal bakeries met the same fate. during the last few years, however, the rigor of the central administration has relaxed and the towns are allowed greater liberty in municipal affairs. under the circumstances it is perhaps little wonder that french municipal socialism is a poor housekeeper. you look in vain for the high ideals of the socialist evangelist. if you visit the towns where socialism abounds you will be told that the socialists have spent more money on the poor than their predecessors. you will find better nurseries for the babies of the working mothers, meals and stockings doled out to school children of the poor, here and there a physician or a lawyer retained by the town to render free service to the working people. on inquiry you will find that the soldiers are drawing increased pensions, the widows and orphans of the workingmen are especially provided for, and that bread is delivered to the needy at the door so they need not go ask for it, need not be beggars. you are impressed that these proletarian town governments are trying to destroy poverty. their ideal is noble, but some of their efforts are very crude. the french socialists are not by any means a unit on the municipal question. in it was the principal question discussed at their national convention at saint-quentin. professor millhaud of the university of geneva, in a very clear and able speech, pointed out the merits of municipalization, citing the ownership of street railways, gas, waterworks, garbage plants, and other public utilities of european and american cities. he included municipal drug-stores, the feeding and clothing of school children, the establishing of playgrounds, and many other municipal activities familiar to american practice, in his local socialistic program. his exposition met with the approval of the jaurès faction. but the guesdists were not satisfied. "who would benefit by cheap municipal gas?" cried a delegate from the rear of the hall. "the rich man, for he needs a great deal of gas to light up his big house. but what laboring man needs gas? when has he time to read? in the evening he is too tired, and he gives no receptions." guesde maintained with great vehemence that municipal ownership and state ownership are not socialism; they may be a step toward socialism, but often result in substituting the tyranny of the state for the tyranny of the private employer. the convention adopted a municipal program after a prolonged discussion that brought out clearly the fact that the guesdists are not devoted to state or municipal ownership as a principle, but only as a means to a greater end. during the last few years a very important movement has been taking place among the peasantry of southern france. under the leadership of compère-morel, a gardener and member of the chamber of deputies, socialism is spreading rapidly among these small and independent landowners. there are several million of these thrifty peasants in france, and their acquisition to socialism will mean, not only a great increase in political power, but a modification of their theory of property. the socialists are luring the small land-holder by telling him that they are with him in his fight against the large estates. they assure the peasant that they have no designs upon his small holdings. it is the _great_ property, not merely property, that is the object of their hostility.[ ] there are other evidences that french socialism is mellowing. most of its leaders are bourgeois. of the seventy-six united socialists in the present chamber, only thirty are workingmen, or trade-union officials; eight are professors in the university or secondary schools; seven are journalists; seven are barristers; seven are farmers; six are physicians; three are school teachers; and two are engineers. this does not suggest class war. socialism is a power in french politics. an observer who moves among the middle class wonders how much of a power it is in french life. the radical party would be considered socialistic in england or the united states; half of it calls itself socialist-radical. it rules the republic from the chamber of deputies. everywhere you hear the people talking about collectivism, the nationalization of railways, of mines, of vineyards, of docks, and ultimately of wheat-fields and market-gardens. but the french are a nation of small farmers and shopkeepers who cling to their property while they argue and vote for their radicalism and socialism. this is the duality of their temperament; they love possessions and they love philosophical speculation. they keep their fields and their little shops, and speculate about the new to-morrow. they vote and debate with imaginative fervor; they pay taxes with stolid commonplace silence. in measuring the strength of french socialism it is necessary to keep this in mind. not that the frenchman does not take socialism seriously. he takes it as seriously as he takes monarchism or republicanism, and much more seriously than he takes religion. there is only one thing he takes more seriously--his property. that is why the socialists number among their adherents all classes and all conditions of men, from anatole france, most fastidious of literary aristocrats, to gaunt and hungry proletarians who infest the cellars and garrets of ancient paris. the french are, after all, the greatest of realists. they speculate in dreams and delicate theories; but they never lose their grip on their little farms and their little shops and the gold bonds of russia. footnotes: [ ] georges weil, _histoire du mouvement socialiste en france_, paris, , p. . [ ] other groups--the word party is hardly applicable in the french chamber of deputies--are the reactionary right; the republican conservatives, or center; the radical left, or liberals. [ ] weil, _supra cit._, p. . [ ] in france, when any one candidate for the chamber of deputies fails to receive a majority of the votes cast, a second ballot is taken, for the two receiving the highest number of votes [ ] quoted by ensor, _modern socialism_, pp. - . see also a collection of millerand's speeches, _le socialisme réformiste français_, paris, . [ ] see "manifeste juillet," . [ ] see _v^{me} congrès général des organisations socialistes français tenu à paris du au décembre. compte-rendu sténographique officiel_, , p. ff. [ ] a partial report of the debate of the bordeaux congress is given in ensor's _modern socialism_, pp. - . [ ] see a. lavy, _l'oeuvre de millerand_, paris, , a sympathetic account of his work; contains also extracts from his speeches and state papers. [ ] see the _contemporary review_, august, , for a brief abstract of this debate. [ ] one of the first laws passed with the aid of the socialist vote was the "day of rest" law, commanding one day of the week as a day of rest. it met the obstinate opposition of the conservatives. the operation of the law is of interest, and instructive. the workmen naturally rejoiced over this increased leisure. the employers, on the other hand, found themselves paying wages for hours in which no service was rendered. they lowered the wages; the workmen resisted. finally the law was so amended as virtually to annul its effect, in certain trades. the socialists became irritated to the verge of breaking their _entente_ with the radicals. [ ] proceedings chamber of deputies, march , . [ ] during this agitation the teachers of the public schools, who had formed a great number of associations, joined in the demand of the syndicalists. one of their number who had signed a vitriolic circular was dismissed by m. briand, the minister of education, and for a time a strike of schoolmasters was threatened, but it did not materialize. [ ] _l'humanité_ is the leading socialist daily of paris. briand had written editorials for it in his "red" days. [ ] these sections declare that the employment, or abetting or instigating the employment, of any means of stopping or impeding railway traffic is a crime; and if it has been planned at a seditious meeting, the instigators are as liable to punishment as the authors of the crime, even if they did not intend to provoke the destruction of railway property. the penalties imposed are very severe. [ ] placards displayed the bitterness of the men. "for our vengeance briand will suffice" was read on the walls under flaming posters that quoted fiery sentences from briand's earlier speeches. [ ] viviani, minister of justice, resigned soon after the close of the strike. he did not agree with briand in his efforts to pass a law making all railway strikes illegal. he said as long as railways were private property men had the right to strike, but not to destroy property. [ ] before his resignation, the old-age pension bill had passed the senate and thus became a law. the socialists supported the bill; but guesde voted against it in spite of his party's instructions, because labor was charged with contributing to the fund. the syndicalists were also violently opposed to it because they believe the amount of the pension is too small. [ ] when in january, , m. poincaré was appointed prime minister, he promptly invited briand into his cabinet as vice-president and millerand as minister of war. [ ] the co-operative movement is spreading gradually throughout france. there are two kinds of societies--the socialist and the independent. in there were co-operative productive societies. in there were . the following figures show the increase in the number of co-operative stores: -- , ; -- , ; -- , ; -- , . [ ] the following table, compiled from the reports of the minister of labor, shows the growth of the labor-union movement: year number of number of unions members ... ... ... ... ... , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , [ ] see _journal of political economy_, march, , for a comprehensive article on french labor unions by o.d. skelton. [ ] from the beginning there were two kinds of unions, named after the color of their membership cards. the "yellows" are those pursuing a policy of peace, and the "reds" are the militants. [ ] the following figures show the increase of strikes since the organization of the c.g.t.: years average average number number average number of strikes of strikers of days idle - , , , - , , , [ ] the doctrines of syndicalism may be found in the writings of georges sorel. also in the following: pouget, _les bases du syndicalisme_; griffuelhs, _l'action syndicaliste_, and _syndicalisme et socialisme_; pouget, _la parti du travail_; potaud and pouget, _comment nous ferons la révolution_; paul louis, _syndicalisme contre l'État_. [ ] pouget, _the basis of trade unionism_, a pamphlet issued in . [ ] _réflexions sur la violence._ [ ] see yvetot, _a b c du syndicalisme_, chap. v. this pamphlet is issued by the c.g.t. [ ] statement of strike committee c.g.t., . [ ] "in every state, the army is for the property owner; in every european conflict, the working class is duped and sacrificed for the benefit of the governing class, the bourgeoisie, and the parasites. therefore the xvth congress approves and extols every action the anti-military and anti-patriotic propaganda, even though it only compromises the situation of all classes and all political parties." see yvetot, _a b c du syndicalisme_, p. . [ ] hervé has written a history of france that has had considerable vogue as a text-book in the public schools. he begins with the significant year ; glorifies the violence, and praises the socialistic manifestations and the heroism of the revolutionists, that have made the past century one of turmoil and perpetual commotion. this book is a sample of the reading given into the hands of the children of the republic. i was told, upon careful inquiry, that a large number of the primary and secondary school teachers are socialists. thiers, before he became president, while still a functionary of monarchy, objected to the establishment of government schools in every village, because, he said, he did not want "a red priest of socialism in every town." to-day he would find these "red priests" everywhere. they have even organized _syndicats_ and joined the c.g.t. [ ] when i called upon him in the prison santé he told me that he was as sincerely opposed to military measures as ever; but that it would be a long time before the people would regard all mankind, rather than a single ethnic group, as the object of their patriotism. pointing to the grim walls of his prison, he said, "vive la république! vive la liberté!" [ ] syndicalism and anti-militarism have spread to spain and italy. but they have not found favor among the phlegmatic north-european countries. [ ] see stehelin, _essais de socialisme municipal_, . [ ] see _les paysans et le socialisme_, a speech delivered by compère-morel, in the chamber of deputies, december , . also published in pamphlet form by the socialist party. chapter vi the belgian labor party i in belgium the physical, political, and economic environment is suited to a symmetrical development of socialism. it is a small country, "at the meeting-point of the three great european civilizations," vandervelde, the leader of the belgian socialists, has pointed out. and his boast is true that the belgian socialists have absorbed the leading characteristics of the social movement in each of these countries. "from england belgian socialists have learned self-help, and have copied their free and independent organizations, principally in the form of co-operative societies. from germany they have adopted the political tactics and the fundamental doctrines which were expressed for the first time in the 'communist manifesto.' from france they have taken their idealistic tendencies, and the integral conception of socialism, considered as an extension of the revolutionary philosophy and as a new religion, an extension and a realization of christianity." this threefold growth would have been impossible if the environment had not been favorable. the belgian population is congested into industrial towns that are thickly strewn over the country, like the suburbs of one vast manufacturing community. these working people have always been miserably housed and poorly fed. in - a public inquiry into housing conditions was instituted in brussels. in the most congested portions of the city, households, comprising , persons, lived in one-room tenements. the houses were in miserable condition. the commission appointed after the riots of describes conditions that are little better than those that prevailed in england in . even as late as , out of , working men and women one-tenth only worked less than ten hours a day; the rest worked from ten to twelve hours. one-fourth of these working people had a wage of francs ( cents) a day, another fourth had to francs ( to cents) a day, and the upper section only . to . francs ( cents to cents) a day. the government inquiry in disclosed the following rate of wages: , persons received less than fr. ( c.) a day. , persons received less than - fr. ( - c.) a day. , persons received less than - fr. ( - c.) a day. , persons received more than fr. ( c.) a day.[ ] in the low countries where agriculture is the leading occupation, conditions are no better. the peasant is poor; the conditions of tenancy hard, though recent legislation has modified them somewhat in the tenant's favor; and the holdings small. agricultural wages are very low. the men in the flemish district receive an average of . francs ( cents) a day, without board, or about . francs ( cents) with board. the women receive . francs ( cents) without board and . francs ( - / cents) with board.[ ] here, then, is a population of industrial and peasant workers who are barely able to make a living, who have little time and less opportunity for education and general development. the percentage of illiteracy is very great; and is equaled only by the most backward countries of southern europe. in , out of every , militiamen, were entirely illiterate; in france, ; in england, ; in holland, ; in switzerland, ; in denmark, . ; in germany, . . in rowntree estimated the illiteracy in the four largest belgian cities to be . per cent.; in the flemish communes, . per cent.; and in the walloon communes (excepting liège), . per cent. outward circumstances have not been wanting to arouse this teeming population into violent discontent. the government for years paid no heed to their misery, and the church, which is very powerful in belgium, was content to distribute charity and consolation, and to admonish the employer to patriarchal care for his men. the national status of the country is guaranteed by the powers; there is no fear of invasion and no need for the intolerable military burdens that weigh down the great countries of europe. there have been no international complications. this little country, with its clusters of thriving towns, its mines, farms, and seaports, could settle down contentedly to its daily tasks like a large family. the great manufacturers and industrial leaders took even less interest in the welfare of the working people than the state or the church. no one seemed to care how the worker fared, and when he himself learned to care the first reactions were violent. we will limit ourselves, in this inquiry, to the political development of the labor movement. belgium is a constitutional monarchy. the constitution, provides for a parliament composed of the senate and the chamber of representatives, both elected by the people, the representatives by direct, the senators by indirect, elections. the king has the veto power and the power to prorogue parliament. a general election follows prorogation, in which the whole membership of senate and house are elected. the communes are governed by elective communal councils. from the establishment of the constitution, in , there have been two leading political parties--the clerical or catholic, and the liberal. the clerical party has been not merely conservative, it has been reactionary. it clings not only to monarchic prerogatives, but to ecclesiastical supremacy. this medieval policy it imposed upon school and government and church. the party has until very recently been in the majority. it is strongest in the low counties, among the agricultural flemings. when the activity of the socialists and radicals forced the question upon the country, a "left" wing of the party began to interest itself in the laboring man, through the traditional methods of the church, rather than by means of state interference. the liberal party is a protest, not only against the predominant influence of the church in political affairs, but also against the financial policies of the conservatives. the liberals early espoused the cause of free schools, modified tariffs, greater local autonomy, and liberal election laws. the election laws confined the electorate to the few property-holders and professional men of the country. in , out of , , male citizens, , were qualified electors. ii these were the conditions that prevailed when the socialists quite suddenly appeared on the scene. there had been a socialist propaganda for years in belgium. brussels was a city of refuge to many fleeing revolutionists of . in a labor union was organized among the spinners and weavers of ghent. the same year colin published his book, _what is social science?_ this volume prepared the way for the remarkable collectivist movement, which was stimulated into modern activity by anselee, a workingman of ghent and organizer of the vooruit co-operative society. cæsar de paepe, a disciple of colin and a man of remarkable intellectual endowments, tried to bring unity to the belgian movement. but the factionalism was not cast aside until , when the belgian labor party (parti ouvrier belge) was organized. now socialists of all factions were drawn together. but, unlike socialists in other countries, they did not expend their energies on political action. the belgian labor movement had a threefold origin--the co-operative movement of colin, the labor-union movement, and the socialistic or political movement of de paepe. these three activities, united in the labor party, have continued to develop, until they are a model for socialists in all countries. the organization of the party is simple. the various organizations are federated into large groups, e.g., the co-operative group, each with a separate organization. the provinces and communes have their local committees for each separate activity. over the entire party sits a general council (conseil général). an executive committee of nine is chosen from this council, and this committee has practical control of the party. the annual convention is the supreme authority. it elects the general council and decides, in democratic fashion, all important questions of policy and activity. every constituent organization, such as the co-operative societies, etc., contributes from its funds to the support of the party. the party is therefore a federation of many societies with various activities, not a vast group of individual voters, as the german social democracy. its solidarity is not individual, but federal. the organization of the labor party proved a stimulus to all the constituent societies. from to over co-operative societies were formed, and within a few years , mutual aid societies were organized. the membership of the labor unions increased from less than , in to , in , and nearly , in . the socialist movement had now achieved solidarity, and was prepared to enter into a conflict for power. its issues were two: universal suffrage and free secular education. the second was necessarily included in the first; for without parliamentary power it would be impossible to secure liberal educational laws, and without a liberal franchise it would be impossible to get parliamentary power. all their political energies were therefore devoted to the reform of the election laws. it is in this activity that the belgian movement forms for our purpose one of the most instructive chapters of european socialism. here is a proletarian horde deprived of participation in government in a constitutional monarchy, struggling toward political recognition. it is armed with all the weapons of militant socialism: a revolutionary tradition; a national history rich in mob violence, street brawls, and conflicts with police and soldiers; possessed of a well-organized party, a class solidarity, and capable and courageous leaders who are willing to go, and do go, to the extreme of the general strike and violence in order to achieve their goal. in short, here we have the socialist political ideal working itself from theory into reality through class struggle. but there is the usual important modification of the marxian conditions; viz., the liberal bourgeois prove a potent ally to the socialists in the press and on the floor of the chamber of representatives. while the socialists were surging in vehement earnestness around the parliament house, the liberals were as earnestly pleading their cause within. the definite fight for universal suffrage began a few years before the organization of the labor party. in a group of workingmen issued an appeal to their fellows to begin the battle for the ballot. in the socialists issued a manifesto which stated the case as follows: "'all powers are derived from the nation; all belgians are equal before the law,' says the constitution of . "in reality all powers are derived from a small number of privileged ones, and all the belgians are divided into two classes--those who are rich and have rights, and those who are poor and have burdens. "we wish to see this inequality vanish, at least before the ballot-box. for the most numerous class of society ought to be represented in the chamber of representatives, because the people whose daily bread depends upon the prosperity of the country should have the power to participate in public affairs. "constitutions are not immutable, and what was solemnly promulgated on one occasion may, without revolution, be altered on another."[ ] the proclamation then proceeded to call a meeting at brussels for the following january ( ). at this meeting it was decided to circulate a monster petition asking parliament to pass a liberal election law and to organize a demonstration to be held in brussels the following summer. in this, the first of a long series of demonstrations, about , persons from various parts of the kingdom paraded the streets of the capital. there was a clash with the police, and a number of arrests were made. from to the liberals tried to persuade the clericals to agree upon a constitutional revision; and the socialists brought to bear upon them all the pressure of the streets. but the clericals were firm. then the socialists tried another manoeuver. they issued a manifesto "to the people of belgium," complaining of the dominion of the church over education, the dominion of a few families over the nation, and the failure of the government to grant liberty to the people. "the hour has come for all citizens to rally under the republican flag." instead of a republican uprising, something more significant and potent occurred; the labor party was organized, welding together all the forces of discontent and unifying their demands into a protest so strong that the government was finally compelled to yield. not, however, until it had exhausted almost every resource of resistance. the party was organized just in the crux of time. a financial crisis was beginning to increase the hardships of the industrial classes. the unrest was intensified by an ingenious piece of propagandist literature, a _workingman's catechism_ (_catechism du peuple_), written by a workingman. two hundred thousand copies in french and , in flemish were scattered among the discontented people. its influence was wonderful. a few questions will indicate the power that lay behind its simple questions and answers. _question._ "who are you?" _answer._ "i am a slave." _q._ "are you not a man?" _a._ "from the point of view of humanity i am a man, but in relation to society i am a slave." _q._ "what is the th article of the constitution?" _a._ "the th article of the constitution says: 'all power is derived from the nation.'" _q._ "is this true?" _a._ "it is a falsehood." _q._ "why?" _a._ "because the nation is composed of , , inhabitants, about , , , and of this , , only , are consulted in the making of laws." and so through every grievance, social, economic, and political. every workman learned his catechism. those who could not read gathered in groups around their more fortunate comrades and listened to the effective questions and answers. by the beginning of the little land was a seething caldron of political and economic unrest. the strike movement began at liège and soon spread to charleroi and other industrial centers. there was enough destruction of property and clashing with police and soldiery to create a panic in the country. in brussels business was at a standstill for days. the socialist party, in a circular issued to the people, said: "the country is visited by a terrible crisis. the disinherited classes are suffering. strikes are multiplying, riots are provoked by the misery. the constantly decreasing wages are spreading consternation everywhere." the disorder aroused a number of anarchists in brussels. they posted anonymous placards inciting the people to violence. the socialists repudiated the anarchists, and one of their orators said: "do not let yourselves be carried away by violence; that will only benefit your adversaries." a mass demonstration was planned, but the mayor of brussels prohibited it. the labor party, however, were allowed to hold their annual convention and to march under their red flag, the government merely requesting that the demonstrants refrain from shouting, "vive la république!" thirty thousand laboring men joined in the demonstration. the liberals and radicals refused to take part in it because they claimed it was only a workingman's movement, and the anarchists refused because "elections lead to nothing." this demonstration was so serious and imposing that it made a deep impression upon the people, and was not without effect upon the government. the crisis finally passed over. a great many rioters were imprisoned in spite of the popular clamor for universal amnesty. the general strike brought no immediate advantage to the workmen. the next few years the socialists devoted to organization. they were determined not to enter upon extended strikes again without thorough preparation. in the meantime the liberal party split. the radicals, or progressists, at their first congress in declared themselves in favor of the separation of church and state, military reform, compulsory education, social and electoral reform. they were, however, not yet prepared to commit themselves to universal suffrage. they favored rather an educational test for voters. this, however, they abandoned in , and virtually placed themselves upon the socialist platform. on august , , another great demonstration in favor of universal suffrage took place in brussels. over , men joined in the parade. the progressists did not take part in the marching, but they were stationed along the route to cheer the men in line. before they dispersed, all the participants united in taking a solemn oath that they would not give up the fight "until the belgian people, through universal suffrage, should regain their fatherland." this is the famous "oath of august ." after this demonstration the progressists joined with the socialists in a conference for discussing ways and means for securing universal suffrage.[ ] this conference is notable because it drew radicals, progressists, and socialists into a united campaign for suffrage reform. the conference resolved to organize demonstrations in every corner of the kingdom and to memorialize parliament. this was to be a final peaceful appeal. if it remained unheeded a general strike would follow. the bourgeois progressists assented to this ultimatum. a few days before the socialist-progressist conference met, a clerical social congress had convened at liège. the agitation of the labor party had at last aroused the conservatives. the resolutions of this conference were pervaded by the traditional apostolic paternalistic spirit of the church. it demanded social reform, amelioration of harsh conditions, state arbitration, industrial insurance; but it set its face against universal suffrage. on the wings of an awakened conservatism it tried to ride the whirlwind of socialism. but no halfway measures would now placate the agitators. the great mass of belgian workmen were aroused, and nothing but the ballot would satisfy them. a propaganda was begun in the army. the enlistment laws were favorable to the rich, who could purchase freedom from military service. the poor conscripts were especially susceptible to the socialist propaganda. in the autumn of at the labor party's annual convention it was suggested that, inasmuch as the parliament of the few had not heeded the wishes of the nation, a parliament of the people should be called, to be composed of as many members as the existing parliament, but chosen by universal suffrage. even a program was proposed for this fancied parliament. by this time the petitions prepared by the suffrage congress were ready. in every arrondissement there were demonstrations. in brussels , men marched to the city hall and handed the mayor their petition protesting against the privileged election laws and demanding universal suffrage. from every village in the kingdom protests were brought to the government demanding universal suffrage. finally on november , , a liberal member in the chamber of representatives proposed a change in the constitution enlarging the electoral franchise. he explained the injustice of the limited franchise, dwelt on the dangers of strikes and riots, and said that he believed the belgian workmen as capable of exercising the rights of citizenship as those of neighboring countries. all parties agreed to discuss the amendment. the debate held popular excitement in abeyance. but as it became more and more evident that nothing would be done the workingman became restive. early in riots broke out in various cities. the situation became acute. socialists and radicals organized a popular referendum on the question. it was not an official referendum, and its results were not binding. but it was an effective method of propaganda, and in many of the communes the councils gave it their sanction, thereby lending it the color of legality. five propositions were submitted to the voters: ( ) manhood suffrage at twenty-one years; ( ) manhood suffrage at twenty-five years; ( ) exclusion of illiterates and persons in receipt of public or private charity; ( ) household suffrage and mental capacity defined by law; ( ) the exclusion of all who have not passed an elementary educational standard. as a rule the clericals refused to participate in the referendum. in brussels, out of , entitled to vote only , voted, with the following results: manhood suffrage at twenty-one years, , ; manhood suffrage at twenty-five years, , ; all other propositions together, , . in huy, out of , voters only , voted, and , of these were in favor of universal suffrage. in antwerp, where liberals and clericals are about evenly divided, only forty-three per cent. of the electors voted, and of , votes cast, , were for universal suffrage. this referendum, and all the demonstrations, had very little effect upon parliament. the deputies were in favor of revision, but could not agree upon a plan. the radicals were in favor of universal suffrage, the clericals unalterably opposed to it, and the liberals only sympathetic towards it. finally, in april, all the proposals were voted down by the chamber of representatives. the socialists immediately ordered a general strike. it began in the coal mines of hainault, spread to the weavers and spinners of ghent, to the glass and iron works of the walloon districts, to the printers and pressmen of brussels, and to the docks at antwerp. two hundred thousand men stopped work in the course of a few days. while the mills and mines were idle the police and soldiers were busy. six men were killed at joliment, six killed and twelve wounded at mons. in brussels the mob pried up the paving-stones for weapons; the city guards patrolled the city, meetings were forbidden, the streets were cleared of people, and the mayor was wounded in a mêlée. a band of "communists" threw a barricade across rue des eperonniers, the last of the barricades. the troops made short work of it. scores of arrests were made in the various cities and the offenders received sentences varying from six years' imprisonment to a fine of fifty francs. in the height of the excitement the chamber of representatives convened and agreed upon a franchise amendment. immediately the general council of the labor party met and declared the strike off. it sent out this pronouncement: "the labor party through its general council records the insertion of manhood suffrage in the constitution. it declares that this first victory of the party has been won under pressure of a general strike. it is resolved to persist in the work of propaganda until it has won universal political equality and has suppressed the plural voting privilege." the new electoral law ( ) was a compromise suggested by professor albert nyssens of the university of louvain. it recognized the three principal demands of the three parliamentary factions: universal suffrage of the radicals, property qualifications of the clericals, and educational qualifications of the liberals. universal suffrage was granted to all male citizens twenty-five years of age. but this was modified in favor of property and education by the granting of additional votes. one additional vote was give ( ) to every voter thirty-five years of age who was the head of a family and paid a direct tax of francs (one dollar); ( ) to every owner of real property valued at , francs ($ . ), or who had an annual income of francs ($ . ) derived from investments in the belgian public funds. two additional votes were given to the holders of diplomas from the higher schools, to those who were or had been in public office, and to those who practised a profession for which a higher education was necessary. no one was allowed more than three votes. whatever may be said of this fancy franchise, it is at least ingenious. it satisfied the first popular hunger after the ballot. the workmen could vote. the conditions imposed for the casting of two votes seem very liberal and the majority of american voters could qualify under them. but in belgium, the land of low wages and congested populations, they were real barricades. nearly two-thirds of the voters failed to reach even this low standard. voting made compulsory. election was by _scrutin de liste_.[ ] iii under these conditions the socialists went into battle. there were , , electors; , with one vote , with two votes, , with three votes. the socialists polled , votes, the clericals , , the liberals , . the new parliament was composed as follows: chamber of representatives--clericals, ; liberals, ; socialists, ; senate--clericals ; liberals, ; socialists, .[ ] from the first the socialists in belgium have not been reluctant in making election arrangements with other parties. in this their first election they united with the progressists. in brussels on the second ballot they proposed terms to the liberals, which were refused. the socialists, however, instructed their followers to vote against the clericals in every instance. wherever there were no radical or socialists lists they supported the liberals.[ ] the same widespread alarm that the first socialist parliamentary accessions aroused everywhere, was caused by these twenty-nine belgian socialist representatives, especially as some of their number were promoted from prison to parliament, and one striker was given his liberty for the time being so that he could attend the session. vandervelde allayed popular apprehension when he announced the program of his party, which combined with the usual labor legislation the demand for the state purchase of coal mines, state monopoly of the liquor business, and communal election reforms. the proposals of the belgian socialists in parliament have invariably been practical, not revolutionary or visionary. one of the first bills introduced by them provided for the reduction of the stamp tax and the tax on the transfer of property and leases. this tax was extremely high, nearly seven per cent., and worked a peculiar hardship on the small tenant. the bill failed of passage. but the government was so impressed by the facts presented in debate that it brought in a law reducing the tax on transfers for all small estates. it is by this indirect method, by their presence in the chamber, and by their powers in debate that the belgian socialists have achieved many practical reforms. they have not the hauteur and aloofness of the german social democrat, nor the fiery passion for idealistic propaganda of the french; they are more sensible than either. since their entrance into parliament a secretary of labor has been added to the cabinet, and every department of labor legislation has felt their influence. the delegation is in constant touch with the party in the various districts. an old-age pension act has been passed, great reductions have been made in military expenditure, the conscript laws have been modified, and the socialists led in the opposition to the belgian policy in the congo. their two main contentions have been over the educational laws and the electoral laws. a school law was passed by the clericals in . it was regarded as reactionary by the socialists, and stormy scenes accompanied its enactment. its provisions are still the source of constant agitation among socialists and liberals. they protest especially against the teaching of religion in the communal schools. it is true that any parent may have his child excused from attending such instruction for reasons of conscience on written application to the proper authorities. but they insist that this subjects the objecting parent to harsh treatment in clerical communities.[ ] the provincial and communal election laws were less favorable to the socialists than the national law. in the government brought in a new local election bill which fixed the voting age at thirty, required three years' residence in a commune, and strengthened the plural voting system by giving a fourth vote to the large land-holders. the socialists and radicals united in contesting of the communes (about one-fourth of the whole number). they won a majority in eighty and a considerable minority in of these communal councils. necessity had cemented the alliance of radicals and socialists. the radicals were now called "_chèvre-choutiers_" because they tried to carry the goat and the cabbage, liberals and socialists, across the stream in the same boat. in the government brought in its new election bill in which it proposed to concede to the demand for proportional representation. but only the large constituencies were to be included in the change, leaving the smaller districts, mostly in the flemish section, to the clerical majorities that prevailed there. the measure was unpopular. the people organized protests against it in every city in the land. in brussels a mob gathered in front of the chamber of deputies. paving-stones were ripped up and hurled through the windows, and there was charging and counter-charging between police and populace. inside the chamber the scene was not less tumultuous. the socialists tried to prevent business by mob tactics. desk-lids were banged, there was shouting and singing, one deputy had provided himself with a horn. the government was compelled to adjourn the session. all that night (june ) there was rioting in brussels. when the chamber met the following day the wild scenes were re-enacted, when a clerical deputy moved that any member causing a disturbance be expelled. in the debate that followed the government declared itself willing to adjourn and study the various proposals of the opposition. this cooled the crowd waiting outside the chamber, and at vandervelde's suggestion the mob quietly dispersed. in the meantime the mayors of brussels, ghent, antwerp, and liège waited on the king and told him they would no longer be responsible for the maintenance of order in their cities if the minister did not withdraw the obnoxious electoral bill. the liberals now joined the socialists and radicals in their processions in every town, singing their war-songs and carrying placards and banners of protest. all this had its effect on the government. a committee representing all the groups in the chamber was appointed to consider all the proposals that had been introduced. vandervelde, in supporting the committee, said that he "spoke for the country that had so effectively demonstrated its power and achieved a victory." soon after this the reactionary ministry fell, and the new government brought in a bill providing uniform proportional representation for all the districts. this bill was promptly enacted into law. the first general election under this law resulted as follows: total vote cast , , socialists , , electing deputies. clericals , " " liberals , " " radicals , " " christian democrats , " " the clerical majority was cut from seventy to eighteen and at last the liberal elements were hopeful of gaining the government and effecting universal suffrage "pure and simple." we have now seen how popular agitation wrested, first, a law permitting plural voting; second, a law permitting proportional representation, from an unwilling government. the contest for universal suffrage "pure and simple" has continued to the present day. in the labor party at its congress at liège decided to renew the agitation in favor of universal suffrage, "even to the extent of the general strike, and agitation in the streets, and not to cease until after the conquest of political equality." vandervelde introduced a bill into the chamber providing for "one man, one vote," and it was defeated by a vote of to . immediately vandervelde and the radical leader proposed a revision of the constitution. the debate on this motion continued until the spring of . all the old spirit of unrest and violence broke out anew. to the violence of protesting mobs was added the coercive force of the general strike. three hundred thousand men stopped work and began demonstrating. troops were called out to guard the government buildings in brussels and to hold the crowds at bay in the provinces. in louvain eight strikers were killed by the soldiers, and in other localities there was bloodshed and destruction of property. finally the chamber of representatives voted to close the debate and dismiss the question entirely for the session. the strike was declared off and quiet restored. in the elections the following may the socialists lost three seats. this had its effect. a meeting of the party was called and it was decided not to resort to further violence. a delegate from charleroi, the seat of the most tumultuous element in the party, expressed regret that the labor party had compromised with the bourgeois parties in calling off the strike. vandervelde defended the action of the council on the ground that the continuance of the strike threatened internal dissensions because of the misery of the strikers and the violence of the government. the party organ, _le peuple_, said on june , : "we are no longer in . the days of barricades have gone by. the narrow little streets of former years have expanded into wide avenues. the soldiers are armed with albinis and mausers. even if all the people were armed it would only be necessary to plant a few cannon at strategic places in the city to put down an insurrection in spite of the greatest heroism of the insurgents."[ ] van overbergh, in his history of the strike, says: "the period of romantic socialism in belgium is past; the days of realism have commenced."[ ] and bertrand, the historian, adds the reason: "its [the general strike's] effect was to keep down the vote. even in the elections of and the vote has remained quite stationary."[ ] whether this means the apotheosis of the general strike in belgium will depend no doubt upon circumstances, it is significant that the words were uttered, and still more significant that political coalition has taken the place of industrial warfare. the liberals and radicals now plan with the socialists. they no longer stand aside and let the socialists march, but they join step with them and carry banners. the greatest of all belgian demonstrations for universal suffrage and free schools took place in august, . in spite of the extreme heat, nearly , radicals, liberals, and socialists gathered in the capital, "not so much to impress the government," a socialist leader said to me, "but to impress the people that we are in earnest, and then to prepare for the coming elections." iv it must not be inferred from this rapid survey of its warfare for political privilege that belgian socialism has forgotten the co-operative movement and all the various activities that were blended in the making of the labor party. belgian socialism is primarily economic. this makes it unique. it has succeeded in becoming economic, in building dairies and bake-shops, in running dry-goods stores and grocery stores and butcher shops, in the present dispensation; and it has succeeded in doing so by accommodating itself to the present conditions. it adopts the eight-hour day when it can, but it is not averse to ten hours when necessary. it pays its employees the highest wage it can, but it recognizes talent and ability like the bourgeois shopkeeper across the street. it has insurance funds that draw interest at the same rate that is paid by bourgeois banks, and it has no scruples about putting the latest approved machinery into its workshops and bakeries. in all this, their activities have remained socialistic. they compete with the bourgeois, but co-operate among themselves. the profits of their activities go to the members of their societies and to the party. their competition has brought ruin to the door of many a shopkeeper who finds his customers flocking to their own shop. government commissions have inquired into the movement at the nervous requests of merchants and tradesmen, but only to find every co-operative enterprise carefully conducted and thriving. the belgian socialist leaders all emphasize the importance of this unity of economic and political activity, and the priority of the economic over the political. it has been a splendid stimulant for the belgian workman. it has aroused him out of the lethargy that has been his greatest enemy for years. it has taught him to work with others, the value of mass movement, the futility of separateness. it has schooled him, not only in reading and arithmetic, in the night classes established everywhere; but in business, in weights and measures; in percentage, in profit and loss; and most of all, in the real hardships that meet tradespeople and commercial men everywhere in their endeavor to get on. workingmen often think that a business man is a necromancer juggling profits out of other people's necessities. the belgian co-operativist has found out that trading is a commonplace and tedious task which requires constant alertness and is merely the drudgery of detail. this experience has taught him, moreover, the futility of laws and the utility of effort. in belgium i was impressed most of all by the nonchalance, almost contempt, that the workman displays toward mere legislation. "why should i toy with words when i have this?" and he points proudly to his co-operative store. the belgian workman has been taught through his co-operative experience the value of patient toil and frugality. slowly he has built up these institutions out of his own savings. when he thought his scant wages were barely enough for bread, he discovered means somehow to pay his dues in the "mutualité." as an instance of his thrift, he saves every year a little fund which is used by the family for an annual holiday, usually a short excursion to a neighboring place of interest. every member of the family contributes to this fund, and, no matter how poor, they look forward to their yearly holiday. the belgian socialist has also been successful in another field. while in other countries the socialists have tried usually in vain to lure the peasant and small farmer, the belgians have made constant progress in this direction. the agrarian movement began with the organizing of the labor party.[ ] vandervelde and hector dennis, a professor of economics in the university at brussels, have been constant in their zeal for the agrarian interests. again, the lure is not socialism in the abstract, nor the gospel of discontent. it is practical, business co-operation. dairies, stores, markets are proving powerful propagandists, even in the catholic lowlands. dr. steffens-frauenweiler quotes from a conservative newspaper: "from different sides we have heard the remark that socialism would never penetrate into the country. in contradiction to this opinion we must observe that those who express this view, and presume to laugh away the socialistic movement among the peasants and farmers, are either not well informed or are submitting themselves to illusions. only a serious attempt to fight socialism through positive reforms will prove a lasting check upon the ambitions of socialists."[ ] in belgium the general strike has been used as an aid in the warfare for political power. we have seen how the first strike was premature, the second effective, and the third proved a boomerang in its reaction upon the labor party. vandervelde distinguishes between the general strike as a means toward social revolution, and the general strike as a political weapon used for securing a _definite_ object.[ ] he says: "the revolutionary general strike is itself the revolution. the reformist general strike, on the contrary, is the attempt of the proletariat to secure partial concessions from the government without questioning the existence of the government, and especially the administration that represents the government." to effect this, it is not essential that all the workmen go out, but only enough to interrupt "the normal course of business, even if the majority of the workers remain at work."[ ] the political general strike has its example, then, in the belgian movement for the electoral franchise. whether it would succeed in wresting other political privileges from the state, is conjecture; that it would not succeed except under the most favorable conditions, is certain. the belgian movement has displayed great absorptive powers and facility of adaptation. it has absorbed all the labor activities of the radical and socialist workmen. it has adapted itself to the necessities of the hour, giving up the daydreams of intangible things. in all this, it has displayed a saneness, in spite of its revolutionary traditions and anarchistic blood.[ ] it has the most "modern" program of the european socialist parties, and the most worldly efficiency. in visiting one of the large workingmen's clubhouses found in the cities, the visitor is impressed with the beehive qualities of the belgian movement. at the "maison du peuple" in brussels--that was built by these underpaid workmen at a cost of , , francs--you find activity everywhere. the savings-bank department is swarming with women and children, come to conduct the business of the family. the café, the headquarters of the party, the offices of the co-operative societies, all are busy. in the evening there are debates, gymnasium contests, moving-picture shows, classes for instruction in the elementary branches, in art, and literature.