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UNDERCURRENTS IN AMERICAN 
 POLITICS 
 
/ 
 UNDERCURRENTS 
 
 IN 
 
 AMERICAN POLITICS 
 
 Comprising the Ford Lectures, delivered at 
 
 Oxford University 
 
 AND the Barbour-Page Lectures, delivered at 
 
 The University of Virginia 
 
 IN THE Spring of 1914 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 
 
 President of Yale University 
 
 NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 MDCCCCXV 
 

 ^ 
 
 V 
 
 Copyright, 1915 
 
 BY 
 
 Yale University Press 
 
 First printed May, 1915, 1000 copies 
 
 M 2 1915 
 ©a,A401198 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In the spring of 1914 it was my privilege to 
 deliver the Barbour-Page Lectures at the Univer- 
 sity of Virginia and the Ford Lectures at Oxford 
 University. As the two courses dealt with kindred 
 subjects, I am publishing them in a single volume. 
 
 The whole might well have been entitled ' ' Extra- 
 Constitutional Government in the United States.'' 
 The Oxford Lectures, on Property and Democracy, 
 show how a great many organized activities of the 
 community have been kept out of government con- 
 trol altogether. The Virginia Lectures, on Politi- 
 cal Methods, show how those matters which were 
 left in government hands have often been managed 
 by very different agencies from those which the 
 framers of our Constitution intended. 
 
 As the first three lectures were delivered to an 
 English audience, they contain some explanations 
 which are unnecessary for American readers; but 
 it seemed on the whole better to print them in their 
 original form. 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 When so wide a range of topics is treated in so 
 small a book, it is impossible to give any adequate 
 set of references to authorities. I have tried in the 
 several lectures to make due acknowledgment to 
 the men who have most nearly anticipated my lines 
 of thought or have furnished me with the largest 
 budgets of illustrative facts; but I have only been 
 able to name a few among the many to whom I am 
 thus indebted. 
 
 Yale University, New Haven 
 April 1915 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 PROPERTY AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 Lecture I 
 
 The Gradual Development op American 
 Democracy ..... 3 
 
 Colonial organization was essentially aris- 
 tocratic ...... 3 
 
 Keligious exclusiveness in New England, 4. 
 Large land grants in middle colonies, 6. Effect 
 of slavery in south, 8. 
 
 Independence made no immediate change 
 
 in this respect ..... 10 
 
 Universal suffrage not adopted, 11. High prop- 
 erty qualifications, 11. Leaders of both parties 
 aristocratic, 13. 
 
 The turning point came in 1820 with the 
 
 advent of a new generation ... 14 
 
 Effect of political watchwords, 15. Effect of 
 Hamilton's land policy, 16. Western type of 
 man and commonwealth, 20. Andrew Jackson, 20. 
 Political democracy established before 1840, 22. 
 
 The political change was attended with a 
 social change, but not with an industrial 
 one ....... 25 
 
 Contrast between Europe and America, 27. 
 Absence of labor legislation, 27. Socialistic agi- 
 tation not effective, 30. 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 Lecture II 
 
 The Constitutional Position of the Prop- 
 erty Owner . . : . . 32 
 
 The American political and social system is 
 based on industrial property rights . 33 
 Traditional opposition between military and in- 
 dustrial classes in Europe, 33. No such tradition 
 in America, 35. Working and fighting power in 
 same hands, 36. 
 
 These rights have been protected by a con- 
 stitutional compact .... 37 
 
 Character of the Constitutional Convention of 
 1787, 38. Balance between home rule party and 
 federal party, 39. Immunities given to the 
 property owner, 40. The American doctrine of 
 sovereignty, 42. 
 
 No serious attempt has been made to amend 
 the Constitutional provisions protecting 
 property ...... 47 
 
 A democracy of small landowners, 48. Need 
 of attracting capital, 49. Freedom of incorpora- 
 tion, 51. Constitutional guarantees of corporate 
 independence, 53. The Dartmouth College case, 
 54. The Fourteenth Amendment and the San 
 Mateo case, 55. 
 
 The Civil War produced industrial unrest, 
 
 but not industrial reform ... 56 
 
 Emancipation of slaves, 56. Currency agitation, 
 57. High protective tariff, 58. The competitive 
 system in America, 59. Its effect on industrial 
 efficiency, 62. 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 Lecture III 
 
 Recent Tendencies in Economics and in 
 
 Legislation ..... 64 
 
 Competition did not protect shippers 
 against abuse of railway power . . 65 
 
 Sudden discovery of this fact after the civil war, 
 66. The Granger movement, 67. Eailway com- 
 missions and the Interstate Commerce Act of 
 1887, 71. 
 
 Failure of competition was not confined to 
 railways ...... 72 
 
 Other public utilities put under control of com- 
 missions, 73. Attempt to enforce competition in 
 productive industry, 74. The Sherman Anti- 
 Trust Act of 1890 not enforced for several years 
 after its passage, 75. 
 
 The present century has witnessed the first 
 serious movement toward state socialism 
 in America ..... 76 
 
 Humanitarian development in Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury, 76. Labor agitation ineffective when it 
 antagonized small landowners, 78. Change in 
 Twentieth Century, 80. Small property owners 
 now ranged against the money power, 81. Char- 
 acter of new laws passed since 1903, 86. In- 
 creased activity in enforcing old laws, 86. Symp- 
 toms of a reaction, 88. Practical limits to state 
 control in America today, 90. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 POLITICAL METHODS OLD AND NEW 
 
 Lecture IV 
 The Growth of Party Machinery . . 97 
 
 The perversion of party government . 97 
 
 Two distinct senses of the word party, 99. 
 Either a means of organizing public opinion in- 
 telligently, or an agency for controlling the 
 offices of the country as a source of power and 
 livelihood, 99. Second meaning tends to sup- 
 plant the first, 101. 
 
 Constitution makes no provision against 
 this danger . . . . .102 
 
 Prescribed mode of election and duties of public 
 officers, 105. Did not prescribe mode of nomi- 
 nation or character of pledges that might be 
 exacted of the candidate, 105. 
 
 Actual agencies of nomination . . . 108 
 
 Caucus established 1796, 108. Overthrown 1824, 
 
 109. Substitution of the convention system, 110. 
 Made power less responsible instead of more so, 
 
 110. Martin Van Buren, 111. 
 
 Rewards of irresponsible activity . . 113 
 
 Municipal and state offices, 114. Jackson and 
 the Federal civil service, 116. Franchises, local 
 and national, 118. The tariff and the currency 
 as party issues, 120. 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 Lecture Y 
 The Reaction against Machine Control . 122 
 Ineffective remedies .... 123 
 
 Turning one party out brings the machinery of 
 another party into office, 123. Predatory pov- 
 erty as dangerous a thing as predatory wealth, 
 125. 
 
 Partially effective remedies . . . 127 
 
 Separation of local from national issues, 128. 
 Brought to public notice by New York election of 
 1871, 129. Local politics made increasingly inde- 
 pendent of national party affiliations, 131. Elec- 
 tion of United States senators by the people, 
 132. Civil service reform, 134, What it has 
 accomplished and what it fails to accomplish, 
 136. 
 
 Present experiments and tendencies . . 137 
 
 Distrust of the legislature, 137. Direct legis- 
 lation through state constitutions, 143. The 
 referendum and initiative, 145. The direct pri- 
 mary, 146. The recall, 147. 
 
 Lecture VI 
 The Seat of Power today .... 149 
 
 Unorganized political opinion ineffective . 149 
 
 New system transfers political chicane from 
 party organization to groups of individuals, 151. 
 Creation of public sentiment by newspapers, 152. 
 
xii CONTENTS 
 
 Growth of the independent press . . 153 
 
 The slavery agitation, 154. The campaign 
 against Tweed in New York, 155. Pulitzer's 
 theory of journalism, 158. Lessened power of 
 party leaders, 159. Government by popular 
 opinion, 159. 
 
 Unforeseen consequences of the change . 162 
 The appeal to emotion, 163. The appeal to im- 
 patience, 167. Theory of popular omniscience, 
 170. Undervaluation of the expert, 172. True 
 function of voters in a democracy, 174. 
 
 Index ....... 181 
 
PEOPEETY AND DEMOCEACY 
 
THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF 
 AMEEICAN DEMOCEACY 
 
 At the time of the adoption of the federal con- 
 stitution in 1788 neither the United States as a 
 whole, nor any of the several commonwealths of 
 which it was composed, was a democracy in the 
 modern sense of the word. 
 
 Ever since their original settlement the political 
 and social system of the English colonies in 
 North America had been essentially aristocratic. 
 Nowhere among them do we find universal suffrage. 
 The right to vote was always confined to taxpayers, 
 and almost always to freeholders. In one colony 
 the minimum freehold qualification for the suffrage 
 was a thousand acres. Nor were the voters as a 
 body generally allowed the privilege of choosing 
 the chief magistrates. The higher administrative 
 officers were either appointed by the crown or 
 elected by councils composed of a few of the richest 
 and most influential citizens. The man of small 
 means and unconsidered ancestry had very little 
 direct participation in the affairs of state. 
 