[ ] a temperance movement, started by the workmen some years ago, has attained a great deal of influence. placards are on the walls of the clubhouses, setting forth the evils of the drink habit. or you visit a co-operative bakery or butcher-shop or grocery store, and the same spirit of diligence, thrift, and reasonableness is there. and you are quite convinced that here is socialism approximating somewhere near its ultimate form. if the belgian labor party should secure control of the government to-morrow it would be more competent to assume the actual obligations of power than would the socialists in any other european country. for they have not built a structure in mid-air, with merely an underpinning of more or less indifferent theories. footnotes: [ ] _l'enquête gouvernementale_, vol. xviii. [ ] _l'annuaire statistique._ [ ] bertrand, _histoire de la démocratie et du socialisme en belgique depuis _, vol ii, p. . [ ] this conference sent the following telegram to the king: "you have asked what is the watchword of the country; the watchword is universal suffrage." [ ] the candidates are arranged in groups or "lists," and the voter votes the list as well as for the individual names on the list. any electors may prepare such a list. the successful candidate must receive a majority. this often necessitates a second ballot between the two receiving the highest number of votes. [ ] bertrand, _histoire_, vol. ii, p. . [ ] one of the significant incidents of this election was the contest against frère orban, for thirty years a parliamentary leader and one of the greatest politicians of his day. his seat was contested by an obscure workingman, and the distinguished parliamentarian was compelled to submit to the ordeal of a second ballot. [ ] the clerical forces are gradually retreating before the repeated onslaughts of liberals and socialists. but the loyalty to the church remains undiminished. on may , , a clerical deputy remarked in the chamber that he would like to see the temporal power of the pope restored. the socialists immediately started an uproar which ended in their singing their "marseillaise" and the adjournment of the sitting. [ ] bertrand, _histoire_, ii, p. . [ ] _la grève générale belge d'avril_, , brussels, . [ ] _histoire_, ii, p. . [ ] see dr. steffens-frauenweiler, _der agrar-sozialismus in belge_. [ ] _op. cit._, p. . [ ] see an article by e. vandervelde, "_der general streik_," in _archiv für sozial-wissenschaft und sozial-politik_, tübingen, may, . the same article was published, same date, in _revue du mois_, paris. [ ] _supra cit._, p. . [ ] bakunin had a large following in belgium during the days of the "old international," and anarchists have never entirely ceased their activities in the large cities. [ ] on the walls of the "maison du peuple" you will find noble paintings. here labored constantine meunier, the sculptor, on his notable "monument au travail." three remarkable sections of this monument, "la mine," "l'industrie," "la glèbe," can be seen in the gallery of modern art, in brussels. there are evidences everywhere of the art interest of these alert working people. one of them, with sincere indignation, pointed out to me the large pile of stone that surmounts the heights of the city, the palace of justice, completed in , and said its "bourgeois babylonian hideousness is the high-water mark of bourgeois taste in art and bourgeois power in politics." chapter vii the german social democracy i it is the constant complaint of the german democrats that there is no liberal party in germany. the wars that repeatedly devastated the country during past centuries drove property owners to seek the protection of a strong, centralized government. this habit has survived the centuries. whenever the middle classes show signs of breaking away from the conservatism of the "regierung," the prince always finds a way of bringing them back. the period of revolution-- --ended in a compromise that ignored the workingmen and virtually left absolutism on the throne. when the new era dawned, and bismarck, like a young giant, shaped the highways of empire, he used the liberals so adroitly that, when his national legerdemain was accomplished, they were a broken and impotent faction, lost in the conservative reaction of the hour. universal suffrage for the reichstag elections was written into the constitution of the new empire, not because the chancellor and his prince loved democracy, but because the smaller states insisted upon this safeguard against prussian omnipotence. democracy and liberalism have never been strong enough to break the fetters of national habit; and nearly all the democracy, certainly all the workingman's democracy, in germany to-day is found in the social democratic party. in order to understand the development of social democracy in germany, it is necessary to bear in mind the bureaucratic, autocratic, paternalistic character of the german government.[ ] it is the german governmental policy to do everything for the welfare of its citizens that can be done; and, in return, it expects the people to let the government alone. the medieval conception of class responsibility survives. it is the attitude of a self-righteous parent toward ignorant and wilful children. the government assumes the right, and possesses the power, to regulate every phase of the citizen's life, in domestic, industrial, educational, moral, and political affairs. it is a regal survival of the theory that government is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. germany is a made-to-order country that clings to medieval conservatism in government; a country that is thoroughly modern in industry and distinctly middle-age in caste; where the workingman has always been treated with patronizing condescension and his political acts watched with jealousy; and where he has, against great odds, determined to work out his own salvation. surrounded by preordained and rigid conditions, he has perfected an organization that is the most remarkable example of proletarian achievement found anywhere in history. to the development and description of this organization we will now address ourselves. german social democracy, while marxian in theory, owes its active existence to ferdinand lassalle, one of those brilliant and daring geniuses who flash, in an hour of adventure, across the prosaic days of history.[ ] he was pronounced a _wunderkind_ by william von humboldt; dashed his way through university routine; attracted the friendship of poets, philosophers, and politicians; was lionized by society; became a revolutionist in , and was, at the age of twenty-three, indicted for inciting a mob of düsseldorf workingmen to acts of violence. he defended himself in a brilliant speech which launched him fully into the campaign of the workingman.[ ] early in his career he volunteered to defend the cause of the countess hatzfeldt, whose unfaithful husband was squandering his estates and suffering her to live in want. lassalle fought the case through thirty-six courts for nine years, and won an ample fortune for the countess, who became the main financial support of lassalle's campaigns. after his first arrest, lassalle was kept under vigilance by the government. but finally, through the interposition of distinguished friends, he was allowed to return to berlin. there, in , he delivered a series of addresses that soon brought him into conflict with the police. his defense in the court was published later under the title, _science and the workingman_. this he followed with a letter, _might and right_,[ ] sent broadcast over the land. in these two publications he succinctly enunciated his theory of democracy: "with democracy alone dwells right, and in democracy alone will might be found. no person in the prussian state to-day has the right to speak of 'rights,' except the democracy, the old and true democracy. for democracy alone has constantly clung to the right, and has never lowered herself by compromising with might."[ ] in the political turmoil of that period, when new forces were awakening to their power and feudalism, conservatism, cobdenism, and democracy were all contending for supremacy, there were three predominating currents of thought. the first was naturally the feudal, the absolutist that would put down by the police power, and failing in that by the soldiery, every attempt at changing the organization of the government. this was embodied in the reactionary, or conservative party, which held then, as it still does, the high places in army and government. bismarck was its leader. it had ample nationalist aims, and was called the "great german party" ("gross deutschland"); austria was included in its ambitions, and monarchic supremacy was the token of its power. it comprised the landowners, the nobles, and the agrarians. the second tendency was commercial, bourgeois. it found expression in the national liberal party, which was liberal in name only. it was the "small german" ("klein deutschland") party, preferring the ascendency of prussia. it comprised the enterprising traders, manufacturers, and bankers, and was strongest in the cities. it was attached to monarchy, cared little for military or political glory, except as it affected trade and taxes. the third tendency had nothing in common with the other two. it was the revolt of the proletarians, led by men of great ability. it was the democratic movement. it abhorred both the idea of feudal prerogative in government, as expressed by king and noble, and the vulgar trade patriotism, as expressed by the national liberals, the bourgeoisie. it took its inspiration from france and its example from england. from france came the political platitudes of equality and liberty with which we are familiar in america; from england, the example of strongly organized trade unions. in germany these two movements, economic and political, were blended into one. not that the workingman's movement was a unity. schultze-delitsch, the founder of the german co-operative movement, contended that labor should keep out of politics and devote itself to economic activities alone. rodbertus, the distinguished economist, who was potent in shaping economic and political thought in germany, wrote lassalle, when he was entreated to join the brilliant agitator's propaganda, that he could "tolerate no political agitation which would excite the working classes against the existing executive power."[ ] there was no unity in the theories of the workingman's movement. the first organizations, the "workingmen's associations," were founded soon after , as soon as the laws gave a limited right of association to the working class. the government looked with suspicion on every political act of labor, and especially upon organizations for political purposes. the ban of the law was put upon those organizations in july, , and the right of public meeting was greatly restricted; police autonomy increased, giving them arbitrary power to stop meetings; and the right of free press was virtually denied. democracy became a movement of silent intrigue and occasional rough outbreak. at this juncture a new political party was organized, to absorb what was "legal" in the democratic workingman's movement and what was truly liberal in the national liberal party. the new party was called progressist ("fortschrittler"). it was a german party, devoted to the manchester doctrine: free commerce, free trade, free press, free speech; freedom of expression in every phase of human activity. it was _laissez-faire_ to the uttermost plunged into the reactionary mass of german politics. the economic issue became freedom of contract _versus_ feudal status; the political issue, freedom of ballot _versus_ hereditary prerogative. the new party began to appeal for the workingman's support. their lure of free speech and freedom of organization was not without effect. the older workingmen, who were not familiar with the teachings of marx and engels, and who had not even read weitling's communistic idealizations, were brought, in some numbers, into the new party. the younger and more radical element in the workingmen's clubs were restless. in some of them had visited the international exposition in london and had talked with marx. the fire of the "international" was kindled. a movement for calling a national workingman's convention was started among these radicals. the progressists tried to check the agitation, saying that every effort should be directed toward establishing a new constitution. but it was in vain. in leipsic a group of radicals seceded from the workingman's union (arbeiter bildungs-verein), and formed a new organization, which they called "vorwärts" (progress). these now invited lassalle to address them on his views of the labor situation. the movement was opportune, and lassalle's answer is the basic document of present-day social democracy.[ ] there is no salvation for the workingman except through "political freedom," he says. this freedom demands laws, and to secure laws united action is essential. they must be powerful enough to get laws to their liking. this power they will not get by being an appendix to the progressists, for they are dominated by a trade doctrine, not by altruistic ideals for the oppressed. with a clearness that has not been excelled, he showed the dependence of economic upon political power and influence. his economic program was none other than louis blanc's state-subsidized workshops. it made no great impression and soon faded away. but his bold plan of a workingman's party fighting fiercely for democracy, and for the betterment of the "normal conditions of the entire working classes," has been developed to surprising perfection. the state, he says, must be the instrument of their power, not the object of their striving. they are in politics, not as politicians, but as proletarians. "the state is nothing but the great organization, the all-embracing association of the working classes." no "sustaining and helping hand" will be their guide. political supremacy is the "only way out of the desert." and how win the state? there is only one way: through universal suffrage, democracy. "universal suffrage is not only your political but also your social foundation principle, the condition precedent of all social help. it is the only means for bettering the material conditions of the working classes." cut loose from rodbertus economically, and from the progressists politically, lassalle was invited to take the leadership of the new movement, which from the start was political rather than economic. he aimed to organize the german workingmen into a great national party, so powerful that it could control governments, make laws, and demand obedience. but it was slow work, and to the fiery spirit of lassalle its snail's pace was exasperating. it provoked him into violence of speech which led him everywhere into the courts and into constant altercations with the crown's solicitors. his powerful personality and unusually active mind made a profound impression everywhere. at the last conference of his association which he attended he claimed the bishop of mayence and the king of prussia as converts. the bishop, baron von ketteler, was indeed turning toward socialism, but not lassalle's political socialism. he was the founder of that christian socialism which has made the catholic church in south germany and the rhineland a potent factor in the labor movement. the king, whose conversion lassalle boldly announced, had only received a delegation of silesian weavers who laid their grievances before him and were promised the royal sympathy. however, lassalle and bismarck had formed a general liking for each other, and the great minister received from the brilliant agitator many suggestions which he later embodied in his state insurance laws. both bismarck and lassalle believed in the power of the state for the amelioration of social conditions. they met several times at the chancellor's solicitation, and bismarck disclosed their conversations to the reichstag, on the insistence of bebel, when the insurance bills were under discussion. the chancellor expressed his admiration for the virility of the socialist's mind and said he believed lassalle perfectly sincere in his purpose.[ ] lassalle did not live to see his general workingmen's association ("allgemeiner deutscher arbeitsverein") attain political power. he was killed in a duel over a love affair august , . his brilliant campaign for democracy had resulted in a petty organization of , members. lassalle's influence is increasing every year. his death-day is celebrated by the german socialists (lassalle feier). the present-day german movement is lassallian rather than marxian.[ ] in a letter to rodbertus, february, , lassalle says that he aimed to show the workingman "how identical the economic and the political forces are. every separation of them is an abstraction, and i believe that uniting the two is the principal potency which i can give to the cause." ii the little handful was soon rent by internal strife and threatened with utter extinction, both by police aggression and by marxian competition. the year lassalle died the international workingman's association was organized and agitation began in germany under the leadership of william liebknecht, a friend and disciple of marx. liebknecht was the scholar of the early social democratic group. he possessed a university education, was a revolutionist in , a fugitive in switzerland and england until . his foreign sojourn did not mellow his natural dogmatism; on the contrary, his long intercourse with marx in london hardened his orthodoxy. he was a powerful polemist. however, alone he could not have organized a national movement. he did not possess the personal traits that lure. he made a notable convert when he won august bebel, a saxon woodturner, to his cause. "i was saul and became paul," bebel said to me. the words are not inapt: his power is pauline. lie has been persecuted and imprisoned, has written speeches and epistles, has made many missionary journeys, and kept constantly in intimate touch with every local phase of his propaganda. his imprisonments have undermined his health, but they have not diminished his mental vigor; and more than once the iron chancellor winced under his ferocious assaults. liebknecht and bebel were more advanced than the workingmen's association, which now had fallen under the leadership of schweitzer, an able but dissolute disciple of lassalle. the two organizations fought each other as rivals. the international wing, under liebknecht and bebel, in , organized the democratic workingmen's party at eisenach, and were called "eisenachers." their program is of great importance. it stated that the first object of the new party was the attaining of the free state (freier volkstaat). this state liebknecht explained at his trial in : "the idea of a free state is interpreted by a majority of our party to mean a republic; but does this necessarily imply that it is to be forcibly introduced? no one has expressed an opinion as to how it is to be introduced. let a majority of the people be won for our opinions, and the state is of our opinions, for the people are the state. a state without a king is conceivable, but not a state without a people. the government is the servant of the people." this free state, the program continues, can be won only by political freedom, and political freedom is the forerunner of economic freedom. demand is therefore made for universal, equal, direct suffrage, with secret ballot, for all men twenty years of age, in both parliamentary and municipal elections. other leading demands were: direct legislation; the abolition of all privileges, whether of birth, wealth, or religion; the establishment of militia in place of standing armies; the separation of church and state; the secularizing of education; the extension of free schools and compulsory education; reform of the courts and extension of the jury system; abolition of all laws restricting freedom of speech, of press, and of association; the establishment of a normal workday; the restriction of female, and abolition of child, labor; the abolition of indirect taxes; the establishment of an income and inheritance tax; the extension of state credit for co-operative enterprises. this program sounds very modern and moderate. but its expositors were not restrained to moderation, and when the congress met at dresden in it adopted a resolution extolling the french commune. a great deal of popular sympathy was lost through this action. meanwhile the lassalle party was slowly gaining ground. in the two parties united at gotha. there were , members in the liebknecht party and , members in the lassalle party. here was adopted the first program of the united german social democracy. its economics are thoroughly marxian in theory and are only slightly tinged by the teachings of lassalle and schultze-delitsch in practice. labor, it affirmed, was the source of all wealth and was held under duress by the capitalistic class. its only emancipation could come from the social ownership of the means of production. the way to this goal could be found through productive copartnership with state aid. the political part of the program embraced the demands made at eisenach. with its unity, a new vigor took possession of the party. its organization was perfected; agitators were in the field; its twenty-three newspapers had over , subscribers. this meant increased police vigilance. all the leaders served terms in prison, newspapers were suppressed, organizations dissolved, houses searched, agitators ordered to leave the country. the government did everything in its power to suppress the movement. every act of oppression popularized the democracy among the proletarians. the blood of the martyrs bore the usual harvest. the new empire had been launched amidst the greatest enthusiasm, shared by every one except the discontented workingmen who had so stoutly fought for entire political freedom. the new imperial parliament was thrown open to them because bismarck had found it necessary to include universal suffrage in the constitution of the reichstag. in the socialists elected two members, and the feudal lords beheld the novel sight of workingmen sitting with them in the imperial diet. the voting strength of the party was , . this was increased to , in , when nine members were elected. in the party cast , votes, electing twelve members. this was cause for alarm. the party had now reached fifth place in point of votes among the fourteen parties or factions that contended for power in germany, and eighth place in point of members elected. but in point of agitation, of perfervid speech and pointed interpellation, it ranked easily first. its delegation in included bebel and liebknecht, now out of jail, and most, afterwards the notorious anarchist in america, and hasselman and bracke, who were not modest in the expression of their opinions. these representatives of democracy let no occasion pass to embarrass the government with peppery questions. bismarck was slowly evolving a scheme for checking the socialist growth and satisfying the demands of labor for better conditions. both revolved around the pivot of patriarchal omnipotence. the suppression was to be accomplished by force; the gratification, by paternal rigor. iii he addressed himself first to repression. he entreated the governments of europe in to unite in stamping out socialism, but he received no encouragement. in spain, exasperated by the revolutionary outbreaks, addressed a circular to the powers, asking their co-operation to check the growth of the revolutionary element. bismarck was ready. but lord granville, for england, said the traditions of his country were favorable to an unrestricted right of residence for foreigners as long as they violated no law of their host. this ended the international attempt. next (in ) bismarck attempted to tighten the gag on the press, but the reichstag refused to sanction his proposals. then he fell back on existing legislation and with great vigor enforced the statutes against revolutionary activity. the police were given wide latitude in interpreting these laws. several acts of wanton violence now occurred which brought about a sudden change of temper in the people. on may , , while driving in unter den linden, emperor william was shot at by a young man. the emperor was not struck by the bullets, but the shots were none the less effective in rousing public indignation. popular condemnation was turned against the social democrats because photographs of liebknecht and bebel were found on the person of the intended assassin. two days later bismarck introduced the anti-socialist laws. they were debated in the reichstag, while most was being tried for libeling the clergy. but the reichstag was not ready to go to the lengths of the chancellor's desire, and by a vote of to rejected his bill. here the matter would have rested had not a second attempt been made on the life of the aged emperor. this occurred on june , and this time the emperor was seriously wounded. naturally the indignation of the nation was thoroughly aroused. in the midst of the excitement, a general election was held, and bismarck won. his own peculiar conservatives increased their delegation from to , the free conservatives from to ; the national liberals reduced their number from to , the liberals from to , the progressists from to . the socialists retained nine seats, losing three; their vote fell from , to , . immediately a repressive law was introduced. it was called "a law against the publicly dangerous activities of the social democracy" (gesetz gegen die gemein-gefährlichen bestrebungen der sozial-demokratie).[ ] bismarck prefaced his law with a very clever prologue (begründung). in simple language he arraigned the social democracy as being, first, anti-social, because it aims at the modern system of production, and does so, not through "humanitarian motives," but through revolution; second, as anti-patriotic, because it makes "the most odious attacks" on the german empire. "the law of preservation therefore compels the state and society to oppose the social democratic movement with decision.... true, thought cannot be repressed by external compulsion; the movements of minds can only be overcome in intellectual combat. but when movements take wrong pathways and threaten destruction, the means for their growth can and should be taken away by legal means. the socialist agitation, as carried on for years, is a continual appeal to violence and to the passions of the multitudes, for the purpose of subverting the social order. the state _can_ check such a movement by depriving social democracy of its principal means of propaganda, and by destroying its organization; and it _must_ do so unless it is willing to surrender its existence, and unless the conviction is to spread amongst the people that either the state is impossible or the aims of social democracy are justifiable.[ ] the law was passed against the vehement protest of the socialists. they disclaimed any connection with the dastardly attempts on the life of the aged emperor. bebel, in an impressive speech, declared that while socialists do "wish to abolish the present form of private property in the factors of production, labor, and land," they had never been guilty of destroying a penny's worth of property. nor did they aim to do so. it was the system of private ownership of great properties, that enabled a few to oppress the many, that they were fighting. and here they were in good company: rodbertus, rosher, wagner, schaeffle, brentano, schmoller, and a host of other scholars and economists, bebel affirmed, were socialistic in their tendencies. bismarck was unyielding. he said he would welcome any real effort to alleviate harsh conditions. but the socialists were a party of destruction and were enemies to mankind. the leader of the progressists said, "i fear social democracy more under this law than without it." the vote of to in favor of the law showed the grim chancellor's sway over the assembly. the law made clean work of it. it forbade all organizations which promulgated views controvening the existing social and political order. it prohibited the collecting of money for campaign purposes; put the ban on meetings, processions, and demonstrations; on publications of all kinds, confiscating the existing stock of prohibited books; and created a status akin to martial law by endowing the police authorities with the power of declaring a locality in a "minor state of siege," and exercising arbitrary authority for one year. a commission was appointed by the chancellor to carry out these inquisitions, and the war between socialistic democracy and medieval autocracy was on. its events are instructive to every government; its sequel a warning to all nations.[ ] the government organized its commission; the socialists met at hamburg to consider the situation. they determined to perfect their organization, to promulgate a secret propaganda, and to use the tribune in the reichstag as the one open pulpit whence they could proclaim their wrongs. the government promptly declared berlin in a "minor state of siege." in the course of a few months about fifty agitators were expelled, bales of literature confiscated, organizations dissolved, meetings dismissed, gatherings prohibited, and the socialist agitation pushed into cellars and back rooms. but there was one tribune which the chancellor could not close--the reichstag tribune. here bebel and liebknecht talked to the nation, and their speeches were given circulation through the records of debate. prince bismarck, in his extremity, tried to muzzle the socialist members and expunge their words from the records; but the members of the reichstag refused this extreme measure. then bismarck asked permission to imprison hasselman and expel fritzche from berlin. these two deputies had been especially vituperative in their attacks upon the law. the chancellor claimed that the famous section of the anti-socialist law authorizing the minor state of siege extended to members of the reichstag. but the house, under the vehement leadership of professor gneist, the distinguished constitutional lawyer, refused to sanction this dangerous measure on the ground that the thirty-first article of the federal constitution exempted members of the reichstag from arrest. bismarck soon had another plan for ridding himself of the socialist nettles in the reichstag. he introduced a bill creating a parliamentary court chosen by the house, who should have the power to punish any member guilty of parliamentary indiscretion. the bill also empowered the house to prevent the publication of any of its proceedings if it desired. the reichstag also refused to sanction this measure. the assassination of czar alexander of russia in march, , gave bismarck the opportunity to renew his efforts to quell socialism and anarchism by international concert. he asked russia to take the initiative, and a conference was called at brussels to which all the leading states were invited. germany and austria eagerly accepted, france made her participation dependent on england's action, and england refused to participate. bismarck next tried to form an eastern league, but austria failed him and he had to content himself with an extradition treaty with russia. bismarck now fell back on his socialist law. he enforced it with vigor, extending the minor state of siege to altona, leipsic, hamburg, and harburg. his commission reported yearly. its words were not reassuring. in it said: "the situation of the social democratic movement in germany and other civilized countries is unfortunately not such as to encourage the hope that it is being suppressed or weakened." the minister of the interior said to the reichstag: "it is beyond doubt that it has not been possible by means of the law of october, , to wipe social democracy from the face of the earth, or even to strike it to the center."[ ] the duration of the law had been fixed at two years. at the end of each term it was renewed, each time with diminishing majorities. meanwhile the rigor of the law was not diminished. the minor state of siege was extended to other centers, including stettin and offenbach. meetings were suppressed everywhere, and dismissed often for the most trivial reasons. the police were given the widest powers and exercised them in the narrowest spirit.[ ] "a hateful system of persecution, espionage, and aggravation was established, and its victims were the classes most susceptible to disaffection."[ ] on the unique _index expurgatorius_ of the government were over a thousand titles, including the works of the high priests of the party, the poetry of herwegh, the romances of von schweitzer, the photographs of the favorite socialist saints, over eighty newspapers and sixty foreign journals. bales of interdicted literature were smuggled in from switzerland to feed the morose and disaffected mind of the german workingman. i can find no record of how many arrests were made. bebel reported to the party convention in that , publications of all kinds had been interdicted and that , persons had been imprisoned, serving an aggregate of over one thousand years.[ ] every trial was a scattering of the seeds, and every imprisoned or exiled comrade became a hero. the awkwardness of the government was matched against the adroitness of the propagandists. a good deal of terror was spread among the people, stories of sudden uprisings and bloody revolutions were told. even the national liberals lost their heads at times. but bebel was always superbly cool. this woodturner developed into one of the ablest political generals of his time. persecuted and pressed into underground channels of activity the party persisted in growing. in it rid itself of the violent revolutionary faction led by most and hasselman. in the elections of the socialists gained three deputies, but their popular vote was reduced over , . in the next election, , they won twenty-four seats and polled , votes; two out of six seats in berlin were won, and one-tenth of the voters in the land were rallied under the red flag. the police were alarmed and the law was enforced with renewed energy. with this powerful backing liebknecht asked the repeal of the "explosives act." a violent debate took place. liebknecht said: "i will tell you this: we do not appeal to you for sympathy. the result is all the same to us, for we shall win one way or another. do your worst, for it will be only to our advantage, and the more madly you carry on the sooner you will come to an end. the pitcher goes to the well until it breaks."[ ] bebel roused all the fury of bismarck when he warned him that if russian methods were imported there would be murder. in july of this year ( ) at freiburg occurred the memorable trial of nine socialist leaders, including bebel, dietz, von vollmar, auer, frohme, and viereck, charged with participating in an illegal organization. all were sentenced to imprisonment for terms varying from six to nine months. preceding the election of the reichstag had been dissolved on the army bill. the patriotic issue, always effective, was made the universal appeal by the government. in spite of this the social democrats polled , votes, a gain of , . saxony had succeeded in holding down the vote to , ; but in prussia the result was startling; in berlin forty per cent. of the voters were social democrats. with all their voting strength the party elected only eleven members to the reichstag. with proportional representation they would have elected forty. the bismarck conservatives returned forty-one members with fewer votes than the socialists. finally in came the end of this farce. it was also the end of the chancellorship of bismarck. his old emperor had died, and a young and daring hand was at the helm. bismarck proposed to embody the anti-socialist laws permanently in the penal code. this might have passed; but he also proposed to exile offenders, not merely from the territory under minor siege, but from the fatherland. this expatriation the assembly would not brook and the reichstag was prorogued. the socialists left parliament with eleven members, they returned with thirty-five; they left with , mandates, they returned with , , , more votes than any other party could claim, and on a proportional basis eighty-five seats would have been theirs. bebel was justified in saying in the reichstag, "the chancellor thought he had us, but we have him." when midnight sounded on the last day of the existence of the oppressive law, great throngs of workingmen gathered in the streets of the larger cities, to sing their marseillaise, cheer their victory, and wave their red flag. now they could breathe again. for the first time in thirteen years they met in national convention on german soil. the veteran liebknecht, recounting their hardships and sacrifices, raised his voice in jubilant phrase: "our opponents did not spare us, and we, too proud and too strong to prove cowardly, struck blow for blow, and so we have conquered the odious law."[ ] iv during the enforcement of the anti-socialist law bismarck began the second part of his policy. he would repress with one hand, with the other he would placate. in he introduced his sickness insurance bill, followed in - by his accident insurance, and in by his old-age pension act.[ ] it is not unnatural that these measures were opposed by the social democrats. they had no love for the chancellor. the dresden congress decided to "reject state socialism unconditionally so long as it is inaugurated by prince bismarck and is designed to support the government system." bismarck "had sown too much wind not to reap a whirlwind."[ ] he had planted hatred in the hearts of the workingmen; he could not hope to reap respect and affection. bismarck believed that socialism existed because the laboring man was not sufficiently interested in the state. he had no property, and was not enlightened enough to appreciate the intangible benefits of sovereignty. in german trade had reached a low ebb. agriculture had fallen into decay. german peasants and workingmen were emigrating to america by the tens of thousands. bismarck promulgated his industrial insurance, first, to placate the workingman; second, to restore prosperity to german industry. as a result of his policy germany is to-day the most "socialized" state in europe. here a workingman may begin life attended by a physician paid by the state; he is christened by a state clergyman; he is taught the rudiments of learning and his handicraft by the state. he begins work under the watchful eye of a state inspector, who sees that the safeguards to health and limb are strictly observed. he is drafted by the state into the army, and returns from the rigor of this discipline to his work. the state gives him license to marry, registers his place of residence, follows him from place to place, and registers the birth of his children. if he falls ill, his suffering is assuaged by the knowledge that his wife and children are cared for and that his expenses will be paid during illness; and he may spend his convalescent days in a luxurious state hospital. if he falls victim to an accident the dread of worklessness is removed by the ample insurance commanded by the state even if his injury permanently incapacitates him. if he should unfortunately become that most pitiful of all men, the man out of work, the state and the city will do all in their power to find employment for him. if he wanders from town to town in search of work the city has its shelter (herberge) to welcome him; if he wishes to move to another part of his town the municipal bureau will be glad to help him find a suitable house, or may even loan him money for building a house of his own. if he is in difficulty the city places a lawyer at his disposal. if he is in a dispute with his employer the government provides a court of arbitration. if he is sued or wishes to sue his employer, he does so in the workingmen's court (gewerbe gericht). if he wishes recreation, there is the city garden; if he wishes entertainment let him go to the public concert; if he wishes to improve his mind there are libraries and free lectures. and if by rare chance, through the grace of the state's strict sanitary regulations and by thrift and care, he reaches the age of seventy, he will find the closing days of his long life eased by a pension, small, very small, to be sure, but yet enough to make him more welcome to the relatives or friends who are charged with administering to his wants.[ ] footnotes: [ ] for a comprehensive description of the german government, see dawson, _germany and the germans_, vol. i. [ ] liebknecht said, in the breslau congress of the social-democratic party: "lassalle is the man in whom the modern organized german labor movement had its origin."--"sozial-demokratische partei-tag," _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] for sketch of lassalle and his work see kirkup, _history of socialism_, pp. et seq.; ely, _french and german socialism of modern times_, p. ; rae, _contemporary socialism_, pp. ff. for an extended account, see dawson, _german socialism and ferdinand lassalle_, london, . georg brandes, _ferdinand lassalle_, originally in danish, has been translated into german, , and into english, . also see franz mehring. _die deutsche sozial-demokratie: ihre geschichte und ihre lehre_; bernhard becker, _geschichte der arbeiter agitation ferdinand lassalles_, brunswick, : this volume contains a good detailed account of lassalle's work. [ ] published in zürich, : _macht und recht_. [ ] _macht und recht_, p. . [ ] letter dated april , . [ ] "Öffentliches antwort-schreiben an das zentral committee zur berufung eines allgemeinen deutschen arbeiter congress zu leipzig," first published in zurich, . [ ] in the reichstag, september , . [ ] when bernstein collected lassalle's works he wrote a sketch of the agitator's life as a preface. a number of years later, , he published his second sketch, _ferdinand lassalle and his significance to the working classes_, in which he shifted his position and assumed a lassallian tone. this change of mind is typical of the social democratic movement toward the lassallian idea. [ ] the law is reprinted in mehring, _die deutsche sozial-demokratie_. [ ] see dawson, _german socialism and ferdinand lassalle_, pp. ff., for a discussion of this law. [ ] a good description of the working of this law is found in dawson, _germany and the germans_, vol. ii, chap. xxxvii. [ ] december , . [ ] "at a large berlin meeting a speaker innocently used the word commune (parish), whereupon the police officer in control, thinking only of the paris commune, at once dismissed the assembly, and a thousand persons had to disperse into the streets disappointed and embittered.... 'militarism is a terrible mistake,' said a speaker at an election meeting, which legally should have been beyond police power, and at these words, further proceedings were forbidden and several persons were arrested. the socialist deputy bebel, in addressing some workingmen on economical questions, said that 'in the textile industry it happens that while the wife is working at the loom, the husband sits at home and cooks dinner,' and the meeting was dismissed immediately."--dawson, _germany and the germans_, vol. ii, pp. - . [ ] dawson, _supra cit._, p. . [ ] _protokoll des partei-tages_, , p. . [ ] reichstag debates, april , . [ ] _protokoll des partei-tages_, , pp. - . [ ] for discussion of german industrial insurance, see w.h. dawson, _bismarck and state socialism_, also j. ellis barker, _modern germany_. [ ] r. meyer, _der emancipations-kampf des vierten standes_, p. . [ ] see appendix for table showing cost of industrial insurance. in germany the state owns railways, canals, river transportation, harbors, telephones, telegraph, and parcels post. banks, insurance, savings banks, and pawnshops are conducted by the state. municipalities are landlords of vast estates, they are capitalists owning street cars, gas plants, electric light plants, theaters, markets, warehouses. they have hospitals for the sick, shelters for the homeless, soup-houses for the hungry, asylums for the weak and unfortunate, nurseries for the babies, homes for the aged, and cemeteries for the dead. chapter viii german social democracy and labor unions i before we proceed to describe the present organization of the social democratic party it will be necessary to say a few words about the organization of labor in germany.[ ] there are four kinds of labor unions: the social democrat or free unions, the hirsch-duncker or radical unions, the christian or roman catholic unions, and the independent unions. all except the last group have special political significance; and only the independents confine themselves purely to economic activity. the socialist unions are called "reds," the independents "yellow," the christians "black." the hirsch-duncker unions were the first in the field. they were organized in by dr. hirsch and herr franz duncker, for the purpose of winning the labor vote for the progressists. dr. hirsch went to england for his model, but the political bias he imparted to the unions was very un-english. they have grown less political and more neutral in every aspect, probably because political radicalism has dwindled, and because they contain a great many of the most skilled of german workmen, the machinists. they are a sort of aristocracy of labor, prefer peace to war, and hesitate long before striking. the christian unions are strongest in the rhine valley and the westphalian mining districts. they are the offspring of bishop kettler's workingmen's associations, organized to keep the laborer in harmony with the roman catholic church. they have undergone a great deal of change since the days of the distinguished bishop, and are now modeled after strict trade-union principles. they retain their connection with the church and the center party (the roman catholic group in the reichstag). for some years there has been a restlessness among these unions. the more militant members are protesting against the influence of the clergy in union affairs, and demand that laborers lead labor. the "yellow" unions stand in bad repute among the others. they are for peace at any price. their membership is largely composed of the engineering trades; and they are usually under contract not to strike, but settle their differences by arbitration. the employing firms contribute liberally to their union funds. by far the largest unions are the social democratic or "free" unions. they embrace over eighty per cent. of all organized labor. their growth has been very rapid during the last twenty years. in , when the socialist law was lifted, they numbered a little over , ; in they numbered nearly , , . as organizations, the social democratic unions possess all the perfection of detail and painstaking craftsmanship for which the germans are justly celebrated.[ ] not the minutest detail is omitted; everything is done to contribute to the solidarity of the working classes. the theory of the german labor movement is, that physical environment is the first desideratum. a well-housed, well-groomed, well-fed workman is a better fighter than a hungry, ragged man; and it is for fighting that the unions exist. the bed-rock of the german workingman's theory is the maxim: "first, be a good craftsman, and all other things will be added unto you." these unions strive to do everything within their power to make, first, a good workman; second, a comfortable workman. this naturally, without artificial stimulants, brings the solidarity, the class patriotism, which is the source of the zeal and energy of these great fighting machines. in all of the larger towns they own clubhouses (gewerkschaftshäuser), which are the centers of incessant activity. they contain assembly halls, restaurants, committee rooms, and lodgings for journeymen and apprentices (wander-bursche) seeking work. there are night classes, public lectures, educational excursions, and circulating libraries. in berlin the workingmen have organized a theater.[ ] the workingman has a genuine sympathy for his union. it enlists his loyalty as much as his country enlists his patriotism. he finds social and intellectual intercourse, sympathy and responsiveness in his union. he saves from his frugal wages to support the union and to swell the funds in its war-chest. he is never allowed to forget that he is first a workingman, and owes his primary duties to his family and his union.[ ] this vast and perfect organization of labor has a complete understanding with the social democratic party, but it is not an integral part of the party. when the unions began to revive, after the repeal of the anti-socialist law, there was a short and severe struggle between the party and the unions for control. the victory of the unions for complete autonomy was decisive. since then good feeling and harmony have prevailed. the governing committees of the two bodies meet for consultation, the powerful press of the party fights the union's battles, and often party headquarters are in the union's clubhouse. they are virtually two independent branches of the same movement. in the national triennial convention of the social democratic unions at hamburg, , a speaker said: "we can say with truth that to-day there are no differences of a fundamental nature between the two great branches [the social democratic unions and the social democratic party] of the labor movement."[ ] bebel has said of the relation between the unions and the party: "every workingman should belong to the union, and should be a party man; not merely as a laboring man, but as a class-conscious (classenbewustsein) laboring man; as a member of a governmental and a social organization which treats and maltreats him as a laboring man."[ ] this is the class spirit of socialism, carried into practical effect. in germany, then, the vast bulk of organized labor is co-operating voluntarily with the social democratic party. ii and what is the present organization of the social democratic party? it is the most perfect party machine in the world. it is organized with the most scrupulous regard for details and oiled with the exuberance of a class spirit that is emerging from its narrowness and is finding room for its expanding powers in the practical affairs of national and municipal life. the only approach to it is the faultless, silently moving, highly polished mechanism devised by the english gentry to control the political destinies of the british empire. our american parties are crude compared with the noiseless efficacy of the english machine, or the remorseless yet enthusiastic and entirely effective operation of the german social democracy. every detail of the workingman's life is embraced in this remarkable political organization. every village and commune has its party vigilance committee. a juvenile department brings up the youth in the principles of the social democracy. the party press includes seventy-six daily papers, some of them brilliantly edited, a humorous weekly, and several monthly magazines. this press co-operates with the trade journals. some of these--notably the masons' journal and the ironworkers' journal--have a vast circulation, numbering many hundred thousand subscribers. the party propaganda is stupendous. in over , meetings were held, and over , , circulars and , , brochures were distributed. every workingman, every voter, was personally solicited during the campaign just closed (january, ). committees and sub-committees were everywhere in this national beehive of workers. women and children were enlisted in the work. the national party is controlled by an executive committee, elected by the national convention, who govern its many activities with the gravity of a college faculty, the astuteness of a lawyer, and the frugality of a tradesman. they issue annual reports, as full of statistics and involved analyses as a government report. and they have no patience for party stars who are ambitious to move in the orbit of their own individual greatness. because the keynote of the party is solidarity, which is a synonym for discipline, "we have no factions, we are one. personally any social democrat may believe as he pleases and do as he pleases. but when it comes to political activity, we insist that he act with the party." these are the words in which one of the younger leaders of the party explained their unity to me. in , when the bavarian rebels were under discussion in the national congress, bebel told the delegates that "a fighting party such as our social democracy can only achieve its aims when every member observes the strictest discipline."[ ] evidences of party discipline are not lacking. the prussian temperament is rough, dogmatic, implacable; the south german is mellow, yielding, kind. the two temperaments often clash. the one loves individual action; the other, military unity. the southern socialist votes for his local budgets in town council and diet, and he receives the chastisement of the northern disciplinarian with mellow good-nature. but solidarity there is, whatever the price; and a class-consciousness, a brotherhood: they call each other "comrades."[ ] the membership of the party includes all those who pay party dues and will oblige themselves to party fealty, to do any drudgery demanded of them.[ ] in six parliamentary districts the membership equals thirty per cent. of the social democratic vote cast; in twenty-four other districts there is a membership of over , per district.[ ] it is difficult to say what proportion of the members of the union are members of the party. the vast bulk of the party members are laboring men, and no doubt the majority of them are members of the union. in the last imperial elections (january, ) this party cast , , votes, almost one-fourth of the entire federal electorate, and elected members to the reichstag, over one-fourth of the entire membership.[ ] in nineteen state legislatures the social democrats have members, in city councils , members, and in , communal councils , members.[ ] the supreme authority of the party is the annual national convention, called "congress." here detailed reports are made by the various committees; and the parliamentary delegation make an elaborate statement, detailing every official act of the group in the reichstag. everything is discussed by everybody; the speeches made by the members in the reichstag, the opinions of the party editors in their daily editorials, the party finances, everything is freely criticised. the most insignificant member has the same privilege of criticism as the party czars; and the criticism often becomes naïvely personal. no doubt the party patriotism is largely fed by this frank, fearless, aboveboard airing of grievances, this freedom from "boss rule." every one has his opportunity, and this robs the plotter and backbiter of his venom. having listened to the faultfinder, they vote; and having voted, they rarely relent. when a decision is reached, the members are expected to abide by it faithfully and cheerfully. they make short work of traitors.