4 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Of course the conditions varied in different parts 
 of the country. The nearest approach to democracy 
 was found northeast of the Hudson river, in the 
 colonies of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode 
 Island and Connecticut. The settlers in this dis- 
 trict were for the most part Puritans. The region 
 was so inhospitable that it did not attract men of 
 wealth. In three of the four colonies a religious 
 rather than a commercial motive had been domi- 
 nant in the foundation. There was no opportunity 
 for the growth of a leisure class, nor would public 
 sentiment have approved of it if there had been. 
 But though the New England freeholders were 
 poor, they were exclusive. Though they tilled their 
 own lands, it did not prevent them from being 
 politically arrogant, any more than the same cause 
 had prevented a Cincinnatus or a Fabius from 
 being politically arrogant in the early days of the 
 Roman republic. The freeman of a Massachusetts 
 commonwealth looked upon new settlers who 
 aspired to become freemen with much the same 
 suspicious eye with which the Roman patrician 
 regarded his plebeian neighbors. 
 
 These suspicions were most strongly manifested 
 when the new settlers held a different creed from 
 the older ones. The original emigrants to Massa- 
 chusetts were Congregationalists. They looked 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 5 
 
 upon members of any other sect as men of doubtful 
 character, not to be trusted with the administration 
 of a growing commonwealth. Woe to the Episco- 
 palian who held that his Lares and Penates were 
 as good politically as those of his Congregational 
 brother! During the earlier years of the history 
 of Massachusetts the charter required that the 
 freemen should be godly ; and the Puritan founders 
 of the colony doubted very gravely whether the 
 Thirty-nine Articles were a sufficiently acceptable 
 road to godliness to make it wise to trust the 
 Episcopalian with the franchise. Even when the 
 franchise itself had been more liberally bestowed 
 and political power had thus become diffused 
 through the whole body of freeholders, the spirit 
 of social exclusiveness remained almost unchanged. 
 For a great deal of the work of New England 
 society centered around the church rather than the 
 state ; and the church was controlled by the 
 descendants of the original settlers.* 
 
 * The parallel between the aristocracy of New England 
 and the aristocracy of the early Eoman republic has much 
 interest and significance. 
 
 In either case the aristocrats were at once farmers and 
 fighters, tilling the soil and resisting the enemy by turns. 
 In either case there was a body of outside or plebeian 
 neighbors, some of whom were just as wealthy as any of 
 the patrician aristocrats, who were for a time excluded 
 
6 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 What was conspicuously true of Massachusetts 
 was true to a somewhat less degree in the other 
 New England colonies. They were societies of poor 
 but proud aristocrats. Connecticut was in some 
 respects the most independent and democratic of 
 all the New England commonwealths. Yet even in 
 Connecticut class distinctions were so strong that 
 down to the very eve of the Revolution the names 
 of the students in the catalogue of Yale College 
 were arranged, not in alphabetical rank, but in the 
 order of the respectability of their parentage. 
 
 In the group of colonies immediately southwest 
 
 from the offices and privileges of the state. The barrier 
 which separated the different classes from one another, 
 whether in Eome or in Massachusetts, was not primarily 
 a political but a religious one. The plebeian had not the 
 same gods as the patrician. The Episcopalian had not the 
 same gods as the Congregationalist. Long after the plebeian 
 had obtained equal rights to military offtces like the consul- 
 ship or the dictatorship, he was excluded from semi-religious 
 positions like that of the praetor. The same thing holds 
 good in Massachusetts. Both in Eome and in New England 
 the ruling class, when compelled to grant political equality, 
 tried to keep a modicum of their old power by reserving a 
 good deal of public authority to the representatives of the 
 church of the founders. This authority the outsider could 
 not claim to share merely because he shared the franchise 
 or the right of holding military command, unless he had 
 gone through the process which the Massachusetts Christian 
 described in terms borrowed from the phraseology of pagan 
 Eome — the process of ' ' sanctification and adoption.'' 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 7 
 
 of the Hudson river the social system was of a 
 different kind. There was much less religious 
 exclusiveness, there was much more commercial 
 inequality. Neither the Dutch in New York, the 
 Quakers in Pennsylvania, nor the Catholics who 
 followed Lord Baltimore to Maryland, showed the 
 same degree of bigotry and intolerance that ani- 
 mated the settlers of New England. These colonies 
 were to a greater or less extent trading ventures, 
 in which the heads of the enterprise reserved for 
 themselves the dominant influence in the direction 
 and control of affairs. Instead of a religious 
 aristocracy of small farmers, we therefore find a 
 commercial aristocracy of traders and planters. 
 The agricultural land of New York was largely 
 held by a few patroons or semi-feudal overlords; 
 a system originally established by the Dutch but 
 not essentially altered or disturbed when the 
 colony passed under British sovereignty. The 
 charters of the other colonies in this region— New 
 Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland — 
 either explicitly provided for a similar form of 
 organization or tacitly encouraged it. In all these 
 colonies, therefore, the influence of a comparatively 
 small number of wealthy citizens was dominant. 
 
 This dominance of wealth was even more marked 
 south of the Potomac, in the colonies or plantations 
 
8 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The 
 agricultural conditions of this region made a 
 system of large holdings or plantations profitable 
 both to the colonists themselves and to the fiscal 
 agents of the mother country. Inequalities of 
 wealth which in the middle colonies were an 
 accident became in the southern colonies an indus- 
 trial advantage if not an economic necessity. 
 Moreover the southern plantations were particu- 
 larly suitable to the employment of slave labor — 
 first that of convicts or redemptioners, and after- 
 ward of negroes imported for the purpose. As is 
 generally the case where slavery prevails, the body 
 of freemen graduallj^ divided itself into two 
 classes: those who were rich enough to own slaves 
 and those who were not. The former class, as is 
 usual in such communities, succeeded in engrossing 
 the political authority; partly by law, partly by 
 political maneuvering, and partly by the force of 
 social usage. 
 
 According to a report of the Surveyor General 
 of the Colonial Customs at the beginning of the 
 eighteenth century, quoted by Hildreth,* there were 
 
 * The account of colonial conditions given by Hildreth is 
 in many respects better than that which we have received 
 from later historians. Hildreth 's merits have been some- 
 what underrated, owing to his intense partisanship in deal- 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 9 
 
 in Virginia on each of the four great rivers men 
 in number from ten to thirty, who by trade and 
 industry had "gotten very competent estates." 
 These gentlemen took care to supply the poorer 
 sort with goods and necessaries, and were sure to 
 keep them always in their debt and consequently 
 dependent on them. Out of this number were 
 chosen the council, assembly, justices, and other 
 officers of government. The justices, besides their 
 judicial functions, managed the business and 
 finances of their respective counties. Parish affairs 
 were in the hands of self-perpetuating vestries, 
 which kept even the ministers in check by avoiding 
 induction and hiring them only from year to year. 
 The twelve counselors possessed extensive author- 
 ity ; their assent was necessary to all the governor 's 
 official acts; they constituted one branch of the 
 
 ing with American political history at the end of the 
 eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century; but 
 his treatment of early colonial affairs is comparatively 
 unaffected by this partisanship, and shows the good effect 
 of contact, personal and social, with colonial traditions. 
 The men with whom Hildreth had talked in his boyhood 
 came of these colonial families whose methods and doings 
 he described. They had retained to a surprisingly large 
 extent the prejudices and feelings of their grandfathers. 
 In spite of his late date Hildreth thus speaks in the 
 character of an eyewitness. There is, I believe, no other 
 American historian of whom this fact is true in approxi- 
 mately equal extent. 
 
10 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Assembly; they exercised the principal judicial 
 authority as judges of the General Court; they 
 were at the head of the militia as lieutenants of 
 the counties; they acted as collectors of the export 
 duty on tobacco and the other provincial imposts, 
 and generally also of the Parliamentary duties, 
 while they farmed the king's quit-rents at a very 
 favorable bargain. A majority of these counselors, 
 united together by a sort of family compact, 
 aspired to engross the entire management of the 
 province. 
 
 All this is doubtless somewhat overstated. Con- 
 ditions were probably not as bad as this in 1705, 
 when the report was written; they certainly were 
 not as bad at the time of the Revolution. But we 
 are quite safe in saying that Thomas Jefferson's 
 doctrines of political equality were not drawn from 
 an observation of the practices that prevailed in 
 his immediate neighborhood. 
 
 The Revolution of 1776 severed the relation of 
 the colonies to the mother country but did not 
 greatly alter the constitutions under which they 
 were organized. These constitutions continued to 
 follow the lines set down in the colonial charters in 
 all respects except those which concerned the Eng- 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 11 
 
 lish overlord. Before the Revolution most of the 
 colonies had been compelled to accept the governors 
 appointed by the crown; after the Revolution the 
 leading citizens elected their own governors and 
 fixed the bounds of their authority; but with 
 that exception the machinery was arranged and 
 conducted in pretty much the same manner as 
 before. No immediate attempt was made to extend 
 the right of suffrage or to increase the proportion 
 of elective offices. The property qualifications 
 demanded of officeholders remained very high. 
 In South Carolina, to quote an extreme instance, 
 no man could serve as governor unless he owned 
 property to the value of ten thousand pounds; 
 which even in the depreciated currency was an 
 enormous sum for that time. The social order was 
 essentially an aristocratic one — not quite so much 
 so as it was in England at that time, but very much 
 more so than it is in England today. While the 
 right to stand for office was not denied to qualified 
 voters of proper age and substance, the actual 
 holding of office was chiefly enjoyed by such persons 
 as happened to belong to families of standing and 
 consideration. 
 