[ ] every year a detailed report on the imperial budget is read, showing how the money is spent on armaments, on police, on courts, and every other department of the empire; and how the money is raised. the convention resolves itself into a school of public finance. this analysis is sent broadcast, as a campaign document. so yearly a report is read of the number of arrests made and the fines and penalties ensuing, on account of _lèse-majesté_ and other laws infringing upon the liberty of the press and of speech. also, every year the central committee report, in great detail, every party activity in every corner of the empire. a well-knit hegemony of party interest is created. the mass is willing to listen to the individual, to bend to the needs of the smallest commune. throughout their frank discussions and involved debates there runs a certain polysyllabic flavor that is characteristically german. they often choose, a year in advance, some important national question, such as the tariff, mining laws, the agrarian situation, and discuss it in great detail, more like an academy of universal knowledge than a political party. the learned blend their involved phraseology and store of facts with the refreshing frankness and ignorance of the unlearned. iii we will now return to the present activities of this party that was born in revolution and nurtured by persecution. in order to understand this activity, it is necessary to review the present attitude of the government toward democracy and socialism. the repeal of the anti-socialist law could not suddenly alter the spirit of opposition. it merely changed the outward aspect of the opposition. the government indicates in many ways its distrust of social democrats. no member of the party has ever been invited by the government to a place of public honor and responsibility. indeed, to be a social democrat effectively closes the door against promotion in civil life.[ ] this silent hostility is not confined to political offices and the civil service; it extends into the professions. judges and public physicians, pastors in the state church, teachers in the public schools, professors in the great universities are included in the ban. a pastor may be a "christian socialist," a professor may nourish his "socialism of the chair," and a judge or a government engineer may be inclined toward far-reaching social experiment. but with social democracy they must have absolutely nothing to do.[ ] the government's attitude is based on the theory that the social democrats are enemies of the monarchy, and are designing to overthrow it and declare a republic the moment they get into power. the kaiser, on several public occasions, has expressed his distrust and disapproval for this vast multitude of his subjects. a number of years ago he is reported to have said that "the social democrats are a band of persons who are unworthy of their fatherland" ("eine bande von menschen die ihres vaterlands nicht würdig sind"). and more recently: "the social democrats are a crowd of upstarts without a fatherland" ("vaterlandslose gesellen"). the kaiser joined in the public rejoicing over the check that had apparently been administered to the growth of the social democracy by the elections of , and in a speech delivered to a throng of citizens gathered for jubilation in the palace yard in berlin, he said that the "socialists have been ridden down" ("niedergeritten"), a military figure of speech. retaliation is not unnatural. the pictures of the hohenzollerns and the high functionaries of state and army do not adorn the walls of the homes of the social democrats. there are seen the portraits of marx and lassalle, liebknecht and bebel. the members of the party never join in a public display of confidence in the government. they exercise a petty tyranny over their neighbors. instances are told of shopkeepers who were compelled to yield to the boycott instituted against them because they voted against the social democrats, and of workmen coerced into joining the union. this feeling of bitterness is most clearly marked in prussia. in southern germany a feeling of good will and co-operation is becoming more marked every year. the king of bavaria is not afraid to shake hands with von vollmar. some years ago a bavarian railway employee was elected to the diet on the social democratic ticket, and his employer, the state, gave him leave of absence to attend to his legislative duties. in baden the leader of the social democratic party called at the palace to present the felicitations of his comrades to the royal family on the occasion of the birth of an heir. the principal immediate issue of the social democrats in germany is electoral reform. none of the states or provinces are on a genuinely democratic electoral basis. in saxony a new electoral law was passed in which typifies the spirit of the entire country.[ ] the electorate is divided into four classes according to their income. the result of the first election under this law in the city of leipsic was as follows: there were , votes cast by , voters. , voters in the one-vote class cast , votes , " " " two- " " " , " , " " " three- " " " , " , " " " four- " " " , " there are ninety-one members in the saxon diet. the law provided that only forty-three of these should be elected from the cities. the three leading cities of saxony, chemnitz, dresden, leipsic, are strongholds of social democracy, while the country districts are conservative. the social democrats feel that the property qualifications and the distribution of the districts impose an unfair handicap against them. in spite of these obstacles they elected so many deputies that they were offered the vice-presidency of the chamber of deputies. the offer, however, was conditioned upon their attending the annual reception given by the king to the representatives. they had hitherto refused to attend these royal functions and were not willing to surrender for the sake of office.[ ] the ancient free cities--hamburg, bremen, lübeck--have election laws as ancient and antiquated as their charters. in lübeck a large majority of the legislative body is elected by electors having an income of over , marks a year. in hamburg the nobles, higher officials, etc., elect representatives, the householders elect , the large landholders elect , those citizens having an income of over , marks a year elect , those who have an income from , to , marks a year elect , those who have an income of less than , marks have no vote. in bremen the various groups or kinds of property are represented in the law-making body. property, not the person, is represented. prussia is the special grievance of the social democrats. here the three-class system of voting prevails. the taxpayers are divided into three classes, according to the amount of taxes paid, each class paying one-third of the taxes. each class chooses one-third of the electors who name the members of the prussian diet. by this arrangement the large property class virtually controls the elections.[ ] by this system the social democratic representation is held down to in a membership of . in the party polled - / per cent. of the entire prussian vote. here again the districts are so arranged that the majority of the members are elected from the conservative rural districts, while the cities, which are strongholds of social democracy, must content themselves with a minority, although nearly per cent. of the population of prussia is urban. these examples are sufficient to indicate the general nature of franchise legislation in germany.[ ] for the past several years universal suffrage demonstrations have been held throughout the empire. the general strike has not been used as a method of political coercion. it is doubtful whether the german temperament is adapted to that kind of warfare. mass-meetings, however, and street demonstrations are the favorite means of the propaganda. sometimes there are conflicts with the police, but these are diminishing in number every year. the government has not diminished its vigilance, and its jealous eyes are never averted from these demonstrations.[ ] an incident occurred in march, , which illustrates the temper of the people and the government. a gigantic demonstration was announced, to be held in treptow park, berlin. the police-president forbade the meeting and had every street leading to the park carefully guarded. one hundred and fifty thousand demonstrants met in the thiergarten, in the very heart of the city, and so secretly had the word been given, so quietly was it executed, and so orderly was this vast throng of workingman, that the police knew nothing of it until the meeting was well under way. permission for the treptow meeting was not again refused. the immediate issue, then, of the german social democracy is universal suffrage. lassalle's cry is more piercing to-day than when that brilliant and erratic agitator uttered it: "democracy, the universal ballot, is the laboring man's hope." the name of the party is significant. the accent has shifted from the first to the second part of the compound--from the marxian to the lassallian word. the german social democrats have never had a millerand or a briand or a john burns; their participation in imperial and provincial affairs has been strictly limited to parliamentary criticism. even in local government, in the communes and cities, they have been allowed only a small share in actual constructive work. but in spite of these facts the party has undergone a most remarkable change of creed and tone. iv we will concern ourselves only with the most significant changes. these follow two general lines: ( ) the attitude of the party towards legislation and practical parliamentary participation; ( ) the internal changes in the party. we will follow these changes through the official reports of the annual party conventions. first we will briefly see what change has taken place in their attitude toward parliamentary activity. the social democrats began as revolutionists and violent anti-parliamentarians. they entered parliament, not to make laws, but to make trouble. in they changed their name from the socialist labor party to the social democratic party; and when some of the older members thought that this was a compromise with their enemies, one of the leaders replied that "a socialist party must _eo ipse_ be a democratic party."[ ] in liebknecht said: "formerly we had an entirely different tactic. tactics and principles are two different things. in in a speech in berlin i condemned parliamentary activity. that was then. political conditions were entirely different."[ ] gradually tactics and principles have coalesced until their line of cleavage is obscured. the earlier reports of the parliamentary delegation are tinged with apology--they are in parliament as protestors, as propagandists, not as legislators. they seem to say: "fellow-partisans, excuse us for being in the reichstag. we don't believe in the bourgeois law-making devices. but since we are here, we purpose to do what we can for the cause. we will not betray you, nor the glorious socialistic state of society that we are all working for." from the first, social democrats have voted against the imperial budget, have opposed all tariffs, indirect taxes, extension of the police power, increase in naval and military expenditure, and colonial exploitation. they took no part at first in law-making, held themselves disdainfully aloof from practical parliamentary efforts, and especially avoided every appearance of coalition with other parties. but gradually a change came over them. in they nominated one of their number for secretary of the reichstag.[ ] gingerly they dipped their fingers into the pottage of reality. soon they began to introduce bills. in they proposed a measure that increased the allowance of the private soldier. their bill became a law. in the next national convention, when they were called to task for their worldliness, they excused themselves by saying that ninety per cent. of the private soldiers were proletarians and their parents were too poor to supply them with the money necessary for army sundries, and the allowance of the state had been inadequate. this was therefore a law that actually benefited the poor. in and they were compelled to face the practical question of an inheritance tax. the delegation supported the measure, after prolonged deliberation over what action to take. this action precipitated a heated discussion in the party congress; the veterans feared the party was surrendering its principles. they were assured by bebel that the vote was orthodox.[ ] in the party instructed its delegation to introduce bills for redistricting the empire for reichstag elections; to reduce the legislative period from five to three years; to revise the laws relating to sailors and provide for better inspection of ships and shipping. these instructions mark a revolution in german social democracy, a change that can best be illustrated by the shift in its attitude on state insurance. in the party resolved: "so-called state socialism, in so far as it concerns itself with bettering the conditions of the working people, is a system of half-reforms whose origin is in the fear of social democracy. it aims, through all kinds of palliatives and little concessions, to estrange the working people from social democracy and to cripple the party. "the social democracy have never disdained to ask for such governmental regulations, or, if proposed by the opposition, to approve of those measures which could better the conditions of labor under the present industrial system. but social democrats view such regulations as only little payments on account, which in nowise confuse the social democracy in its striving for a new organization of society."[ ] they are now not above collecting even small sums on account. in their convention declares that state insurance is "the object of constant agitation. for what we have thus far secured by no means approaches what the laborer demands."[ ] the committee on parliamentary action reported, a few years ago, that "no opportunity was lost for entering the lists in behalf of political and cultural progress. in the discussion of all bills and other business matters, the members of the delegation took an active part in committee as well as in _plenum_."[ ] there is no longer half-abashed juvenile reluctance at legislative participation. the reports boast of the work done by the party in behalf of the workingman, the peasant, small tradesman, small farmer, and humbler government employees. eleven bills were introduced by the delegation in - , relating to factory and mine inspection, amending the state insurance laws, the tariff laws, the redistricting of the empire for reichstag elections--i.e., all pertaining to labor, politics, and finance. twenty resolutions were moved by the delegation, and many interpellations called. interpellation, however, is not very satisfactory in a government where the ministry is not responsible to parliament. in the social democrats introduced a bill to make the chancellor and his cabinet responsible to the reichstag. ledebour, who made the leading speech for the social democrats, gave a clear exposition of his party's contention. he wanted a government "wherein the people, in the final analysis, decided the fate of the government. for, in such a government, only those men come into power who represent a program, represent conviction and character; not any one who has succeeded, for the moment, in pleasing the fancy and becoming the favorite of the determining kamarilla." if the election should turn on this issue, "whether there shall be a perpetuation of the sham-constitutional, junker bureaucracy, or the establishing of a democratic parliamentary authority," the parliamentary party would win. "the will of the people should be the highest law."[ ] in january, , this party of isolation entered the reichstag as the strongest group: members acknowledge the leadership of bebel. by co-operating with the radicals and national liberals, the progressive elements had a majority over the conservative and clerical reactionaries for the first time in the history of the empire. here bebel consented to become a candidate for president of the chamber. he received votes; the candidate of the conservatives, dr. spahn, leader of the clerical center, received . enough national liberals had wavered to throw the balance in favor of conservatism. a socialist was elected first vice-president, and a national liberal second vice-president. the president-elect refused to act with a socialist vice-president and resigned. the radical member from berlin, herr kaempf, was then elected president.[ ] thereupon the national liberal second vice-president also resigned, and a radical was chosen in his stead. the social democrats and the radicals were made responsible for the leadership of the new reichstag. it is customary for the president and the vice-president of the chamber to announce to the kaiser when the reichstag is organized and ready for business. the kaiser let it be known that he did not care to receive the radical officers. the socialist first vice-president refused to join in the proposed official visit. the prussian temper is slow to change. these illustrations clearly indicate the trend of social democratic legislative and political policy. it is the universal story--ambition brings power, power brings responsibility, responsibility sobers the senses. v the second development that we are to trace relates to the program, or platform, of the party. the official program has not undergone any change, but the interpretation, the spirit, has mellowed. the erfurter program of is still their party pledge. the program is in two parts; the first an elaborate exposition of marxian economics, the second a series of practical demands differing only slightly from the gotha program. only one speech was made in the national convention on the adoption of this bifurcated platform, that attempted to link marxian theory to lassallian realism. this speech was made by liebknecht, friend of marx, who elaborately explained his friend's theory of value, doctrine of class war and social evolution. the program was adopted _en bloc_. the chairman ignored a few protesting "noes" when the vote was called, and declared it unanimously adopted. these few voices of protest soon swelled to considerable volume. within one year after the repeal of the socialist law the party had entered upon the difficult task of being both critic and parliamentarian, constructive and destructive, under rigid military discipline. to the few protesters at erfurt, it seemed as though the party had entered the lifeboat, manned the oars, and neglected to untie the painter. when the elections of recorded a severe setback for the party the progressives were told to keep the eyes of faith on the "ultimate goal" of socialism. one of the réformistes replied: "the whole idea of an ultimate goal is distasteful to me. there is no ultimate goal; for beyond your ultimate goal is another world of striving."[ ] and another critic said: "nothing wears threadbare so rapidly by constant use as words of faith. constantly spoken or heard, they become stereotyped into phrases, and the inspired prophet creates the same offensive impression as a priest who has nothing else to offer but words." the interest of the workingman "finds its expression in the practicalness of the second part of the erfurter program, and the wholly practical work of the party."[ ] it was at this time that edward bernstein, friend and literary heir of engel, published a series of critical papers in the party journal, _die neue zeit_, attacking especially the catastrophic and revolutionary postulates and saying "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing." kautsky, the dogmatist of the party, replied to these articles and a feverish discussion followed in all the party press.[ ] in the party conventions of and this controversy was waged with considerable energy. von vollmar made merry over kautsky's "inquisition" and called the debate "a noisy cackling over nothing." the mass of the party, he said, did not trouble their heads about theories, but plodded along unmindful of hairsplitting.[ ] bebel made a herculean effort to reconcile both elements. to the revisionists he said, "we are in a constant state of intellectual moulting,"[ ] to the orthodox he said, "we remain what we have always been."[ ] it was at dresden, , that the revisionist tempest reached its height in the party teapot. the germans' love for polysyllabic phrase-making, for which jaurès taunted them at the amsterdam congress, was here given full play. von vollmar repeated that nobody except a few dull theorists read kautsky's or bernstein's views; the mass of voters cared for practical results, and "revisionists and anti-revisionists are nothing but a bugbear."[ ] here the matter rested until the elections of opened the eyes of the party high priests. they gained only , votes and lost one-half of their seats in the reichstag. a number of the leading socialists promptly began to attack the dogmas of the party program as illusions and pitfalls. the class war, the revolutionary method, the theory of an ever-increasing proletariat and decreasing bourgeoisie were attacked as unscientific, and illusory. "the erfurt program recites a vagary, it repels the intellect, it must be changed;" that was the opinion of the advanced thinkers of the party. no party congresses, no priestly pronunciamentos have been able to check the spread of revolt. as long as kautsky and bebel live the program will probably not be re-phrased. but even kautsky is mellowing under the ripeness of years and circumstances; and bebel, shrewd politician, knows the campaigning value of appearing at the same time orthodox and progressive.[ ] to-day one hears very little of marx and a great deal of legislation. the last election, with its brilliant victory for social democracy, was not won on the general issues of the erfurter program but on the particular issue of the arrogance of the bureaucracy, and ballot reform. a large mass of voters cast their ballots for social democratic candidates as a protest against existing governmental conditions, not as an affirmation of their assent to the marxian dogmas. the truth is, marx is a tradition, democracy is an issue.[ ] another indication of the notable changes that have come over social democracy is seen in the socialists' relation to other parties. here their dogmatic aloofness is the most tenacious. during the years of their bitter persecution by the government they found their excuse in an isolation that was forced upon them. von vollmar told his colleagues, immediately after the repeal of the anti-socialist law, that the south germans were ready to co-operate with every one who would be willing to give them an inch. in reply to this bebel introduced a resolution affirming that "the primary necessity of attaining political power" could not be "the work of a moment," but was attained only by gradual growth. during the period of growth the social democrats should not work for mere "concessions from the ruling classes," but "have only the ultimate and complete aim of the party in mind." the bebelian theory linked the ultimate goal with ultimate power, both to be attained by waiting until the flood tide. this question became practical when the social democratic members of the provincial legislatures voted with other parties for the state budget. the national party claimed authority over the local party, a claim which was resented by the bavarians and other south german delegations.[ ] in the south germans were chastised by a vote of to for voting for their state budget. they were rebuked again in and in . in the latter year bebel told them "three times is enough," indicating that there would be a split in the party if they insisted on voting for their local budgets. the south germans defended their action by saying that they had always agitated for more pay for state employees, and that they were willing to vote the funds that would make this possible. a new champion appeared for the réformistes--dr. frank of mannheim, a brilliant speaker who is called by his following a "second lassalle." he made a withering attack on the marxian school, but bebel's censure was carried by to . finally at magdeburg, , the budget question reached its climax. bebel boasted that his policy of negation had wrought great changes in germany. "i say it without boasting, in the whole world there is no social democracy that has accomplished as much positive good as the german social democracy."[ ] he claimed the insurance laws, factory laws, and the repeal of special and oppressive legislation as the fruits of his policy. bebel then warned the badensians that this is the last time they will be forgiven; one other offense, and they will be put out of the party. dr. frank made an elaborate reply. he said that there was a working agreement between the social democrats and liberals whereby they co-operated against the conservatives. in the state legislature they had a "bloc" with the liberals and had elected a vice-president and secretary and important chairmanships by means of this coalition. they had, moreover, reformed the public school system, secured factory legislation, and had secured direct elections in all towns of , or over. the réformistes' principles are so clearly stated in this speech that i quote several paragraphs: "i tell you, comrades, if you think that under all the circumstances you can win only small concessions; with such a message of hopelessness you will not conquer the world, not even the smallest election district. [_great commotion and disturbance._] but what would be the meaning of this admission that small concessions can be secured? in tearing down a building dramatic effects are possible. but the erection of a building is accomplished only by an accumulation of small concessions. behold the labor unions, that are so often spoken of, how they struggle for months, how they suffer hunger for months, in order to win a concession of a few pennies. often one can see that a small concession contains enormous future possibilities, and in twenty or thirty years will become a vital force in the shaping of the society that is to come." "nor will i examine the question whether in parliamentary activity only small concessions can be won. is it not possible, through parliamentary action, to take high tariffs and business speculations from the necks of the workingmen? is it not possible to modify police administration, and the legislative conditions that profane prussia to-day? are these conditions necessary concomitants of the modern class-state (klassenstaat)? is it not possible to create out of prussia and germany a modern state, where our workingmen, even as their brethren in western europe, can fight their great battles upon the field of democratic equality and citizenship? if you wish to view all that as 'small concessions' you are at liberty to do so. i view it as a tremendous revolution, if it succeeds, to secure, through such a struggle, liberty for the prussian working class."[ ] the censure was carried, the baden delegation left the hall during the voting. on the following day it returned to declare its loyalty to the party, but with the proviso that they would by no means promise how they would vote on their state budget in the future. events are shaping themselves rapidly in germany. ministerial responsibility cannot much longer be denied. the elections of should serve as a plain portent to the reactionaries. that bebel is willing to be a candidate for president of the reichstag is a significant concession; that the radicals and many national liberals are willing to vote for him, would have been deemed impossible ten years ago. such conditions as prevail between the government and the radicals and social democrats cannot long continue. the break with the past must come, sooner or later. the pressure of radical and democratic votes will become so powerful, that not even the strong traditions of the empire can wholly withstand it. in may, , i visited the reichstag on an eventful occasion. the social democrats had voted with the government for a new constitution for alsace-lorraine containing universal manhood suffrage. herr bebel was jubilant. he said: "it marks a new epoch. we have voted with the government. not that we have capitulated. but the government have come to our convictions, they have granted universal suffrage to alsace, now they cannot long deny that right to prussia and the other states."[ ] we have now seen that politically a great change has come over the german socialists; that they are participating in legislation, and are especially solicitous about all acts that pertain to labor and political liberty; that they are gradually moving toward co-operation with other parties; that they are gradually sloughing off the inflexible marxian armor, and are assuming the pliable dress of modernism. all this is to be expected of a party that began as a vigorous, narrow, autocratic party of revolution and protest, and is emerging from its hard experiences, a self-styled "cultural party" ("kultur partei"). dr. südekum, editor of communal praxis, in his report of the parliamentary group, in , wrote: "we have in the reichstag two kinds of duties; first, the propaganda of our ideas and program; second, practical work, i.e., to enhance, not alone the interests of the working class, but the entire complex, so-called cultural interests. the problems that the social democratic party as a 'cultural party' has to solve, which are assigned to it as the representative of cultural progress in every realm of human activity, must increase in the same proportion that the bourgeois parties allow themselves to be captured by the government and neglect these problems."[ ] it is a far cry from "class war" to "human cultural activities." such an expansion of purpose requires a greatly enlarged electorate. the majority of the workingmen are already in the party, where will the increase come from? there are two directions in which the party can hope to gain new recruits--the small farmer and the small tradesman. the small farmer is peculiarly hard to reach. he is well guarded--the church on the one side, the landlord and _junker_ on the other. to step in and steal his heart is a very difficult task. the work is pushed steadily, with tenacity, but results are slow in coming. among the tradespeople and business men, there is more rapid progress, especially in southern germany. in munich a great many tradespeople vote for von vollmar.[ ] primarily it will always be a workingman's party. its soul is the labor movement. its political aim is democracy, and its hope is the power of sheer preponderance of numbers. what it will do when it has that power is a speculation that does not lure the prosaic teutonic mind. "we will find plenty to do," one of them said, "when we have the government. we have plenty to do now, that we haven't the government." this is wisdom learned of france. this means that the party have given up their "splendid isolation"--what von vollmar called their "policy of sterility and despair"[ ]--a policy which they acknowledged by words long after they had abandoned it in fact. they abandoned it the moment they championed labor legislation, and sought the sanitation of cities and the opening of parks, in their municipal councils. the pressure of things as they are has been too powerful for even the german social democracy, with its dogmatic temper and strength of millions. revolution has, even here, been replaced by a slow and orderly development. the rapidity with which the medieval empire will be democratized will depend upon the formation of a genuine liberal party that will enlist those citizens who are inclined toward modernism but cannot be enticed into the social democratic or radical parties. when such a party is formed, and an alliance made with the social democrats, then the transformations will be rapid.[ ] among the most significant accessions to the social democracy are many professional men: lawyers, physicians, engineers, etc. this augurs a change in party spirit and method. dr. frank of mannheim told me that he considered the extent to which the party could lure the intellectual element the measure of the party greatness and power. vi a word should be added upon the attitude of the social democrats toward militarism. the standing army and the increasing navy of germany are a heavy tax upon the people. the germans for centuries have been military in ambition, soldiers by instinct. the social democrats, in common with all socialists, are opposed to war. but the german is a patriot. in the international congress at stuttgart, the french and russian delegations imposed an extreme anti-military resolution upon the socialists, against the protest of the germans. bebel called their anti-patriotic utterances "silly word-juggling."[ ] the berlin congress, , adopted the following resolution, in view of the added military burdens proposed by the reichstag: "the prevailing military system, not being able to guarantee the country against foreign invasion, is a continual threat to international peace and serves the capitalistic class-government, whose aim is the industrial exploitation and suppression of the working classes, as an instrument of oppression against the masses. "the party convention therefore demands, in consonance with the program of the social democratic platform, the establishment of a system of defense based upon a general militia, trained and armed. the congress declares that the social democratic members of the reichstag are in complete accord with the party and with the politically organized working classes of germany, when they vote against every measure of the government aimed at perpetuating the present military system."[ ] during a debate in the reichstag in , bebel declared, in the defense of the fatherland, _if it were invaded_, even he in his old age would "shoulder a musket." he demanded military drill for youths as a preliminary to the shortening of military service in the standing army; if this were not done the defense of the country would be weakened whenever the service shall be reduced to one year. the chancellor had on this occasion introduced a bill making all military service uniformly two years, and abolishing the privileges that had been granted to a few favored classes. for this action they were severely criticised in the next party convention. bebel replied: "i said, _if the fatherland really must be defended_, then we will defend it. because it is our fatherland. it is the land in which we live, whose language we speak, whose culture we possess. because we wish to make this, our fatherland, more beautiful and more complete than any other land on earth. we defend it, therefore, not for you but against you."[ ] this patriotic declamation was received with "tremendous applause." von vollmar, himself a soldier of distinction, said, in the bavarian diet, a few years ago: "if the necessity should arise for the protection of the realm against foreign invasion, then it will become evident that the social democrats love their fatherland no less than do their neighbors; that they will as gladly and heroically offer themselves to its defense. on the other hand, if the foolish notion should ever arise to use the army for the support of a warring class prerogative, for the defense of indefeasible demands, and for the crushing of those just ambitions which are the product of our times, and a necessary concomitant of our economic and political development,--then we are of the firm conviction that the day will come when the army will remember that it sprang from the people, and that its own interests are those of the masses." this makes their position very clear. vii the party that for years held itself in disdainful aloofness, was so defiant of co-operation, in the national parliament, is ductile, neighborly, and eager to help in the municipal and communal councils. it has a communal program of practical details, and no small part of the splendid progress in municipal administration in germany is due to the social democrats. everywhere you hear praise from officials and from political rivals for the careful work of the social democratic members of municipal bodies. owing to the unfavorable election laws, the social democrats do not elect a large number of members to local councils. in no important city do they preponderate. if universal manhood suffrage were enacted, they would control the majority of the local legislative bodies. as it is, they are an active minority, and guard jealously the interests of the working classes. munich may be taken as the type of city in which the social democrats are active.[ ] in there were , qualified electors for the reichstag election in munich, in there were only , qualified electors for the municipal elections. this shows the restrictive influence of property qualifications for local elections. in a city council of members, the social democrats elected only . and of elected members of the chamber of magistrates they elected only . this minority is an active committee of scrutiny. it carefully and minutely scrutinizes all the acts of the municipal authorities, especially pertaining to labor, to contracts for public work, and to the conditions of city employees. they vote consistently in favor of the enlargement of municipal powers; e.g., the extension of parks, of street-car lines, the building of larger markets. for a number of years the social democrats of munich have urged the utilizing of the water power of the isar, which rushes through the city. and the municipality is now utilizing some of this power. the social democrats also favor every facility for the extension of the art and culture for which munich is justly celebrated. they take no narrow, provincial views of such questions, and set an example that might with profit be followed by parties who claim for themselves the prerogative of culture. they are constantly working for better public educational facilities, and are especially hostile to the encroachments of the church upon the domain of public education. they are in favor of increased public expenditures; opposed to all indirect taxes, especially those that tend to raise the price of food. their special grievance is the property qualification required for voting. they say that a law which allows only one-fifteenth of the citizens ( , out of over , ) a right to vote is "shameful," and they are bending every effort to change the law. what is true in munich is true in other cities: democratic election laws are denied them. but they are active everywhere, and do not despise the doing of small details, doing them well and with zest. it is obvious that socialism in germany cannot be put to a constructive test until the election laws are democratized and the higher administrative offices are opened to them. that will bring the real test of this colossal movement. * * * * * we may sum it all up by saying that social democracy in germany is first of all a struggle for democracy. the accent is on the second part of the compound. it is, secondly, a struggle for the self-betterment of the working classes; and it is, thirdly, a protest against certain conditions that the present organization of society imposes upon mankind. an american sojourning among the german people must be impressed with the painstaking organization of the empire. every detail of life is carefully ordered to avoid waste and to secure efficiency, even at the cost of individual initiative. this military empire, of infinite discipline, is now undergoing a political metamorphosis. the force that is bringing about the change is being generated at the bottom of the social strata, not at the top. this signifies that a change is sure to come. footnotes: [ ] see meyer, _emancipations-kampf des vierten standes_, chap. v; also j. schmoele, _die sozial-demokratische gewerkschaften in deutschland, seit dem erlasse des sozialistischen gesetzes_, jena, , et seq. [ ] the following table compiled from _statistisches jahrbuch_ shows their growth in recent years: year members , , , , , , , , , , , , , , in their income was , , marks, their expenditure , , marks. see appendix, p. , for membership of all the unions. [ ] when i visited the berlin _gewerkschaftshaus_, a model three-room dwelling--living room, kitchen, and bedroom--had been furnished and decorated in simple, durable, and artistic fashion. this exhibit was thronged with workingmen, their wives and daughters. some years ago it was discovered that the youth of the working people were reading cheap and unworthy literature. the central committee of the unions now issues cheap editions of the choicest literature for children and young people. these two incidents show the vigilance of the unions, in looking after all the wants of their people. [ ] the number of strikes in recent years are given as follows: , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , .--from _statistisches jahrbuch für das deutsche reich_. [ ] _protokoll: sozial-demokratische partei-tag_, , p. . [ ] see bebel, _gewerksbewegung und politische parteien_: preface. [ ] see _protokoll des partei-tages_, , pp. - . [ ] "_genossen_": the word really means "brethren." [ ] party membership has grown as follows: , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , ; , , . [ ] _bericht des partei-vorstandes_, - . [ ] see appendix, p. , for complete election returns. [ ] _bericht des partei-vorstandes_, - . [ ] in - the "berliner opposition" threatened a revolt. they were given every opportunity of explaining their grievances, were told what to do, and, disobeying, were promptly shown the door. [ ] "it has been truthfully said that in germany a social democrat cannot even become a night-watchman."--prof. bernhard harms (university of kiel), _ferdinand lassalle und seine bedeutung für die sozial-demokratie_, , p. . [ ] "do you enjoy freedom from political interference?" i asked a high official in the civil service. "absolutely. we think as we please, talk as we please, and do as we please. but we must let the social democrats alone." [ ] see appendix, p. , for synopsis of this law. [ ] the vote for the saxon legislature at this time was as follows: party voters votes social democrats , , conservatives , , national liberal , , independents (freisinnige) , , anti-semites , , the social democrats included over one-half of the voters, cast about one-third of the votes, and elected only one-fourth of the members. [ ] some curious instances of inequality appear in the cities. in berlin in one precinct one man paid one-third of the taxes and consequently possessed one-third of the legislative influence in that precinct. in another precinct the president of a large bank paid one-third of the taxes, and two of his associates paid another third. these three men named the member of the diet from that precinct. [ ] for the struggle for ballot reform in bavaria, see _der kampf um die wahlreform in bayern_, issued in by the bavarian social democratic party executive committee. [ ] february , , was set aside as a day for suffrage demonstration throughout the empire. in berlin alone forty-two meetings were announced. these provoked the following edict: "notice! the 'right to the streets' is hereby proclaimed. the streets serve primarily for traffic. resistance to state authority will be met by the force of arms. i warn the curious. berlin, february , . police-president, von iagow." the social democratic papers called attention to the fact that these notices were printed on the same forms that the police-president often used to announce that the streets would be closed to all traffic on account of military parades. [ ] _protokoll_, , pp. - . [ ] _protokoll_, , pp. - . [ ] there are eight secretaries elected. they are distributed, by custom, among the parties, according to their voting strength. the social democrats had always refrained from taking part in any of the elections; now they enter the lists, abstaining from voting for any candidate except their own--who, in turn, received no other votes. [ ] bebel was not present in the reichstag at the time this vote was taken, but he told the convention that, had he been present, he should have supported the tax bill. _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] reichstag debates, december , . [ ] in the election of january, , the social democrats carried every district in berlin excepting the one in which the kaiser's palace is situated. here a spirited contest took place. a second ballot was made necessary between the radicals and social democrats, and the conservatives, throwing all their forces on to the radical side, succeeded in keeping this last stronghold from their enemies. but herr kaempf's majority was only votes. [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] _supra cit._, p. . [ ] this controversy is known as the "revisionist movement." the revisionists' position is set forth in bernstein's book, _die voraussetzung des sozialismus und die aufgaben der sozial-demokratie_. the marxian position is set forth in kautsky's reply, _bernstein und die sozial-demokratie_. an english edition of bernstein's book has been published in the labor party series in london. [ ] _protokoll_, . [ ] _supra cit._, p. . [ ] _supra cit._, p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , pp. - . [ ] in the congress of bebel tried to dispel the gloom by a long and optimistic speech in which he declared that their success was not to be measured by the number of seats they won, but by the number of voters. he closed by saying, "we are the coming ones, ours is the future in spite of all things and everything."--_protokoll_, , p. . [ ] one of the veteran party leaders answered my question as to the present-day influence of marx as follows: "the bulk of our party have never read marx. it takes a well-trained mind to understand him. conditions have entirely changed since his day, and we are busy with questions of which marx never dreamed and of which he could not foretell. he laid the philosophical basis for our party, but our party is practical, not philosophical." [ ] in bebel proposed the necessity of a working coalition with other parties in prussia to gain electoral reform. he said: "we cannot stand alone. we must attempt to go hand in hand with certain elements in the bourgeois parties--without, however, endangering our identity." but the party was not willing to go as far as the veteran, and a resolution was adopted limiting such co-operation strictly to prussia and giving the central committee full power to veto the acts any electoral district might take in this direction. [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] in november, , berlin's new city hall was dedicated. the members of the city council were invited to be present. the social democrats cast a large majority of all the votes in berlin. but the social democrats refused to attend the ceremonies. the program, as published, called for a "hoch!" to the kaiser, and the social democrats never joined in public approval of the government. _vorwärts_, the leading social democratic daily, said that social democrats have nothing to do with such a display of "byzantinism." "if any one thought it necessary to shout 'hoch!' he could shout 'hoch!' to the working population of berlin." [ ] _protokoll_, , pp. - . [ ] amongst the business people of mannheim, munich, and other cities in baden, bavaria, and hesse, there are many who support the social democratic candidates, because, they say, there is no genuinely liberal party. it should, however, be borne in mind that the social democrats of these southern districts are liberal and progressive, not the unbending, orthodox variety of prussia. [ ] von vollmar, _Über die aufgaben der deutschen social-demokratie_. [ ] the _hansa bund_ (hanseatic league), organized a few years ago, may be the nucleus of such a party. it is composed of smaller manufacturers and business men opposed to tariffs and the trusts, and in favor of a more liberal government. [ ] _protokoll_, social democratic party, , p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] _protokoll_, , p. . [ ] see _die sozial-demokratie im münchener rathaus_, issued by the bavarian party executive committee, . also _die sozial-demokratie im bayerischen landtag, - _, vols., issued by the party press in munich; and e. auer, _arbeiterpolitik im bayerischen landtag_. chapter ix the english labor party i we come now to the land of the industrial revolution--that colossal upheaval which changed the face of society, as the vast continental uplifts of past geological epochs changed the face of the earth. and just as the continents were centuries in settling themselves to their new conditions, so human society is now slowly adjusting itself to the conditions wrought by this violent change. one of the evidences of this gradual readjustment is socialism. for to socialism machine industry is a condition precedent. in this sense england has produced modern socialism. there is no blacker picture than the england of to , and no drearier contrast than the quaint villages and their household industries of the earlier period and the "spreading of the hideous town," after arkwright and hargreaves and watt. these inhuman conditions are faithfully and dispassionately revealed in the reports of the various royal commissions of inquiry: statistical mines where marx and engels found abundant material for their philosophy of gloom. and from these dull and depressing government folios charles kingsley drew his indignant invectives, and carlyle his trenchant indictments against a society that would imprison its eight-year-old children, its mothers, and its grandmothers in dingy factories fourteen hours a day for the sake of profits, and then release them at night only to find lodgings in the most miserable hovels and rickety tenements. it is almost surprising to one familiar with the details of this gruesome record that a social revolution did not follow immediately in the wake of the industrial revolution. there were riots at first, and machines were smashed. but the hand of the worker was impotent against the arm of steel. the workman soon resigned himself to his fate and his misery. the poor laws did not help, they only multiplied the burdens upon the state without taking the load from the poor. the laborer was too helpless to help himself, and the state and society were apathetic. the rapid expansion of industry found an ample outlet in the growing commerce to every corner of the world. england was making money. she was gradually shifting control from the traditional landowner to the new factory owner. the landed gentry had inherited a fine sense of patriarchal responsibility. the factory owner had no traditions. he was a parvenu. his interests were machinery and ships, not politics and humanity. he acquiesced in the poor laws as the easiest way out of a miserable mess; he let private charity take its feeble and intermittent course, paying his rates and giving his donations with self-satisfied sanctity. all this time labor was abundant. the markets of the world were hungry for the goods of english mills. then came suddenly the chartist movement.