 Nor did the adoption of the Federal Constitution 
 involve any necessary or immediate change in these 
 particulars. This constitution indeed provided 
 
12 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 that each of the several federated states should 
 have a republican form of government. But to 
 the makers of the Federal Constitution the word 
 ''republican" did not mean democratic. The 
 members of the convention that drafted it were 
 representatives of the conservative class in the 
 community. Their "republic" was the equivalent 
 of Aristotle's "politeia, " or self-governing com- 
 monwealth. Most of them would have been horror- 
 stricken at the idea of universal suffrage. There 
 was indeed in all the states a strong minority of 
 real democrats, many of whom opposed the adop- 
 tion of the Constitution. But the necessity of 
 having an efficient central government was so 
 obvious that the views of the conservative party 
 prevailed decisively; and the outspoken champions 
 of democracy were forced to acquiesce, as best they 
 might, in the adoption of a polity which some of 
 them regarded as a betrayal of the cause of popular 
 liberty. 
 
 The conservatives or Federalists remained in 
 control for twelve years after they had secured 
 the passage of the Constitution. Then it was the 
 turn of the Democrats, who came into power with 
 the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. It is, 
 however, significant of the state of popular feeling 
 at the time that the advent of the popular party 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 13 
 
 to office was signalized by no important political 
 or social changes.* Jefferson's administration 
 illustrated the old adage, "A radical plus power 
 equals a conservative." The leaders of the Demo- 
 crats, like the leaders of the Federalists, were for 
 the most part representatives of old families. 
 Madison and Monroe bore as respectable names as 
 "Washington or Adams. Aaron Burr, arch-democrat 
 and corrupter of society, who taught Tammany 
 Hall the methods which have made New York 
 politics a byword, was of as good social standing 
 as Alexander Hamilton, friend of Washington and 
 founder of the republic's fiscal system. 
 
 To make America a democracy, in fact as well 
 as in name, it was not enough for one party to pass 
 out of power. It was necessary for one whole 
 generation to pass off the stage and give place to 
 
 * The apparent change of front by the Democratic leaders 
 in the years immediately following the adoption of the 
 United States Constitution was due to two causes. 
 
 In the first place, the formation of a centralized govern- 
 ment under the new constitution was actually followed by 
 a high degree of prosperity. The years preceding 1788 had 
 been a time of depression. The decade that immediately 
 followed was one of commercial expansion. It was natural, 
 and in fact inevitable, that this change from depression 
 to prosperity should be attributed to the Constitution and 
 that that instrument should become popular with everybody 
 who benefited by the commercial improvement. 
 
 The views of the extreme Democrats were further dis- 
 
14 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 a new generation with other antecedents and other 
 ideals. Until about the year 1820 the citizens of 
 the United States were British subjects who had 
 accidentally transferred their allegiance without 
 correspondingly altering their political instincts. 
 The United States remained in many essential 
 features a group of English colonies, separated 
 from the mother country in 1776, somewhat against 
 their will, by the want of tact of George the Third 
 and his ministers, and united with one another in 
 1788, also somewhat against their will, by the 
 extraordinary tact of the leaders of the Consti- 
 tutional Convention. Colonial, however, they 
 remained in feeling, and separate also to a large 
 degree in feeling, for twenty or thirty years 
 afterward. 
 
 But with the advent of a new generation things 
 were altered. Farrand, who among all our histo- 
 
 credited by the history of the French Eevolution in 1792 
 and 1793. The excesses of the Eeign of Terror gave 
 conservatives in America as well as in England strong 
 arguments against putting unrestricted power in the hands 
 of the masses, and made Democrats themselves doubt 
 whether their own theories of popular government were as 
 good practical guides as they had previously supposed. 
 Jefferson and his immediate followers never abandoned 
 their belief in the people, but they modified to some extent 
 their desire to trust the people with the direct exercise of 
 administrative authority. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 15 
 
 rians is probably best qualified to judge of this 
 point, dates the real beginning of distinctively 
 American history, not from the declaration of 
 independence in 1776 nor from the adoption of 
 the Constitution in 1788, but from the close of 
 the War of 1812. The years following this war 
 witnessed the birth of a true national spirit, which 
 was at once American and democratic. 
 
 Several causes combined to produce this change. 
 First among them was the effect of the Declaration 
 of Independence itself upon boys who were taught 
 to read it. ''We hold these truths to be self- 
 evident," said the writers of the Declaration, 
 ''that all men are created equal, that they are 
 endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalien- 
 able rights, that among these are life, liberty, and 
 the pursuit of happiness." To the men of 1776 
 this sentence was simply a convenient phrase for 
 justifying acts of armed resistance to England 
 which had been committed by the several colonies 
 in the past and were likely to be continued on a 
 larger scale and with more organized purpose in 
 the immediate future. The writers believed them 
 in the same way that they believed other political 
 doctrines of Locke or Rousseau; that is, they gave 
 them a sufficient measure of intellectual assent to 
 be able to use them as a basis of argument without 
 
16 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 violating their consciences. But they were not 
 ready to accept them as part of the sentiment which 
 underlay their estimate of their fellow men and 
 the conduct of their own daily life. With the next 
 generation the case was different. What had been 
 a phrase to the fathers was an article of faith to 
 the sons. They had learned in their earliest and 
 most impressionable years that this was the prin- 
 ciple upon which the American nation was founded. 
 It was this, they were taught, which more than 
 anything else differentiated American society from 
 European society. What had been at first a mere 
 proposition regarding equality became under such 
 influences a sentiment in favor of equality. The 
 feeling of patriotism was enlisted to drive out the 
 old feeling of caste prejudice. The sentiments of 
 human equality and of national pride were in fact 
 so closely bound up with one another that whatever 
 strengthened the second strengthened the first. 
 The war against England from 1812 to 1815, 
 unfortunate as it was in many of its incidents, laid 
 the foundation for a new intensity of patriotic 
 feeling and new enthusiasm for human equality. 
 
 Of equal importance in promoting the spirit of 
 democracy was the system of land laws under 
 which the West was settled. 
 
 The greater part of the actual area of the United 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 17 
 
 States at the end of the eighteenth century was 
 the property of the national government, unen- 
 cumbered by claims of individuals or corporations. 
 The thirteen states that formed the Union occupied 
 only a small fringe along the Atlantic coast. Some 
 of them held grants of land in the interior by 
 virtue of their colonial charters ; but the total area 
 effectively covered by these grants was not large 
 in amount. Speaking broadly, the immense domain 
 in the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi was 
 at the disposal of the federal authorities. The 
 power thus held by the United States Government 
 was wisely used. Alexander Hamilton, Washing- 
 ton's secretary of the treasury, was a man who 
 understood the larger principles of statesmanship 
 better than any other American of his age. He 
 saw that in the disposal of this land fiscal consid- 
 erations should be subordinated to political ones; 
 that the most valuable thing which a democracy 
 could do with a public domain was to settle it with 
 as large a number as possible of actual freeholders. 
 In pursuance of this policy, arrangements were 
 made for the survey of the public lands at as early 
 a date as possible. Lines were run at intervals of 
 half a mile, both from north to south and from 
 east to west, dividing the country into square 
 sections of the area of a quarter of a mile, or one 
 
18 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 hundred and sixty acres, each. These are the 
 quarter sections so constantly alluded to in the 
 land laws of the United States. On the lands thus 
 surveyed the price was first fixed at $2.00 an acre, 
 which was afterwards generally reduced to $1.25. 
 
 But this cheap rate was not the only inducement 
 offered to settlers. By a series of "preemption 
 acts" from 1801 to 1841 a man who had actually 
 settled upon public land without paying for it was 
 given prior claim to its ultimate ownership. It 
 was, as it were, reserved for a time when he might 
 be ready to purchase. Nobody could buy it over 
 his head. The result of these Preemption Acts was 
 that a man who did not have the money to buy the 
 land could enter and take possession of it, with the 
 assurance that if he made proper improvements he 
 would be given a chance not only to get the benefit 
 of his improvements, but ultimately to buy the 
 land itself out of the proceeds of his successful 
 farming. 
 
 Hamilton built even better than he knew. The 
 political consideration that he felt most strongly 
 was the danger of foreign invasion. The United 
 States held the central and western parts of the 
 continent by rather a precarious tenure. The 
 colonies that had revolted from England were 
 stretched along the Atlantic seaboard. A range 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 19 
 
 of mountains, not very high but rugged and almost 
 unbroken, separated them from the interior valleys. 
 The first settlement in these interior valleys had 
 been made, not across the mountains but by the 
 Mississippi on the south or the St. Lawrence on 
 the north. Spain held the lower Mississippi; 
 England held the lower St. Lawrence. Most of 
 the permanent white residents of the Mississippi 
 valley were French. The names of the older towns 
 show the kind of population with which we had 
 to deal: Yincennes, Terre Haute, St. Louis. The 
 ideals and institutions of the newly founded 
 United States had no particular attraction for the 
 inhabitants of towns with names like these. A war 
 with either England or Spain — or, for that matter, 
 a war with France — ^might easily have deprived 
 the states of the Atlantic seaboard of the slender 
 hold they had on the interior. As a result 
 of Hamilton's land policy the interior valleys of 
 the West were rapidly settled by a population 
 distinctively American in its ideals and senti- 
 ments. This settlement, taken in conjunction with 
 Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana and the upper 
 Mississippi valley from the French and Spanish 
 claimants, secured the country against the danger 
 of war on the western frontier. 
 
 This was the immediate and obvious effect of 
 
20 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Hamilton's policy. But it had also an effect on 
 our internal constitution, less obvious but much 
 more fundamentally important. It created a type 
 of commonwealth and type of man which was 
 distinctively American. Our lands were occupied 
 by a body of men of great ability and enterprise 
 but small capital; men who were ready to work 
 and respected others in proportion to their readi- 
 ness to work. In the region beyond the Alleghany 
 mountains the sort of equality contemplated by 
 the Declaration of Independence was in large 
 measure realized. In the valleys on either side of 
 the Ohio river America witnessed for the first time 
 the growth of commonwealths that had never been 
 colonies but grew up to statehood independently; 
 communities that had never known crown governors 
 and crown grants, but had developed under the 
 American flag and the preemption law. Owing 
 to the conditions under which they were founded, 
 these western communities were intensely patriotic 
 and intensely convinced of the essential equality 
 of all mankind. 
 
 Under the operation of these causes there arose 
 a new democracy, different from anything which 
 was readily conceivable by an earlier generation. 
 Of this new American democracy Andrew Jackson, 
 elected to the presidency in 1828, was the chosen 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 21 
 
 representative. Of all the presidents of the United 
 States he was the one who sprang most directly 
 from the people; and the years of his triumph 
 were marked by the development of the distinctive 
 features which we have been accustomed to regard 
 as characteristic of American political life — the 
 adoption of universal suffrage, the multiplication 
 of elective ofSces, and the complex system of party 
 organization which has lasted with but slight 
 change until the present time.* 
 
 * It is somewhat singular that the democratic America 
 of a later generation should have so occupied the minds of 
 historians as to crowd out the memory of the aristocratic 
 America of earlier times. There are several reasons which 
 may serve to account for this. 
 
 In the first place, the foreign observers of America whose 
 accounts were most widely read saw the country after the 
 change instead of before it. The earliest of these accounts 
 was that by Chevalier, who investigated the American trans- 
 portation system and published his results in a masterly 
 work, ' ' Les Voies de Communication en Amerique. ' ' The 
 political change was not complete at the date of Chevalier's 
 visit, but the parts of the country which he saw were those 
 where development was most active and the new spirit of 
 democracy most manifest. 
 
 Another Frenchman whose books were more widely read 
 and whose views had much larger influence than Chevalier's 
 was Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville studied America 
 carefully and was a man of eminent ability both as an 
 observer and as a critic; but he was a thorough Frenchman, 
 and he had a Frenchman's fondness for brilliant generali- 
 zation. Taking the America of the fourth decade of the 
 
22 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 These developments were not consciously intro- 
 duced as party measures by the national govern- 
 ment. Under the American Constitution they 
 could not be. The several states have to decide 
 for themselves what qualifications shall be required 
 of their voters and how their officers shall be 
 elected or appointed. It is all the more significant, 
 therefore, that such a fundamental change in public 
 opinion should have taken place in so many 
 commonwealths at the same time, and that a nation, 
 till then predominantly aristocratic in its social 
 constitution, should have become so thoroughly 
 democratic in so short a period. 
 
 In the two decades from 1820 to 1840 new states 
 were organized which gave full rights of sover- 
 
 nineteenth century as he saw it, lie reasoned that the prin- 
 ciples of political action which then prevailed were an 
 inherent result of the American character, foreordained and 
 predestined from the beginning. His observations concern- 
 ing the times of which he wrote were so just that people 
 attached undue weight to his statements of antecedent con- 
 ditions, which were not based upon his own observation and 
 were in some instances not correct. If De Tocqueville 's 
 judgments had been unflattering to the American public, 
 some of his historical generalizations would have been more 
 readily challenged. But De Tocqueville, though not a ful- 
 some critic, was a friendly one. His explanations furnished 
 American readers with plausible excuses for many of the 
 faults of their social system. When Mrs. Trollope criticised 
 American manners malignantly, or when Charles Dickens did 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 23 
 
 eignty to all men who were personally free; and 
 older states like New York and Massachusetts 
 abolished property qualifications for the franchise 
 that had previously existed. The number of officers 
 directly chosen by the people was multiplied. 
 The pecuniary qualification required for the various 
 offices was lessened or abolished. The whole sys- 
 tem of nomination and election was so modified 
 as to give more immediate influence to the will of 
 the people and less to that of the leading families. 
 Even for those offices whose incumbents were 
 appointed by the executive instead of being elected, 
 the old principle of fixity of tenure during good 
 behavior was quite generally abolished, and the 
 office itself made a reward of party service. 
 
 the same thing more goodnaturedlj and humorously, it was 
 a pleasure to fall back on De Tocqueville and to say that 
 these evils were but the incidental defects of an inherent 
 spirit of democracy which had always prevailed in the 
 United States and which made people disregard the niceties 
 of custom and convention in order to appraise men at their 
 true value. 
 
 This is not intended as a criticism of De Tocqueville, who 
 next to Bryce and possibly Ostrogorski, is the ablest foreign 
 writer on American affairs; but to show why some of the 
 less essential parts of his work gained undue influence over 
 the public mind and contributed to a misunderstanding of 
 earlier American history from which hardly any of our 
 modern writers except Farrand and McMaster have been 
 able to keep themselves wholly free. 
 
24 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 These changes were more rapid and complete in 
 the northern and central states than in the 
 southern ones; but every section felt the effect of 
 this movement in greater or less degree. With 
 surprising speed and thoroughness the country as 
 a whole passed from a political system which was 
 in its essentials aristocratic and English to one 
 which was democratic and American. 
 
 Even more remarkable than the rapidity of the 
 change itself was the absence of any reaction of 
 feeling or retrogression of practice such as usually 
 follows in the wake of rapid reform movements 
 of this sort. When the Democrats went out of 
 office and their opponents, now called Whigs 
 instead of Federalists, came into power, there was 
 no attempt to bring government back to its old 
 basis. Parties divided on other lines. The 
 Democrats stood for free trade, the Whigs for 
 protection. The Democrats stood for home rule, 
 the Whigs for national authority. A few years 
 later, as a result of the struggle between home rule 
 and nationalism, the Democrats stood for slavery 
 and the Republicans (who had succeeded the old 
 Whig party) for emancipation. But in none of 
 these American political conflicts of the middle of 
 the nineteenth century could one party claim the 
 title of conservative and the other that of liberal, 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 25 
 
 as these titles were understood and used in the 
 politics of contemporary European states. The 
 political triumph of democracy was complete. 
 
 This transformation of the political order was 
 attended by a similar change in the social order; 
 though the social change was for various reasons 
 less rapid and complete than the political one. 
 
 The society of the West had been from the first 
 quite as democratic as its politics. There was but 
 one important class distinction — that between 
 workers and idlers. If a settler was willing to 
 work he could get large returns with very little 
 capital ; if he was not willing to work there was no 
 place for him. Under such circumstances a man 
 could achieve social position in three ways only: 
 by hospitality, by professional efficiency, or by 
 securing public office. Wealth without hospitality, 
 education without efficiency, honorable descent 
 without public service, were not regarded as social 
 qualifications. They were despised rather than 
 admired. 
 
 These social standards — or, if you please, this 
 absence of social standards — of the West had a 
 marked effect on the Atlantic coast. Almost every 
 Eastern family numbered among its members one 
 or two who had "gone West"; who had proved 
 their fitness as men under the new conditions, and 
 
26 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 were inclined to despise the social order of older 
 communities as artificial. These men were apt to 
 be of a type strong enough to modify the views, 
 not only of their own family circles, but of the 
 whole community from which they came. 
 
 In the northern Atlantic states this modification 
 was very rapid. In the southern states it was 
 slower. The North had been an aristocracy of 
 small farmers who cultivated their own ground. 
 The South had been an aristocracy of large 
 planters who lived on the produce of the slaves. 
 When members of slave-holding families moved 
 westward they often carried their slaves with them, 
 and by this means succeeded to some extent in 
 perpetuating in the new country the class dis- 
 tinction which had subsisted in the old. While the 
 general structure of Northern social life began to 
 change in 1820, that of the South remained un- 
 changed for a generation more; until the civil 
 war of 1861, with the resulting enfranchisement 
 of the negro and impoverishment of the large land- 
 holders, had taken away the physical basis on which 
 it had rested for more than a century so securely. 
 