[ ] the flame of discontent spread and a revolution seemed impending. this first great outbreak of english labor was a political movement, fed by economic causes. the repeal of the corn laws and the passage of the factory acts modified economic conditions and mollified labor for the time. the repeal of the corn laws brought cheaper food; the factory acts brought better conditions of labor. meanwhile individualism was evolving an economic creed. the manchester doctrine was the logical outcome of england's insular position and her driving individualistic manufactures. but it was _laissez-faire_ in industrialism, not in unionism. the laboring men were now beginning to organize, and cobden himself proposed the act that made unionism ineffective as a political force. however, indirectly, free trade stimulated labor, because it brought great prosperity, made work abundant, and employers sanguine. unions now rapidly multiplied, but they were local, isolated. their federation into a great national body came later. socialism, or unionism, or any other general movement cannot develop in england with the rapidity and enthusiasm that is shown for "movements" on the continent. the traditions of the english people are constitutional. socialism can thrive among them only if it is "constitutional," and the fabians are to-day talking about "constitutional socialism" with judicial solemnity. all the training of the english people is contrary to the theory of progress through violence. they have had few revolutions accompanied by bloodshed, they have had a great many accompanied by prayers and parliamentary oratory--"constitutional" methods. they have, moreover, a real reverence for property. the poor who have none are taught to respect the rich who have. the church, the common law, the statute law, the customs, all the sources of tradition and habit, have emphasized the sanctity of property. only within the last few decades, as will be seen presently, has a radical change, a veritable revolution, come over the people in this respect. the british temperament is not given to nerves. this stolid, phlegmatic, self-contained individualist has no inflammable material in his heart. ruskin failed to arouse him, he wove too much artistry into his appeal; and carlyle could not move him, his epigrams were too rhapsodical. such temperaments are not given to rapid propagandism. and finally, the englishman is too practical to be a utopist. he concerns himself with the duties of to-day rather than the vagaries of to-morrow. utopianism made no impression on him. owen, the great utopian, was a welshman. the celt has imagination. nor do intricate theories or involved philosophies touch the mind of the briton. the splendor that enraptures the frenchman, the abstruse reasoning that delights the german, are alike boredom to this practical inventor of machinery and builder of ships. in spite of these characteristics there is no country in europe where there is more agitation about socialism than there is in england to-day. it is discussed everywhere. almost the entire time of parliament during the past few years has been taken up with more or less "socialistic" legislation. the public mind is steeped in it. there is more actually being done in england toward the "socialization" of property, and the state, than in any other european country. and less being said about the theory of value, the class war, capitalistic production, proletariat and bourgeois, and the other continental pet phrases of socialism. marx, who lived among the english for many years, but whose heart was never with them, would not call this rapid social movement socialistic, because it does not avowedly "aim" at "socializing capitalistic production." the doings of the english are certainly not accomplished in the spirit of his orthodoxy. but the current toward state control, toward pure democracy, land nationalization, nationalization of railways and mines, has set in with the swiftness of a mill-race and is grinding grist with an amazing rapidity. as i write these words, london and the whole country are wrought up over lloyd george's insurance bill and the projected ballot reform bill. meetings everywhere, fervid parliamentary debate, the papers filled with letters from everybody; every organization, debating society, and board of directors of great industries passing resolutions. even the labor party is divided over the paternalistic measure that aims to bring relief to the sick and disabled working man and woman. amidst all this discussion, noise, and party zeal is discerned the drift of the nation toward a new and unexpected goal. nowhere is it so difficult to define a socialist, or to mark boundaries to the movement. but why mark shore-lines? the flood is on. i will here take the position that whatever extends the functions of the state (community) over property, or into activities formerly left to individuals or to the home, is an indication of the socialistic trend. old-fashioned socialists like keir hardie are constantly warning the people that what is now going on in england is only social reform, not socialism. the fabians, on the other hand, are exerting every effort to add to the swiftness of the present movement. to a student of democracy things now passing into law, and events now shaping into history, in england, are of peculiar significance. such events, transpiring in a country so long abandoned to a rampant individualism, are portents of a newer time. they are signals of approaching changes to america, to us who have inherited the common law, the governmental traditions, the democratic ideals of liberty, if not the substantial stolidity of temperament and self-complacent egoism of the briton. all parties, socialists and conservatives, will admit this: that all this turmoil, these rapidly succeeding general elections, these public discussions, these new laws, indicate that a new social ideal is being formed. that in itself is worthy of consideration. for the ideal will shape the destiny. ii present-day socialism in england seems to have risen to sudden magnitude from vacuity, to have permeated this cautious island over night. for over a generation all socialism had disappeared from view. the elaborate schemes of owen, the altruistic propaganda under the gentle kingsley and his noble companion maurice, the artistic revolt against the ugliness of commercialism led by ruskin, who even shared the toil of the breakers of stones to prove his sincerity--all these movements seem suddenly to have disappeared from the face of the island, like a glacial current dropping suddenly, without warning, into the depths of the moulin. england was given over to a highly prosperous industrialism. the manchester doctrine was enthroned. commercialism and a glittering pseudo-humanitarian internationalism found expression in the alternating victories of the astute disraeli and the grandiloquent gladstone. meanwhile poverty and misery infested the underplaces of the land, a poverty and misery that was appalling. every protester was proudly pointed to the repeal of the corn laws, the revision of the poor laws, the reform act of , and the factory acts. when sir henry vane had ascended the scaffold which his sacrifice made historic, he said: "the people of england have long been asleep; when they awake they will be hungry." when the england of to-day awoke it was to a greater hunger than the politically starved roundhead or cavalier ever endured. it is no figure of speech to speak of hungry england. its brilliant industrialism has always had a drab background of want. chiozza money says of the present position of labor: "the aggregate income of the , , people in the united kingdom in - was approximately £ , , , ; , , persons took £ , , ; , , persons took £ , , ; , , persons took £ , , ."[ ] and he sums up the condition as follows: "the position of the manual workers in relation to the general wealth of the country has not improved. they formed, with those dependent upon them, the greater part of the nation in , and they enjoyed but about forty per cent. of the national income, according to the careful estimate of dudley baxter. to-day, with their army of dependents, they still form the greater part of the nation, although not quite so great a part, and, according to the best information available, they take less than forty per cent. of the entire income of the nation." although during this time the national income had increased much faster than the rate of population, "the board of trade, after a careful examination of the question of unemployment in , arrived at the general conclusion that 'the average level of employment during the last years has been almost exactly the same as the average of the preceding years.'"[ ] while the general level of wage-earners has been maintained, and while wealth has greatly increased, the poverty of the kingdom has shown little tendency to diminish. "as for pauperism, it is difficult to congratulate ourselves upon improvement since , when we remember that in england and wales alone , , to , , persons are in receipt of relief in the course of a single year. this means _one person in every _ has recourse to the poor-law guardians during a single year." "if our national income had but increased at the same rate as our population since , it would in have amounted to but about £ , , , . as we have seen, it is now about £ , , , . yet the error in distribution remains so great, that, while the total population in was , , , we have to-day a nation of , , poor people in our rich country, and many millions of these are living under conditions of degrading poverty. of those above the line of primary poverty, millions are tied down by the conditions of their labor to live in surroundings which preclude the proper enjoyment of life or the proper raising of children."[ ] an event occurred in that aroused public opinion on the question of labor conditions. the dockers along the great wharves in london went out on strike, and forced public attention upon the misery of these most wretched of british workmen,[ ] whose wages were so low that they could not buy bread for their families and their employment was so irregular that they were idle half of the time. john burns came into prominence first during this strike. he raised over $ , by public appeals to support the strikers. general sympathy was with the men; and the arbitrators to whom their grievances were submitted awarded most of their demands. the effect of this strike was far-reaching. all over the kingdom unskilled labor was roused to its power, and a new era in labor organization began. iii in no country has the labor-union movement achieved a greater degree of organization than in england.[ ] the movement has been economic, turning to politics only in recent years; it concerned itself with wages and conditions of labor, not with party programs and parliamentary candidates. the characteristic feature of english trade-unionism is collective bargaining, long since introduced into america, but unknown in most european countries. the english unions also organized insurance societies called "friendly societies."[ ] for many years the laws regulating labor unions had been liberally construed by the courts, and the unions had done very much as they pleased. two decisions have been rendered during the last decade that threatened the unions' existence both as a political and economic force. in the taff vale railway company brought suit against the amalgamated society of railway servants, charging the men with conspiring to induce the workmen to break their contracts with the company. the court enjoined the union from picketing and from interfering with the men in their contractual relations with the employing company, and assessed the damages at $ , against the offending union. the house of lords, sitting in final appeal, affirmed the judgment of the trial court. this virtually meant the stopping of strikes, for strikes without pickets and vigilance would usually be unavailing. it also meant financial bankruptcy. a second far-reaching decision was made by the house of lords in december, , when the "osborne judgment" was affirmed, granting to one osborne, a member of the amalgamated society of railway servants, an injunction restraining the union from making a levy on its members, and from using any of its funds for the purpose of maintaining any of its members, or any other person, in parliament. the unions had taken it for granted that they had the legal right to contribute out of their funds to political campaigns, and to pay the labor members of parliament a salary out of the union treasury.[ ] the court held such payments were illegal, on the ground that they were _ultra vires_. the charter of the unions did not sanction it.[ ] the english workman has not only had the trade union for a training school in practical affairs, but the co-operative movement began here; and here it flourishes, not as widely spread among the poorer workmen as in belgium, but among the better-paid workers it is very popular. it is singular that the only practical result left of owen's stupendous plans was the little co-operative shop, opened in at rochdale, with a capital of $ and a gross weekly income of $ . owen did not start this shop, but a handful of his followers were the promoters of the tiny enterprise. the co-operative union to-day embraces wholesale, retail, productive, and special societies, with nearly , , members, increasing at the rate of , a year, and doing $ , , worth of business annually. there is also a rapidly growing co-partnership movement, especially in the building of "garden suburbs" and tenements. in there were two such companies, with $ , worth of property. in they had increased to associations, with over $ , , worth of property. the membership is not confined to workingmen, but they form the bulk.[ ] from the beginning of the modern labor movement we see that the british workmen have shown a strong tendency to organize. their organizations included at first only the skilled workers. there was a gulf between the trained worker and the unskilled worker. the latter, forming the substratum of poverty, were too abject for organizing. these two great bodies of workers, skilled and unskilled, have been gradually brought together and their interests united. the taff vale and osborne judgments have forced them into politics. the unskilled have been given the benefit of the experience of the skilled, and a fair degree of homogeneity and group ambition has been reached. to enter politics a new form of organization was necessary. we will see how one was prepared for them. iv we will now turn to the socialist organizations. they are more numerous than in the other countries we have studied, and more varied in color. but not any of them are as strong as the french or german organizations. in william morris and h.m. hyndman, a personal friend of marx, organized the "democratic federation." for a few years it was the only socialist organization. it split on the question of revolution. morris and his friends, many of them inclined toward anarchy, founded the "socialist league." this league has long since vanished. hyndman and his followers renamed their society the "social democratic federation." it still persists, under the name social democratic party (popularly "s.d.p."), and remains the only organized trace of militant, reactionary marxianism in england. for a long time it refrained from politics, advocated violence, and was the faithful imitator of the guesdist party in france. these are doctrines and methods that repel the english mind, and the federation never has been strong. it has a weekly paper, _justice_, and a monthly paper, _the social democrat_; claims one member in parliament, elected however by the labor party, and (in ) members of various local governing bodies. its aged leader, hyndman, clings tenaciously to the dogmas of marx, and all the changes that have come over the socialist movement during the last decades have not altered his views or methods.[ ] the federation's affiliations and sympathy have been with the international rather than the british movement, and until a few years ago it monopolized british representation on the international executive committee. soon after morris left the federation a new and novel socialist society was formed in london. two americans gave the impulse that started the movement--henry george, through his works on single tax, and thomas davidson of new york, a gentle dreamer of the new to-morrow. henry george's books had been read by a group of young men in london, and when dr. davidson went there to lecture he found these young men ready to listen to his utopian generalizations. soon these men organized the fabian society. they were not sure of their ground, and took for their motto: "for the right moment you must wait as fabius did when warring against hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain and fruitless." a number of brilliant young men soon joined the fabians, and their "tracts" have become famous. among their members they include sidney webb, the sociologist; george bernard shaw, the playwright and cynic; chiozza money, statistician and member of parliament; rev. r.j. campbell of the city temple; rev. stewart headlam, leader in the church socialist movement; and a horde of others, famous in letters, the professions, and the arts. it is difficult to estimate the influence of this unique group of personages, and it is very easy to underestimate it. from the first they committed themselves to the policy of "permeation," instead of aggressive propaganda. they would transform the world by intellectual osmosis. they have, thus, not only contributed by far the most brilliant literature to modern socialism, but have touched some of the inner springs of political and social power. prime ministers and borough councilmen, poor-law guardians and chancellors of the exchequer, have been influenced by the propulsion of their ideas. but it has all been done so noiselessly and so well disguised, that to the social democratic federation the fabians are "mere academicians," and to the independent labor party they are forerunners of "tyrannical bureaucracy." eleven fabians are in parliament, and they are not silent onlookers. for years the fabians have dominated the london county council. its brilliant "missionaries" attract large audiences, and "fabian essays" have passed through many editions. each member of this society is the creator of his own dogma. the marxian formulas, especially the theory of surplus value, are not reverenced by them. england is the only country in europe where there is a strong church socialist movement. in the christian social union was formed by members of the church of england. it is not a socialist organization, but it has enlisted a wide practical interest in the labor movement. it was the outgrowth of the pan-anglican congress, which met at lambeth in . at this conference a committee on socialism made a noteworthy report, recommending the bringing together of capital and labor through the agency of co-operation and association.[ ] in "the church socialist league" was organized. "it seeks to convert the christened people of england to socialism. its members are committed to the definite economic socialism of accredited socialist bodies. the league is growing rapidly. branches are springing up all over the country. its members have addressed thousands of meetings on behalf of both socialist and labor candidates at parliamentary and principal elections.... the members of the league are socialists. they seek to establish a commonwealth in which the people shall own the land and industrial capital collectively and administer the same collectively."[ ] the influence of the church socialist league and the fabians has spread to the universities, especially to oxford and cambridge. a number of distinguished professors are active socialists. the movement thus gained ground more rapidly among the intellectuals than among the workingmen. it was not until that a socialist labor party was organized. the social democratic federation was too dogmatic, hard, and bitter to draw the english laboring man; the fabians and the church socialists were avowedly not partisan. in a group of labor delegates met at bradford and, under the leadership of keir hardie, organized the independent labor party (i.l.p.). this definite step had been preceded by many local political organizations among labor unionists. the necessity for political activity had been felt in many places. the bradford convention was merely the coalescing of many local movements. the i.l.p. is a socialist body, but it is not dogmatically, not obnoxiously so. it forms, rather, a connecting link between socialism and labor unions. it entered politics at once, but with discouraging results. its candidates polled only , votes; only were elected. a closer alliance with the labor unions was necessary. this was accomplished when the unions, in , appointed a labor representative committee, whose duty it was, as the name implies, to increase labor's representation in parliament.[ ] this committee had first to determine its relation to the other political parties. the liberals and conservatives among the laborites were outvoted, and the committee determined upon a new course. representatives from the socialist bodies--the i.l.p., s.d.f., and fabians--were asked to join the unions in an alliance that should use its united strength in electing members to parliament. all agreed, but the s.d.f. soon withdrew. in the name of the committee was changed to the labor party. it is founded upon the broadest basis of co-operation, so that neither socialist, no matter how radical, nor non-socialist should find it impossible to work with the party. its constitution defines this coalition: "the labor party is a federation consisting of trade unions, trade councils, socialist societies, and local labor parties." "co-operative societies are also eligible," as are "national organizations of women accepting the basis of this constitution and the policy of the party." the object of the party is "to secure the election of candidates to parliament and to organize and maintain a labor party with its own whips and policy." party rigor is carefully prescribed: "candidates and members must accept this constitution and agree to abide by the decisions of the parliamentary party in carrying out the aims of this constitution; appear before their constituents under the title of labor candidates; abstain strictly from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any parliamentary party not affiliated, or its candidates; and they must not oppose any candidate recognized by the national executive of the party." "before a candidate can be regarded as adopted for a constituency, his candidature must be sanctioned by the national executive." the party, thus centrally controlled, is well organized in every part of the kingdom. it maintains a fund for paying the election expenses of its members.[ ] the osborne judgment has been a serious setback to the party, especially in local elections. the payment of members was voted in by parliament as a partial remedy, and the government has promised a reform election bill that will impose the burden of all necessary election expenses upon the state. the party membership has grown from , in to nearly , , in . such leading members of the party as j. ramsay macdonald, keir hardie, philip snowden, and over one-half of the parliamentary group, are socialists. the party refused to commit itself to socialistic principles until , when it declared itself in favor of the following resolution: "the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange to be controlled in a democratic state in the interests of the entire community, and the complete emancipation of labor from the domination of capitalism and landlordism, with the establishment of social and economic equality between the sexes."[ ] in the party had members in county councils, in town councils, in urban district councils, in rural district councils, in parish councils, on poor-law boards, on school boards. there are ( ) about , labor men and socialist members on the various local governing bodies in great britain.[ ] v we see, then, that socialism and trades-unionism in england coalesced. but a more important confluence of political ideals was soon to occur. the elections of indicated to the people of england that a new force had entered the domain of political power, which had so long been assigned to the gentry and men of wealth. a careful observer of political events, and a member of parliament, described the results as follows: "when the present house of commons ( ) was completed in january last, and it was discerned that labor members had been elected, a cry of wonder went up from press and public. people wrote and spoke as if these members were the forerunners of a political and social revolution; as if the old party divisions were completely worn out, and as if power were about to pass to a new political party that would represent the masses as opposed to the classes. these fears or hopes were reflected in the house of commons itself. during the early months of the session the labor party received from all quarters of the house an amount of deference that would have been described as sycophantic if it had been directed towards an aristocratic instead of towards a democratic group."[ ] the tidal wave of reaction following the boer war had swept the liberal party into power, and had given fifty seats to the labor party. the effect was nothing short of revolutionary. disraeli, in his _sibyl_, spoke of "two nations," two englands, the england of the gentry and the england of the working classes. the elections since the boer war have given this "other england" its chance. the gentry, the whigs and tories, will never again fight their political jousts with the "other england" looking contentedly on. this "mass mind of organized labor" has become the "new controlling force in progressive politics."[ ] the "transformed england" began to see evidences of the change. the first bill brought in by the labor party provided for the feeding of school children, from the homes of the poor, out of public funds. "the business in life of my colleagues and myself is to impress upon this house the importance of the poverty problem," said the spokesman of the labor party in an important debate.[ ] england had awakened hungry. now occurred the most significant political event in the history of modern england. the liberal party took over the immediate program of the labor party. this is significant because it swept england away from her industrial moorings of individualistic _laissez-faire_, and extended the functions of the state into activities that had hitherto been left to individual initiative. a complete revolution had taken place since cobden's day. the state acknowledged new social and economic obligations. in the parliamentary struggle that followed hereditary prerogative in property was undermined and hereditary prerogative in government virtually destroyed, and the principles of democracy enormously extended.[ ] in england the question of co-operation between socialists and other parties has been more important than in any other european country: because in a democratic parliament concessions are always made to large portions of the electorate by the parties in power, and because the practical temperamental qualities of the british discard the fine-drawn distinctions between groups and sub-groups that are so assiduously maintained in france and germany. in the amsterdam congress of the international the question was discussed whether socialists should act with other parties. jaurès and his _bloc_ were the occasion of the debate. kautsky said that in times of national crises like war it might be necessary for socialists to co-operate with the government to insure national safety. no such extraordinary standard has ever existed among practical englishmen, who usually know what they want, and are not particular about the means of getting it. william morris, uncompromising dogmatist, inveighed against the whigs in as "the harlequins of reaction." democracy was his ideal of government, and he was not entirely averse to political action on the part of socialists. "to capture parliament, and turn it into a popular but constitutional assembly, is, i must conclude, the aspiration of the genuine democrats wherever they may be found." but he was wary of compromise. "some democrats take up actual pieces of socialism, the nationalization of land, or of railways, or cumulative taxation of incomes, or limiting the right of inheritance, or new patent laws, or the restriction by law of the day's labor.... all this i admit and say is a hopeful sign, and yet once again i say there is a snare in it.... a snake lies lurking in the grass." "those who think they can deal with our present system in this piecemeal way very much underrate the strength of the tremendous organization under which we live, and which appoints to each of us his place, and, if we do not choose to fit it, grinds us down until we do."[ ] morris' advice, "beware the whigs," was uttered at a time when the leader of that party, gladstone, was beginning to see that the chief event of the century would be the merging of the social question with politics. the "piecemeal" method that morris decried became the actual method of parliamentary activity as soon as a new party, a third party, arose and drew its inspiration from the working classes. such a party was anticipated. lord rosebery said in : "i am certain there is a party in this country, unnamed as yet, that is disconnected with any existing political organization--a party that is inclined to say, 'a plague on both your houses, a plague on all your politics, a plague on all your unending discussions that yield so little fruit.'"[ ] and the same year john (now lord) morley prophesied: "now i dare say the time may come, it may come sooner than some think, when the liberal party will be transformed or superseded by some new party."[ ] and professor dicey, over a decade ago, spoke of the waning orthodoxy of liberalism and its rapid merging into socialism. the "piecemeal" party of morris, the "transformed" party of morley, the radicalized party of dicey, is the liberal party of to-day. the "unnamed" party of rosebery is the labor party, which not only says, "a plague upon all your discussions," but, "a plague upon all your fine-spun theories of class war--it's results we want." before detailing some of the significant acts of this new democratic coalition, it should be added that the motive of the liberal party has not been unmixed with politics. the labor party possesses not only the or votes in the house of commons; there are hundreds of thousands of labor votes outside. this background of silent, vigilant voters forms the greatest force of the labor party. many liberal members hold their seats by its favor. there are in both the great parties men with strong sympathies for the labor ideal. in fact, a number of socialists are sitting with the liberals. there is no clear demarcation. it is only a difference of the degree of infusion. the labor party has had a strong influence upon the house of commons. for many years the "government" has ruled quite arbitrarily. when there are only two parties this is possible. but when an influential third party appears on the scene, government by the "front benchers" must be moderated.[ ] the "cross benchers" have wrested a good deal of power from the leaders. this is necessary in a democracy which is kept alive only by contact with the people. there is more government by the commons, and less government by the ministry. this _entente_ can degenerate into parliamentary tyranny if it wishes. it can demand the clôture, as well as open the valves of useless debate. but an arbitrary act unsanctioned by the cross benchers would be likely to bring destruction upon the government that perpetrated it. vi a review of the acts of parliament since the liberal-labor coalition and a perusal of the debates are convincing proof of the character of the new legislation and the opinions that prompt it. we must confine ourselves to a few types of this legislation, enough to show the actual changes now in process. the first bill introduced by the labor party, and enacted into law, authorized the providing of meals for poor children in the schools. it does not make this compulsory, but under its sanction in over $ , were spent in providing over , , meals. nearly half of these were in london.[ ] this law is especially assailed by the anti-socialists. they claim its administration has been too lenient, not discriminating between the needy and those capable of self-help. it is only the entering wedge of socialism, they say; it is only a step from feeding the child to clothing him, and from feeding and clothing the child to caring for the parent. they recall that sidney webb has often said that if the city furnishes water free to its citizens it should be able to furnish milk as well. the second bill introduced by the labor party was the trades dispute act. this was framed to annul the taff vale decision, making the unions immune from suits for tortious acts and providing an elaborate system of arbitrating labor disputes. the provisions of this act were tested by two railway crises. in the railway employees threatened to go out on strike. lloyd george, then president of the board of trade, averted the strike by enlisting all the power of the government in persuading the companies and the men to agree to a scheme of arbitration. this was to last a stipulated term of years, but before the time had elapsed the men actually struck ( ), and for a week the country was in a panic. lloyd george, then chancellor of the exchequer, again used all the power of the government to bring peace, and a commission was appointed to investigate the grievances of the men, who had agreed to abide by its decision. in this way the government has become the most active force in settling labor disputes--a subject that was formerly left to the two parties of the labor contract. a workman's compensation act and an old-age pension act soon followed. the latter provides a pension for all workmen who are years old. unlike the german act, the government provides all the funds. in the labor exchange act empowered the board of trade to establish labor exchanges. these have been established in every city. at first there was some friction with the unions because "blacklegs" were assigned to places. but since union men have been invited to sit on the local governing committees, things are running smoother. there are three laws which show the trend of the changing relation of the state to property. the development act of provides for the appointment of five commissioners, upon whose recommendation the treasury advances money to any governmental department or public authority or university or association of persons for the purpose of aiding agriculture and rural industries of all sorts; the reclamation of drainage lands and of forests; the general improvement of rural transportation, including the building of "light railways"; the construction and improvement of harbors; the improvement of inland navigation, including the building of canals; and the development and improvement of fisheries. this law endows the government with the necessary authority for the absorption of virtually all the internal means of communication except the trunk railways, and extends the paternal arm of the government over agriculture and the fisheries and subsidiary industries.[ ] the first report of the commission, - , indicates that work under this law has begun in earnest. a comprehensive plan of regeneration, embracing the entire kingdom and based on adequate surveys, is outlined. one of the interesting features of the plan is the proposal to do as much of the work as possible by direct labor rather than by competitive bidding. the commission wants to make sure "that the funds shall not go into the pockets of private individuals."[ ] under an enthusiastic commission there will be practically no limit to the influence of this law. two other acts are closely allied with this scheme: the small holdings act of , and the housing and town planning act of . the small holdings act gives authority to county councils to "provide small holdings for persons who desire to buy or lease and will themselves cultivate the holdings." this provision is extended to borough, urban, district, and parish councils. these authorities may purchase such lands "whether situate within or without their county." the town planning act gives cities and towns the power to purchase land and allot it, to tear down undesirable buildings, to co-operate with any workingman's association for improving and erecting dwellings, and to buy the necessary land for making improvements of all kinds. john burns, who stood sponsor for this bill, explained that it gave complete authority to local governing bodies "to make a city healthful and a city beautiful." following the british habit, work has very cautiously begun under these acts. up to december, , about , acres were purchased or leased under the allotment act, and sublet to , individual tenants. "town planning" has progressed rapidly, and the regeneration of the british slums, the most dismal in the world, may be not far distant.[ ] under the small holdings act there were, up to december, , nearly , applicants, asking for over , acres. only one-fifth of this amount was acquired, for , holders. thirty per cent. of the applicants are agricultural laborers, and the majority of the others are drawn from the rural population who have some small business or trade in the villages and wish a plot of land for a garden. this "often makes the difference between a bare subsistence and comparative prosperity."[ ] these laws show the drift of the current. the question of the nationalization of railways has been the subject of parliamentary inquiry, and the great railway strike of emphasized the matter profoundly. the state in completed the taking over of all the telephone lines; it conducts an extensive postal savings bank and a parcels post. in local affairs some british cities are models of municipal enterprise. even london, that amorphous mass of human misery and opulence, is changing its aspect. since the granting of municipal home rule it has built a vast system of street railways, cleaned out acres of slums, opened breathing spaces, built tenements, and in many other ways displayed evidences of an awakening civic consciousness. three other pieces of legislation must be described more in detail, because they are more revolutionary, far-reaching, and democratic than anything attempted by the british nation since the days of the reform bill. first is the famous "budget" of lloyd george. when this virile welshman became chancellor of the exchequer he cast his budget in the mold of his social theories. he said: "personally, i look on the budget as a part only of a comprehensive scheme of fiscal and social reform: the setting up of a great insurance scheme for the unemployed and for the sick and infirm, and the creation, through the development bill, of the machinery for the regeneration of rural life."[ ] the land system of england is feudal. tenure still legally exists. there still clings the flavor of social and political distinction to fee simple. this the landowners have fortified against all the changes that industrialism has wrought. there has been no general land appraisement since the pilgrims landed at the new plymouth. the "land monopoly" successfully resisted every attack until the famous budget of . chiozza money quotes john bateman's analysis of the "new domesday book," fixing the ownership of land in england and wales as follows:[ ] in , in the united kingdom, there was a total area of , , acres; of this , , acres were owned by , persons. "while the total income of the nation is £ , , , , the landowners take £ , , as land rent."[ ] england is a great industrial and commercial nation living on leased land. the development of the industrial towns has enormously multiplied the value of some of these vast estates.[ ] the new budget proposed, first, to tax the land values; not a fictitious sum, or the value of the land with improvements, but the site value--the increment value with which the land is endowed because of its favorable location. second, to this was added a per cent. reversion duty. third, a tax was levied on undeveloped land held for speculative purposes. and, fourth, a per cent. tax on mineral rights was assessed on the owners of the land that contained the mines. these proposals raised a storm. they aimed at the traditional stronghold of english aristocracy. the budget passed the house of commons by a large majority; the lords rejected it. the government promptly prorogued parliament and went before the people. and what was at first only an attack upon hereditary rights in land became an attack also upon hereditary rights in politics. the house of lords became an issue as well as the budget. after a fiery and furious campaign, in which socialists and laborites joined radicals and liberals, the budget won by a safe majority.[ ] the lords passed the measure. but this resistance cost them dear. one of the first prerogatives established by the house of commons was the right to control the purse-strings of the kingdom. custom has given the sanction of constitutionality to this prerogative. and the lords, in first denying and then delaying the budget, laid themselves open to the charge of "hereditary arrogance" and "unconstitutionalism." after the passage of the budget there followed six months of conference between the two front benches, to find a basis of reform for the house of lords upon which all could unite. when it became evident that this was impossible, the government again prorogued parliament and went to the people for a mandate on the question of "reforming the lords." the liberals and their allies were, for a third time, returned to power, and in february, , the prime minister, mr. asquith, introduced his "parliament bill," taking from the house of lords the power to amend a money bill so as to change its character. if any other bill passed by the commons is rejected by the lords, the commons can pass it over their veto; and if this is done in three consecutive sessions of the same parliament--provided two years elapse between the introduction of the bill and its third rejection by the lords--it becomes a law. the law is intended as a preliminary measure. the preamble states that it is the intention of the government to provide for a second chamber "constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis." the bill was so amended by the lords as to change its character and returned to the commons. the prime minister then informed the leaders of the opposition that the king, "upon the advice of his ministers," had consented to create enough peers to insure the passage of the bill in its original form. rather than have their house encumbered by new peers, the lords gave a reluctant consent to the measure that virtually destroyed the bicameral system in england. this profound constitutional change, that practically makes england a representative democracy pure and simple, was unaccompanied by any of those popular and spectacular demonstrations one naturally expects to see on such occasions. the debate in both houses rarely touched the pinnacle of excitement, its fervor was partisan rather than patriotic.[ ] in , when the hereditary peers stood in the way of the reform bill, which had passed the commons by only one majority, the populace rose _en masse_, surged through the streets of the capital, and threatened the king and his iron duke,--whose statue now adorns every available square in the city,--and made it known that their wishes must be respected. to-day the people, secure in the knowledge of their supremacy, scarcely notice the efforts of the opposition, in its attempts to bolster the falling walls of hereditary prerogative in representative government. so far has england assumed the air of democracy. the third piece of legislation, to which allusion has been made, indicates the direction that this democracy is taking. it is the insurance bill, also introduced by lloyd george, and passed in december, . it insures the working population against "sickness and breakdown." it is planned to follow up the law with insurance against non-employment. the law is of especial interest to americans, because it adapts the principle of the german system to the anglo-saxon's traditional aversion to state bureaucracy. it commands a compulsory contribution from employer and employee, supplemented by state grants. these funds are not administered by the state, but by "friendly societies" (insurance orders organized by the unions) and other benevolent organizations of workingmen now in existence. these are democratic, voluntary organizations. where no such organizations exist, the post-office administers the fund. the keynote of this law is the prevention of invalidity. its details are largely based upon the reports of the royal poor law commissioners, - . the commission made two voluminous reports; mrs. sidney webb, a member of the commission, prepared the minority report.[ ] the labor party, in all of these measures, voted with the liberals. the insurance bill was denounced by the most radical laborites on the ground that labor was charged with contributing to the fund, and that the bill was inadequate. but the majority of the delegation voted for the measure. vii enough has now been said to indicate the changes in economic and social legislation that are being brought about in england by the coalition of socialists and liberals.[ ] the causes for this change cannot be laid to socialism alone. socialism is an effect quite as much as a cause; it is the result of industrial conditions, as well as the prompter of changes. the permeation of the working classes with the principles of state aid; the spread of discontent; the lure of better days; all deepened and emphasized by the poverty of the island, are the sources of this social democratic current. this has led, first, to the unification of the several socialist groups; secondly, to the coalescing of labor union and socialist ambitions into the labor party; thirdly, to an effective co-operation between the labor party and the liberal-radicals. sagacious socialists saw this trend long ago. in sidney webb appealed to the liberals to espouse the cause of labor. he pointed out the inevitable, and it has happened.[ ] two questions naturally arise: first, how far will this movement toward social democracy go? second, how long will the labor party hold together and prompt the action of the liberals and radicals in social legislation? the first question is not merely conjectural. the reform bill now ( ) prepared by the government will destroy the last vestige of property qualifications for voting. it will destroy plural voting, which now allows a freeholder to vote in every district where he holds land. in some districts the absentee voters hold the balance of power.[ ] votes for women are also promised. this increased electorate will not be conservative in its convictions. along with this will come the abolishing of the custom that compels candidates to bear the election expenses; the payment of members of parliament has already begun; the lure of office is no longer a will-o'-the-wisp to the poor with ambition. the new liberalism is, then, devoted first of all to real democracy, in which the king's prerogatives retain their sickly place. as to the functions of the state, it will "probably retain its distinction from socialism in taking for its chief test of policy the freedom of the individual citizen rather than the strength of the state, though the antagonism of the two standpoints may tend to disappear in the light of progressive experience."[ ] as to property, it will probably continue to make unearned increments and incomes bear the burden of social reform; create a business democracy for running the public utilities, leaving more or less unhampered the fields of legitimate industrial opportunity. "property is not an absolute right of the individual owner which the state is bound to maintain at his behest. on the contrary, the state on its side is justified in examining the rights which he may claim, and criticising them; seeing it is by the force of the state and at its expense that all such rights are maintained."[ ] this, the well-considered opinion of a well-known scholar, may be properly taken as the gauge of present-day english radical sentiment on the inviolability of property rights. as to the second question: how long will the coalition hang together? the socialists are now ( ) showing signs of restiveness. the old question, that has rent all socialists in all countries, and always will, because socialism is a wide-spreading and vague generalization, has arisen among these practical englishmen. in the convention of the i.l.p., , there was a prolonged discussion on the policy of the party in its relation to other parties. "the labor party should stand for labor, not for liberalism," was the complaint. keir hardie suggested that they were not in parliament to keep governments in office or to turn them out, but "to organize the working classes into a great independent political power, to fight for the coming of socialism."[ ] a resolution objecting to members of the party "appearing on platforms alongside liberal and tory capitalists and landlords," was defeated by a large majority.[ ] in the house of commons clashes are not infrequent between the laborites and the liberals. annually the labor members move an amendment to the address of the crown, asking for a bill "to establish the right to work by placing upon the state the responsibility of directly providing employment or maintenance for the genuinely unemployed."[ ] john burns opposed their amendment in , in a brilliant and vehement speech, not so much because the government was opposed to the principle, but for the political reason that the government was not ready to bring in a bill of its own, which should be a part of its comprehensive system of social reform.[ ] the great strike of transportation workers, in the summer of , widened the breach between laborites and liberals, and between the extreme and moderate socialists. this strike spread from the dockers of liverpool to london, from the dockers to the railway workers, and then to the teamsters and drivers of the larger cities, until a general tie-up of transportation was threatened. it came very near being a model general strike. its violence was met with a call for the troops. the labor members in parliament protested earnestly against the use of soldiers. but the government was prompt and firm in its suppression of disorder. a bitter debate took place between the government and the labor leaders.[ ] how much of this give and take must be attributed to the play of politics, it is impossible to declare. but this great strike clearly revealed the difference between violent socialism and moderate radicalism. the one is willing to effect revolutions through law and order, the other to effect them through violence and disruption. the moderate socialists seem willing to take a middle course between these extremes. the following quotation from a speech delivered by ramsay macdonald, leader of the labor party, at a convention of the i.l.p., clearly illustrates the moderate view: "we can cut off kings' heads after a few battles, we can change a monarchy into a republic, we can deprive people of their titles, and we can make similar superficial alterations by force; but nobody who understands the power of habit and of custom in human conduct, who appreciates the fact that by far and away the greater amount of an action is begun, controlled, and specified by the system of social interrelationship in which we live, move, and have our being; and still more, nobody who understands the delicate and intricate complexity of production and exchange which keeps modern society going, will dream for a single moment of changing it by any act of violence. as soon as that act is committed, every vital force in society will tend to re-establish the relationship which we have been trying to end, and what is more, these vital forces will conquer us in the form of a violent reaction, a counter revolution. when we cut off a newt's tail, a newt's tail will grow on again. "i want the" i.l.p.'s action "to be determined by our numbers, our relative strength, the state of public opinion, the character of the question before the country. i appeal to it that it take into account all the facts and circumstances, and not, for the sake of satisfying its soul and sentiment, go gaily on, listening to the enunciation of policies and cheering phrases which obviously do not take into account some of the most important and at the same time most difficult problems which representation in parliament presents to it."[ ] in another place macdonald has detailed the steps in the progress of parliamentary socialism. he begins with "palliatives," such as factory inspection, old-age pensions, feeding of school children; next, the state engages in constructive legislation, "municipalization and nationalization in every shape and form, from milk supplies to telephones," and finally insists on the taxing of unearned increment and a general redistribution of the burdens of the state.[ ] not all the members of the i.l.p. are agreed upon this moderate statement. keir hardie and his immediate followers still cling to the "larger hope" of a socialized society, to which commonplace legislation is only a crude preliminary. bernard shaw has confessed the orthodoxy of the new social democracy. "nobody now considers socialism as a destructive insurrection ending, if successful, in millennial absurdities," and of the budget he said: "if not a surrender of the capitalist citadel, it is at all events letting down the drawbridge."[ ] the public utterances of the radical leaders are often less restrained than those of the socialists,[ ] so that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference. professor hobhouse, in his analysis of the difference between liberal-radicalism and socialism, says: "i venture to conclude that the differences between a true and consistent public-spirited liberalism and a rational collectivism, ought, with a genuine effort at mutual understanding, to disappear. the two parties are called on to make common cause against the growing power of wealth, which, by its control of the press and of the means of political organization, is more and more a menace to the healthy working of popular government."[ ] and brougham villiers stated, a year before the liberals gained control of the government, that the hope of the country lay in an "alliance, won by persistent, intelligent helpfulness on the part of the liberals, with the alienated artisans, for the betterment of the conditions of the poorest, so as to give at once hope and life and better leisure for thought."[ ] so we see socialism and liberalism united in accomplishing changes in legislation and ancient institutions--changes that are revolutionary in character and will be far-reaching in results. it is not the red revolutionary socialism of marx; it is the practical british socialism of amelioration. "this practical, constitutional, evolutionary socialism," a chronicler of the fabians calls it.[ ] it would have to be practical to appeal to the british voter, constitutional to lure the british statesman, and evolutionary to satisfy the british philosopher. in the troublous days of - there were a great many young socialists who believed the social revolution was waiting around the next corner and would soon sweep over london in gory reality. many of these young men are sober fabians now, or staid conservatives or liberals. to-day they think they were mistaken. they were not. there was a revolution around the next corner. it has already captured the high places. society, government, is rapidly encroaching upon private property through the powers of taxation, of police supervision, and all manner of constitutional instrumentalities. ownership, even in land, is now only an incident, the rights of the community are in the ascendant. democracy has conquered hereditary privilege. and the revolution is still advancing. england is showing the world that "the way to make socialism safe is to make democracy real."