 But these changes in the political and social 
 order were not accompanied by any corresponding 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 27 
 
 change in the industrial order. It has been a 
 perpetual surprise to observers of American insti- 
 tutions that complete political enfranchisement has 
 not resulted in attempts to restrict the power of 
 capital. For at least sixty years after the adoption 
 of universal suffrage the tendency was all in the 
 other direction — to legislate for the property owner 
 rather than against him; to strengthen the powers 
 of capital rather than to diminish them. Demo- 
 crats, Whigs, and Republicans differed as to their 
 aims and methods, but they vied with one another 
 in protecting the rights of property. Even on the 
 remote and comparatively lawless western frontier, 
 where a man might kill a dozen of his fellow men 
 with impunity and enjoy the continued respect 
 of those about him, the stealing of a horse was 
 punished by immediate hanging and by the for- 
 feiture of all claim to social standing in this world 
 or the next. 
 
 The small protection given to the rights of man, 
 as compared with that which was accorded to the 
 rights of property, is a salient feature in the early 
 history of every American state — and sometimes 
 in its later history also. "While England was 
 developing a large and on the whole highly 
 beneficent body of factory Acts, the United States 
 was doing nothing. It is only forty years since the 
 
28 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 first effective law regarding hours of labor was 
 passed by the state of Massachusetts, limiting 
 the hours of women and children to about ten a 
 day ; and even this was regarded at the time of its 
 passage as a piece of somewhat dangerous humani- 
 tarianism. As late as 1885 the attempt to keep 
 children out of factories until they were twelve 
 years old was considered by many people a radical 
 measure of interference with economic freedom. 
 While England had been developing a system of 
 employers' liability adequate to protect the work- 
 men under modern conditions, the United States 
 stood for many years idle. The old common law 
 doctrine that the employee assumed the risks of 
 his employment, and that the employer was not 
 liable for damages for an injury to one workman 
 resulting from the carelessness of another, remained 
 in full force in America for many years after it 
 had been done away with in England. The 
 employer was encouraged by his immunity from 
 responsibility to maintain antiquated methods and 
 practices dangerous to life and limb, which he alone 
 could change and for whose ill effects he was 
 morally though not legally responsible. Systems 
 of industrial insurance were devised in monarchies 
 like Prussia ; they were unknown in the democratic 
 commonwealths of America, Progressive taxation 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 29 
 
 has been used by nearly every country of Europe 
 as a means of correcting the inequalities of 
 wealth. Not until the most recent times has the 
 American democracy attempted to employ it for 
 this purpose.* 
 
 These are but a few among the many instances 
 of democratic concern for the interests of the 
 property owner and democratic unconcern for the 
 interests of humanity. Even in those exceptional 
 cases where the Americans of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury passed laws to restrict the power of capital, 
 we generally find that they were intended to pro- 
 tect one class of capitalists against the encroach- 
 ments of another. Forty years ago there was a 
 successful agitation to abolish the practice indulged 
 in by many manufacturers of maintaining '' com- 
 pany stores" at which their workmen were com- 
 pelled to trade ; but the reform was carried through 
 not so much because of the injury to the workmen 
 who had to trade at the stores, as because of the 
 injury to other stores that did not belong to the 
 company. There was during the same period an 
 active and widespread attempt to reduce the rates 
 
 * There was a certain amount of progression in the income 
 taxes of the Civil War. But these taxes were introduced as 
 revenue measures under stress of fiscal necessity, and were 
 abolished amid general rejoicing from all parties as soon 
 as possible after the close of the war. 
 
30 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 charged by railroads in the upper Mississippi 
 valley; but this was avowedly based on the fact 
 that the higher rates prevented the farmers whom 
 the railroads served from paying interest on their 
 mortgages. 
 
 From time to time we find traces of discontent 
 with the industrial system as a whole. From time 
 to time socialist leaders would arise who attempted 
 to organize the laboring classes of the community 
 for a war against capital. Agitators of this kind 
 made their most forcible appeal to immigrants 
 who had recently arrived in the country and were 
 not familiar with American laws and customs. 
 There was a widespread socialistic movement of 
 this kind in 1833; there have been sporadic ones 
 ever since. Some of this agitation aroused a good 
 deal of public interest and a little fear among the 
 more timid capitalists. But as long as there was 
 plenty of free land in the United States the socialist 
 agitators were at a disadvantage. The immigrant 
 felt that he had more to gain by settling down and 
 trying to become a capitalist than by going to war 
 and trying to fight the capitalist. He was inclined 
 to say to the agitators what the boy said to the 
 lady who offered him sponge cake at a party, "I 
 can get as good as that at home." He might be 
 ready to applaud the men who declaimed against 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF DEMOCRACY 31 
 
 the injustice of this or that particular arrange- 
 ment of industrial society; he was not ready to 
 declare war against an industrial society which 
 offered him so many inducements to become one 
 of its members. It was the rule all through the 
 nineteenth century that as long as the socialist 
 orators stuck to words the multitude applauded 
 them, but whenever their words were followed by 
 deeds the multitude shrank from them. At bye- 
 elections the socialists won occasional victories; at 
 elections of national importance their vote was 
 habitually a disappointment to the leaders of the 
 party. 
 
 I propose in the next lecture to examine the 
 reasons why democracy did not lead to socialism; 
 why universal suffrage was not used to impair the 
 dominance of the property owner; why the legal 
 and constitutional position of property in America 
 remained for a series of years stronger than it was 
 in England in the same period. In the third lecture 
 I propose to examine the effect of certain changes 
 in the United States during recent years which 
 have brought America, for the first time in its 
 history, face to face with what Europe knows as 
 the social question. 
 
II 
 
 THE CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION OF 
 THE PEOPERTY OWNER 
 
 European observers of American politics are apt 
 to be surprised at a certain weakness of action in 
 industrial matters on the part of our public 
 authorities. The legislatures are often ready to 
 pass individual measures of regulation; they are 
 rarely willing to pursue a consistent and carefully 
 developed policy for the attainment of an economic 
 end. The people frequently declaim against the 
 extent of the powers of corporate capital ; they are 
 seldom disposed to put that capital under the direct 
 management of the government itself. The man 
 who talks loudest of the abuses of private railroad 
 administration often shrinks from the alternative 
 of having railroads owned and managed by the 
 state. 
 
 In spite of frequent acts of adverse legislation, 
 the constitutional position of the property owner 
 in the United States has been stronger than in any 
 country in Europe. However much public feeling 
 may at times move in the direction of socialistic 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 33 
 
 measures, there is no nation which is so far removed 
 from socialism as ours by its organic law and its 
 habits of political action. I propose to trace, as 
 far as is possible within the limits of a single 
 lecture, the reasons for this somewhat anomalous 
 condition; to show why the rights of property 
 were so strongly protected in the Federal Consti- 
 tution, as originally adopted by the several states 
 and as subsequently interpreted by the courts ; and 
 why as a matter of history the charige of the social 
 and political order from an aristocracy to a democ- 
 racy has not been accompanied by anything like 
 a corresponding change in the industrial order.* 
 
 I shall begin with a proposition which may sound 
 somewhat startling, but which I believe to be 
 literally true. The whole American political and 
 social system is based on industrial property right, 
 far more completely than has ever been the case in 
 any European country. In every nation of Europe 
 there has been a certain amount of traditional 
 opposition between the government and the indus- 
 trial classes. In the United States no such 
 tradition exists. In the public law of European 
 communities industrial freeholding is a compara- 
 
 * For a suggestive treatment of this subject from a some- 
 what different standpoint, see W. E. Weyl, The New 
 Democracy. 
 
34 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 tively recent development. In the United States, 
 on the contrary, industrial freeholding is the 
 foundation on which the whole social order has 
 been established and built up. 
 
 Let us examine the reasons for this in detail. 
 
 Down to the thirteenth century the system of 
 land tenure in every country of Europe was a 
 feudal one. It was based upon military service. 
 A man held a larger or smaller estate on account 
 of his larger or smaller amount of fighting effi- 
 ciency. There were many rival claimants for the 
 land. The majority of those who wanted to 
 cultivate the soil were unable to protect themselves 
 against spoliation. In the absence of an efficient 
 protector or overlord no industry was productive 
 and no large accumulation of capital was possible. 
 The services of the military chieftain were indis- 
 pensable as a basis for the toil of the laborer or 
 the forethought of the capitalist. It was the 
 military chieftain, therefore, who enjoyed the 
 largest measure of respect socially, and the 
 strongest position politically. 
 
 As the conditions of public security grew better 
 these things changed. From the fourteenth cen- 
 tury to the nineteenth Europe witnessed a gradual 
 substitution of industrial tenures for military 
 tenures; a gradual development of a system of 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 35 
 
 property law intended to encourage the activities 
 of the laborers and the capitalists, rather than to 
 reward the services of the successful military- 
 chieftain.* But down to the end of the eighteenth 
 century this capitalistic or industrial sort of pri- 
 vate property represented a superadded element 
 rather than an integral basis of society. And even 
 the developments of the last hundred years have 
 not been sufficient to obliterate a certain sense of 
 newness when we contrast the position of the 
 aristocracy of wealth with that of the aristocracy 
 of military rank. 
 
 In the American colonies conditions were wholly 
 different. There was no marked separation of 
 military and industrial classes. The working 
 power and the fighting power were in the hands 
 of the same or nearly the same persons. The land 
 owner held his property by a title which was at 
 once military and industrial. He was prepared 
 to defend it; he was also prepared to work upon 
 it, or at any rate to direct the labor of others who 
 worked upon it. There was no excuse from mili- 
 tary duty except physical weakness. There was no 
 excuse from industrial duty except public service. 
 
 * The experience of England in this matter has been well 
 set forth in the earlier chapters of Ashley's English 
 Economic History. 
 
36 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Of course there was a certain differentiation of 
 employment. There were some men, like Leather- 
 stocking in Cooper's tales, who were specially 
 skilled in the ways of Indian fighting; and when 
 trouble with the Indians was anticipated, as it 
 quite frequently was, it was understood that these 
 men might leave their farms to be tilled by others. 
 But when peace returned the Indian fighter went 
 to work like his neighbors. Aristocratic as the 
 colonies were in many of their habits and feelings, 
 they would not tolerate the growth of a leisure 
 class. If a man had more land than his fellows, 
 or enjoyed more authority than his fellows, it was 
 expected that he would work harder and fight 
 harder. And this expectation was generally 
 realized. There was a well-defined aristocracy; 
 but there was no military aristocracy as distin- 
 guished from an industrial one, except in the 
 immediate entourage of the governors sent over 
 from England. And the effect of the aristocratic 
 circle surrounding these governors was to weaken 
 rather than to strengthen the claims of military 
 authority, because its members made themselves so 
 unpopular by their habitual exclusiveness and 
 intolerance that they united the colonists in a spirit 
 of resistance to all such claims and pretensions. 
 
 At the time, therefore, when the United States 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 37 
 
 separated from England, respect for industrial 
 property right was a fundamental principle in the 
 law and public opinion of the land. How far this 
 respect for property right would have continued 
 unimpaired if the several colonies had remained 
 separate from one another is an uncertain and 
 profitless question. They did not remain separate. 
 They adopted a federal constitution which con- 
 tained a number of guarantees for the permanence 
 of property right — some intentional, some probably 
 accidental — which made it difficult for legislatures 
 in subsequent generations to alter the legal condi- 
 tions of the earlier period, except when such 
 alterations secured the approval of the courts. 
 
 I have spoken in the previous lecture of the cir- 
 cumstances which led to the adoption of the Federal 
 Constitution. During the war of the Revolu- 
 tion, from 1775 to 1782 and in the years imme- 
 diately thereafter, the American Union had been 
 a league of independent states, and a very loose 
 one. These states had formed an organization 
 for mutual protection in carrying on a war against 
 England. But this organization was very weak 
 indeed. While the war lasted, the imminence of 
 perils which threatened to involve all, and the 
 personality of a few leaders, of whom George 
 Washington was the most conspicuous, enabled the 
 
38 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 different colonies to act with some degree of 
 coherence. "We must all hang together," said 
 one of the signers of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, "or we shall all hang separately. ' ' But 
 when independence was conceded by England in 
 1782 and the restraints of common danger were 
 removed, the hopeless inefficiency of the central 
 government became obvious. From 1783 to 1789 
 the United States had no means of securing concert 
 of action at home or respect and influence abroad. 
 Clear-headed men saw the absolute necessity of 
 centralization. The members of the Constitutional 
 Convention of 1787 felt these considerations very 
 strongly. A large majority of them were men of 
 substance; a considerable minority were men of 
 wealth. They had viewed with apprehension the 
 readiness of their fellow countrymen to issue paper 
 money, to scale down debts, or to interpret the 
 obligation of contract in such a manner as to 
 render large investments of capital precarious. It 
 was at once a matter of personal interest and of 
 public interest to them to prevent this ; of personal 
 interest because acts of this kind would impair 
 their own enjoyment and success ; of public interest 
 because it was vitally necessary to America to have 
 its industry and commerce managed in the most 
 efficient and far-sighted way. 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 39 
 
 This fact is of itself sufficient to account for the 
 general tone of the Constitution on matters of 
 property right. But there are certain clauses in 
 that instrument which have been even more 
 effective in securing the property holders against 
 adverse legislation than the Convention itself in- 
 tended or expected. The reason for this is some- 
 what curious. The whole document was the result 
 of a series of compacts, agreements, and com- 
 promises, between two pretty evenly balanced 
 parties — a states rights party, which wished to 
 limit the powers of the federal government, and a 
 national party, which was anxious to set some 
 practical control on the autonomy of the states. 
 In meeting the wishes of these two parties and 
 limiting the powers of both state and federal 
 governments, the Convention more or less unwit- 
 tingly* gave the property owners as a body certain 
 
 * There has been a tendency in recent years to represent 
 the makers of the Constitution as engaged in a deliberate 
 attempt to tie the hands of legislators with regard to their 
 future action in matters of property right. A study of 
 the debates of the Constitutional Convention shows that a 
 good deal of what they did in this way was accidental 
 rather than deliberate. This is well illustrated by the 
 history of the clause in Article I, section 10, which prohibits 1 
 the passage, by any of the states, of laws impairing the ' 
 obligation of contract. No such prohibition was suggested 
 by the Convention to the Committee of Detail for its con- 
 sideration, nor is there any trace of it in the final report 
 
40 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 guaranties against legislative interference of any- 
 kind. 
 
 It was in the first place provided that there 
 should be no taking of private property without 
 due process of law. The states rights men feared 
 that the federal government might, under the stress 
 of military necessity, pursue an arbitrary policy 
 of confiscation. The federalists, or national party, 
 feared that one or more of the states might pursue 
 the same policy under the influence of sectional 
 jealousy. To avoid this double danger both parties 
 united on a constitutional provision which pre- 
 vented the legislature or executive, either of the 
 nation or of the individual states, from taking 
 property without allowing judicial inquiry into 
 the public necessity involved, and without making 
 full compensation even in case the result of such 
 
 made by that Committee. During the discussion of this 
 report (which constitutes the basis of the Constitution as 
 finally passed) the insertion of such a clause was suggested; 
 but it was opposed by Mr. Gouverneur Morris and others 
 as unwise, and was not pressed to a vote. What the 
 Convention ultimately adopted- instead of this, was a motion 
 to prohibit ''retrospective" laws. This at any rate was 
 the entry in the journal, though there is some doubt whether 
 it was transmitted in that shape to the committee of final 
 revision, known as the Committee on Style. This committee 
 seems to have taken the responsibility of changing the 
 phraseology of this section on its own account; so that 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 41 
 
 inquiry was favorable to the government; and it 
 was further provided, by another equally impor- 
 tant clause in the Constitution, that no state should 
 pass a law impairing the obligation of contracts. 
 
 No man foresaw what would be the subsequent 
 effect of these provisions in preventing a majority 
 of voters, acting in the legislature or through the 
 executive, from disturbing existing arrangements 
 with regard to railroad building or factory opera- 
 tion until the railroad stockholders or factory 
 owners had had the opportunity to have their case 
 tried in the courts. Clauses which were at first 
 intended to prevent sectional strife, and to protect 
 the people of one locality against arbitrary legis- 
 lation in another, became a means of strengthening 
 vested rights as a whole against the possibility of 
 legislative or executive interference. Nor was the 
 
 when the whole instrument was last submitted to the Con- 
 vention and rather hurriedly passed, the clause was made 
 to read: ''any ex post facto law or law impairing the 
 obligation of contract.'' A motion made by Elbridge 
 Gerry to extend this prohibition to the Federal Government 
 as well as to the states was not seconded. Indeed, the 
 Convention at that stage of proceedings seems to have been 
 not unnaturally impatient of further delay and anxious to 
 pass anything which the Committee on Style recommended. 
 The whole matter can be followed out in detail in Farrand 's 
 Records of the Federal Convention, by the aid of his excel- 
 lent index to the successive sections of the Constitution. 
 
42 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 direct effect of these clauses in preventing specific 
 acts on the part of the legislature the most impor- 
 tant result of their existence. They indirectly 
 became a powerful means of establishing the 
 American courts in the position which they now 
 enjoy as arbiters between the legislature and the 
 property owner. For whenever an act of the 
 legislature violated, or even seemed to violate, one 
 of these clauses, it came before the court for 
 review; and in case the court found that such 
 violation existed, the law was blocked — rendered 
 powerless by a dictum of the judges declaring it 
 unconstitutional. 
 
 An Act of the British Parliament is authorita- 
 tive. It is law, ipso facto, as soon as it is regularly 
 passed. It cannot be resisted except by revolution. 
 But an Act of the United States Congress or of 
 a state legislature is not law except as it lies within 
 the limits allowed by the Constitution. Whether 
 it transgresses these limits is a matter for the courts 
 to decide. Any restriction of property right by 
 legislative act is therefore null and void unless the 
 courts decide that due process of law has been 
 followed and that no obligation of contract is 
 impaired. 
 