[ ] footnotes: [ ] see _supra_, p. . [ ] see chiozza money, _riches and poverty_, first page, edition . [ ] _op. cit._, p. . [ ] _op. cit._, pp. - . [ ] see v. nash and h.l. smith, _the story of the dockers' strike_, london, . [ ] see sidney and beatrice webb, _history of trades unionism_, london, . [ ] there are about , members in those unions that pay out-of-work benefits. the following table gives some conception of the magnitude of the out-of-work problem in england. it shows the sums expended by the unions for out-of-work relief: year amount £ , , , , , , , , , , out of a body of , , workmen, chiozza money estimates that , are always out of work. _opus cit._, p. . [ ] members of parliament received no pay until , when the radical-liberal government passed a law giving each member a salary of $ , a year. [ ] a discussion of this case from the fabian point of view is found in the preface to webb's _history of trades unionism_, edition of . the labor unions and the labor party have issued pamphlets on these two decisions. the legal points are fully discussed in the official reports of the cases. [ ] there are , , working men and women in great britain; , , belong to co-operative enterprises, , , to trade unions. [ ] see h.m. hyndman, _autobiography_, london, . [ ] dr. wescott, bishop of durham, was the founder of the christian social union. his pamphlet, _socialism_, is a real contribution to the literature on the church and its relation to labor. the present attitude of the union may be gleaned from the following quotation taken from the letter written by dr. gore, bishop of birmingham, to his diocese, on the occasion of his transfer to the bishopric of oxford. the letter was written during the railway and dockers' strike, in september, : "there is a profound sense of unrest and dissatisfaction among workers recently. i cannot but believe that this profound discontent is justified, though some particular exhibitions of it are not. as christians we are not justified in tolerating the conditions of life and labor under which the vast mass of our population is living. we have no right to say that these conditions are not remediable. preventable lack of equipment for life among young, and later the insecurity of employment and inadequacy of remuneration, and consequent destitution and semi-destitution among so many people, ought to inspire in all christians a determination to reform our industrial system." [ ] from _statement of principles of the league_. [ ] even at this time the conservatism of the unions was hard to break. the vote to take this step was , to , in favor of appointing the committee. [ ] election expenses are borne by the candidates, not by the state. they frequently are over $ , , and it obviously is impossible for a workingman to conduct such a campaign at his own expense. [ ] proceedings of labor party, annual congress, . [ ] see _socialists in great britain_, a compilation published by the london _times_, p. . the following table shows the membership of the labor party since its formation in , from the annual report of the party executive, : trades councils and local labor trade unions parties socialist societies no. membership no. no. membership total - , , , - , , , - , , , - , , , - , , , - , , , - , , , { } , , , , , { } , , , , , { } , , , , , { } , , , , , { } { } this total includes , co-operators. { } includes co-operators. { } includes co-operators, and , members of the women's labor league. { } includes co-operators, and , members of the women's labor league. { } includes co-operators, and , members of the women's labor league. the decrease in membership during the last year is ascribed to the osborne judgment. [ ] harold cox, _socialism in the house of commons_, p. . [ ] see j.a. hobson, _the crisis of liberalism_, for a discussion of the new party alignments. Émile boutmy, philosophical critic of the english, says that england, "transformed in all outward seeming, ... has just begun a new history." see his _the english people: a study in their political psychology_, london, , for a keen analysis of english political proclivities. [ ] _parliamentary debates_, th series, vol. , p. . speech by g. lansbury. [ ] the new liberal government invited john burns into the cabinet. he is the first workingman in english history to occupy a cabinet position. the more restless socialists are inclined to call him a liberal because responsibility has taught him caution. but he still persists that he is a socialist. he is a fabian, and boasts of the three times that he was imprisoned for participating in labor agitations. about twenty years before his elevation he said in the old bailey, where he had been arraigned for "sedition and conspiracy" in conducting a strike: "i may tell you, my lord, that i went to work in a factory at the early age of ten years and toiled there until five months ago, when i left my workshop to stand as parliamentary candidate for the western division of nottingham." it must be kept in mind that many of the conservatives are committed to social legislation. they are not, however, in favor of the indefinite expansion of democracy, and are opposed to the adult suffrage bill as proposed by the liberals. [ ] william morris, _signs of change_, p. . [ ] speech delivered in st. james' hall, march , . [ ] speech delivered at newcastle, may , . [ ] in the british house of commons the ministry and the opposition leaders sit in the front benches on opposite sides of the house facing each other. a "front bencher" always commands a hearing, owing to his high position in the party. the members of the party sit behind their leaders and are called "back benchers." the minor groups, the labor party and the irish party, sit in the cross benches at the lower end of the chamber and are called "cross benchers." [ ] see _annual report board of education_, - . [ ] keir hardie, the dean of the socialist group in parliament, fathered this law. sidney webb, the distinguished fabian, was made a member of the commission. [ ] see first annual report of the commission. [ ] see _annual report home office_, - . [ ] _ibid._ [ ] the money for these things he proposed to raise by taxes, and especially by a tax on land values. [ ] chiozza money, _riches and poverty_, p. . no. of owners class of owners acres owned peers and peeresses , , , great landowners , , , squires{ } , , , greater yeomen{ } , , , lesser yeomen{ } , , , small proprietors , , , cottagers , , public bodies , , waste lands , , ------- --------- , , , { } this classification is purely arbitrary. [ ] _op. cit._, p. . [ ] the leaseholder is burdened with "rack-rent" and "premiums"; when the lease expires the improvements revert to the landlord. there has been, for years, a well-organized single-tax movement in england that points to the evils of this land system as conclusive proof of the validity of henry george's theory. [ ] one of the choruses popular with the great throngs that paraded the streets in that eager campaign is full of significance. it was sung to the tune of "marching through georgia." "the land, the land, 'twas god who gave the land; the land, the land, the ground on which we stand; why should we be beggars, with the ballot in our hand? god gave the land to the people." [ ] during the debate on the second reading in the house of commons, the writer one day counted twenty members on the benches, and a labor member called the attention of the speaker to the fact that "in this hour of constitutional crisis only twenty brave men are found willing to defend the prerogatives of the realm!" [ ] some of the fabians, nevertheless, fought the bill, and their champion, bernard shaw, called lloyd george's effort "the premature attempt of a sentimental amateur." [ ] in the labor party claimed credit for the following measures passed during the parliamentary session of that year: "( ) the grant of an additional £ , ($ , , ) for the unemployed, and the extraction of a promise that, if it was insufficient, 'more would be forthcoming.' "( ) the passing of the trades boards bill--the first effective step against 'sweating.' "( ) the smashing of the bill authorizing the amalgamation of three great railways. "( ) a discussion, protest, and vote against the visit of bloody nicholas, the tsar. the labor party's amendments secured supporters, whilst only members of the british parliament were dirty enough to support the tsar's visit. "( ) the introduction of the shop hours bill and the extortion of a promise that it shall be adopted by the government and passed."--from a campaign pamphlet, _the labor party in parliament_, p. . [ ] see _wanted--a program: an appeal to the liberal party_. s. webb, london, . [ ] see article by professor hobhouse, on "democracy in england," _atlantic monthly_, february, . [ ] j.a. hobson, _the crisis of liberalism_, p. . [ ] l.t. hobhouse, _democracy and reaction_, p. . [ ] see "report eighteenth annual conference, i.l.p.," , p. . [ ] _supra cit._, p. . some of the i.l.p. members are continental in their views. the president of the party used these words in his address, : "all this jiggery-pokery of party government played like a game for ascendency and power is no use to us" (_supra cit._, p. ). the discipline of the labor party was unable to keep half a dozen of its ablest debaters from fighting the insurance bill. the reversion of the radical socialist element to the i.l.p. is by some observers considered not unlikely. then the liberal or _réformiste_ element will become either a faction of the liberal-radical party or melt entirely away as the chartists did in . [ ] this was the language used in the amendment moved in january, . [ ] see _parliamentary debates_, th series, vol. , february , . [ ] the socialist workmen always resent the activity of the police and soldiers during strikes. in f. engels wrote to an american friend: "the police brutalities in trafalgar square have done wonders in helping to widen the gap between the workingmen radicals and the middle-class liberals and radicals." (see _briefe und auszüge aus briefen von fr. engels u. a._, stuttgart, .) one of the incidents of the debate over the railway strike in the house of commons was a clash between lloyd george, the liberal leader, and keir hardie, the socialist. keir hardie had made inflammatory speeches to striking workmen, and for this the chancellor of the exchequer gave him a terrific and unmerciful flaying. (see _parliamentary debates_, th series, vol. , aug. , .) [ ] j. ramsay macdonald: speech delivered at edinburgh, . [ ] see j. ramsay macdonald, _the socialist movement_, pp. - . [ ] g.b. shaw, preface to "fabian tracts." [ ] see lloyd george's famous "limehouse speech." [ ] l.t. hobhouse, _democracy and reaction_, p. . [ ] brougham villiers, _the opportunity of liberalism_, preface. [ ] see article by secretary pease, of the fabians, on the fabian society, _t.p.'s magazine_, february, . [ ] j.a. hobson, _the crisis of liberalism_, p. . chapter x conclusion we have now concluded our survey of the political activities of socialism in the four countries that present the most characteristic features of this movement of the working classes. it is peculiarly difficult to draw general conclusions from the study of a movement so protean. democracy is young; socialism is in its early infancy. is there a rational trend in socialism? or is it only a passing whim of the masses? is it a crude theory, an earnest protest, a powerful propaganda? or is it a current of human conviction so strong, so deep-flowing that it will be resistless? it is futile to deny the power of the socialist movement. the greatest proof of its virility is its ability to break away from marxian dogma and from the fantasies of the utopists, and acknowledge mundane ways and means. in spite of this earthiness, it still has its fanciful abstractions. some of its prophets are still glibly proclaiming a new order,--as if society were artificial, like a house, and could be torn down piecemeal or by dynamite, and then rebuilt to suit the vagaries of a new owner. on the other hand, a portion of the socialists are learning that society is a living thing that can be shaped only by training, like the mind of a child. socialism, as a whole, is metamorphosing. some of its vicious eccentricities, like the ravings against religion and the espousal of free love, have already vanished. it is learning that institutions are the product of ages, not of movements, and cannot be changed at the fancy of every new and disgruntled social prophet. the best school for socialism has been the school of parliamentary activity. here the hot-blooded protesters become sober artisans of statecraft. we have seen how the early utopian ideas, with their edenesque theory of the guilelessness of man, were abruptly exchanged for the theory of violence, based on the materialistic conception of the universe and of man. neither the soft humanities of the utopists nor the blood and thunder of revolution overturned the existing state. but when the workingmen appeared in parliaments, then things began to change. in every country where the socialists have entered parliament, they appeared suddenly, in considerable numbers. so in france, germany, england, belgium, austria. and they always produced a flutter, often a scare, among the conservatives. they were an untried force. their preachings of violence and their antagonism to property made them an unknown quantity, to be feared, and not to be lightly handled--a bomb of political dynamite that might explode any moment and scatter the product of ages into fragments! but no explosion came. and one more example of the persistence of human nature was added to the long annals of history. in every country the parliamentary experience has been the same: the liberal and radical element, attracted by the legislative demands of the labor party, coalesced, for specific issues, with the socialists, and a new era of economic and social legislation was ushered in. even in germany, with its unmodern conditions in government, all the powers of feudal autocracy failed to crush the rising forces of the new political consciousness. in france and england we have seen socialists take their places in the cabinet, to the chagrin of that portion of the socialists who still regard social classes as natural enemies, and consider social co-operation among all the elements of society impossible. in brief, socialism has entered politics and has become mundane. you need a microscope to tell a socialist from a socialist-radical in france, and a laborite from a radical-liberal in england. briand and millerand may be voted out of the socialist party, and john burns may be spurned by the i.l.p. but these men are teaching a double lesson: first, that there are no new ways to human betterment; second, that the old way is worth traveling, because it does lead to happier and easier conditions of toil. socialists the world over will soon be compelled to realize that the political force which shrinks from the responsibility of daily political drudgery will never be a permanent factor in life. a political party that is afraid to assume the obligations of government for fear that it will lose its ideal, is too fragile for this world. the socialist party wherever it exists is a labor party, with a labor program that is based on conditions which need to be remedied. their practical demands as a rule are of such a nature that all of society would benefit by their enactment into law. the mystery has all gone out of the movement. it is not necromancy, it is plain parliamentary humdrum which you see. the threatened witchery is all words; the doing is intensely human, of the earth earthy. the socialist movement tends toward the latest phase of democracy, which is social democracy; the democracy that has ceased to toy with liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the other tinsel abstractions of the bourgeois revolutions; the democracy that sees poverty and suffering increase as wealth and ease increase. it is the democracy of the human heart, that cares for the babe in the slums, the lad in the factory, the mother at the cradle, and the father in his old age. against all these helpless ones society has sinned. and it is to a universal, sincere, social penance that the new democracy calls the rich, the powerful, and the comfortable. socialism is merging rapidly into this new democracy. in doing so it is abandoning its two great illusions. the first illusion is that the interests of the worker are somehow different from the interests of the rest of the community. class war has been a resonant battle-cry, and has served its purpose. it is folly for any class to magnify its needs above those of the rest of society. civilization and culture embrace the artisan and the artist, the poor and the powerful. any class interest that clashes with the welfare of society as a whole cannot survive. socialism is abandoning the tyranny of class war, is being mellowed by class co-operation. socialists are now claiming that their interests are the interests of society. the social complexion of the party in the countries of its greatest advancement is an indication of this. many of the party leaders are of middle-class origin. some of them are rich. you call at their homes and servants open the door and receive your card on a silver tray. multitudes of lawyers, physicians, journalists, and professors are in the movement. dr. frank of mannheim, the leader of the badensian socialists, said to me that the degree to which socialism can gain the support of the intellectual element is the measure of success of the movement. all this indicates that socialism is breaking the bonds of self-limited class egoism. the peasant landowner, the small shopkeeper, the intellectualist, and occasionally a man or two of wealth and high social position are being drawn into this new democracy. the question is now being seriously asked: can there be a social co-operation? must there always be industrial war? von vollmar, millerand, vandervelde, macdonald proclaim the possibility of rational co-operation. macdonald says: "the defense for democracy which is far and away the weightiest is that progress must spring, not from the generosity or enlightenment of a class, but from the common intelligence." "it must be pointed out that the labor legislation now being asked for is very much more than a sequel to that passed under the influence of lord shaftesbury. this differs from that as the working of the moral conscience differs from the motives of the first brute man who shaped his conduct under a contract of mutual defense with a friendly neighbor. to use the arm of the law to abolish crying evils, to put an end to an ever-present injustice, is one thing; to use that arm to promote justice and to keep open the road to moral advancement, to bring down from their throne in the ideal into a place in the world certain conceptions of distributive justice, is quite another thing. and yet this latter is now being attempted, and was certain to be attempted as soon as democracy came into power. when society is enfranchised, the social question becomes the political question."[ ] "the state is not the interest of a class, but the organ of society."[ ] there can be no broader foundation for political action than this. all progress springs from the "common intelligence" to which every one contributes his quota. the second great illusion of socialism is the social revolution. no one except a few extremists any longer thinks of the revolution by blood. engels, the friend of marx, shows that everywhere violence is giving way to political methods. "even in the romance countries we see the old tactics revised. everywhere the german example of using the ballots is being followed. even in france the socialists see more and more that no lasting victory is to be theirs unless they win beforehand the great masses of the people. the slow work of propaganda and parliamentary activity is here also recognized as the next step in party development."[ ] engels shows how socialists have entered the parliaments of belgium, italy, denmark, bulgaria, roumania, as well as the parliaments of the great powers. and he indicates that the revolution of the socialist must come as a revolution by majorities--which is democracy. engels still believed that violence would follow the accession of democratic power. if he had lived another decade he would have discarded this last remnant of the theory of violence. in germany the bourgeois are more frightened over the legal than over the illegal acts of the socialist. they fear the results of elections more than rebellion. violence they can suppress with a bayonet, but laws--they must be obeyed. this is true in every country. the power of the ballot is infinitely greater than the power of the bullet, provided it is followed up with common sense and energy. the theory of violence, then, has almost disappeared. the syndicalist, in his reversion to anarchy, attempts to revive the forsaken theory. he does this by a general strike. but the general strike is not to be confused with the social revolution. the general strike, wherever it has been tried as an economic forcing valve, has failed. but whenever it has been used as a political uprising, demanding political rights, it has been more or less successful. in belgium we have seen how it brought results. in sweden a few years ago there was a general strike that not only shut every factory, but stopped the street cars and all transportation lines, closed the gas-works, and even the newspapers were suspended. it was a powerful political protest, but the number of striking workmen did not equal the non-strikers. in italy in a general strike was called to protest against the arbitrary attitude of the government toward the labor movement. in some of the cities all work ceased, even the gondoliers of venice joined the strikers. in russia in - the transportation lines and post and telegraph lines were tied up while the workingmen demonstrated for their political liberty. the violence of socialism to-day is political; the violence of trade unionism is economic. as the democratic consciousness spreads, there may be such a coalescing of interests that violence will cease. but a human society without warfare and contention is still a tax upon the imagination. strikes are increasing in number and bitterness and all the arbitrations and devices of democracies seem helpless in the turmoil of economic strife. i am not unmindful that behind all this parliamentary activity there is the dim background of hope in the hearts of many socialists that somehow the wage system will vanish, that competition will cease, that the primary activities of production and distribution will be assumed by society, and that economic extremes will become impossible. in a people of fitful temper and ebullient spirit the doctrine of overturning remains a constant menace. socialism in spain and italy wears a scarlet coat, in germany a drab, and in england a black. the danger to civilization lurks, not in the survival of the doctrines of the older socialism, but in the temper of the people who espouse them. the socialist movement has accomplished three notable things. first, it has spread democracy. the bourgeois revolutions established democracy; socialism extends it. we have seen how in belgium it compelled the governing powers to give labor the ballot; how in germany, hard set and dogmatic, it is shaping events that will surely lead to ministerial responsibility and to universal suffrage; and how in england it is resulting in universal manhood suffrage and probably "votes for women." socialism is spreading the obligations of government upon all shoulders. it is not, however, democratizing the machinery of administration. in france the centralized autocracy of napoleon's empire remains almost untouched. in england the ancient traditions of administration are slow to change. in germany the civil service will be the last barrier to give way. secondly, socialism has forced the labor question upon the lawmakers. this is a great achievement. the neglected and forgotten portions of the human family are now the objects of state solicitude. the record of this revolution is written in the statute books. turn the leaves of the table of contents of a modern parliamentary journal, and compare it with the same work of thirty years ago. almost the entire time is now taken up with questions that may be called humanitarian rather than financial or political. grave ministers of state make long speeches on the death-rate of babies in the cities, on the cost of living in factory towns, on the causes of that most heartbreaking of modern woes, non-employment. budgets are now concerned with the feeding of school children as well as the building of warships, and with the training of boys as well as the drilling of soldiers. nowhere has this radical change taken place without a labor party. the laboring man forced the issue. he bent kings and cabinets and parliaments to his demands. the time was ripe, society had reached that stage of its development when it was ready to take up these questions. but it did not do so of its own free will. when labor parties sprang like magic into puissance, a decade ago, the social conscience was ready to hear their plea. bismarck foresaw their demands. but he was too obsessed of feudalism to realize their motives. therefore his state socialism failed to silence the socialists. the workman had his heart in the cause, not merely his tongue. and the third great achievement is the natural result of the other two. when democracy is potent enough to force its demands on parliament, then the power of the state is ready to fulfil its demands. so we find in every country where social democracy has gained a foothold a constant increase of the functions of the state. what shall the state do? that is now the great question. one hundred years ago it was, what sort of a state shall we have? that is answered: a democratic state; at least, a state democratic in spirit. the state is no longer merely judge, soldier, lawmaker, and governor. it is physician, forester, bookkeeper, schoolmaster, undertaker, and a thousand other things. society has grown complex, and the state, which is only another name for society, has developed a surprising precocity. we have seen that in england especially the trend of legislation is to deprive the individual, one by one, of those prerogatives which gave him dominion over property. a man owning land in the city of london, for instance, has not the liberty to build as he likes or what he likes. he must build as the state permits him, and the exactions are manifold. he can be compelled to build a certain distance from the street,--that is, the city demands a strip of his land for common use. he can build only a certain height,--the community wants the sunlight. if his older buildings are dilapidated, the city tears them down. if the streets through his allotment are too narrow, the city widens them. in short, he may have title in fee simple, but the community has a title superior. even his income from this parcel of land is not all his own. the state now takes a goodly slice in taxes. if he is inclined to resent this, and does not improve his property, the state taxes him on the unearned increment, and if he refuses to submit to this "socialism," the constable seizes the whole parcel, and he can have what is left after the community has satisfied its demands. the taxes that he pays are distributed over a vast variety of activities. they go to feed school children, to pension aged workmen, to send inspectors into the factories, to keep up hospitals, as well as to light and pave the streets and pay policemen. other taxes that he pays on other forms of property go to the improvement of agriculture, to the payment of boards of arbitration, and so on. in short, ownership is becoming more and more only an incident; it is not merely a badge of ease, but a symbol of social responsibility. the burden of the law is shifting from property to persons, from protecting things to protecting humanity. this change from the roman law is almost revolutionary. even blackstone, our halfway-mark in the evolution of the common law, is busy with postulates protecting property. where is this encroachment of the state on private "rights" going to end? there are some things which the state (society) can do better than the individual; like the marshaling of an army or conducting a post-office, and things that are done to counteract the selfishness of individuals, like factory inspection. but there are other things which society cannot do; things that depend on individual effort, like art, literature, and invention. the two fields of state and individual activity merge into each other. each nation marks its own distinctions. but this is certain: _in a democracy the state will do the things which the people want it to do_. and in a social democracy these things are numerous. social democracy strikes a balance between individual duty and collective energy. it brings the power of government (collective power), not to the few who are rich, therefore ignoring oligarchy; nor to the few who are clever, thereby ignoring tyranny; nor to the few who are well-born, thus discarding aristocracy; but it brings all the power of the government to all the people. it attempts to coalesce the cleverness of the tyrant, the experience of the aristocrat, the wealth of the industrial nabob, and the aggregate momentum of the mass, into a humanitarian power. it attempts to use the gifts of all for the benefit of all. social democracy is the resultant of two forces meeting from opposite directions: the forces of industrialism, and socialism, of collectivism and individualism. no one can draw the exact direction of this resultant. it attempts to avoid the tyranny and selfishness of the few, and the tyranny and greed of the many. our study of the operation of governments under the sway of social democracy has shown the sort of legislation that is demanded. it is not necessary to repeat here the details of these laws. but it is necessary to bear in mind that there are two industrial questions which have absolutely refused to bend to the power of government: the question of the length of the workday and the question of wages. the vast majority of strikes are due to differences over these two questions. the eight-hour day and the minimum wage have been successful only in a limited government service.[ ] nor has any machinery set up by governments to avoid industrial collisions between workmen and employers been successful in avoiding differences over hours and wages. the elaborate system of germany, for instance, is nothing more than the good will of the state offered to the warring industrial elements in the interests of peace. the questions of hours and wages are so fundamental that they embrace the right of private property. any power that divests an individual of the right to dispose of his time or substance by contract virtually deprives him of the right of ownership. the limits to the possibilities of social democracy are the limits of private ownership. this brings us at once to the verge of the eternal question of government--the finding of a just ratio between individual and collective responsibility: a ratio that varies with varying nationalities, and that will vary with the passing years. each generation in every land will have to fix the limitations for itself. the new social democracy has acquired certain characteristics which will help us in determining the trend of its movements. in the first place it is an educated social democracy. the taunt of ignorance applied to the old socialism of passion cannot be applied to the new socialism of practice. the nations of europe no longer debate the suitability of universal education. that question happily was settled for the united states with the landing of the pilgrims. it took one hundred years for europe to understand the ordinance of , that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." not all of the european nations have touched the heights of this ideal, but social democracy is struggling towards it, and schools, more or less efficient, are open to the workmen's children. this education is extended to adults by the press and by self-imposed studies. the eagerness with which men and women flock to lectures and night classes is a great omen. in paris the _École socialiste_ and _université populaire_, in germany and belgium the night classes in the labor union clubhouses, the debates and the lecture courses, are evidences of intellectual eagerness. in the second place it is a drilled democracy. it is organized into vast co-operative societies and trade unions. here it learns the lesson of constant watchfulness over details. this training in the infinite little things of business is a good sedative. socialists bargain and sell and learn the lessons of competition; do banking and learn discount; engage in manufacture and learn the problem of the employer. they are, moreover, drilled in parliaments, in city and county councils, in communal offices. they learn the advantages of give and take, are skilled in compromise, and feel the friction of opposition. all this has wrought a wonderful change in socialism. to a belgian co-operativist running a butcher-shop, the eight-hour day is a practical problem; and to a bavarian member of a city council the question of opening communal dwellings ceases to be only a subject for debate. nothing has brought these people to earth so suddenly as the infusion of earthly experience into their blood. and this transfusion has given them life. it has rid them of their many adjectives and given them a few verbs. it has robbed them in large measure of their mob spirit.[ ] every year the arbitrary governments of europe are finding police coercion more and more unnecessary. the socialist crowd is growing orderly, is achieving that self-control which alone entitles a people to self-government. it is not unnatural that this movement has made leaders. of these, herr august bebel is the most remarkable example. this woodturner, turned party autocrat and statesman, is a never-ending wonder to the german aristocracy. his speeches are read as eagerly as those of the chancellor, and his opinions are quoted as widely as the kaiser's. when in he made his great speech on the morocco question in the social democratic convention, it was reported by the column in all of the great continental and english dailies. bebel is an example of what the open door of opportunity will do, and he had to force the door himself. a few years ago, in a moment of reminiscent confidence, he confessed that he used to cherish as an ideal the time when he could, for once, have all the bread and butter he could eat. in america we are accustomed to this rising into power of obscure and untried men. but in europe it is rare. european social democracy is an expression of the desire on the part of the people for the open highways of opportunity. in the third place, social democracy is self-conscious. i have not used the word class-conscious, because it is more than the consciousness of an economic group. history is replete with instances that reveal the irresistible power generated by mass consciousness. this is the psychology of nationalism. the dynamo that generates the mysterious voltage of patriotism, of tribal loyalty, is the heart. socialism has replaced tribal and national ideals and welded its devotees into a self-conscious international unity. whatever danger there may be in socialism is the danger of the zealot. the ideal may be impracticable and discarded, but the devotion to it may be blind and destructive. as a rule, socialist leaders and writers maintain that this drawing together of socialism and democracy is only transitory, and that beyond this lies the promised land of social production. jaurès has explained this clearly: "democracy, under the impetus given it by organized labor, is evolving irresistibly toward socialism, and socialism toward a form of property which will deliver man from his exploitation by man, and bring to an end the régime of class government. the radicals flatter themselves that they can put a stop to this movement by promising the working classes some reforms, and by proclaiming themselves the guardians of private property. they hope to hold a large part of the proletariat in check by a few reforming laws expressing a sentiment of social solidarity, and by their policy of defending private property to rouse the conservative forces, the petty bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the small peasant proprietors to oppose socialism."[ ] so we see that in spite of their experiences socialists still draw a clear distinction between their socialism and democracy. the socialist is willing to ignore the experiences of the past twenty years in his ecstasy of vision. he claims that whatever has been done is mere reform. he affects to belittle it, the marxian scorns it. to the socialist, democracy is only the halfway house on the road to the economic paradise. he has his gaze fixed on the new jerusalem of "co-operative production" and "distributive justice." whether this new city, with its streets paved with the gold of altruism and its gates garnished with the pearls of good will and benevolence, will be brought from the fleecy clouds of ecstatic imagination to our sordid earth remains a question of speculation to that vast body of sincere and practical citizens who have not scaled the heights of the socialistic patmos. european socialism has been transplanted to america. but its growth until quite recently has been very slow, and confined largely to immigrants. there is no political spur to hasten the movement. here democracy has been achieved. the universal ballot, free speech, free press, free association are accomplished. many of the economic policies espoused by the social democratic parties of europe are written into the platforms of our political parties. there will be no independent labor party of any strength until the old parties have aroused the distrust of the great body of laboring men, and until the labor unions cut loose from their traditional aloofness and enter politics. how socialistic such a party will be must depend upon the circumstances attending its organization. the two third-party movements which have flourished since the civil war, the greenback movement of the ' 's and the populist movement of the ' 's, were virtually "class" parties, restricted to the agricultural population of the middle and far west; and both of them feared socialism as much as they hated capitalism. neither of these parties outlived a decade. economic prosperity abruptly ended both.[ ] the stress of political exclusiveness and the harsh hand of government will not produce a reactionary movement among the workingmen of america. but economic circumstances may do so. we are still a young country full of the hope of youth. the ranks of every walk of life are filled with those who have worked their way to success from humble origin. most of our famous men struggled with poverty in their youth. their lives are constantly held up to the children of the nation as examples of american pluck, enterprise, and opportunity. a nation that lures its clerks toward proprietorship and its artisans toward independence offers barren soil for the doctrines of discontent. we have no stereotyped poverty in the european sense. our farmers own their acreage, and many of the urban poor are able to buy a cottage in the outskirts of the city. but there are signs that these conditions are undergoing profound changes. unlimited competition has led to limitless consolidation of industries, and the financial destinies of the republic repose in the hands of comparatively few men. so much of the marxian proposition is fulfilled, at the moment, in america. this concentrated wealth has not been unmindful of politics. governmental power and money power are closely identified in the public mind. our cities are overflowing with a new population from the excitable portions of southern europe, a population that is proletarian in every sense of the word. panics follow one another in rapid succession. the uneasiness of business is fed by the turmoil of politics. unrest is everywhere. labor and business are engaged in constant struggles that affect all members of society. the cost of living has increased alarmingly in the last ten years. we are becoming rapidly a manufacturing nation; the balance of power is shifting from the farm to the city.[ ] european socialists are taking a keen interest in american affairs. bebel said to me: "you are getting ready for the appropriation of the great productive enterprises and the railways. your trusts make the problem easy." john burns prophesied that violence and bloodshed alone would check us in our mad career for wealth. jaurès asked how long it would take before our poverty would be worse than that of europe. at a distance they see us plunging headlong into a socialist régime. professor brentano of munich knows us better. he said to me, "conservation will be your socialism."[ ] if the fundamental principles of conservation can be embodied in constitutional laws, then there will be an almost indefinite extension of the power of the state over industry. it will embrace mines, forests, irrigated deserts; it will extend to the sources of all water supply and water power; the means of transportation may ultimately be included. so that without radical legal and institutional changes it will be possible for many of the sources of our raw materials to be placed under governmental surveillance, leaving the processes of manufacture and exchange in the hands of private individuals. there are at present many indications that this will be our general process of "socialization." the people appear to want it; and in a democracy the will of the people must prevail. before we have advanced far along the new road of conservation we will find it necessary to reconstruct our whole system of administration. the haphazard of politics must be foreign to public business. everywhere in europe, especially in germany and england, the people, including the socialists, appear satisfied with the efficiency of their administrative machinery. who would intrust the running of a railroad to our federal or state governments? we have reached the extreme of rampant _laissez-faire_. our youthful vigor and material wealth have kept us buoyant. politically we will become more radical, economically less individualistic, in the next cycle of our development. there is no magic that saves a people except the magic of opportunity. in a democracy especially it is necessary to constantly purge society by free-moving currents of talent and virtue. this replenishing stream has its sources in the sturdy, healthy workers of the nation. the movement is from the depths upward. it is the supreme function of the state to keep these sources unclogged. footnotes: [ ] j. ramsay macdonald, _ethical democracy_, pp. - . [ ] j. ramsay macdonald, _socialism and government_, vol. ii, p. . [ ] frederick engels' introduction to marx' _klassenkampf_, pp. - , . [ ] the coal strike in england in march, , brought the question of a legalized minimum wage before the people. [ ] on november , , a vast army of working men and women, estimated at , by the anti-socialist papers, marched under the red flag through the streets of vienna as a protest against the existing franchise laws. they were given the right of way and walked in silence through the streets of the capital. their orderliness was more impressive than their vast numbers. it was an object-lesson that the government did not forget. [ ] jean jaurÈs, _studies in socialism_, eng. ed., p. . [ ] what the so-called progressive party will accomplish, in this direction, remains to be seen. [ ] the socialist vote in the united states is as follows: , , , , , , , , (estimated) the vast increase shown in was made in municipal and other local elections. on january , , villages, towns, and cities in states had some socialist officers. several important cities have been under socialist rule, notably milwaukee and schenectady, where the socialists captured the entire city machinery. in the socialists lost control of milwaukee, although their vote increased , . their overthrow was accomplished by the coalescing of the old parties into a citizens' party, a line-up between radicalism and conservatism that will probably become the rule in american local politics. the party is organized along the lines of the german social democracy. its membership has grown as follows: , , , , , , , , , (may) , [ ] in this statement, professor brentano re-enforces the opinions of the american economist to whose teachings and writings the "progressive" movement in american economics and politics, and especially the movement for conservation of natural resources, must be traced. for many years professor richard t. ely has been pointing the way to this conservative "socialization" of our natural wealth. appendix i. bibliography the following list of the principal works consulted in the preparation of this volume may serve also as a bibliography on the subject. there are very few american books in the list, because the object of this volume is to summarize the european situation. for the spirit of the movement the student must consult the contemporary literature of socialism--the newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, and the campaign documents that flow in a constant stream from the socialist press. these are, of course, too numerous and too fluctuating in character to be catalogued. lists of these publications can be secured at the following addresses: the fabian society, clements inn, strand, london, w.c. the labor party, victoria street, westminster, london, s.w. the independent labor party, bride lane, fleet street, london, e.c. german social democracy, verlags-buchhandlung _vorwärts_, lindenstrasse, berlin, s.w. belgian labor party, _le peuple_, - rue de sable, brussels. french socialist party, _la parti socialiste_, rue de la corderie, paris. general works: the founders of socialism blanc, louis: _socialism._ an english edition was published in . ---- _organization of labor._ english edition in . booth: _saint-simon and saint-simonism._ cabet, Étienne: _le vrai christianisme_, . feuerbach, friedrich: _die religion der zukunft_, - . ---- _essence of christianity._ an english translation, , in the "english and foreign philosophical library." fourier, f.c.m.: _oeuvres complètes._ vols. - . gammond, gatti de: fourier and his system, . gide, charles: _selections from fourier._ an english translation by julien franklin, . godwin, william: _an inquiry concerning political justice_, . kingsley: _cheap clothes and nasty_, . morrell, j.r.: _life of fourier_, . morris, william: _works of_; _chants for socialists_, . owen, robert: _an address_, etc., . ---- _addresses_, etc., . ---- _an explanation of the distress_, etc., . ---- _book of the new moral world_, etc., . proudhon, pierre joseph: the works of. english translation by tucker, american edition, . saint-simon: _new christianity._ an english translation by rev. j.e. smith. . weil, g.: _l'École saint-simonisme--son histoire_, etc., . weitling, william: _garantieen der harmonie und freiheit_, . general works: modern discussion bebel, a.: _woman, in the past, present, and future._ an english translation appeared in london in . bernstein, edward: _responsibility and solidarity in the labor struggle_, . brooks, j.g.: _the social unrest_, . ely, r.t.: _french and german socialism_, . ensor, r.c.k.: _modern socialism._ a useful collection of socialist documents, speeches, programs, etc. graham, w.: _socialism new and old_, . guthrie, w.b.: _socialism before the french revolution_, . guyot, y.: _the tyranny of socialism_, . jaurÈs, j.: _studies in socialism_, . kautsky, k.: _the social revolution._ an english translation by j.b. askew. the best continental view of modern marxianism, and the most widely read. kelly, edmond: _twentieth century socialism_, . the most noteworthy of recent american contributions to socialist thought. kirkup: _a history of socialism_, . a concise and authoritative narrative. koigen, d.: _die kultur-ausschauung des sozialismus_, . levy, j.h.: _the outcome of individualism_, . macdonald, j.r.: _socialism and society_, . macdonald is not only the leader of the british labor party, but his writings comprise a comprehensive exposition of the views of labor democracy. ---- _character and democracy_, . ---- _socialism_, . ---- _socialism and government_, . mill, j.s.: _socialism_, . a collection of essays, etc., from the writings of john stuart mill touching on socialism. rae, j.: _contemporary socialism_, . a standard work. richter: _pictures of the socialist future_, . schaeffle: _the impossibility of social-democracy_, . ---- _the quintessence of socialism_, . probably the most authoritative and concise refutation of the socialist dogmas. sombart, werner: _socialism and the social movement_, . widely read, both in the original and in the english translation. contains an interesting critique of marxianism. spencer, herbert: _the coming slavery_, . a reprint from _the contemporary review_. stoddard, jane: _the new socialism_, . a convenient compilation. tugan-baranovsky, m.i.: _modern socialism_, . a systematic and scholarly résumé of the doctrines of socialism. warschauer, o.: _zur entwickelungsgeschichte des sozialismus_, . wells, h.g.: _new worlds for old_, . one of the most popular expositions of socialism. marx and engels aveling, e.b.: _the student's marx._ a handy compilation. . boehm-bawerk: _karl marx and the close of his system._ an english translation was made in . engels, friedrich: _die entwickelung des socialismus von der utopie zur wissenschaft_, . ---- _socialism--utopian and scientific_, . ---- _l. feuerbach und der ausgang der klassischen deutschen philosophie_, . ---- _briefe und auszüge von briefen_, . ---- _friedrich engels, sein leben, sein wirken und seine schriften_, . marx and engels: _the communist manifesto._ there have been many editions; that of is probably the widest known for its historical introduction. marx, karl: _the poverty of philosophy._ an answer to proudhon's _la philosophie de la misère_. an english translation was made by h. quelch, . ---- _enthüllungen über den kommunisten process zu köln_, . engels' preface gives an account of the origin of the "society of the just." ---- _die klassenkämpfe in frankreich, - ._ ---- _revolution and counter-revolution in germany in ._ an english translation appeared in . ---- _capital_, . ---- _the international workingmen's association._ two addresses on the franco-prussian war, . ---- _the international workingmen's association--the civil war in france._ an address to the general council of the international, . the international dave, v.: _michel bakunin et karl marx_, . engels, f.: _the international workingmen's association_, . froebel, j.: _ein lebenslauf_--for an account of marx vs. bakunin. guillaume, j.: _l'internationale: documents et souvenirs_, . jaeckh, gustav: _l'internationale._ an english translation was published in . jaeger, e.: _karl marx und die internationale arbeiter association_, . maurice, c.e.: _revolutionary movements of - _, . testut, o.: _l'internationale--son origine, son but, son principes, son organisation_, etc. third edition, . a german edition translated by paul frohberg, leipsic, . ---- _le livre bleu de l'internationale_, . villetard: _history of the international._ translated by susan m. day, new haven, . _ein complot gegen die internationale arbeiter association_, , gives a careful version of the marxian side of the bakunin controversy. "international workingmen's association"--"_procès-verbaux, congrès à lausanne_," . _troisième congrès de l'association internationale des travailleurs_, brussels, . _manifeste aux travailleurs des campagnes._ paris, . _manifeste addressé à toutes les associations ouvrières_, etc. paris, . _international arbeiter association protokoll._ a german edition of the proceedings of the paris congress, , with a valuable introduction by w. liebknecht. france jaeger, eugen: _geschichte der socialen bewegung und des socialismus in frankreich_, . jaurÈs, jean: _l'armée nouvelle--l'organisation socialiste de la france_, . the initial installment of the long-promised account of the socialist state. lavy, a.: _l'oeuvre de millerand_, . an appreciative history of millerand's work. contains many documents, speeches, etc. peixotto, j.: _the french revolution and modern socialism_, . von stein, lorenz: _der sozialismus und communismus des heutigen frankreichs_, . weil, georges: _histoire du mouvement socialiste en france_, . belgium bertrand, louis: _histoire de la démocratie et socialisme en belgique depuis _, . introduction by vandervelde. ---- _histoire de la coopération en belgique_, . bertrand, louis, et al.: _ années de domination bourgeois_, . destrÉe et vandervelde: _le socialisme en belgique._ langerock, h.: _le socialisme agraire_, . steffens-frauweiler, h. von: _der agrar sozialismus in belgien_, munich, . vandervelde, Émile: _histoire de la coopération en belgique_, . ---- _essais sur la question agraire en belgique_, . ---- article on the general strike in _archiv für sozial wissenschaft_, may, . germany bebel, august: _die social-demokratie im deutschen reichstag._ a series of brochures detailing the activity of the social democrats-- - . of course from a partisan point of view. ---- _aus meinem leben_, . an intimate recital of the development of social democracy in germany. bernstein, edward: _ferdinand lassalle und seine bedeutung für die arbeiter klasse_, . brandes, georg: _ferdinand lassalle: ein literarisches charakter-bild._ berlin, . an english translation was published in . this is a brilliant biography. dawson, w.h.: _german socialism and ferdinand lassalle_, . ---- _bismarck and state socialism_, . ---- _the german workman_, . ---- _the evolution of modern germany_, . eisner, k.: _liebknecht--sein leben und wirken_, . a brief sketch of the veteran social democrat. frank, dr. ludwig: _die bürgerlichen parteien des deutschen reichstags_, . a socialist's account of the rise of german political parties. harms, b.: _ferdinand lassalle und seine bedeutung für die deutsche sozial-demokratie_, . ---- _sozialismus und die sozial-demokratie in deutschland._ hooper, e.g.: _the german state insurance system_, . kampfmeyer, p.: _geschichte der modernen polizei im zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen kulturbewegung_, . a socialist's recital of the use of police. ---- _geschichte der modernen gesellschafts-klassen in deutschland_, . from a socialist standpoint. kohut, a.: _ferdinand lassalle--sein leben und wirken_, . lassalle, ferdinand: _offenes antwortschreiben an das central-comité zur berufung eines allgemeinen deutschen arbeiter congress zu leipzig_, . ---- _die wissenschaft und die arbeiter_, . ---- _macht und recht_, . a complete edition of lassalle's works was published in , under the title "gesamte werke ferdinand lassalles." lowe, c.: _prince bismarck: an historical biography_, . a sympathetic description of bismarck's attempt to solve the social problem. mehring, f.: _die deutsche sozial-demokratie--ihre geschichte und ihre lehre_, . third edition. a compact narrative. meyer, r.: _emancipationskampf des vierten standes_, . naumann, friedrich: _die politischen parteien_, . history of german political parties. a radical account. schmoele, j.: _die sozial-demokratische gewerkschaften in deutschland seit dem erlasse des sozialisten gesetzes_, , etc. _sozial-demokratische partei-tag-protokoll._ annual reports of the party conventions. _documente des sozialismus._ an annual publication edited by bernstein. england arnold-foster, h.: _english socialism of to-day_, . barker, j.e.: _british socialism_, . a collection of quotations. bibby, f.: _trades unionism and socialism_, . blatchford, r.: _merrie england_, . churchill, winston: _liberalism and the social problem_, . engels, f.: _the condition of the working classes in england in _, . fay, c.r.: _co-operation at home and abroad_, . gammage, r.g.: _history of the chartist movement_, . hardie, keir: _from serfdom, to socialism_, . hobhouse, l.t.: _the labor movement_, . ---- _liberalism_, . ---- _democracy and reaction_, . hobson, j.a.: _the crisis in liberalism_, . holyoake: _history of cooperation_, . knott, y.: _conservative socialism_, . lecky, w.e.h.: _democracy and liberty_, . macdonald, j.r.: _the people in power_, . ---- _socialism to-day_, . masterman, c.f.g.: _the condition of england_, . mccarthy, j.: _the epoch of reform_, . for chartism and the reform movements of the nineteenth century democracy. money, chiozza: _riches and poverty_, . nicholson, j.s.: _history, progress and ideals of socialism._ a criticism of the socialist viewpoint. noel, conrad: _the labor party._ a criticism of the attitude of liberals and conservatives toward the social problems. from the labor party viewpoint. snowden, p.: _the socialist budget_, . towler, w.g.: _municipal socialism._ the anti-socialist viewpoint. _the times_: _the socialist movement in great britain_, . a reprint of a series of carefully prepared articles in _the times._ villiers, b.: _the opportunity of liberalism_, . ---- _the socialist movement in england_, . webb, s.: _wanted--a program: an appeal to the liberal party_, . ---- _socialism in england_, . webb, b. and s.: _industrial democracy_, . ---- _the history of trade unionism_, . ii. france . note on the french government yves guyot, the distinguished french publicist, told the writer that there was only one compact, disciplined political party in france, the united socialists. other than the socialists, there is no well-organized group in the chamber of deputies. the right, center, and left coalesce almost insensibly into each other. party platforms and party loyalty are replaced by a political individualism that to an american politician would seem like political anarchy. the chamber of deputies is supreme--the ministry stands or falls upon its majority's behest. this gives to the deputy a peculiar personal power. he is only loosely affiliated with his group, is a powerful factor in the government of the republic, and is directly dependent upon his constituents for his tenure in office. the result is a personal, rather then a party, system of politics. this remarkably decentralized system of representative governance is counterbalanced by a highly efficient and completely centralized system of administration, which is based on civil service, and outlives all the mutations of ministries and shifting of deputies. the ministry, naturally, has theoretical control over the administrative officials. during the campaign for reorganizing the army and navy, and the disestablishment of the church, under the radical-socialist _bloc_, a few years ago, general andré, acting for the ministry, resorted to a comprehensive system of espionage to ferret out the undesirable officers. every commune has its official scrutinizer, who reports the doings of the employees to the government. this, in turn, has created a clientilism. the deputy is needed by the ministry, the deputy needs the votes of his constituency, the local officials need the good will of the deputy. the result is a fawning favoritism that has taken the place of party servitude as we know it in america. the socialists have precipitated a serious problem in this relation of the government employee to the state: can the state employees form a union? there are nearly , , state employees. this includes not only all the functionaries, but all the workmen in the match factories, the mint, the national porcelain factory and tobacco plants, and the navy yards. in and again in the court of cassation decided that "the right of forming a union (_syndicat_) is confined to those who, whether as employers or as workmen or employed, are engaged in _industry, agriculture, or commerce_, to the exclusion of all other persons and all other occupations." the government has, however, countenanced some infringements. a few syndicates of municipal and departmental employees are allowed; but they are mostly workmen, not strictly functionaries. there are several syndicates of elementary school teachers. but they have not been allowed to federate their unions. at lyons the teachers formed a union and, according to law, filed their rules and regulations with the proper official, who turned them over to the minister of justice, and after a cabinet consultation it was decided that the union was illegal, but would be ignored. they then joined the local _bourse du travail_ (federation of labor), and briand, then minister of education, vetoed their action. then a number of branches in the public service, including post-office and customs-house employees, teachers, etc., united in forming a committee "_pour la défense du droit syndical des salaries de l'état, des départements et du commerce_." this "committee of defense" petitioned clémenceau on the right to organize, and intimated that the great and only difference between the state and the private employer is that the former adds political to economic oppression. this is pure syndicalism. under the individual political jugglery that takes the place of the party system in france, the problem is not made any the easier. . program of the liberal wing of the french socialists, adopted at tours, , under the leadership of jaurÈs _i.