 The power thus granted to the courts to render 
 acts of the legislature inoperative is perhaps the 
 
 J 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 43 
 
 most distinctive feature of the American Consti- 
 tution; it is certainly the one which English 
 publicists find it the most difficult to understand. 
 
 The jurisprudence of England is founded on the 
 theory that there must be in every country some 
 sovereign, some designated person or body of 
 persons whose deliberately expressed will must be 
 obeyed. The older writers based this sovereignty 
 upon a supposititious social contract. Hobbes, for 
 instance, said that the evils of anarchy were so 
 great that the people had entered into an agree- 
 ment to obey a common superior who could main- 
 tain order, and that, as long as the superior 
 maintained order, the people were bound by their 
 agreement. To philosophers of this school, the 
 assumption of this compact, fictitious though it 
 was, was the fundamental justification of state 
 authority. 
 
 Bentham and his followers rejected Hobbes* 
 fiction of a social compact. Bentham said that the 
 authority of the state rested, not on a fictitious 
 agreement supposed to have been made by our 
 remote ancestors, but on an actual, present-day 
 fact that the people recognize a common superior 
 and render him habitual obedience. It is the fact 
 of obedience, not the fiction of a compact, that 
 makes him sovereign. But Bentham insisted just 
 
44 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 as clearly as Hobbes did that there were no logical 
 limits to the sovereign's power. There might be 
 practical limits. Things might be so badly man- 
 aged that continued obedience was intolerable. In 
 that case we had a revolution, a temporary state 
 of anarchy, followed by the acceptance of a new 
 sovereign; but as long as there was any sovereign 
 at all it was, in Bentham's view, absurd to talk 
 of theoretical restraints upon the exercise of his 
 power. 
 
 The American view of sovereignty differs from 
 that of Bentham in one or two important respects. 
 The American constitutional lawyer holds that we 
 habitually obey a common superior within certain 
 limits. It recognizes that the authority of the state 
 is based on the fact of habitual obedience on the 
 part of its members. "A just government exists 
 by consent of the governed. But that obedience, 
 and that consent, which are accorded as long as 
 government keeps within what we regard as the 
 sphere of its authority, cease when it tries to go 
 outside of that sphere." When the acts of the 
 legislature or executive are kept within certain 
 constitutional lines, and follow certain rules laid 
 down by the public opinion, we obey the govern- 
 ment. Within these bounds it is de facto sover- 
 eign. When it transgresses those bounds, we do 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 45 
 
 not obey it. If it attempts to extend its power 
 beyond the limits which public opinion has fixed, 
 its acts are nullified; — set at nought by the refusal 
 of the public to cooperate in their enforcement. 
 "We do not attempt to change the sovereign by a 
 process of revolution; we leave him undisturbed 
 within the domain of his traditional authority. 
 But we refuse the active help which is necessary 
 to enable him to extend that authority into an 
 unauthorized domain. 
 
 The doctrine of passive resistance has been 
 treated with a good deal of unmerited ridicule. 
 We are told that it is only another name for 
 revolution; that if any body of men assumes to 
 tell the sovereign that he cannot pass certain limits, 
 they themselves are claiming sovereignty by that 
 very act. This is not necessarily true. If a man 
 prevents a policeman from doing something which 
 lies outside of the limits of his office, he is not 
 assuming sovereignty. He is not even trying to 
 lessen the respect for the police. He is simply 
 keeping the police authority within traditional 
 bounds. Whether such acts do result in over- 
 throwing the authority of the police is a matter 
 for the historian to determine. The experience of 
 the United States shows that very sharp limits 
 can be set to the exercise of the authority of a 
 
46 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 governing body without in the least impairing its 
 power and efficiency within those limits. 
 
 It is sometimes argued that if the American 
 courts can limit the powers of both national and 
 state legislatures, the courts themselves are sover- 
 eign. This appears to be a misleading use of 
 language. The courts certainly do not claim or 
 exercise the kind of sovereignty which is exercised 
 by the English Parliament. It is a truer descrip- 
 tion of the situation to say that America under the 
 Constitution witnesses an actual exercise of divided 
 sovereignty; that the people live under a con- 
 current jurisdiction of state and nation, obeying 
 each in some things; and that the authoritative 
 position of the courts in determining the limits of 
 this sovereignty is not itself a transcendent exercise 
 of sovereign power, but a highly skilled exposition 
 of public opinion — in other words, that the 
 authority of American judges rests on the same 
 sort of basis as the authority of English judges — 
 on their power of interpretation of precedents and 
 customs. 
 
 The early history of the Supreme Court of the 
 United States furnishes strong confirmation of this 
 statement. While the clauses of the Constitution 
 left the federal courts large duties and powers, 
 their ability to fulfil those duties and to exercise 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 47 
 
 those powers was not shown until a chief justice 
 of the first rank — John Marshall — was by his 
 almost unrivalled power of exposition able to enlist 
 the opinion both of lawyers and of laymen in 
 support of the judicial authority. It is to the work 
 of judges like Marshall and Story and Kent 
 that the actual position of the courts under the 
 American Constitution is mainly due. 
 
 But constitutional restraints of this kind, while 
 they strengthened the position of the property 
 holder in American politics, could not give him 
 permanent security in case public opinion de- 
 manded a change. For the Constitution itself can 
 be amended, and will be amended, when there is 
 a consensus of voters in different parts of the 
 country in favor of amendment. Alteration of the 
 Federal Constitution is a slower and more formal 
 thing than alteration of the law, or than alteration 
 of the constitution of any single state. But it 
 comes when there is a demand for it. Why did 
 not this demand make itself felt? Why did the 
 intensely democratic America of the nineteenth 
 century rest satisfied with constitutional provisions 
 regarding property right which were devised by 
 representatives of an aristocratic society in the 
 eighteenth under circumstances which strengthened 
 the hands of the conservatives ? 
 
48 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 The first cause for this persistence of property 
 right is to be found in the land policy of the 
 United States. We saw in the previous lecture 
 how the method adopted in the disposal of the 
 public lands promoted democracy. Side by side 
 with this effect, and in curious contrast to it, was 
 an equally marked effect in promoting industrial 
 conservatism. 
 
 The immigrant who settled in the western states 
 was offered two things : the vote, and the chance 
 of becoming a landowner. The fact that votes 
 were bestowed so freely upon large bodies of 
 settlers, many of whom were of alien race and 
 traditions, caused serious apprehension in many 
 quarters. Where so many of the individual 
 settlers were personally reckless and uncontrolled 
 by tradition, there was good reason to fear that 
 they would organize their governments in a reck- 
 less and untraditional fashion, and thus pave the 
 way for the abuse of democratic power. These 
 fears proved to be unfounded. The opportunity 
 to own farms in freehold made ambitious settlers 
 conservative. Men with a hundred and sixty 
 acres of land were not likely to pass laws which 
 would interfere with the rights of property, and 
 particularly of landed property. The prospect of 
 becoming landowners had the same sort of steady- 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 49 
 
 ing effect upon men who framed the constitutions 
 of new states in 1820 or 1830 that the fact of 
 already being landowners had upon the men who 
 framed the Federal Constitution forty years 
 earlier. 
 
 But Hamilton's policy of giving a home at a 
 nominal price to every bona fide settler, though it 
 was the most important single element in securing 
 the rights of property against measures of legis- 
 lative interference, was by no means the only 
 influence of the kind. 
 
 The immigrant found it easy to get land; he 
 found it hard to get capital. Natural resources 
 were present in abundance. The accumulated 
 supplies of machinery, fuel, and food which enable 
 man to utilize those natural resources effectively 
 were conspicuous by their absence. Each addition 
 to the capital of the community, however small, 
 represented a large addition to its productiveness. 
 The savings of the settlers and the investments of 
 citizens who lived in other states contributed alike 
 to this end. 
 
 Under these circumstances there was a tendency 
 to grant all possible privileges to those who had 
 capital for investment and to free them from 
 arbitrary restrictions of every kind. No community 
 would enforce a usury law which limited the rate 
 
50 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 of interest to six per cent, when people who 
 borrowed capital at eight or at ten per cent made 
 large and legitimate profits over and above the 
 interest rate. The dangers lay in the opposite 
 direction. All through the period from 1830 to 
 1860 the western states of the Union tended to 
 encourage every sort of scheme which would 
 attract capital or the semblance of capital, without 
 much regard to its present or prospective sound- 
 ness. Banking laws were so loosely and carelessly 
 drawn that a board of directors could issue large 
 amounts of notes upon small amounts of reserve. 
 The bank notes, so long as they circulated from 
 hand to hand, appeared to increase the working 
 capital of the community; and any man who 
 undertook to examine too closely the nature of 
 the security that lay behind the note was regarded 
 as an unpatriotic member of society, who in an 
 excess of selfish over-caution questioned the validity 
 of a bill which he might just as easily have passed 
 on to the next man without inquiry.* Not until 
 
 * I have been told on what appears to be good authority 
 that the bank examiners of many of the western states in 
 the years prior to 1857 always made their visits of inspec- 
 tion in a certain order; so that a very small amount of gold 
 reserve, by being passed from bank to bank at the opportune 
 moment, could do duty in protecting a large number of 
 separate note issues. And when I asked one of my inform- 
 
POSITION OF PEOPERTY OWNER 51 
 
 the time of the Civil War, when the United States 
 government needed to use the banks as a means 
 in carrying out its own fiscal policies, was this 
 state of things effectively remedied. 
 