--declaration of principles_ socialism proceeds simultaneously from the movement of democracy and from the new forms of production. in history, from the very morrow of the french revolution, the proletarians perceived that the declaration of the rights of man would remain an illusion unless society transformed ownership. how, indeed, could freedom, ownership, security, be guaranteed to all, in a society where millions of workers have no property but their muscles, and are obliged, in order to live, to sell their power of work to the propertied minority? to extend, therefore, to every citizen the guarantees inscribed in the declaration of rights, our great babeuf demanded ownership in common, as a guarantee of welfare in common. communism was for the boldest proletarians the supreme expression of the revolution. between the political régime, the outcome of the revolutionary movement, and the economic régime of society, there is an intolerable contradiction. in the political order democracy is realized: all citizens share equally, at least by right, in the sovereignty; universal suffrage is communism in political power. in the economic order, on the other hand, a minority is sovereign. it is the oligarchy of capital which possesses, directs, administers, and exploits. proletarians are acknowledged fit as citizens to manage the milliards of the national and communal budgets; as laborers, in the workshop, they are only a passive multitude, which has no share in the direction of enterprises, and they endure the domination of a class which makes them pay dearly for a tutelage whose utility ceases and whose prolongation is arbitrary. the irresistible tendency of the proletarians, therefore, is to transfer into the economic order the democracy partially realized in the political order. just as all the citizens have and handle in common, democratically, the political power, so they must have and handle in common the economic power, the means of production. they must themselves appoint the heads of work in the workshops, as they appoint the heads of government in the city, and reserve for those who work, for the community, the whole product of work. this tendency of political democracy to enlarge itself into social democracy has been strengthened and defined by the whole economic evolution. in proportion as the capitalistic régime developed its effects, the proletariat became conscious of the irreducible opposition between its essential interests and the interests of the class dominant in society, and to the bourgeois form of democracy it opposed more and more the complete and thorough communistic democracy. all hope of universalizing ownership and independence by multiplying small autonomous producers has disappeared. the great industry is more and more the rule in modern production. by the enlargement of the world's markets, by the growing facility of transport, by the division of labor, by the increasing application of machinery, by the concentration of capitals, immense concentrated production is gradually ruining or subordinating the small or middling producers. even where the number of small craftsmen, small traders, small peasant proprietors, does not diminish, their relative importance in the totality of production grows less unceasingly. they fall under the sway of the great capitalists. even the peasant proprietors, who seem to have retained a little independence, are more and more exposed to the crushing forces of the universal market, which capitalism directs without their concurrence and against their interests. for the sale of their wheat, wine, beetroot, and milk, they are more and more at the mercy of great middlemen or great industries of milling, distilling, and sugar-refining, which dominate and despoil peasant labor. the industrial proletarians, having lost nearly all chance of individually rising to be employers, and being thus doomed to eternal dependence, are further subject to incessant crises of unemployment and misery, let loose by the unregulated competition of the great capitalist forces. the immense progress of production and wealth, largely usurped by parasitic classes, has not led to an equivalent progress in well-being and security for the workers, the proletarians. whole categories of wage-earners are abruptly thrown into extreme misery by the constant introduction of new mechanisms and by the abrupt movements and transformations of industry. capitalism itself admits the disorder of the present régime of production, since it tries to regulate it for its gain by capitalistic syndicates, by trusts. even if it succeeded in actually disciplining all the forces of production, it would only do so while consummating the domination and the monopoly of capital. there is only one way of assuring the continued order and progress of production, the freedom of every individual, and the growing well-being of the workers; it is to transfer to the collectivity, to the social community, the ownership of the capitalistic means of production. the proletariat, daily more numerous, ever better prepared for combined action by the great industry itself, understands that in collectiveness or communism lie the necessary means of salvation for it. as an oppressed and exploited class, it opposes all the forces of oppression and exploitation, the whole system of ownership, which debases it to be a mere instrument. it does not expect its emancipation from the good will of rulers or the spontaneous generosity of the propertied classes, but from the continual and methodical pressure which it exerts upon the privileged class and the government. it sets before itself as its final aim, not a partial amelioration, but the total transformation of society. and since it acknowledges no right as belonging to capitalistic ownership, it feels bound to it by no contract. it is determined to fight it, thoroughly, and to the end; and it is in this sense that the proletariat, even while using the legal means which democracy puts into its hands, is and must remain a revolutionary class. already by winning universal suffrage, by winning and exercising the right of combining to strike and of forming trade-unions, by the first laws regulating labor and causing society to insure its members, the proletariat has begun to react against the fatal effects of capitalism; it will continue this great and unceasing effort, but it will only end the struggle when all capitalist property has been reabsorbed by the community, and when the antagonism of classes has been ended by the disappearance of the classes themselves, reconciled, or rather made one, in common production and common ownership. how will be accomplished the supreme transformation of the capitalist régime into the collectivist or communist? the human mind cannot determine beforehand the mode in which history will be accomplished. the democratic and bourgeois revolution, which originated in the great movement of france in , has come about in different countries in the most different ways. the old feudal system has yielded in one case to force, in another to peaceful and slow evolution. the revolutionary bourgeoisie has at one place and time proceeded to brutal expropriation without compensation, at another to the buying out of feudal servitudes. no one can know in what way the capitalist servitude will be abolished. the essential thing is that the proletariat should be always ready for the most vigorous and effective action. it would be dangerous to dismiss the possibility of revolutionary events occasioned either by the resistance or by the criminal aggression of the privileged class. it would be fatal, trusting in the one word revolution, to neglect the great forces which the conscious, organized proletariat can employ within democracy. these legal means, often won by revolution, represent an accumulation of revolutionary force, a revolutionary capital, of which it would be madness not to take advantage. too often the workers neglect to profit by the means of action which democracy and the republic put into their hands. they do not demand from trade-unionist action, co-operative action, or universal suffrage, all that those forms of action can give. no formula, no machinery, can enable the working-class to dispense with the constant effort of organization and education. the idea of the general strike, of general strikes, is invincibly suggested to proletarians by the growing magnitude of working-class organization. they do not desire violence, which is very often the result of an insufficient organization and a rudimentary education of the proletariat; but they would make a great mistake if they did not employ the powerful means of action, which co-ordinates working-class forces to subserve the great interests of the workers or of society; they must group and organize themselves to be in a position to make the privileged class more and more emphatically aware of the gulf which may suddenly be cleft open in the economic life of societies by the abrupt stoppage of the worn-out and interminably exploited workers. they can thereby snatch from the selfishness of the privileged class great reforms interesting the working-class in general, and hasten the complete transformation of an unjust society. but the formula of the general strike, like the partial strike, like political action, is only valuable through the progress of the education, the thought, and the will of the working-class. the socialist party defends the republic as a necessary means of liberation and education. socialism is essentially republican. it might be even said to be the republic itself, since it is the extension of the republic to the régime of property and labor. the socialist party needs, to organize the new world, free minds, emancipated from superstitions and prejudices. it asks for and guarantees every human being, every individual, absolute freedom of thinking, and writing, and affirming their beliefs. over against all religions, dogmas, and churches, as well as over against the class conception of the bourgeoisie, it sets the unlimited right of free thought, the scientific conception of the universe, and a system of public education based exclusively on science and reason. thus accustomed to free thought and reflection, citizens will be protected against the sophistries of the capitalistic and clerical reaction. the small craftsmen, small traders, and small peasant proprietors will cease to think that it is socialism which wishes to expropriate them. the socialist party will hasten the hour when these small peasant proprietors, ruined by the underselling of their produce, riddled with mortgage debts, and always liable to judicial expropriation, will eventually understand the advantages of generalized and systematized association, and will claim themselves, as a benefit, the socialization of their plots of land. but it would be useless to prepare inside each nation an organization of justice and peace, if the relations of the nations to one another remained exposed to every enterprise of force, every suggestion of capitalist greed. the socialist party desires peace among nations; it condemns every policy of aggression and war, whether continental or colonial. it constantly keeps on the order of the day for civilized countries simultaneous disarmament. while waiting for the day of definite peace among nations, it combats the militarist spirit by doing its utmost to approximate the system of permanent armies to that of national militias. it wishes to protect the territory and the independence of the nation against any surprise; but every offensive policy and offensive weapon is utterly condemned by it. the close understanding of the workers, of the proletarians of every country, is necessary as well to beat back the forces of aggression and war as to prepare by a concerted action the general triumph of socialism. the international agreement of the militant proletarians of every country will prepare the triumph of a free humanity, where the differences of classes will have disappeared, and the difference of nations, instead of being a principle of strife and hatred, will be a principle of brotherly emulation in the universal progress of mankind. it is in this sense and for these reasons that the socialist party has formulated in its congresses the rule and aim of its action--international understanding of the workers; political and economic organization of the proletariat as a class party for the conquest of government and the socialization of the means of production and exchange; that is to say, the transformation of capitalist society into a collectivist or communist society. _ii.--program of reforms_ the socialist party, rejecting the policy of all or nothing, has a program of reforms whose realization it pursues forthwith. ( ) _democratization of public authorities_ . universal direct suffrage, without distinction of sex, in every election. . reduction of time of residence. votes to be cast for lists, with proportional representation, in every election. . legislative measures to secure the freedom and secrecy of the vote. . popular right of initiative and referendum. . abolition of the senate and presidency of the republic. the powers at present belonging to the president of the republic and the cabinet to devolve on an executive council appointed by the parliament. . legal regulation of the legislator's mandate, to be revocable by the vote of any absolute majority of his constituents on the register. . admission of women to all public functions. . absolute freedom of the press, and of assembly guaranteed only by the common law. abrogation of all exceptional laws on the press. freedom of civil associations. . full administrative autonomy of the departments and communes, under no reservations but that of the laws guaranteeing the republican, democratic, and secular character of the state. ( ) _complete secularization of the state_ . separation of the churches and the state; abolition of the budget of public worship; freedom of public worship; prohibition of the political and collective action of the churches against the civil laws and republican liberties. . abolition of the congregations; nationalization of the property in mortmain, of every kind, belonging to them, and appropriation of it for works of social insurance and solidarity; in the interval, all industrial, agricultural, and commercial undertakings are to be forbidden to the congregations. ( ) _democratic and humane organization of justice_ . substitution for all the present courts, whether civil or criminal, of courts composed of a jury taken from the electoral register and judges elected under guarantees of competence; the jury to be formed by drawing lots from lists drawn up by universal suffrage. . justice to be without fee. transformation of ministerial offices into public functions. abolition of the monopoly of the bar. . examination from opposite sides at every stage and on every point. . substitution for the vindictive character of the present punishments, of a system for the safe keeping and the amelioration of convicts. . abolition of the death penalty. . abolition of the military and naval courts. ( ) _constitution of the family in conformity with individual rights_ . abrogation of every law establishing the civil inferiority of women and natural or adulterine children. . most liberal legislation on divorce. a law sanctioning inquiry into paternity. ( ) _civic and technical education_ . education to be free of charge at every stage. . maintenance of the children in elementary schools at the expense of the public bodies. . for secondary and higher education, the community to pay for those of the children who on examination are pronounced fit usefully to continue their studies. . creation of a popular higher education. . state monopoly of education at the three stages; as a means towards this, all members of the regular and secular clergy to be forbidden to open and teach in a school. ( ) _general recasting of the system of taxation upon principles of social solidarity_ . abolition of every tax on articles of consumption which are primary necessaries, and of the four direct contributions;[ ] accessorily, relief from taxation of all small plots of land and small professional businesses.[ ] . progressive income-tax, levied on each person's income as a whole, in all cases where it exceeds , francs (£ ). . progressive tax on inheritances, the scale of progression being calculated with reference both to the amount of the inheritance and the degree of remoteness of the relationship. . the state to be empowered to seek a part of the revenue which it requires from certain monopolies. ( ) _legal protection and regulation of labor in industry, commerce, and agriculture_ . one day's rest per week, or prohibition of employers to exact work more than six days in seven. . limitation of the working-day to eight hours; as a means towards this, vote of every regulation diminishing the length of the working-day. . prohibition of the employment of children under fourteen; half-time system for young persons, productive labor being combined with instruction and education. . prohibition of night-work for women and young persons. prohibition of night-work for adult workers of all categories and in all industries where night-work is not absolutely necessary. . legislation to protect home-workers. . prohibition of piece-work and of truck. legal recognition of blacklisting. . scales of rates forming a minimum wage to be fixed by agreement between municipalities and the working-class corporations of industry, commerce, and agriculture. . employers to be forbidden to make deductions from wages, as fines or otherwise. workers to assist in framing special rules for workshops. . inspection of workshops, mills, factories, mines, yards, public services, shops, etc., shall be carried out with reference to the conditions of work, hygiene, and safety, by inspectors elected by the workmen's unions, in concurrence with the state inspectors. . extension of the industrial arbitration courts to all wage-workers of industry, commerce, and agriculture. . convict labor to be treated as a state monopoly; the charge for all work done shall be the wage normally paid to trade-unionist workers. . women to be forbidden by law to work for six weeks before confinement and for six weeks after. ( ) _social insurance against all natural and economic risks_ . organization by the nation of a system of social insurance, applying to the whole mass of industrial, commercial, and agricultural workers, against the risks of sickness, accident, disability, old age, and unemployment. . the insurance funds to be found without drawing on wages; as a means towards this, limitation of the contribution drawn from the wage-workers to a third of the total contribution, the two other thirds to be provided by the state and the employers. . the law on workmen's accidents to be improved and applied without distinction or nationality. . the workers to take part in the control and administration of the insurance system. ( ) _extension of the domain and public services, industrial and agricultural, of state, department, and commune_ . nationalization of railways, mines, the bank of france, insurance, the sugar refineries and sugar factories, the distilleries, and the great milling establishments. . organization of public employment registries for the workers, with the assistance of the bourses du travail and the workmen's organizations: and abolition of the private registries. . state organization of agricultural banks. . grants to rural communes to assist them to purchase agricultural machinery collectively, to acquire communal domains, worked under the control of the communes by unions of rural laborers, and to establish depôts and entrepôts. . organization of communal services for lighting, water, common transport, construction, and public management of cheap dwellings. . democratic administration of the public services, national and communal; organizations of workers to take part in their administration and control; all wage-earners in all public services to have the right of forming trade-unions. . national and communal service of public health, and strengthening of the laws which protect it--those on unhealthy dwellings, etc. ( ) _policy of international peace and adaptation of the military organization to the defense of the country_ . substitution of a militia for the standing army, and adoption of every measure, such as reductions of military service, leading up to it. . remodeling and mitigation of the military penal code; abolition of disciplinary corps, and prohibition of the prolongation of military service by way of penalty. . renunciation of all offensive war, no matter what its pretext. . renunciation of every alliance not aimed exclusively at the maintenance of peace. . renunciation of colonial military expeditions; and in the present colonies or protectorates, withdrawn from the influence of missionaries and the military régime, development of institutions to protect the natives. . basis of the united socialist party of france _adopted january , _ the representatives of the various socialistic organizations of france: the revolutionary socialist labor party, the socialist party of france, the french socialist party, the independent federations of bouches-du-rhône, of bretagne, of hérault, of the somme, and of l'yonne, commanded by their respective parties and federations to form a union upon the basis indicated by the international congress of amsterdam, declare that the action of a unified party should be based upon the principles established by the international congress, especially those held in france in and amsterdam in . the divergence of views and the various interpretations of the tactics of the socialists which have prevailed up to the present moment have been due to circumstances peculiar to france and to the absence of a general party organization. the delegates declare their common desire to form a party based upon the class war which, at the same time, will utilize to its profit the struggles of the laboring classes and unite their action with that of a political party organized for the defense of the rights of the proletariat, whose interests will always rest in a party fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed to all the bourgeois classes and to the state which is their instrument. therefore the delegates declare that their respective organizations are prepared to collaborate immediately in this work of the unification of all the socialistic forces in france, upon the following basis, unanimously adopted: . the socialist party is a class party which has for its aim the socialization of the means of production and exchange, that is to say, to transform the present capitalistic society into a collective or communistic society by means of the political and economic organization of the proletariat. by its aims, by its ideals, by the power which it employs, the socialist party, always seeking to realize the immediate reforms demanded by the working class, is not a party of reforms, but a party of class war and revolution. . the members of parliament elected by the party form a unique group opposed to all the factions of the bourgeois parties. the socialist group in parliament must refuse to sustain all of those means which assure the domination of the bourgeoisie in government and their maintenance in power: must therefore refuse to vote for military appropriations, appropriations for colonial conquest, secret funds, and the budget. even in the most exceptional circumstances the socialist members must not pledge the party without its consent. in parliament the socialist group must consecrate itself to defending and extending the political liberties and rights of the working classes and to the realization of those reforms which ameliorate the conditions of life in the struggle for existence of the working class. the deputies should always hold themselves at the disposition of the party, giving themselves to the general propaganda, the organization of the proletariat, and constantly working toward the ultimate goal of socialism. . every member of the legislature individually, as well as each militant socialist, is subject to the control of his federation; all of the officials in all of the groups are subject to the central organization. in every case the national congress has the final jurisdiction over all party matters. . there shall be complete freedom of discussion in the press concerning questions of principle and policy, but the conduct of all the socialist publications must be strictly in accord with the decisions of the national congress as interpreted by the executive committee of the party. journals which are or may become the property of the party, either of the national party or of the federations, will naturally be placed under the management of authorities permanently established for that purpose by the party or the federations. journals which are not the property of the party, but proclaim themselves as socialistic, must conform strictly to the resolutions of the congress as interpreted by the proper party authorities, and they should insert all the official communications of the party and party notices, as they may be requested to do. the central committee of the party may remind such journals of the policies of the party, and if they are recalcitrant may propose to the congress that all intercourse between them and the party be broken. . members of parliament shall not be appointed members of the central committee, but they shall be represented on the central committee by a committee equal to one-tenth of the number of delegates, and in no case shall their representation be less than five. the federation shall not appoint as delegates to the central committee "_militants_" who reside within the limits of the federation. . the party will take measures for insuring, on the part of the officials, respect for the mandates of the party, and will fix the amount of their assessment. . a congress charged with the definite organization of the party will be convened as soon as possible upon the basis of proportional representation fixed, first upon the number of members paying dues, and second upon the number of votes cast in the general elections of . iii. germany . political parties in germany there are a great many "fractions" in german politics. but, following the continental custom, they are all grouped into three divisions, the left or radical, right or conservative, and the center. in germany the center is the catholic or clerical party. the leading groups are as follows: . _conservative._--the "german conservatives" are the old tories; the "free conservatives" profess, but rarely show, a tendency toward liberal ideas, although they have, at intervals, opposed ministerial measures. the conservatives are for the government (regierung) first, last, and all the time. they were a powerful factor under bismarck and docile in his hands. since his day they have suffered many defeats because of their reactionary policy. but the group still is the kaiser's party, the stronghold of modern medievalism, opposed to radical reforms, and adhering to "the grace of god" policy of monarchism. economically they are _junker_ and "big business." the anti-socialist laws were the expression of their ideas as to socialism and the way to quench it. . _national liberal._--this party is not liberal, in the sense that england or america knows liberalism. it is really only a less conservative party than the extreme right, although it began as the brilliant progressist party of the early ' 's. it was triumphant in the prussian diet until bismarck shattered it on his war policy. in the first reichstag it had members, nearly one-third of the whole. but bismarck needed it, got it, and left it quite as conservative as he wished. it voted for the anti-socialist laws and for state insurance. . _progressive_ (_freisinnige_, literally, "free-minded").--this faction is a cession from the old progressist party of which lassalle was a member for a few months. they are radicals of a very moderate type, and are opposed to the junker bureaucracy. there are two wings--the people's party (_freisinnige volkspartei_) and the progressive union (_freisinnige vereinigung_). it is a constitutional party, and has counted in its ranks such eminent scholars as professor virchow and professor theodor mommsen. they are in favor of ministerial responsibility, are free traders of the manchester type, opposed to state intervention and state insurance, but favor factory inspection, sanitation, and other social legislation. they are in favor of freedom in religion, trade, and education, and espouse ballot reform. they have a well-organized party, but do not seem effective in winning elections. they share, to some degree, with the social democrats the prejudice of the religious folk against free-thinking and religious latitudinarianism. it is the middle-class party of protest against bureaucracy. . the _center_, or catholic party, is a homogeneous, isolated, well-disciplined, inflexible group, dominated by loyalty to their religion. whenever they have co-operated with the government it has been in return for favors shown. the ranks of this party were closed by the _culturkampf_, which resulted in the expulsion of the jesuit orders and the separation of the elementary schools from the church. the party is reactionary in politics and economics. . _anti-semitic._--the name discloses the ideals of a party inspired by dread and hatred of an element that comprises less than . per cent. of the population, and whose political disabilities were not all removed until in prussia and in mecklenburg. this party was formed in , largely through the agitation of the court chaplain, pastor stöcker, whose diatribes were peculiarly effective in berlin, where some very disgraceful scenes were enacted by members of this party. . _independent groups_ are formed by the various nationalities that are under subjection to german dominance. these are the danish, hannoverian, alsace-lorraine, and polish groups. they usually are grouped with the center. . there are also a number of independent members in the reichstag. they adhere loosely to the larger groups, but as a rule merit the name given them--_wilden_, "wild ones." the accompanying table (p. ) shows the distribution of seats in the reichstag, for the past thirty years. . some modern german election laws _analysis of the new election law of saxony_ _a._ one vote--every male years of age. _b._ two votes, every male, as follows: . those who have an annual income of over , marks ($ ). . those who hold public office or a permanent private position with an annual income of over , marks ($ ). . those who are eligible to vote for landskulturrat (agricultural board) or gewerbskammer (chamber of commerce) and from their business have an income of over , marks. (this includes merchants, landowners, and manufacturers.) . those who are owners or beneficiaries of property in the kingdom from which they have an income of , marks ($ . ) a year, and upon which at least tax units are assessed. . those who own, or are beneficiaries of, land in the kingdom, to the extent of at least hectares, devoted to agriculture, or forestry, or horticulture, or more than one-half hectare devoted to gardening or wine culture. . those who have conducted such professional studies as entitle them to the one-year volunteer military service. _c._ the following have three votes: . those who have an income of over , marks ($ ). . those in division b, and , who have an income from office or position of over , marks ($ ). . those who are not in private or public service and have a professional income of over , marks. (this includes lawyers, physicians, artists, engineers, publicists, authors, professors.) . those in b, , whose income is over , marks ($ ). . those in b, , with hectares devoted to agriculture, etc., and hectare to gardening or wine culture. _d._ the following have four votes: . those who have an income of , marks ($ ). . those in b, and , or in c, , with an income over , marks ($ ). . those in b, , with an annual income of over , marks ($ ). . those in b, , with hectares devoted to agriculture or hectares devoted to gardening or wine culture. _e._ voters over years old have an extra vote (alters-stimme), but no voter is allowed over four votes. sachsen-altenburg, in - , modified its election laws as follows: the legislature is composed of representatives elected by the cities; by the rural districts; by the highest taxpayers; one each by the chamber of commerce, the board of agriculture, the craft guilds (handwerks-kammer), and the labor council (arbeiter-kammer). the vigorous protest of the social democrats did not avail against the passage of this law. saxe-weimar recently modified its election law as follows: all citizens of communes were given the right to vote. the great feudal estates ( persons in ) elect representatives to the diet; the rest of the highest taxpayers, i.e., those who have a taxable income of over , marks, elect . the university of jena elects member, the chamber of commerce , the handwerks-kammer (craft guilds) , landwirthschaftkammer (agricultural board) , the arbeitskammer (labor council) . there are members in the diet: the remaining are elected at large. . statistical tables state insurance in germany _industrial insurance in germany, ._ sick benefits: number insured , , men , , women , , income , , marks outlay , , " accident insurance: number insured , , men , , women , , income , , marks outlay , , " old-age pensions: number insured , , men , , women , , income , , marks outlay , , " from to a total of , , , marks ($ , , , ) was paid out in industrial insurance. (compiled from _statistisches jahrbuch des deutschen reiches_.) labor unions in germany =================+===================+=============+====================== _name of union_ | _membership_ | _no. of | _amount in | | unions_ | treasury--marks_ -----------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+----------- | | | | | | +---------+---------+------+------+----------+----------- social democratic| , , | , , | , | , | , , | , , hirsh-duncker | , | , | , | , | , , | , , christian | , | , | , | , | , , | , , patriotic | , | , | | | , | , "yellow" | , | , | | | , | , independent* | , | , | | | , , | , , -----------------+---------+---------+------+------+----------+----------- * this is a nondescript group of local organizations, containing ( ) , poles, as well as the organization of railwaymen, telegraph operators, postal employees, all in the government service, and organized as friendly societies rather than as fighting bodies. government employees are not supposed to participate in "unionism." compiled from _statistisches jahrbuch des deutschen reiches_. table showing vote cast in reichstag elections since the founding of the empire* ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ election year | | | | | population of empire | , , | , , | , , | , , | number of voters | , , | , , | , , | , , | number who voted | , , | , , | , , | , , | per cent. of vote cast | . | . | . | . | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ conservative | , | , | , | , | imperial conservative | , | , | , | , | anti-semites | ... | ... | ... | ... | other conservative groups| ... | ... | ... | ... | center | , | , , | , , | , , | guelphs | , | , | , | , | danes | , | , | , | , | poles | , | , | , | , | alsatians | ... | , | , | , | national liberal | , , | , , | , , | , , | other liberal groups | , | , | , | , | progressist or radical | , | , | , | , | people's party | , | , | , | , | social democrats | , | , | , | , | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ election year | | | | | population of empire | , , | , , | , , | , , | number of voters | , , | , , | , , | , , | number who voted | , , | , , | , , | , , | per cent. of vote cast | . | . | . | . | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ conservative | , | , | , , | , | imperial conservative | , | , | , | , | anti-semites | ... | ... | , | , | other conservative groups| ... | ... | ... | , | center | , , | , , | , , | , , | guelphs | , | , | , | , | danes | , | , | , | , | poles | , | , | , | , | alsatians | , | , | , | , | national liberal | , | , | , , | , , | other liberal groups | , | ... | ... | ... | progressist or radical | , | , | , | , , | people's party | , | , | , | , | social democrats | , | , | , | , , | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+==========+ ==========================+==========+==========+==========+ election year | | | | population of empire | , , | , , | , , | number of voters | , , | , , | , , | number who voted | , , | , , | , , | per cent. of vote cast | . | . | . | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+ conservative | , , | , | , | imperial conservative | , | , | , | anti-semites | , | , | , | other conservative groups| , | , | , | center | , , | , , | , , | guelphs | , | , | , | danes | , | , | , | poles | , | , | , | alsatians | , | , | , | national liberal | , | , | , , | other liberal groups | , | , | , | progressist or radical | , | , | , | people's party | , | , | , | social democrats | , , | , , | , , | ==========================+==========+==========+==========+ ==========================+==========+=========== election year | | population of empire | , , | , , number of voters | , , | , , number who voted | , , | , , per cent. of vote cast | . | . ==========================+==========+=========== conservative | , , | , , imperial conservative | , | , anti-semites | , | ... other conservative groups| , | , center | , , | , , guelphs | , | , danes | , | , poles | , | , alsatians | , | , national liberal | , , | , , other liberal groups | , } progressist or radical | , } , , people's party | , } social democrats | , , | , , ==========================+==========+=========== * in round numbers. from kürschner's _deutscher reichstag_, p. . party representation in the reichstag the years are those of general elections--excepting --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ _party or faction._ | | | | | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ right conservatives | | | | | | | german or imperial | | | | | | | conservatives | | | | | | | "wild" conservatives | | | -- | | | | anti-semites | -- | -- | | | | | league of landowners | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | | bavarian land league | -- | -- | -- | -- | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ center center | | | | | | | poles | | | | | | | guelphs | | | | | | | alsatians | | | | | | | danes | | | | | | | "wild" clericals | | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ left national liberals | | | | | | | radicals united progressives | } | | { | | (radicals) | } | | { | | other progressive | } | | { | | groups (radicals) | } | | { | | people's party | | | -- | | | | "wild" liberals | | | | | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ social democrats* | | | | | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ _party or faction._ | | | | | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ right | conservatives | | | | | | | german or imperial | | | | | | | conservatives | | | | | | | "wild" conservatives | | | | | | | anti-semites | | | | } | | league of landowners | | | | } | | bavarian land league | | | | | -- | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ center | center | | | | | | | poles | | | | | | | guelphs | | | | | | | alsatians | | | | | | | danes | | | | | | | "wild" clericals | | -- | | -- | -- | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ left | national liberals | | | | | | | radicals | united progressives | | | | } | | (radicals) | | | | } | | other progressive | | | | } | | groups (radicals) | | | | } | | people's party | | | | } | | "wild" liberals | | | -- | | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ social democrats* | | | | | | | --------------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+ * they form the extreme radical left. (these groups are those given in kürchner's _deutscher reichstag_, p. .) . program of the german social democratic party _adopted at erfurt, _ the economic development of bourgeois society leads by natural necessity to the downfall of the small industry, whose foundation is formed by the worker's private ownership of his means of production. it separates the worker from his means of production, and converts him into a propertyless proletarian, while the means of production become the monopoly of a relatively small number of capitalists and large landowners. hand-in-hand with this monopolization of the means of production goes the displacement of the dispersed small industries by colossal great industries, the development of the tool into the machine, and a gigantic growth in the productivity of human labor. but all the advantages of this transformation are monopolized by capitalists and large landowners. for the proletariat and the declining intermediate classes--petty bourgoisie and peasants--it means a growing augmentation of the insecurity of their existence, of misery, oppression, enslavement, debasement, and exploitation. ever greater grows the number of proletarians, ever more enormous the army of surplus workers, ever sharper the opposition between exploiters and exploited, ever bitterer the class-war between bourgeoisie and proletariat, which divides modern society into two hostile camps, and is the common hall-mark of all industrial countries. the gulf between the propertied and the propertyless is further widened through the crises, founded in the essence of the capitalistic method of production, which constantly become more comprehensive and more devastating, which elevate general insecurity to the normal condition of society, and which prove that the powers of production of contemporary society have grown beyond measure, and that private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their application to their objects and their full development. private ownership of the means of production, which was formerly the means of securing to the producer the ownership of his product, has to-day become the means of expropriating peasants, manual workers, and small traders, and enabling the non-workers--capitalists and large landowners--to own the product of the workers. only the transformation of capitalistic private ownership of the means of production--the soil, mines, raw materials, tools, machines, and means of transport--into social ownership and the transformation of production of goods for sale into socialistic production managed for and through society, can bring it about, that the great industry and the steadily growing productive capacity of social labor shall for the hitherto exploited classes be changed from a source of misery and oppression to a source of the highest welfare and of all-round harmonious perfection. this social transformation means the emancipation not only of the proletariat, but of the whole human race which suffers under the conditions of to-day. but it can only be the work of the working-class, because all the other classes, in spite of mutually conflicting interests, take their stand on the basis of private ownership of the means of production, and have as their common object the preservation of the principles of contemporary society. the battle of the working-class against capitalistic exploitation is necessarily a political battle. the working-class cannot carry on its economic battles or develop its economic organization without political rights. it cannot effect the passing of the means of production into the ownership of the community without acquiring political power. to shape this battle of the working-class into a conscious and united effort, and to show it its naturally necessary end, is the object of the social democratic party. the interests of the working-class are the same in all lands with capitalistic methods of production. with the expansion of world-transport and production for the world-market the state of the workers in any one country becomes constantly more dependent on the state of the workers in other countries. the emancipation of the working-class is thus a task in which the workers of all civilized countries are concerned in a like degree. conscious of this, the social democratic party of germany feels and declares itself _one_ with the class-conscious workers of all other lands. the social democratic party of germany fights thus not for new class-privileges and exceptional rights, but for the abolition of class-domination and of the classes themselves, and for the equal rights and equal obligations of all, without distinction of sex and parentage. setting out from these views, it combats in contemporary society not merely the exploitation and oppression of the wage-workers, but every kind of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, a party, a sex, or a race. setting out from these principles the social democratic party of germany demands immediately-- . universal equal direct suffrage and franchise, with direct ballot, for all members of the empire over twenty years of age, without distinction of sex, for all elections and acts of voting. proportional representation; and until this is introduced, re-division of the constituencies by law according to the numbers of population. a new legislature every two years. fixing of elections and acts of voting for a legal holiday. indemnity for the elected representatives. removal of every curtailment of political rights except in case of tutelage. . direct legislation by the people by means of the initiative and referendum. self-determination and self-government of the people in empire, state, province, and commune. authorities to be elected by the people; to be responsible and bound. taxes to be voted annually. . education of all to be capable of bearing arms. armed nation instead of standing army. decision of war and peace by the representatives of the people. settlement of all international disputes by the method of arbitration. . abolition of all laws which curtail or suppress the free expression of opinion and the right of association and assembly. . abolition of all laws which are prejudicial to women in their relations to men in public or private law. . declaration that religion is a private matter. abolition of all contributions from public funds to ecclesiastical and religious objects. ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be treated as private associations, which manage their affairs quite independently. . secularization of education. compulsory attendance of public primary schools. no charges to be made for instruction, school requisites, and maintenance, in the public primary schools; nor in the higher educational institutions for those students, male and female, who in virtue of their capacities are considered fit for further training. . no charge to be made for the administration of the law, or for legal assistance. judgment by popularly elected judges. appeal in criminal cases. indemnification of innocent persons prosecuted, arrested, or condemned. abolition of the death-penalty. . no charges to be made for medical attendance, including midwifery and medicine. no charges to be made for death certificates. . graduated taxes on income and property, to meet all public expenses as far as these are to be covered by taxation. obligatory self-assessment. a tax on inheritance, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other politico-economic measures which sacrifice the interests of the whole community to the interests of a favored minority. for the protection of the working-class the social democratic party of germany demands immediately-- . an effective national and international legislation for the protection of workmen on the following basis: (_a_) fixing of a normal working-day with a maximum of eight hours. (_b_) prohibition of industrial work for children under fourteen years. (_c_) prohibition of night-work, except for such branches of industry as, in accordance with their nature, require night-work, for technical reasons, or reasons of public welfare. (_d_) an uninterrupted rest of at least thirty-six hours in every week for every worker. (_e_) prohibition of the truck system. . inspection of all industrial businesses, investigation and regulation of labor relations in town and country by an imperial department of labor, district labor departments, and chambers of labor. thorough industrial hygiene. . legal equalization of agricultural laborers and domestic servants with industrial workers; removal of the special regulations affecting servants. . assurance of the right of combination. . workmen's insurance to be taken over bodily by the empire; and the workers to have an influential share in its administration. . separation of the churches and the state. (_a_) suppression of the grant for public worship. (_b_) philosophic or religious associations to be civil persons at law. . revision of sections in the civil code concerning marriage and the paternal authority. (_a_) civil equality of the sexes, and of children, whether natural or legitimate. (_b_) revision of the divorce laws, maintaining the husband's liability to support the wife or the children. (_c_) inquiry into paternity to be legalized. (_d_) protective measures in favor of children materially or morally abandoned. . communal program of the bavarian social democratic party inasmuch as our communes are hindered in the fulfilment of their economic and political duties by reactionary laws, we demand: a.--of the state: . a change of the municipal code, granting genuine local autonomy. a single representative chamber, a four-year term of office, one-half retiring every two years. universal adult suffrage, secret ballot, the franchise not to be denied to those receiving public aid. . radical tax reform, through the establishing of a uniform, progressive income and property tax, collected by the communes; local taxes to be assessed upon increment value; and prohibition of all taxes upon the necessaries of life. . a common-school law providing universal public education free from all religious bias, compulsory up to fourteen years of age. obligatory secondary schools, the inclusion of social and political economy in their curricula; the defraying of expenses of pupils by the state. substitution of professional supervision of schools for clerical supervision. . enactment of a domiciliary law, in place of the present inadequate laws, providing for all the necessary sanitary and socio-political demands. extending the municipalities' right of condemnation to the extent that towns may erect houses and schools, open streets, and make all necessary public improvements demanded by the public welfare. . passage of a sanitary code. regulation of sanitation in the public interests. free medical attendance at births. public nurseries. . the administration of public charities by the local authorities. b.--of the commune we demand: . abolishing all taxes upon the rights of citizenship and of residence. granting of full franchise rights after one year's residence. . elections to be held on a holiday or on sunday. . pensions for communal employees. . the cost of local administration to be borne by local property or from additions to the direct state taxes. abolishing of all indirect taxes. denial of all public aid to the church. . all public services to be conducted by the commune; these to be considered as public conveniences and necessities, and not to serve a mere pecuniary interest, but to be run as the public welfare demands. rational development of existing water-power, means of communication, etc. . stipulating, in every contract for municipal work, the wages to be paid, and other conditions of labor, such arrangements to be made with the labor organizations; the right to organize into unions not to be denied to laborers and municipal employees and officers. abolishing of strike clause in contracts for public works. prohibition, of the sub-contractor system. securing wages of workmen by bonds. forbidding municipal officers participating in any business that will bring them into contract relations with the municipality. . development of a public school system which shall be non-sectarian and free to all. restricting the number of pupils in the classes as far as practical. furnishing free meals and clothing to needy school children; such service not to be counted as public charity. establishing continuation schools for both sexes, and schools for backward children. establishing of public reading-rooms and free public libraries. . the advancement of public housing plans. the purchasing of large land areas by the municipality, to prevent speculation in building lots. simplification of the procedure in examination of building plans, and the granting of building permits. simplifying the regulations pertaining to the building of cottages and small residences. municipal aid in the building of workingmen's homes. providing cheaper homes in municipal houses and tenements. providing loans of public moneys to building associations and agricultural associations. leasing of land by the municipality. municipal inspection of dwellings and of all buildings, the municipality to keep close scrutiny on all real estate developments. establishment of a public bureau of homes, where information and aid can be secured, and where proper statistics can be gathered concerning building conditions. . providing for cheap and wholesome food through the regulation and supervision of its importation and inspection. . extension of sanitation. conducting hospitals according to modern medical science. establishing municipal lying-in hospitals. free burials. . public care for the poor and orphans. the bettering of the economic condition of women. the granting of aid out of public funds. public inspection and control of all orphanages, hospitals for children, and nurseries. . the establishment of public labor bureaus, which are to act as employment agencies, information bureaus, gather labor statistics, and supervise the sociological activities of the municipality. providing work for those in need of employment, on the public works of the commune. provision for the support of those out of work in co-operation, with the labor unions' efforts in the same direction. the extension of municipal factory inspection and labor laws, as far as the general laws permit. appointment of laborers as building inspectors. the development of the industrial and commercial courts. sunday as a day of rest. . liberal wages to be paid workmen employed on public works. fixing a minimum wage in accordance with the rules of the labor unions; formation of public loan and credit system; eight-hour day. insuring public employees against sickness, accident, and old age. making provision for widows and orphans of public employees. right to organize not to be denied all municipal employees and officials. recognition of the unions. annual vacation, on full pay, to every municipal employee and official. municipal employees to be given their wages during their attendance on military manoeuvers, and the payment of the difference between their wages and their sick-benefits in case of illness. . formation of a union of communes or towns, when isolated municipalities find themselves impotent in securing these demands. . election address (wahlruf) of the german social democrats for the reichstag elections of on the th of january, , the general election for the reichstag takes place. rarely have the voters been called upon to participate in a more consequential election. this election will determine whether, in the succeeding years, the policy of oppression and plundering shall be carried still farther, or whether the german people shall finally achieve their rights. in the reichstag elections of the voters were deceived by the government and the so-called national parties: many millions of voters allowed themselves to be deluded. the reichstag of the "national" _bloc_ from heydebrand down to weimar and nauman has made nugatory the laws pertaining to the rights of coalition; has restricted the use of the non-germanic languages in public meetings; has virtually robbed the youth of the right of coalition, and has favored every measure for the increase of the army, navy, and colonial exploitation. the result of their reactionaryism is an enormous increase of the burdens of taxation. in spite of the fact that in over , , marks increase was voted, in stamp tax, tobacco tax, etc., in spite of the sacred promise of the government, through its official organ, that no new taxes were being contemplated, the government has, through its "financial reforms," increased our burden over five hundred millions. liberals and conservatives were unanimous in declaring that four-fifths of this enormous sum should be raised through an increase in indirect taxes, the greater part of which is collected from laborers, clerks, shopkeepers, artisans, and farmers. inasmuch as the parties to the bülow-_bloc_ could not agree upon the distribution of the property tax and the excise tax, the _bloc_ was dissolved and a new coalition appeared--an alliance between the holy ones and the knights (block der ritter und der heiligen). this new _bloc_ rescued the distiller from the obligations of an excise tax, defeated the inheritance tax, which would have fallen upon the wealthy, and placed upon the shoulders of the working people a tax of hundreds of millions, which is paid through the consumption of beer, whiskey, tobacco, cigars, coffee, tea--yea, even of matches. this conservative-clerical _bloc_ further showed its contempt for the working people in the way it amended the state insurance laws. it robbed the workingman of his rights and denied to mothers and their babes necessary protection and adequate care. in this manner the gullibility of the voters who were responsible for the hottentot elections of was revenged. since that date every by-election for the reichstag, as well as for the provincial legislatures and municipal councils, has shown remarkable gains in the social democratic vote. the reactionaries were consequently frightened, and now they resort to the usual election trick of diverting the attention of the voters from internal affairs to international conditions, and appeal to them under the guise of nationalism. the morocco incident gave welcome opportunity for this ruse. at home and abroad the capitalistic war interests and the nationalistic jingoes stirred the animosities of the peoples. they drove their dangerous play so far that even the chancellor found himself forced to reprimand his _junker_ colleagues for using their patriotism for partisan purposes. but the attempt to bolster up the interests of the reactionary parties with our international complications continues in spite of this. voters, be on your guard! remember that on election day you have in your hand the power to choose between peace or war. the outcome of this election is no less important in its bearing upon internal affairs. count bülow declared, before the election of , "the fewer the social democrats, the greater the social reforms." the opposite is true. the last few years conclusively demonstrate this. the socio-political mills have rattled, but they have produced very little flour. in order to capture their votes for the "national" candidates, the state employees and officials were promised an increase in their pay. to the high-salaried officials the new reichstag doled out the increase with spades, to the poorly paid humble employees with spoons. and this increase in pay was counterbalanced by an increase in taxes and the rising cost of living. to the people the government refused to give any aid, in spite of their repeated requests for some relief against the constantly increasing prices of the necessities of life. and, while the chancellor profoundly maintained that the press exaggerated the actual conditions of the rise in prices, the so-called saviors of the middle class--the center, the conservatives, the anti-semites and their following--rejected every proposal of the social democrats for relieving the situation, and actually laid the blame for the rise in prices upon their own middle-class tradesmen and manufacturers. _new taxes, high cost of living, denial of justice, increasing danger of war_--that is what the reichstag of , which was ushered in with such high-sounding "national" tom-toms, has brought you. and the day of reckoning is at hand. voters of germany, elect a different majority! the stronger you make the social democratic representation in the reichstag, the firmer you anchor the world's peace and your country's welfare! the social democracy seeks the conquest of political power, which is now in the hands of the property classes, and is mis-used by them to the detriment of the masses. they denounce us as "revolutionists." foolish phraseology! the bourgeois-capitalistic society is no more eternal than have been the earlier forms of the state and preceding social orders. the present order will be replaced by a higher order, the socialistic order, for which the social democracy is constantly striving. then the solidarity of all peoples will be accomplished and life will be made more humane for all. the pathway to this new social order is being paved by our capitalistic development, which contains all the germs of the new order within itself. for us the duty is prescribed to use every means at hand for the amelioration of existing evils, and to create conditions that will raise the standard of living of the masses. therefore we demand: . the democratizing of the state in all of its activities. an open pathway to opportunity. a chance for every one to develop his aptitudes. special privileges to none. the right person in the right place. . universal, direct, equal, secret ballot for all persons twenty years of age without distinction of sex, and for all representative legislative bodies. referendum for setting aside the present unjust election district apportionment and its attendant electoral abuses. . a parliamentary government. responsible ministry. establishment of a department for the control of foreign affairs. giving the people's representatives in the reichstag the power to declare war or maintain peace. consent of the reichstag to all state appropriations. . organization of the national defense along democratic lines. militia service for all able-bodied men. reducing service in the standing army to the lowest terms consistent with safety. training youth in the use of arms. abolition of the privilege of one-year volunteer service. abolition of all unnecessary expense for uniforms in army and navy. . abolition of "class-justice" and of administrative injustice. reform of the penal code, along lines of modern culture and jurisprudence. abolition of all privileges pertaining to the administration of justice. . security to all workingmen, employees, and officials in their right to combine, to meet, and to organize. . establishment of a national department of labor, officials of this department to be elected by the interests represented upon the basis of universal and equal suffrage. extension of factory inspection by the participation of workingmen and workingwomen in the same. legalized universal eight-hour day, shortening the hours of labor in industries that are detrimental to health. . reform of industrial insurance, exemption of farm laborers and domestic servants from contributing to insurance funds. direct election of representatives in the administration of the insurance funds; enlarging the representation of labor on the board of directors; increasing the amounts paid workingmen; lowering age for old-age pensions from to years; aid to expectant mothers; and free medical attendance. . complete religious freedom. separation of church and state, and of school and church. no support of any kind, from public funds, for religious purposes. . universal, free schools as the basis of all education. free text-books. freedom for art and science. . diminution and ultimate abolition of all indirect taxes, and abolition of all taxes on the necessities of life. abolition of duties on foodstuffs. limiting the restrictions upon the importation of cattle, fowl, and meat to the necessary sanitary measures. reduction in the tariff, especially in those schedules which encourage the development of syndicates and pools, thereby enabling products of german manufacture to be sold cheaper abroad than at home. . the support of all measures that tend to develop commerce and trade. abolition of tax on railway tickets. a stamp tax on bills of lading. . a graduated income, property, and inheritance tax; inasmuch as this is the most effective way of dampening the ardor of the rich for a constantly increasing army and navy. . internal improvements and colonization; the transformation of great estates into communal holdings, thereby making possible a greater food supply and a corresponding lowering of prices. the establishment of public farms and agricultural schools. the reclamation of swamp-lands, moors, and dunes. the cessation of foreign colonization now done for the purpose of exploiting foreign peoples for the sake of gain. voters of germany! new naval and military appropriations await you; these will increase the burdens of your taxes by hundreds of millions. as on former occasions, so now the ruling class will attempt to roll these heavy burdens upon the shoulders of the humble, and thereby increase the burden of existence of the family. therefore, let the women, upon whom the burden of the household primarily rests, and who are to-day without political rights, take active part in this work of emancipation and join themselves with determination to our cause, which is also their cause. voters of germany! if you are in accord with these principles, then give your votes on the th of january to the social democratic party. help prepare the foundations for a new and better state whose motto shall be: death to want and idleness! work, bread, and justice for all! let your battle-cry on election day resound: long live the social democracy! executive committee of the social democratic representation in the reichstag. berlin, december , . footnotes: [ ] personal tax; tax on movables; tax on land; door and window tax. [ ] a license to trade is required for many businesses in france. iv. belgium political unionism in belgium the catholic church essayed to organize in belgium a "christian socialist" movement, patterned after bishop kettler's movement in the rhine provinces. the movement was called "fédération des sociétés ouvriers catholiques" and grew to considerable power. the federation soon, however, developed democratic tendencies that separated it from the clerical party, and the abbé daens, their first deputy in the chamber of representatives, provoked the hostility of the ecclesiastical authorities and was deprived of his clerical prerogatives. the catholic labor unions, which did not join in this democratic movement, have in the last few years developed some strength, and have now about , members. the progressists or radicals have from the first been favorable to labor and have in their ranks many workmen from the industries "de luxe," such as bronze workers, jewelers, art craftsmen, etc. the liberals have a trades-union organization which does not flourish. it has about , members. the liberals have, however, together with the progressists, some influence over the independent unions, with their , members. the socialist labor unions are the largest and most powerful. their average yearly membership in the years - was , ; in it was , ; in it had increased to , . statistical tables table showing the development of co-operative societies in belgium =======+===========+============+===========+=========+ | | | | | | _no. of | _sales-- | _profits--| _no. of | _year_ | societies_| francs_ | francs_ | members_| -------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------+ | | , , | , , | , | | | , , | , , | , | | | , , | , , | , | | | , , | , , | , | | | , , | , , | , | | | , , | , , | , | ---------+-----------+------------+-----------+---------+ =======+===========+============+============ | _no. | _value of | _paid-up | of | realty | capital _year_ | employees_| francs_ | francs_ -------+-----------+------------+------------ | | , , | , , | | , , | , , | | , , | , , | | , , | , , | | , , | , , | | , , | , , ---------+-----------+------------+------------ table showing the growth of the wholesale co-operative movement in belgium from the date of its beginning in ========+===================== | _amount of business _year_ | done--francs_ --------+--------------------- | , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , | , , --------+--------------------- program of the belgian labor party _adopted at brussels in _ declaration of principles . the constituents of wealth in general, and in particular the means of production, are either natural agencies or the fruit of the labor--manual and mental--of previous generations besides the present; consequently they must be considered the common heritage of mankind. . the right of individuals or groups to enjoy this heritage can be based only on social utility, and aimed only at securing for every human being the greatest possible sum of freedom and well-being. . the realization of this ideal is incompatible with the maintenance of the capitalistic régime, which divides society into two necessarily antagonistic classes--the one able to enjoy property without working, the other obliged to relinquish a part of its product to the possessing class. . the workers can only expect their complete emancipation from the suppression of classes and a radical transformation of existing society. this transformation will be in favor, not only of the proletariat, but of mankind as a whole; nevertheless, as it is contrary to the immediate interests of the possessing class, the emancipation of the workers will be essentially the work of the workers themselves. . in economic matters their aim must be to secure the free use, without charge, of all the means of production. this result can only be attained, in a society where collective labor is more and more replacing individual labor, by the collective appropriation of natural agencies and the instruments of labor. . the transformation of the capitalistic régime into a collectivist régime must necessarily be accompanied by correlative transformations-- (_a_) in _morals_, by the development of altruistic feelings and the practice of solidarity. (_b_) in _politics_, by the transformation of the state into a business management (_administration des choses_). . socialism must, therefore, pursue simultaneously the economic, moral, and political emancipation of the proletariat. nevertheless, the economic point of view must be paramount, for the concentration of capital in the hands of a single class forms the basis of all the other forms of its domination. to realize its principles the labor party declares-- ( ) that it considers itself as the representative, not only of the working-class, but of all the oppressed, without distinction of nationality, worship, race, or sex. ( ) that the socialists of all countries must make common cause (_être solidaires_), the emancipation of the workers being not a national, but an international work. ( ) that in their struggle against the capitalist class the workers must fight by every means in their power, and particularly by political action, by the development of free associations, and by the ceaseless propagation of socialistic principles. i.--political program . _electoral reform._ (_a_) universal suffrage without distinction of sex for all ranks (age-limit, twenty-one; residence, six months). (_b_) proportional representation. (_c_) election expenses to be charged on the public authorities. (_d_) payment of elected persons. (_e_) elected persons to be bound by pledges, according to law. (_f_) electorates to have the right of unseating elected persons. . _decentralization of political power._ (_a_) suppression of the senate. (_b_) creation of legislative councils, representing the different functions of society (industry, commerce, agriculture, education, etc.); such councils to be autonomous, within the limits of their competence and excepting the veto of parliament; such councils to be federated, for the study and defense of their common interests. . _communal autonomy._ (_a_) mayors to be appointed by the electorate. (_b_) small communes to be fused or federated. (_c_) creation of elected committees corresponding to the different branches of communal administration. . _direct legislation._ right of popular initiative and referendum in legislative, provincial, and communal matters. . _reform of education._ (_a_) primary, all-round, free, secular, compulsory instruction at the expense of the state. maintenance of children attending the schools by the public authorities. intermediate and higher instruction to be free, secular, and at the expense of the state. (_b_) administration of the schools by the public authorities, under the control of school committees elected by universal suffrage of both sexes, with representatives of the teaching staff and the state. (_c_) assimilation of communal teachers to the state's educational officials. (_d_) creation of a superior council of education, elected by the school committees, who are to organize the inspection and control of free schools and of official schools. (_e_) organization of trade education, and obligation of all children to learn manual work. (_f_) autonomy of the state universities, and legal recognition of the free universities. university extension to be organized at the expense of the public authorities. . _separation of the churches and the state._ (_a_) suppression of the grant for public worship. (_b_) philosophic or religious associations to be civil persons at law. . _revision of sections in the civil code concerning marriage and the paternal authority._ (_a_) civil equality of the sexes, and of children, whether natural or legitimate. (_b_) revision of the divorce laws, maintaining the husband's liability to support the wife or the children. (_c_) inquiry into paternity to be legalized. (_d_) protective measures in favor of children materially or morally abandoned. . _extension of liberties._ suppression of measures restricting any of the liberties. . _judicial reform._ (_a_) application of the elective principle to all jurisdictions. reduction of the number of magistrates. (_b_) justice without fees; state-payment of advocates and officials of the courts. (_c_) magisterial examination in penal cases to be public. persons prosecuted to be medically examined. victims of judicial errors to be indemnified. . _suppression of armies._ provisionally; organization of a national militia. . _suppression of hereditary offices, and establishment of a republic._ ii.--economic program a.--_general measures_ . _organization of statistics._ (_a_) creation of a ministry of labor. (_b_) pecuniary aid from the public authorities for the organization of labor secretariates by workmen and employers. . _legal recognition of associations, especially--_ (_a_) legal recognition of trade-unions. (_b_) reform of the law on friendly societies and co-operative societies and subsidy from the public authorities. (_c_) repression of infringements of the right of combination. . _legal regulation of the contract of employment._ extension of laws protecting labor to all industries, and especially to agriculture, shipping, and fishing. fixing of a minimum wage and maximum of hours of labor for workers, industrial or agricultural, employed by the state, the communes, the provinces, or the contractors for public works. intervention of workers, and especially of workers' unions, in the framing of rules. suppression of fines. suppression of savings-banks and benefit clubs in workshops. fixing of a maximum of , francs for public servants and managers. . _transformation of public charity into a general insurance of all citizens--_ (_a_) against unemployment; (_b_) against disablement (sickness, accident, old age); (_c_) against death (widows and orphans). . _reorganization of public finances._ (_a_) abolition of indirect taxes, especially taxes on food and customs tariffs. (_b_) monopoly of alcohol and tobacco. (_c_) progressive income-tax. taxes on legacies and gifts between the living (excepting gifts to works of public utility). (_d_) suppression of intestate succession, except in the direct line and within limits to be determined by law. . _progressive extension of public property._ the state to take over the national bank. social organization of loans, at interest to cover costs only, to individuals and to associations of workers. i. _industrial property._ abolition, on grounds of public utility, of private ownership in mines, quarries, the subsoil generally, and of the great means of production and transport. ii. _agricultural property._ (_a_) nationalization of forests. (_b_) reconstruction or development of common lands. (_c_) progressive taking over of the land by the state or the communes. . _autonomy of public services._ (_a_) administration of the public services by special autonomous commissions, under the control of the state. (_b_) creation of committees elected by the workmen and employees of the public services to debate with the central administration the conditions of the remuneration and organization of labor. b.--_particular measures for industrial workers_ . _abolition of all laws restricting the right of combination._ . _regulation of industrial labor._ (_a_) prohibition of employment of children under fourteen. (_b_) half-time system between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. (_c_) prohibition of employment of women in all industries where it is incompatible with morals or health. (_d_) reduction of working-day to a maximum of eight hours for adults of both sexes, and minimum wage. (_e_) prohibition of night-work for all categories of workers and in all industries, where this mode of working is not absolutely necessary. (_f_) one day's rest per week, so far as possible on sunday. (_g_) responsibility of employers in case of accidents, and appointment of doctors to attend persons wounded. (_h_) workmen's memorandum-books and certificates to be abolished, and their use prohibited. . _inspection of work._ (_a_) employment of paid medical authorities, in the interests of labor hygiene. (_b_) appointment of inspectors by the councils of industry and labor. . _reorganization of the industrial tribunals_ (conseils de prud'hommes) _and the councils of industry and labor_. (_a_) working women to have votes and be eligible. (_b_) submission to the courts to be compulsory. . _regulation of work in prisons and convents._ c.--_particular measures for agricultural workers_ . _reorganization of the agricultural courts._ (_a_) nomination of delegates in equal numbers by the landowners, farmers, and laborers. (_b_) intervention of the chambers in individual or collective disputes between landowners, farmers, and agricultural workers. (_c_) fixing of a minimum wage by the public authorities on the proposition of the agricultural courts. . _regulation of contracts to pay farm-rents._ (_a_) fixing of the rate of farm-rents by committees of arbitration or by the reformed agricultural courts. (_b_) compensation to the outgoing farmer for enhanced value of property. (_c_) participation of landowners, to a wider extent than that fixed by the civil code, in losses incurred by farmers. (_d_) suppression of the landowner's privilege. . _insurance by the provinces, and reinsurance by the state, against epizootic diseases, diseases of plants, hail, floods, and other agricultural risks._ . _organization by the public authorities of a free agricultural education._ creation or development of experimental fields, model farms, agricultural laboratories. . _purchase by the communes of agricultural implements to be at the disposal of their inhabitants._ assignment of common lands to groups of laborers engaging not to employ wage labor. . _organization of a free medical service in the country._ . _reform of the game laws._ (_a_) suppression of gun licenses. (_b_) suppression of game preserves. (_c_) right of cultivators to destroy all the year round animals which injure crops. . _intervention of public authorities in the creation of agricultural co-operative societies--_ (_a_) for buying seed and manure. (_b_) for making butter. (_c_) for the purchase and use in common of agricultural machines. (_d_) for the sale of produce. (_e_) for the working of land by groups. . _organization of agricultural credit._ iii.--communal program . _educational reforms._ (_a_) free scientific instruction for children up to fourteen. special courses for older children and adults. (_b_) organization of education in trades and industries, in co-operation with workmen's organizations. (_c_) maintenance of children; except where the public authorities intervene to do so. (_d_) institution of school refreshment-rooms. periodical distribution of boots and clothing. (_e_) orphanages. establishments for children abandoned or cruelly ill-treated. . _judicial reforms._ office for consultations free of charge in cases coming before the law-courts, the industrial courts, etc. . _regulation of work._ (_a_) minimum wage and maximum working-day to be made a clause in contracts for communal works. (_b_) intervention of trade associations in the fixing of rates of wages, and general regulation of industry. the echevin of public works to supervise the execution of these clauses in contracts. (_c_) appointment by the workmen's associations of inspectors to supervise the clauses in contracts. (_d_) rigorous application of the principle of tenders open to all, for all services which, during a transition-period, are not managed directly. (_e_) permission to trade-unions to tender, and abolition of security-deposit. (_f_) creation of _bourses du travail_, or at least offices for the demand and supply of employment, whose administration shall be entrusted to trade-unions or labor associations. (_g_) fixing of a minimum wage for the workmen and employees of a commune. . _public charity._ (_a_) admission of workmen to the administration of the councils of hospitals and of public charity. (_b_) transformation of public charity and the hospitals into a system of insurance against old age. organization of a medical service and drug supply. establishment of public free baths and wash-houses. (_c_) establishment of refuges for the aged and disabled. night-shelter and food-distribution for workmen wandering in search of work. . _complete neutrality of all communal services from the philosophical point of view._ . _finance._ (_a_) saving to be effected on present cost of administration. maximum allowance of , francs for mayors and other officials. costs of entertainment for mayors who must incur certain private expenses. (_b_) income tax. (_c_) special tax on sites not built over and houses not let. . _public services._ (_a_) the commune, or a federation of communes composing one agglomeration, is to work the means of transport--tramways, omnibuses, cabs, district railways, etc. (_b_) the commune, or federation of communes, is to work directly the services of general interest at present conceded to companies--lighting, water-supply, markets, highways, heating, security, health. (_c_) compulsory insurance of the inhabitants against fire; except where the state intervenes to do so. (_d_) construction of cheap dwellings by the commune, the hospices, and the charity offices. v. england growth of socialistic sentiment in england in the earl of wemyss made a speech in the house of lords deploring the advancement of state interference in business and giving a résumé of the acts of parliament that showed how "socialism" invaded st. stephens from to . his speech is interesting, not because it voices the ultra-conservative's apprehensions but because the earl had really discovered the legal basis of the new social democratic advance, which had come unheralded. the earl reviewed the bills that parliament had sanctioned, which dealt with state "interference." twelve bills referred to lands and houses. "all of these measures assume the right of the state to regulate the management of, or to confiscate real property"--steps in the direction of substituting "land nationalization" for individual ownership. five laws dealt with corporations, "confiscating property of water companies," etc.; nine dealt with ships: "all of them assertions by the board of trade of its right to regulate private enterprise and individual management in the mercantile marine;" six with mines, "prompting a fallacious confidence in government inspection;" six with railways, "all encroachments upon self-government of private enterprise in railways--successive steps in the direction of state railways." nine had to do with manufactures and trades, "invasions by the state of the self-government of the various interests of the country, and curtailment of the freedom of contract between employers and employed." "the pawnbrokers' act of was the thin edge of the wedge for reducing the business of the 'poor man's banks' to a state monopoly." twenty laws dealt with liquor, "all attempts on the part of the state to regulate the dealings and habits of buyers and sellers of alcoholic drinks." sixteen dealt with dwellings of the working class, "all embodying the principle that it is the duty of the state to provide dwellings, private gardens, and other conveniences for the working classes, and assume its right to appropriate land for these purposes." there were nine education acts, "all based on the assumption that it is the duty of the state to act _in loco parentis_." four laws dealt with recreation, "whereby the state, having educated the people in common school rooms, proceeds to provide them with common reading-rooms, and afterwards turns them out at stated times into the streets for common holidays." of local government and improvement acts, there were passed "a vast mass of local legislation ... containing interferences in every conceivable particular with liberty and property." the earl quotes lord palmerston as saying in , "tenant right is landlord wrong," and lord sherbrooke, in , "happily there is an oasis upon which all men, without distinction of party, can take common stand, and that is the good ground of political economy." and the noble lord concludes by predicting, "the general social results of such socialistic legislation may be summed up in 'dynamite,' 'detectives,' and 'general demoralization.'"[ ] in the earl again turned his guns upon the radical advance, but only seven peers were on the benches to listen. in he made a third résumé under a more liberal patronage of listeners; this time the factory laws and inspection measures came in for his especial criticism. he said: "now, my lords, what is the character of all this legislation? it is to substitute state help for self help, to regulate and control men in their dealings with one another with regard to land or anything else. the state now forbids contracts, breaks contracts, makes contracts. the whole tendency is to substitute the state or the municipality for the free action of the individual."[ ] an early political broadside by the marxians. the earlier attitude of the marxian socialists of london toward participating in elections is shown in the following broadside, dated july, : "we, revolutionary social democrats, disdain to conceal our principles. we proclaim the class war. we hold that the lot of the worker cannot to any appreciable extent be improved except by a complete overthrow of this present capitalist system of society. the time for social tinkering has gone past. government statistics show that the number of unemployed is slowly but surely increasing, and that the decreases in wages greatly preponderate over the increases, and everything points to the fact that the condition of your class is getting worse and worse. "refuse once for all to allow your backs to be made the stepping stones to obtain that power which they (the politicians) know only too well how to use against you. "scoff at their patronizing airs and claim your rights like men. refuse to give them that which they want, i.e., your vote. give them no opportunity of saying that they are _your_ representatives. refuse to be a party to the fraud of present-day politics, and "abstain from voting." thrift institutions in england for savings, insurance, etc., (from chiozza money--"riches and poverty," p. ) ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- _name of institution_ | _number of | _funds_--£ | members_ | ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- building societies | , | , , ========================================+==============+============== ordinary friendly societies | , , | , , friendly societies having branches | , , | , , collecting friendly societies | , , | , , benevolent societies | , | , workingmen's clubs | , | , specially authorized societies | , | , specially authorized loan societies | , | , medical societies | , | , cattle insurance settlers | , | , shop clubs | , | , ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- total | , , | , , ========================================+==============+============== co-operative societies, industry and | | trade | , , | , , business co-operative societies | , | , land co-operative societies | , | , , ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- total | , , | , , ========================================+==============+============== trade unions | , , | , , workmen's compensation schemes | , | , friends of labor loan societies | , | , ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- grand total of registered provident | | societies | , , | , , ========================================+==============+============== railway savings banks | , * | , , @ trustee savings banks | , , * | , , @ post office savings banks | , , * | , , @ ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- bank total | , , | , , ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- grand total | , , | , , ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- | * depositions| @ deposits ----------------------------------------+--------------+-------------- in this table allowance must be made for those belonging to more than one society, and, of course, not all the depositors or members are workingmen, especially in the savings banks and building-societies. constitution and standing orders of the independent labor party of england standing orders ( ) _contributions_ affiliation fees and parliamentary fund contributions must be paid by december st each year. _annual conference_ . the annual conference shall meet during the month of january. . affiliated societies may send one delegate for every thousand or part of a thousand members paid for. . affiliated trades councils and local labor parties may send one delegate if their affiliation fee has been s., and two delegates if the fee has been s. . persons eligible as delegates must be paying bona fide members or paid permanent officials of the organizations sending them. . a fee of s. per delegate will be charged. . the national executive will ballot for the places to be allotted to the delegates. . voting at the conference shall be by show of hands, but on a division being challenged, delegates shall vote by cards, which shall be issued on the basis of one card for each thousand members, or fraction of a thousand, paid for by the society represented. _conference agenda_ . resolutions for the agenda and amendments to the constitution must be sent in by november st each year. . amendments to resolutions must be sent in by december th each year. _nominations for national executive and secretaryship_ . nominations for the national executive and the secretaryship must be sent in by december th. . no member of the parliamentary committee of the trade union congress or of the management committee of the general federation of trade unions is eligible for nomination to the national executive. constitution (as revised under the authority of the newport conference, ) organization i. _affiliation._ . the labor party is a federation consisting of trade unions, trades councils, socialist societies, and local labor parties. . a local labor party in any constituency is eligible for affiliation, provided it accepts the constitution and policy of the party, and that there is no affiliated trades council covering the constituency, or that, if there be such council, it has been consulted in the first instance. . co-operative societies are also eligible. . a national organization of women, accepting the basis of this constitution, and the policy of the party, and formed for the purpose of assisting the party, shall be eligible for affiliation as though it were a trades council. ii. _object._ to secure the election of candidates to parliament and organize and maintain a parliamentary labor party, with its own whips and policy. iii. _candidates and members._ . candidates and members must accept this constitution; agree to abide by the decisions of the parliamentary party in carrying out the aims of this constitution; appear before their constituencies under the title of labor candidates only; abstain strictly from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any parliamentary party not affiliated, or its candidates; and they must not oppose any candidate recognized by the national executive of the party. . candidates must undertake to join the parliamentary labor party, if elected. iv. _candidatures._ . a candidate must be promoted by an affiliated society which makes itself responsible for his election expenses. . a candidate must be selected for a constituency by a regularly convened labor party conference in the constituency. [the hull conference accepted the following as the interpretation of what a "regularly convened labor party conference" is:--all branches of affiliated organizations within a constituency or divided borough covered by a proposal to run a labor candidate must be invited to send delegates to the conference, and the local organization responsible for calling the conference may, if it thinks fit, invite representatives from branches of organizations not affiliated but eligible for affiliation.] . before a candidate can be regarded as adopted for a constituency, his candidature must be sanctioned by the national executive; and where at the time of a by-election no candidate has been so sanctioned, the national executive shall have power to withhold its sanction. v. _the national executive._ the national executive shall consist of fifteen members, eleven representing the trade unions, one the trades councils, women's organizations, and local labor parties, and three the socialist societies, and shall be elected by ballot at the annual conference by their respective sections. vi. _duties of the national executive._ the national executive committee shall . appoint a chairman, vice-chairman, and treasurer, and shall transact the general business of the party; . issue a list of its candidates from time to time, and recommend them for the support of the electors; . report to the affiliated organization concerned any labor member, candidate, or chief official who opposes a candidate of the party, or who acts contrary to the spirit of the constitution; . and its members shall strictly abstain from identifying themselves with or promoting the interests of any parliamentary party not affiliated, or its candidates. vii. _the secretary._ the secretary shall be elected by the annual conference, and shall be under the direction of the national executive. viii. _affiliation fees and delegates._ . trade unions and socialist societies shall pay s. per annum for every thousand members or fraction thereof, and may send to the annual conference one delegate for each thousand members. . trades councils and local labor parties with , members or under shall be affiliated on an annual payment of s.; similar organizations with a membership of over , shall pay £ s., the former councils to be entitled to send one delegate with one vote to the annual conference, the latter to be entitled to send two delegates and have two votes. . in addition to these payments a delegate's fee to the annual conference may be charged. ix. _annual conference._ the national executive shall convene a conference of its affiliated societies in the month of january each year. notice of resolutions for the conference and all amendments to the constitution shall be sent to the secretary by november st, and shall be forthwith forwarded to all affiliated organizations. notice of amendments and nominations for secretary and national executive shall be sent to the secretary by december th, and shall be printed on the agenda. x. _voting at annual conference._ there shall be issued to affiliated societies represented at the annual conference voting cards as follows: . trade unions and socialist societies shall receive one voting card for each thousand members, or fraction thereof paid for. . trades councils and local labor parties shall receive one card for each delegate they are entitled to send. any delegate may claim to have a vote taken by card. parliamentary fund i. _object._ to assist in paying the election expenses of candidates adopted in accordance with this constitution, in maintaining them when elected; and to provide the salary and expenses of a national party agent. ii. _amount of contribution._ . affiliated societies, except trades councils, and local labor parties shall pay a contribution to this fund at the rate of d. per member per annum, not later than the last day of each financial year. . on all matters affecting the financial side of the parliamentary fund only contributing societies shall be allowed to vote at the annual conference. iii. _trustees._ the national executive of the party shall, from its number, select three to act as trustees, any two of whom, with the secretary, shall sign checks. iv. _expenditure._ . _maintenance._--all members elected under this constitution shall be paid from the fund equal sums not to exceed £ per annum, provided that this payment shall only be made to members whose candidatures have been promoted by one or more societies which have contributed to this fund; provided further that no payment from this fund shall be made to a member or candidate of any society which has not contributed to this fund for one year, and that any society over three months in arrears shall forfeit all claim to the fund on behalf of its members or candidates, for twelve months from the date of payment. . _returning officers' expenses._--twenty-five per cent. of the returning officers' net expenses shall be paid to the candidates, subject to the provisions of the preceding clause, so long as the total sum so expended does not exceed twenty-five per cent. of the fund. . _administration._--five per cent. of the annual income of the fund shall be transferred to the general funds of the party, to pay for administrative expenses of the fund. the independent labor party: constitution and rules, - name _the independent labor party._ membership open to all socialists who indorse the principles and policy of the party, are not members of either the liberal or conservative party, and whose application for membership is accepted by a branch. any member expelled from membership of a branch of the i.l.p. shall not be eligible for membership of any other branch without having first submitted his or her case for adjudication of the n.a.c. object the object of the party is to establish the socialist state, when land and capital will be held by the community and used for the well-being of the community, and when the exchange of commodities will be organized also by the community, so as to secure the highest possible standard of life for the individual. in giving effect to this object it shall work as part of the international socialist movement. method the party, to secure its objects, adopts-- . _educational methods_, including the publication of socialist literature, the holding of meetings, etc. . _political methods_, including the election of its members to local and national administrative and legislative bodies. program the true object of industry being the production of the requirements of life, the responsibility should rest with the community collectively, therefore:-- the land being the storehouse of all the necessaries of life should be declared and treated as public property. the capital necessary for the industrial operations should be owned and used collectively. work, and wealth resulting therefrom, should be equitably distributed over the population. as a means to this end, we demand the enactment of the following measures:-- . a maximum of hours' working week, with the retention of all existing holidays, and labor day, may st, secured by law. . the provision of work to all capable adult applicants at recognized trade union rates, with a statutory minimum of d. per hour. in order to remuneratively employ the applicants, parish, district, borough, and county councils to be invested with powers to:-- (_a_) organize and undertake such industries as they may consider desirable. (_b_) compulsorily acquire land; purchase, erect, or manufacture buildings, stock, or other articles for carrying on such industries. (_c_) levy rates on the rental values of the district, and borrow money on the security of such rates for any of the above purposes. . state pension for every person over years of age, and adequate provision for all widows, orphans, sick and disabled workers. . free, secular, moral, primary, secondary, and university education, with free maintenance while at school or university. . the raising of the age of child labor, with a view to its ultimate extinction. . municipalization and public control of the drink traffic. . municipalization and public control of all hospitals and infirmaries. . abolition of indirect taxation and the gradual transference of all public burdens on to unearned incomes with a view to their ultimate extinction. the independent labor party is in favor of adult suffrage, with full political rights and privileges for women, and the immediate extension of the franchise to women on the same terms as granted to men; also triennial parliaments and second ballot. organization i.--officers . chairman and treasurer. . a _national administrative council._--to be composed of fourteen representatives, in addition to the two officers. . no member shall occupy the office of chairman of the party for a longer consecutive period than three years, and he shall not be eligible for re-election for the same office for at least twelve months after he has vacated the chair. . _election of n.a.c._--four members of the n.a.c. shall be elected by ballot at the annual conference, and ten by the votes of members in ten divisional areas. . _duties of n.a.c._-- (_a_) to meet at least three times a year to transact business relative to the party. (_b_) to exercise a determining voice in the selection of parliamentary candidates, and, where no branch exists, to choose such candidates when necessary. (_c_) to raise and disburse funds for general and by-elections, and for other objects of the party. (_d_) to deal with such matters of local dispute between branches and members which may be referred to its decision by the parties interested. (_e_) to appoint general secretary and officials, and exercise a supervising control over their work. (_f_) to engage organizers and lecturers when convenient, either permanently or for varying periods, at proper wages, and to direct and superintend their work. (_g_) to present to the annual conference a report on the previous year's work and progress of the party. (_h_) to appoint when necessary sub-committees to deal with special branches of its work, and to appoint a committee to deal with each conference agenda. such committee to revise and classify the resolutions sent in by branches and to place resolutions dealing with important matters on the agenda. (_i_) it shall not initiate any new departure or policy between conferences without first obtaining the sanction of the majority of the branches. (_k_) matters arising between conferences not provided for by the constitution, shall be dealt with by the n.a.c. (_l_) a full report of all the meetings of the n.a.c. as held shall be forwarded to each branch. . _auditor._--a chartered or incorporated accountant shall be employed to audit the accounts of the party. ii.--branches . _branch._--an association which indorses the objects and policy of the party, and affiliates in the prescribed manner. . _local autonomy._--subject to the general constitution of the party, each branch shall be perfectly autonomous. iii.--finances . branches shall pay one penny per member per month to the n.a.c. . the n.a.c. may strike off the list of branches any branch which is more than months in arrears with its payments. . the n.a.c. may receive donations or subscriptions to the funds of the party. it shall not receive moneys which are contributed upon terms which interfere in any way with its freedom of action as to their disbursement. . the financial year of the party shall begin on march st, and end on the last day of february next succeeding. iv.--annual conference . the _annual conference_ is the ultimate authority of the party, to which all final appeals shall be made. . _date._--it shall be held at easter. . _special conferences._--a special conference shall always be called prior to a general election, for the purpose of determining the policy of the party during the election. other special conferences may be called by two-thirds of the whole of the members of the n.a.c, or by one-third of the branches of the party. . _conference fee._--a conference fee per delegate (the amount to be fixed by the n.a.c.) shall be paid by all branches desiring representation, on or before the last day of february in each year. . no branch shall be represented which was not in existence on the december st immediately preceding the date of the annual conference. . branches of the party may send one delegate to conference for each fifty members, or part thereof. branches may appoint one delegate to represent their full voting strength. should there be two or more branches which are unable separately to send delegates to conference, they may jointly do so. . delegates must have been members of the branch they represent from december st immediately preceding the date of the conference. . notices respecting resolutions shall be posted to branches not later than january d. resolutions for the agenda, and nominations for officers and n.a.c. shall be in the hands of the general secretary eight weeks before the date of the annual conference, and issued to the branches a fortnight later. amendments to resolutions on the agenda and additional nominations may be sent to the secretary four weeks before conference, and they shall be arranged on the final agenda, which shall be issued to branches two weeks before conference. a balance sheet shall be issued to branches two weeks before the conference, showing the receipts and expenditure of the party for the year, also the number of branches affiliated and the amount each branch has paid in affiliation fees during the year. . the chairman of the party for the preceding year shall preside over the conference. . _conference officials._--the first business of the conference shall be the appointment of tellers. it shall next elect a standing orders committee, with power to examine the credentials of delegates, and to deal with special business which may be delegated to it by the conference. . in case any vacancy occurs on the n.a.c. between conferences, the unsuccessful candidate receiving the largest number of votes at the preceding election shall fill the vacancy. vacancies in the list of officers shall be filled up by the vote of the branches. . the principle of the second ballot shall be observed in all elections. . the conference shall choose in which divisional area the next conference shall be held. v.--parliamentary candidates . the n.a.c. shall keep a list of members of the party from which candidates may be selected by branches. . any branch at any time may nominate any eligible member of the party to be placed upon that list. . the n.a.c. itself may place names on the list. . no person shall be placed upon this list unless he has been a member of the party for at least twelve months. . branches desiring to place a candidate in their constituencies must in the first instance communicate with the n.a.c., and have the candidate selected at a properly convened conference of representatives of the local branches of all societies affiliated with the labor party, so that the candidate may be chosen in accordance with the constitution of the labor party. the n.a.c. shall have power to suspend this clause where local or other circumstances appear to justify such a course. . before the n.a.c. sanctions any candidature it shall be entitled to secure guarantees of adequate local financial support. . no branch shall take any action which affects prejudicially the position or prospects of a parliamentary candidate, who has received the credentials of the labor party, without first laying the case before the n.a.c. . each candidate must undertake that he will run his election in accordance with the principles and policy of the party, and that if elected he will support the party on all questions coming within the scope of the principles of the i.l.p. * * * * * _the constitution shall not be altered or amended except every third year, unless upon the requisition of two-thirds of the n.a.c. or one-third of the branches of the party, when the proposed alterations or amendments shall be considered at the following conference._--resolution, edinburgh, . basis of the fabian society the fabian society consists of socialists. it therefore aims at the re-organization of society by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. in this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people. the society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites. the society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can conveniently be managed socially. for, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living. if these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), rent and interest will be added to the reward of labor, the idle class now living on the labor of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails. for the attainment of these ends the fabian society looks to the spread of socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon. it seeks to promote these by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects. the following questions are addressed to parliamentary candidates by the fabians: will you press at the first opportunity for the following reforms:-- i.--_a labor program_ . the extension of the workmen's compensation act to seamen, and to all other classes of wage earners? . compulsory arbitration, as in new zealand, to prevent strikes and lockouts? . a statutory minimum wage, as in victoria, especially for sweated trades? . the fixing of "an eight-hours' day" as the maximum for all public servants; and the abolition, wherever possible, of overtime? . an eight-hours' bill, without an option clause, for miners; and, for railway servants, a forty-eight-hours' week? . the drastic amendment of the factory acts, to secure (_a_) a safe and healthy work-place for every worker, (_b_) the prevention of overwork for all women and young persons, (_c_) the abolition of all wage-labor by children under , (_d_) compulsory technical instruction by extension of the half-time arrangements to all workers under ? . the direct employment of labor by all public authorities whenever possible; and, whenever it is not possible, employment only of fair houses, prohibition of sub-contracting, and payment of trade-union rates of wages? . the amendment of the merchant shipping acts so as (_a_) to secure healthy sleeping and living accommodation, (_b_) to protect the seaman against withholding of his wages or return passage, (_c_) to insure him against loss by shipwreck? ii.--_a democratic budget_ . the further taxation of unearned incomes by means of a graduated and differentiated income-tax? . the abolition of all duties on tea, cocoa, coffee, currants, and other dried fruits? . an increase of the scale of graduation of the death duties, so as to fall more heavily on large inheritances? . the appropriation of the unearned increment by the taxation and rating of ground values? . the nationalization of mining rents and royalties? . transfer of the railways to the state under the act of ? iii.--_social reform in town and country_ . the extension of full powers to parish, town, and county councils for the collective organization of the (_a_) water, (_b_) gas and (_c_) electric lighting supplies, (_d_) hydraulic power, (_e_) tramways and light railways, (_f_) public slaughter-houses, (_g_) pawnshops, (_h_) sale of milk, (_i_) bread, (_j_) coal, and such other public services as may be desired by the inhabitants? . reform of the drink traffic by (_a_) reduction of the number of licenses to a proper ratio to the population of each locality, (_b_) transfer to public purposes of the special value of licenses, created by the existing monopoly, by means of high license or a license rate, (_c_) grant of power to local authorities to carry on municipal public houses, directly or on the gothenburg system? . amendment of the housing of the working classes act by (_a_) extension of period of loans to one hundred years, treatment of land as an asset, and removal of statutory limitation of borrowing powers for housing, (_b_) removal of restrictions on rural district councils in adopting part iii. of the act, (_c_) grant of power to parish councils to adopt part iii. of the act, (_d_) power to all local authorities to buy land compulsorily under the allotments clauses of the local government act, , or in any other effective manner? . the grant of power to all local bodies to retain the free-hold of any land that may come into their possession, without obligation to sell, or to use for particular purposes? . the relief of the existing taxpayer by (_a_) imposing, for local purposes, a municipal death duty on local real estate, collected in the same way as the existing death duties, (_b_) collecting rates from the owners of empty houses and vacant land, (_c_) power to assess land and houses at four per cent. on the capital value, (_d_) securing special contributions by way of "betterment" from the owners of property benefited by public improvements? . the further equalization of the rates in london? . the compulsory provision by every local authority of adequate hospital accommodation for all diseases and accidents? iv.--_the children and the poor_ . the prohibition of the industrial or wage-earning employment of children during school terms prior to the age of ? . the provision of meals, out of public funds, for necessitous children in public elementary schools? . the training of teachers under public control and free from sectarian influences? . the creation of a complete system of public secondary education genuinely available to the children of the poor? . state pensions for the support of the aged or chronically infirm? v.--_democratic political machinery_ . an amendment of the registration laws, with the aim of giving every adult man a vote, and no one more than one vote? . a redistribution of seats in accordance with population? . the grant of the franchise to women on the same terms as to men? . the admission of women to seats in the house of commons and on borough and county councils? . the second ballot at parliamentary and other elections? . the payment of all members of parliament and of parliamentary election expenses, out of public funds? . triennial parliaments? . all parliamentary elections to be held on the same day? the program of the social democratic federation, object the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, to be controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the entire community, and the complete emancipation of labor from the domination of capitalism and landlordism, with the establishment of social and economic equality between the sexes. the economic development of modern society is characterized by the more or less complete domination of the capitalistic mode of production over all branches of human labor. the capitalistic mode of production, because it has the creation of profit for its sole object, therefore favors the larger capital, and is based upon the divorcement of the majority of the people from the instruments of production and the concentration of these instruments in the hands of a minority. society is thus divided into two opposite classes: one, the capitalists and their sleeping partners, the landlords and loanmongers, holding in their hands the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and being, therefore, able to command the labor of others; the other, the working-class, the wage-earners, the proletariat, possessing nothing but their labor-power, and being consequently forced by necessity to work for the former. the social division thus produced becomes wider and deeper with every new advance in the application of labor-saving machinery. it is most clearly recognizable, however, in the times of industrial and commercial crises, when, in consequence of the present chaotic conditions of carrying on national and international industry, production periodically comes to a standstill, and a number of the few remaining independent producers are thrown into the ranks of the proletariat. thus, while on one hand there is incessantly going on an accumulation of capital, wealth, and power into a steadily diminishing number of hands, there is, on the other hand, a constantly growing insecurity of livelihood for the mass of wage-earners, an increasing disparity between human wants and the opportunity of acquiring the means for their satisfaction, and a steady physical and mental deterioration among the more poverty-stricken of the population. but the more this social division widens, the stronger grows the revolt--more conscious abroad than here--of the proletariat against the capitalist system of society in which this division and all that accompanies it have originated, and find such fruitful soil. the capitalist mode of production, by massing the workers in large factories, and creating an interdependence, not only between various trades and branches of industries, but even national industries, prepares the ground and furnishes material for a universal class war. that class war may at first--as in this country--be directed against the abuses of the system, and not against the system itself; but sooner or later the workers must come to recognize that nothing short of the expropriation of the capitalist class, the ownership by the community of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, can put an end to their abject economic condition; and then the class war will become conscious instead of unconscious on the part of the working-classes, and they will have for their ultimate object the overthrow of the capitalist system. at the same time, since the capitalist class holds and uses the power of the state to safeguard its position and beat off any attack, the class war must assume a political character, and become a struggle on the part of the workers for the possession of the political machinery. it is this struggle for the conquest of the political power of the state, in order to effect a social transformation, which international social democracy carries on in the name and on behalf of the working-class. social democracy, therefore, is the only possible political party of the proletariat. the social democratic federation is a part of this international social democracy. it, therefore, takes its stand on the above principles, and believes-- . that the emancipation of the working-class can only be achieved through the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and their subsequent control by the organized community in the interests of the whole people. . that, as the proletariat is the last class to achieve freedom, its emancipation will mean the emancipation of the whole of mankind, without distinction of race, nationality, creed, or sex. . that this emancipation can only be the work of the working-class itself, organized nationally and internationally into a distinct political party, consciously striving after the realization of its ideals; and, finally, . that, in order to insure greater material and moral facilities for the working-class to organize itself and to carry on the class war, the following reforms must immediately be carried through:-- immediate reforms _political_ abolition of the monarchy. democratization of the governmental machinery, viz., abolition of the house of lords, payment of members of legislative and administrative bodies, payment of official expenses of elections out of the public funds, adult suffrage, proportional representation, triennial parliaments, second ballot, initiative and referendum. foreigners to be granted rights of citizenship after two years' residence in the country, without any fees. canvassing to be made illegal. all elections to take place on one day, such day to be made a legal holiday, and all premises licensed for the sale of intoxicating liquors to be closed. legislation by the people in such wise that no legislative proposal shall become law until ratified by the majority of the people. legislative and administrative independence for all parts of the empire. _financial and fiscal_ repudiation of the national debt. abolition of all indirect taxation and the institution of a cumulative tax on all incomes and inheritance exceeding £ . _administrative_ extension of the principle of local self-government. systematization and co-ordination of the local administrative bodies. election of all administrators and administrative bodies by equal direct adult suffrage. _educational_ elementary education to be free, secular, industrial, and compulsory for all classes. the age of obligatory school attendance to be raised to . unification and systematization of intermediate and higher education, both general and technical, and all such education to be free. state maintenance for all attending state schools. abolition of school rates; the cost of education in all state schools to be borne by the national exchequer. _public monopolies and services_ nationalization of the land and the organization of labor in agriculture and industry under public ownership and control on co-operative principles. nationalization of the trusts. nationalization of railways, docks, and canals, and all great means of transit. public ownership and control of gas, electric light, and water supplies, as well as of tramway, omnibus, and other locomotive services. public ownership and control of the food and coal supply. the establishment of state and municipal banks and pawnshops and public restaurants. public ownership and control of the lifeboat service. public ownership and control of hospitals, dispensaries, cemeteries, and crematoria. public ownership and control of the drink traffic. _labor_ a legislative eight-hour working-day, or hours per week, to be the maximum for all trades and industries. imprisonment to be indicted on employers for any infringement of the law. absolute freedom of combination for all workers, with legal guarantee against any action, private or public, which tends to curtail or infringe it. no child to be employed in any trade or occupation until years of age, and imprisonment to be inflicted on employers, parents, and guardians who infringe this law. public provision of useful work at not less than trade-union rates of wages for the unemployed. free state insurance against sickness and accident, and free and adequate state pensions or provision for aged and disabled workers. public assistance not to entail any forfeiture of political rights. the legislative enactment of a minimum wage of s. for all workers. equal pay for both sexes for the performance of equal work. _social_ abolition of the present workhouse system, and reformed administration of the poor law on a basis of national co-operation. compulsory construction by public bodies of healthy dwellings for the people; such dwellings to be let at rents to cover the cost of construction and maintenance alone, and not to cover the cost of the land. the administration of justice and legal advice to be free to all; justice to be administered by judges chosen by the people; appeal in criminal cases; compensation for those innocently accused, condemned, and imprisoned; abolition of imprisonment for contempt of court in relation to non-payment of debt in the case of workers earning less than £ per week; abolition of capital punishment. _miscellaneous_ the disestablishment and disendowment of all state churches. the abolition of standing armies, and the establishment of national citizen forces. the people to decide on peace and war. the establishment of international courts of arbitration. the abolition of courts-martial; all offenses against discipline to be transferred to the jurisdiction of civil courts. the labor party: session of parliament, - [at the beginning of every session of parliament, the labor party members agree on a program of procedure to which they adhere for that session. they stick to the bills, in the order chosen, until they are either passed or defeated. the following is the list for .] bills to be balloted for in order named: . trade union amendment bill. . unemployed workmen bill. . education (administrative provisions) bill. . electoral reform bill. . eight-hour day bill. . bill to provide against eviction of workmen during trade disputes. . railway nationalization bill. motions to be balloted for in order named: . militarism and foreign policy: (on lines of resolution passed by the special conference at leicester). . defect in sheriffs' courts bill (scotland) relating to power of eviction during trade disputes. . general s. minimum wage. other motions from which selection may be made after the three foregoing subjects have been dealt with: saturday to monday stop. eviction of workmen during trade disputes. extension of particulars clause to docks, etc. nationalization of hospitals. adult suffrage. commission of inquiry into older universities. workmen's compensation amendment. atmosphere and dust in textile factories. system of fines in textile and other trades. inclusion of clerks in factory acts. eight-hour day. electoral reform. inquiry into industrial assurance. poor law reform. truck. railway and mining accidents. labor exchanges administration. labor ministry. veto conference. day training classes. school clinics. indian factory laws. hours in bakehouses. house-letting in scotland. fabian election address [the following is an election broadside issued for the municipal election of london, soon after the establishment of municipal home rule for the metropolis, by the organization of the london county council. it discloses the practical nature of the earlier fabian political activities.] county council election: address of mr. sidney webb, ll.b. (london university), (progressive and labor candidate) central committee rooms, , new cross road, s.e. electors of deptford, on the nomination of a joint committee of delegates of the liberal and radical association, the women's liberal association, the working men's clubs, and leading trade unionists and social reformers in deptford, i come forward as a candidate for the county council election. i shall seek to lift the contest above any narrow partisan lines, and i ask for the support of all who are interested in the well-being of the people. _the point at issue_ for much is at stake for london at this election. notwithstanding the creation of the county council, the ratepayers of the metropolis are still deprived of the ordinary powers of municipal self-government. they have to bear needlessly heavy burdens for a very defective management of their public affairs. the result is seen in the poverty, the misery, and the intemperance that disgrace our city. a really progressive county council can do much (as the present council has shown), both immediately to benefit the people of london, and also to win for them genuine self-government. do you wish your county council to attempt nothing more for london than the old metropolitan board of works? this is, in effect, the reactionary, or so-called "moderate," program. or shall we make our county council a mighty instrument of the people's will for the social regeneration of this great city, and the "government of london by london for london?" that is what i stand for. _relief of the taxpayer_ but the crushing burden of the occupier's rates must be reduced, not increased. even with the strictest economy the administration of a growing city must be a heavy burden. the county council should have power to tax the ground landlord, who now pays no rates at all directly. moreover, the rates must be equalized throughout london. why should the deptford ratepayer have to pay nearly two shillings in the pound more than the inhabitant of st. george's, hanover square? and we must get at the unearned increment for the benefit of the people of london, who create it. _a labor program_ i am in favor of trade union wages and an eight-hours day for all persons employed by the council. i am dead against sub-contracting, and would like to see the council itself the direct employer of all labor. _municipalization_ at present london pays an utterly unnecessary annual tribute, because, unlike other towns, it leaves its water supply, its gas-works, its tramways, its markets, and its docks in the hands of private speculators. i am in favor of replacing private by democratic public ownership and management, as soon and as far as safely possible. it is especially urgent to secure public control of the water supply, the tramways, and the docks. moreover, london ought to manage its own police, and all its open spaces. _the condition of the poor_ but the main object of all our endeavors must be to raise the standard of life of our poorer fellow-citizens, now crushed by the competitive struggle. as one of the most urgent social reforms, especially in the interests of temperance, i urge the better housing of the people; the provision, by the council itself, of improved dwellings and common lodging-houses of the best possible types, and a strict enforcement of the sanitary laws against the owners of slum property. _local questions_ i believe in local attention to local grievances, and i should deem it my duty, if elected, to look closely after deptford interests, especially with regard to the need for more open spaces, and the early completion of the new thames tunnel. a more detailed account of my views may be found in my book, "the london programme," and other writings. i am a londoner born and bred, and have made london questions the chief study of my life. i have had thirteen years' administrative experience in a government office, a position which i have resigned in order to give my whole time to london's service. with regard to my general opinions, it will be enough to say that i have long been an active member of the fabian society, and of the executive committee of the london liberal and radical union. sidney webb. , park village east, regent's park, n.w. the following meetings have already been arranged. others will be announced shortly. february .--lecture hall, high street, at p.m. february .--lecture hall high street, at p.m. march .--new cross hall, lewisham high road, at p.m. fabian election dodger [the fabians and other socialists broke into london municipal politics under the name "progressives." the following is one of their earliest election dodgers.] county council election _saturday, march , _ part of the program of the progressives _rates._--reduce the occupiers' rates one-half, by charging that portion upon the great landlords, whose ground values are increased by every improvement, and are now untaxed; and by a municipal death duty. _gas and water._--reduce the cost and improve the quality and quantity by new sources of supply, if the present companies will not come to terms favorable to the taxpayer. _city companies._--apply their whole income of, say £ , (on leave obtained from the new parliament), for the benefit of london. the royal commission of stated that this income is virtually public property. about £ , is now squandered each year among the members and their friends. _homes for the poor._--the poor can all be comfortably housed, as in the municipal dwellings of glasgow and liverpool, without extra cost to the taxpayer, and the "doss-houses" abolished. _cheap food._--by doing away with the market monopolies of the city corporation and other private owners, food can be lowered in price. good food, especially fish, is now often destroyed or sold for manure to keep up the price. _poor man's vote._--one-third of your votes are lost. the registration laws must be thoroughly altered. footnotes: [ ] debates, house of lords, july, , . the speech was privately printed. [ ] debates, may , . this speech was also given private circulation. vi. general . origin of the word "collectivism" "this word, invented by colins, came into common use toward the end of the empire. bakunin used it in the congress at berne in , to oppose it to the communistic régime of cabet. an economist in designated, under this name, the system under which production will be confined to communes or parishes. the socialists who opposed authority, disciples of bakunin, used the word for a long time to designate their doctrine. the section of locle was one of the first to employ it. but by and by, about , the marxists, partisans of the proletarian reign, used the word 'collectivism' to distinguish their 'scientific socialism,' of which term they were fond, from the communistic utopias of the older school, which they discovered. and they gave to bakunins the name anarchists. these accepted the name, taking care to write it with a hyphen, _an-archie_, as their master proudhon had done. they soon dropped the hyphen and accepted the word anarchy as a declaration of war against all things as they are."[ ] . table showing results of parliamentary elections (compiled from report of secretary of the international, ) ====================+===========+===========+===========+============== | _no. | _total no.|_no. seats |_per cent. of _country_ | socialist | seats in |held by |socialists | votes_ |parliament_|socialists_| seats_ --------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------- great britain ( )| , | | | . germany ( ) | , , | | | . luxemburg ( ) | | | | . austria ( ) | , , | | | . france ( ) | , , | | | . italy ( ) | , | | | . spain ( ) | , | | | . russia | | | | . finland ( ) | , | | | . norway ( ) | , | | | . sweden ( ) | , | | | . denmark ( ) | , | | | . holland ( ) | , | | | . belgium ( ) | , | | | . switzerland ( ) | , | | | . turkey ( ) | | | | . servia ( ) | , | | | . u.s.a. ( ) | | | | --------------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-------------- in the socialists held the following number of local officers, according to the report of the international secretary ============================+============================ great britain | finland germany | norway austria-bohemia | sweden hungary | denmark france | belgium bulgaria | servia ----------------------------+---------------------------- . table showing the membership of the socialist party, in various countries (compiled from reports of the secretary of the international, - ) =========================+===================+=================== | | -------------------------+-------+-----------+-------+----------- |_local | |_local | _country_ |groups_| _members_ |groups_| _members_ -------------------------+-------+-----------+-------+----------- great britain, l.p. | | , , | | , , | | | | great britain, j.l.p. | | , | | , great britain, s.d.f. | | , | | , great britain, fabians | | , | | , germany | | , | | , | | ( , )| | ( , ) austria | | | | bohemia | | | | | | | | hungary | | , | | , france | | , | | , italy | | | | , russia* | | , | | , spain | | | | poland-prussian | | | | poland-russian | | , | | finland | | , | | , | | ( , )| | ( , ) norway | | , | | , | | ( , )| | ( , ) sweden | | | | , denmark | | | | holland | | , | | , belgium | | , | | , switzerland | | | | servia | | | | bulgaria | | , | | , u.s.a. | | , | | -------------------------+-------+-----------+-------+----------- =========================+==================== | -------------------------+-------+------------ |_local | _country_ |groups_| _members_ -------------------------+-------+------------ great britain, l.p. | | , , | | ( , ) great britain, j.l.p. | | , great britain, s.d.f. | | , great britain, fabians | | , germany | | , | | ( , ) austria | | , bohemia | | , | | ( , ) hungary | | , france | | , italy | | , russia* | | , spain | | poland-prussian | | , poland-russian | | , finland | | | | norway | | , | | ( , ) sweden | | , denmark | | , holland | | , belgium | | , switzerland | | , servia | | , bulgaria | | , u.s.a. | | , -------------------------+-------+----------- * province of lettland. figures in parenthesis indicate number of women members. . american socialist party platform [adopted by national convention may, , and by membership referendum august th, . amended by referendum september th, .] principles human life depends upon food, clothing, and shelter. only with these assured are freedom, culture, and higher human development possible. to produce food, clothing, or shelter, land and machinery are needed. land alone does not satisfy human needs. human labor creates machinery and applies it to the land for the production of raw materials and food. whoever has control of land and machinery controls human labor, and with it human life and liberty. to-day the machinery and the land used for industrial purposes are owned by a rapidly decreasing minority. so long as machinery is simple and easily handled by one man, its owner cannot dominate the sources of life of others. but when machinery becomes more complex and expensive, and requires for its effective operation the organized effort of many workers, its influence reaches over wide circles of life. the owners of such machinery become the dominant class. in proportion as the number of such machine owners compared to all other classes decreases, their power in the nation and in the world increases. they bring ever larger masses of working people under their control, reducing them to the point where muscle and brain are their only productive property. millions of formerly self-employing workers thus become the helpless wage slaves of the industrial masters. as the economic power of the ruling class grows it becomes less useful in the life of the nation. all the useful work of the nation falls upon the shoulders of the class whose only property is its manual and mental labor power--the wage worker--or of the class who have but little land and little effective machinery outside of their labor power--the small traders and small farmers. the ruling minority is steadily becoming useless and parasitic. a bitter struggle over the division of the products of labor is waged between the exploiting propertied classes on the one hand and the exploited propertyless class on the other. in this struggle the wage-working class cannot expect adequate relief from any reform of the present order at the hands of the dominant class. the wage workers are therefore the most determined and irreconcilable antagonists of the ruling class. they suffer most from the curse of class rule. the fact that a few capitalists are permitted to control all the country's industrial resources and social tools for their individual profit, and to make the production of the necessaries of life the object of competitive private enterprise and speculation is at the bottom of all the social evils of our time. in spite of the organization of trusts, pools, and combinations, the capitalists are powerless to regulate production for social ends. industries are largely conducted in a planless manner. through periods of feverish activity the strength and health of the workers are mercilessly used up, and during periods of enforced idleness the workers are frequently reduced to starvation. the climaxes of this system of production are the regularly recurring industrial depressions and crises which paralyze the nation every fifteen or twenty years. the capitalist class, in its mad race for profits, is bound to exploit the workers to the very limit of their endurance and to sacrifice their physical, moral, and mental welfare to its own insatiable greed. capitalism keeps the masses of workingmen in poverty, destitution, physical exhaustion, and ignorance. it drags their wives from their homes to the mill and factory. it snatches their children from the playgrounds and schools and grinds their slender bodies and unformed minds into cold dollars. it disfigures, maims, and kills hundreds of thousands of workingmen annually in mines, on railroads, and in factories. it drives millions of workers into the ranks of the unemployed and forces large numbers of them into beggary, vagrancy, and all forms of crime and vice. to maintain their rule over their fellow-men, the capitalists must keep in their pay all organs of the public powers, public mind, and public conscience. they control the dominant parties and, through them, the elected public officials. they select the executives, bribe the legislatures, and corrupt the courts of justice. they own and censor the press. they dominate the educational institutions. they own the nation politically and intellectually just as they own it industrially. the struggle between wage workers and capitalists grows ever fiercer, and has now become the only vital issue before the american people. the wage-working class, therefore, has the most direct interest in abolishing the capitalist system. but in abolishing the present system, the workingmen will free not only their own class, but also all other classes of modern society. the small farmer, who is to-day exploited by large capital more indirectly but not less effectively than is the wage laborer; the small manufacturer and trader, who is engaged in a desperate and losing struggle for economic independence in the face of the all-conquering power of concentrated capital; and even the capitalist himself, who is the slave of his wealth rather than its master. the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class, while it is a class struggle, is thus at the same time a struggle for the abolition of all classes and class privileges. the private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation, is the rock upon which class rule is built; political government is its indispensable instrument. the wage-workers cannot be freed from exploitation without conquering the political power and substituting collective for private ownership of the land and means of production used for exploitation. the basis for such transformation is rapidly developing within present capitalist society. the factory system, with its complex machinery and minute division of labor, is rapidly destroying all vestiges of individual production in manufacture. modern production is already very largely a collective and social process. the great trusts and monopolies which have sprung up in recent years have organized the work and management of the principal industries on a national scale, and have fitted them for collective use and operation. there can be no absolute private title to land. all private titles, whether called fee simple or otherwise, are and must be subordinate to the public title. the socialist party strives to prevent land from being used for the purpose of exploitation and speculation. it demands the collective possession, control, or management of land to whatever extent may be necessary to attain that end. it is not opposed to the occupation and possession of land by those using it in a useful and bona fide manner without exploitation. the socialist party is primarily an economic and political movement. it is not concerned with matters of religious belief. in the struggle for freedom the interests of all modern workers are identical. the struggle is not only national but international. it embraces the world and will be carried to ultimate victory by the united workers of the world. to unite the workers of the nation and their allies and sympathizers of all other classes to this end, is the mission of the socialist party. in this battle for freedom the socialist party does not strive to substitute working class rule for capitalist class rule, but by working class victory, to free all humanity from class rule and to realize the international brotherhood of man. program as measures calculated to strengthen the working class in its fight for the realization of this ultimate aim, and to increase its power of resistance against capitalist oppression, we advocate and pledge ourselves and our elected officers to the following program: _general demands_ . the immediate government relief for the unemployed workers by building schools, by reforesting of cut-over and waste lands, by reclamation of arid tracts, and the building of canals, and by extending all other useful public works. all persons employed on such works shall be employed directly by the government under an eight-hour work-day and at the prevailing union wages. the government shall also loan money to states and municipalities without interest for the purpose of carrying on public works. it shall contribute to the funds of labor organizations for the purpose of assisting their unemployed members, and shall take such other measures within its power as will lessen the widespread misery of the workers caused by the misrule of the capitalist class. . the collective ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, steamboat lines, and all other means of social transportation and communication. . the collective ownership of all industries which are organized on a national scale and in which competition has virtually ceased to exist. . the extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests, and water power. . the scientific reforestation of timber lands, and the reclamation of swamp lands. the land so reforested or reclaimed to be permanently retained as a part of the public domain. . the absolute freedom of press, speech, and assemblage. _industrial demands_ . the improvement of the industrial condition of the workers. (_a_) by shortening the workday in keeping with the increased productiveness of machinery. (_b_) by securing to every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week. (_c_) by securing a more effective inspection of workshops and factories. (_d_) by forbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age. (_e_) by forbidding the interstate transportation of the products of child labor, of convict labor, and of all uninspected factories. (_f_) by abolishing official charity and substituting in its place compulsory insurance against unemployment, illness, accidents, invalidism, old age, and death. _political demands_ . the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the amount of the bequests and to the nearness of kin. . a graduated income tax. . unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women, and we pledge ourselves to engage in an active campaign in that direction. . the initiative and referendum, proportional representation, and the right of recall. . the abolition of the senate. . the abolition of the power usurped by the supreme court of the united states to pass upon the constitutionality of legislation enacted by congress. national laws to be repealed or abrogated only by act of congress or by a referendum of the whole people. . that the constitution be made amendable by majority vote. . the enactment of further measures for general education and for the conservation of health. the bureau of education to be made a department. the creation of a department of public health. . the separation of the present bureau of labor from the department of commerce and labor, and the establishment of a department of labor. . that all judges be elected by the people for short terms, and that the power to issue injunctions shall be curbed by immediate legislation. . the free administration of justice. such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole power of government, in order that they may thereby lay hold of the whole system of industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance. footnotes: [ ] georges weil, _histoire du mouvement social en france_, p. . index allemane, american socialist party platform, amsterdam congress, anarchy, , , anselee, anti-militarism, in france, - ; in belgium, ; in germany, - anti-socialist law (german), - asquith, premier, and the parliament bill, - austria, revolution in, bakunin, , barthou, on french post-office strike, ; on railway strike, bebel, august, , ; on anti-socialist law, , , , , ; arrest of, ; candidate for president of reichstag, ; on defeat of socialism, , ; on inheritance tax, ; as a party leader, ; on new alsatian constitution, ; on militarism, - ; on participation in legislation, , ; on party discipline, , , , ; on socialism in united states, belgium, - ; government of, - ; co-operative movement in, - ; agrarian movement in, ; nature of belgian socialism, - ; labor organizations in, - ; labor party in parliament, - ; political parties in, ; poverty and illiteracy in, - , , bernstein, ed., bibliography, - bismarck and lassalle, ; and reichstag suffrage, ; and repression of socialism, - ; anti-socialist law, - ; and state insurance, - blanc, louis, , - , ; lassalle adopts plan of, bourgeoisie, defined, bourse du travail, , ; federation of, ; organization of, - brentano, prof., on socialism in u.s., briand, aristide, , , , ; became prime minister, ; program of legislation, ; and the railway strike, - brousse, , brussels, city of refuge, ; demonstrations in, , , - ; maison du peuple of, burns, john, ; in cabinet, , ; on right to work, ; on socialism in u.s., cabet, carlyle, on chartist movement, "c.g.t." _see_ syndicalists and syndicalism chartist movement, - , christian socialism, , - christian social union, church socialist league, class basis of socialism, - , , . _see also_ marx class interests, illusion of, - class war, guesdists on the, class war and syndicalists, - clémenceau, debate with jaurès, , ; on post-office strike, - clerical party in belgium, , , , , ; in germany, . _see also_ political parties colin, co-operative movement started by, "collectivism," origin of word, communal program of bavarian socialists, ; of belgian socialists, communist league, the, communist manifesto, , - compère-morel, - competition and the socialist theory, , co-operation, ; in belgium, _see_ belgium; in england, - ; _see also_ england; statistics of, , davidson, thomas, democracy and socialism, , ; spread of, by socialists, democratic revolutions, - ; in germany, - dennis, prof. hector, development act (eng.), dicey, prof., on the liberal and socialist parties, dockers' strike, dreyfus affair, - eisenach program, - election laws, german, - electoral reform. _see_ saxony, prussia, "free cities," chartist movement ely, prof. r.t., conservation in u.s., emperor william's life attempted, - engels, frederick, , , - ; on english police, ; on changes in revolutionary ideals, england, growth of socialism in, ; thrift institutions in, ; socialism in, - ; character of socialism in, - . _see also_ chartist movement; engels; industrial revolution; insurance bill; labor party; labor exchange act; land system; liberal party; lords, house of english, characteristics of the, - ; income of the, - erfurt program, ; dissatisfaction with, - fabian society, origin, - ; famous members, - ; attitude toward constitutionalism, ; basis of, ; an election address of, ; an election dodger of, feudalism, class ideals of, , , ; in germany, feuerbach, - fourier, - , france, revolution of , ; commune of , , ; socialist party of, - ; factions in socialist party, - ; "united socialists," , ; socialist radicals, ; the "bloc," , ; labor unions in, ; post-office strike in, - ; railway strike in, - ; local socialism in, - ; government of, - france, anatole, frank, dr., on the baden budget, - ; on the intellectual classes and socialism, "free cities," election laws in, french revolution, gambetta, general strike, ; in belgium, , , , george, henry, george, lloyd, ; budget of, - ; insurance bill of, - ; flays keir hardie, germany, social democracy in, - ; revolution in, ; character of government in, ; the new empire, ; most "socialized" country, - ; labor unions in, - ; party representation in reichstag, ; vote of all parties in, ; political parties in, - . _see also_ "free cities;" suffrage; progressists; labor organizations; liberal party gneist, prof., and anti-socialist law, godin, j., godwin, guesde, jules, , , , , , , guise, community at, hardie, keir, , and development act, , ; on using military during strike, ; on goal of socialism, hasselman, ; expelled from social democratic party, hegel, , hegelians, young, , hervé, gustave, , hobhouse, prof., hyndman, h.m., i.l.p., organization of, , ; on liberal coalition, - ; attitude on insurance bill, ; constitution and by-laws, industrial revolution, ; change in social ideals, , ; violence of first days, ; in england, - insurance bill (eng.), - international, the, ; "old international," - ; "new international," - ; amsterdam congress of, international socialist bureau, , international socialist statistics, , international workingmen's association, jaurès, jean, , , , , , , ; leader of "bloc," - ; debate with clémenceau, - ; in amsterdam congress, ; on difference between socialism and democracy, ; on socialism in u.s., kaiser, the, and german social democrats, , kautsky, k., , ; on revisionism, - ; on amsterdam congress, kingsley, labor exchange act (england), labor organization in france, ; in germany, - , - labor party, english, , , - , , - , , , , ; program of, , labor party, the first, ; in belgium, _see_ belgium; program of, labor questions and socialism, labor unions in belgium, political activity of, . _see also_ belgium labor unions in england. _see_ trades unions labor unions in france. _see_ bourse du travail, and syndicats labor unions in germany, . _see also_ germany land system of england, - lassalle, - , ; leipzig address, ; general workingman's association, - ; influence on german social democracy, league of the just, - , ledebour, on ministerial responsibility, legislation, advocated by socialists, in germany, _see_ social democratic party; in england, - liberal party, in germany, - , , ; in england, , , , - , - liebknecht, , , , , , ; in reichstag, ; arrested, ; on party tactics, ; on erfurt program, london, progress in, lords, house of, an issue, - , macdonald, j. ramsay, on i.l.p., - ; on democracy, - mazzini, , , mccarthy, justin, on chartism, marx, karl, , , , ; theories of - ; formulæ of, "capital," - ; influence on socialist movement, - ; criticism of, , ; theory of revolution, ; on german revolution, , , ; on the commune, , ; the communist manifesto, - ; "address" and "statutes" of the "old international," , , , ; at the hague, ; present influence in germany, marxian influence in the international, - marxians and the possibilists, , marxians in england, , maurice, menger, adolph, critique of marxianism, - mill, john stuart, millerand, , , , , , , , , ; at st. mandé, ; program of, - ; expelled from socialist party, ; on railway strike, , ; on ideals of socialism, . militarism, and the international, - ; and the syndicalists, - money, chiozza, , , , morley, lord, on new liberalism, morris, wm., , ; on whigs, most, herr, in reichstag, ; expelled from socialist party, munich, socialist activity in, - municipal socialism in france, - ; in germany, - old age pensions, osborne judgment, the, owen, robert, , , - , ; rochdale, paepe, cæsar de, paris, commune. _see_ commune. first meeting of "new international," - parliament bill, - peasantry, french, - ; belgian, - possibilists, poverty and socialism, - ; in england, - ; in belgium, _see_ belgium progressists, in belgium, , ; in germany, , , proudhon, - , proudhonism in england, prussia, election laws, réformistes, in france, _see_ millerand, briand; in germany, - revisionist controversy in germany, - revolution, social, , , , ; modern idea, revolutionary era, - rodbertus, , , rosebery, lord, rousseau, ruskin, sabotage, , , , , , sachsen-altenburg, election law, saint-simon, - , saxe-weimar, election law, saxony, new election law, , schultze-delitsch, shaw, g.b., , , simiyan, on french post-office strike, small holdings act, , social democratic federation, (english), , , , social democratic party (german), - ; discipline, - ; attitude of government towards, - ; change in temper, - ; attitude towards legislation, - ; first bill in reichstag, ; attitude on state insurance, ; present temper, ; program of, , , , ; attitude towards other parties, , ; election address of, socialism, ideals of, - ; theories, ; development of, ; political awakening of, ; modern conception of revolution, ; what is, , ; changes in, ; illusions of, ; in different countries, ; limits of, ; characteristics of present, - ; in parliaments, ; what it has accomplished, - ; nature of its demands, - ; difference between socialism and democracy, - ; when the word was first used, socialist officers, list of, socialist party, membership of, socialist vote in leading countries, sorel, georges, south germany budget controversy, - state, increased functions of, - state insurance, opposed by socialists, ; attitude of present-day socialists, ; in germany, , ; statistics, ; _see also_ bismarck südekum, dr., on nature of social democratic party, suffrage, struggle for, in belgium, - ; electoral laws of belgium, - ; struggle for, in germany, , - syndicalism, , - , - , - , - , taff vale decision, - , thiers, president, town planning act, , trades disputes act, trades unions, english, and the international, , , ; 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