 Among many means employed by the states of 
 the Union toward rapid development of their 
 resources, the joint stock company or industrial 
 corporation was most prominent. 
 
 The incorporation acts of the colonies at the end 
 of the eighteenth century were based almost 
 entirely upon English models. The American law, 
 like the English law of the same period, was 
 reluctant to allow people to avail themselves of the 
 principle of limited liability until there had been 
 a special examination of the circumstances by some 
 public authority. But as time went on this state 
 of things changed rapidly. There were in America 
 almost no large capitalists who could finance 
 industrial enterprises on an extensive scale. To 
 
 ants what would have happened to the bank if the bank 
 examiner had deviated from the regular routine, I was told 
 that he would probably have had to quit the country. It 
 is at any rate quite probable that the consequences of a 
 departure from the regular routine would have been as 
 disastrous both to him and to the banks as those which we 
 find when a teacher who has for a series of exercises called 
 his class in alphabetical order suddenly departs from this 
 practice without notice. 
 
52 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 build factories or canals it was necessary to get a 
 large number of small investors united; and these 
 investors could not safely plan to unite their for- 
 tunes for the promotion of speculative enterprises 
 unless limited liability was assured them as a 
 matter of course. A few states, notably Massa- 
 chusetts, held to the principles of the older 
 English law. But Massachusetts, though better 
 provided with capital than most other parts of 
 the Union, found that this policy interfered with 
 its development, and that states which had more 
 liberal laws made more rapid progress in the 
 introduction of the necessary improvements. 
 Investors sought other localities for investment; 
 the growth of Massachusetts business was hindered ; 
 its character was not greatly improved. The 
 ultimate result in Massachusetts, as in other states, 
 was the passage of general laws under which any 
 group of individuals could associate their capital 
 for industrial enterprise and obtain the privileges 
 of limited liability from the state. 
 
 Some men were awake to the danger that might 
 arise from the growth of corporations. Andrew 
 Jackson was one of these men ; and his contest with 
 the Bank of the United States is a well-known 
 episode in American financial history. But such 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 53 
 
 fears as Jackson's were exceptional.* Most people 
 were too much, occupied with the necessity of 
 getting capital for their several communities to 
 trouble their minds very much about what might 
 be done with the capital when it was once invested. 
 There was far more tendency to help the corpora- 
 tions by subsidies and special privileges than to 
 limit them by laws whose immediate necessity was 
 not very obvious. Charters were granted with the 
 utmost freedom by almost every state in the Union ; 
 and charter powers once given could not easily be 
 restricted. 
 
 The control of the government over corporations 
 was weakened, and the rights and immunities 
 of the property holders were correspondingly 
 strengthened, by two developments of constitu- 
 tional law whose effect upon the modern industrial 
 situation may be fairly characterized as fortuitous. 
 One of these was the decision in the celebrated 
 Dartmouth College case in 1819 ; the other was the 
 passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
 Constitution of the United States in 1868. 
 
 I call their effect fortuitous, because neither the 
 judges who decided the Dartmouth College case 
 
 * Even Jackson's quarrel with the Bank appears to have 
 been based on personal grounds quite as much as on 
 constitutional ones. 
 
54 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 nor the legislators wlio passed the Fourteenth 
 Amendment had any idea how these things would 
 affect the modern economic situation. The Dart- 
 mouth College case dealt with an educational 
 institution, not with an industrial enterprise. The 
 Fourteenth Amendment was framed to protect the 
 negroes from oppression by the whites, not to 
 protect corporations from oppression by the legis- 
 lature. It is doubtful whether a single one 
 of the members of Congress who voted for it 
 had any idea that it would touch the question 
 of corporate regulation at all. Yet the two 
 together have had the effect of placing the Ameri- 
 can industrial corporation in a constitutional 
 position of extraordinary vantage. 
 
 In 1816 the New Hampshire legislature attempted 
 to abrogate the charter of Dartmouth College. 
 Daniel Webster was employed by the College in 
 its defense. His reasoning so impressed the 
 members of the court that they committed them- 
 selves to the position that a charter was a contract ; 
 that a state, having induced people to invest 
 money by certain privileges and immunities, could 
 not at will modify those privileges and immunities 
 thus granted. Whether the court would have taken 
 such broad ground if the matter had come before 
 it thirty or forty years later, when the abuses of 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 55 
 
 ill-judged industrial charters had become more 
 fully manifest, is not sure ; / but having once 
 adopted this view and maintained it in a series of 
 decisions, the courts could not well abandon it. 
 Inasmuch as many of the corporate charters 
 granted by state legislatures had an unlimited 
 period to run, the theory that these instruments 
 were contracts binding the state for all time had 
 a very important bearing in limiting the field 
 within which a legislature could regulate the 
 activity of such a body, or an executive interfere 
 with it. 
 
 Again, by the Fourteenth Amendment to the 
 Federal Constitution the states were forbidden to 
 interfere with the civil rights of any person or 
 to pass discriminating laws which should treat 
 different persons unequally. This amendment, 
 passed just after the close of the Civil War, was 
 intended simply to protect the negro; to prevent 
 the southern states which were in the act of being 
 readmitted to the Union from abridging the rights 
 of the blacks. A number of years elapsed before 
 the probable effect of this clause upon the consti- 
 tutional position of industrial corporations seems 
 to have been realized. But in 1882 the Southern 
 Pacific Railroad Company, having been, as it 
 conceived, unfairly taxed by the assessors of a 
 
56 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 certain county in California, took the position that 
 a law of the state of California taxing the property 
 of corporations at a different rate from that of 
 individuals was in effect a violation of the Four- 
 teenth Amendment to the Constitution, because a 
 corporation was a person and therefore entitled to 
 the same kind of treatment as any other person. 
 This view, after careful consideration, was upheld 
 by the federal courts. A corporation, therefore, 
 under the law of the United States, is entitled to 
 the same immunities as an individual; and since 
 the charter creating it is a contract, whose terms 
 cannot be altered at the will of the legis- 
 lature which is a party thereto, its constitutional 
 position as a propertj^ holder is much stronger in 
 America than it is anywhere in Europe. 
 
 This effect of the Fourteenth Amendment was 
 all the more important because it came at a time 
 when men's political conservatism had been a good 
 deal unsettled by the incidental consequences of 
 the Civil War. 
 
 The dominant power of the large landholders of 
 the South had been destroyed. These landholders 
 had remained more essentially an aristocracy than 
 any other social group in the United States; and 
 like most aristocracies, they had been essentially 
 conservative in all questions affecting property 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 57 
 
 right. When a body of men like these, as con- 
 spicuous for their political ability as had been the 
 Roman landed aristocracy two thousand years 
 earlier, was suddenly reduced from affluence to 
 poverty, an important bulwark for the stability of 
 property rights was taken away. 
 
 The Civil War had accustomed people to the use 
 of depreciated paper money, dependent for its 
 value upon the order of the government making 
 it a legal tender for the payment of debts. The 
 over-issue of United States treasury notes, or 
 greenbacks, had been so great that a dollar in 
 paper in 1864 was worth less than half a dollar 
 in gold. This had had a considerable effect on 
 wages and prices in every line of industry. It 
 had encouraged speculators to contract obligations 
 recklessly because they hoped to pay them in a 
 currency that would have become still further 
 depreciated. In districts where such speculators 
 were numerous the voters frequently urged their 
 congressional representatives to oppose any attempt 
 to restore specie payments after the war had come 
 to an end. For twelve years after its close debtors 
 and creditors contended against one another to 
 secure action by the United States government 
 regarding its treasury notes which should be favor- 
 able to their several interests. After it became 
 
58 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 evident that no more paper would be issued, and 
 that the government could and would accumulate 
 a sufficient gold reserve to resume payment of its 
 notes in 1879, the debtors joined with the silver 
 mine owners to renew the coinage of the old silver 
 dollar, which was now worth less than the gold 
 dollar. The fact that the government was thus 
 constantly importuned to legislate against one 
 class of property owners for the benefit of another 
 prepared the public for the more radical suggestion 
 of legislation against property owners as a body, 
 in the interest of those who had little or nothing. 
 
 The tariff legislation in the years following the 
 Civil War had a somewhat similar history. During 
 the war all taxes had been high. There were heavy 
 excise rates which the home producer had to pay. 
 To give him some measure of protection the import 
 duty on foreign products which came to the 
 American market was made higher still. In the 
 years immediately following the war the excise 
 duties were abolished. The import duties, through 
 a disagreement between the Senate and the House 
 as to details, remained unchanged. The result was 
 that many industries were given the benefit of 
 extraordinarily high rates of protection which 
 nobody had ever really intended to bestow. Some 
 of the concerns called into being by this unwise 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 59 
 
 policy were dependent upon its continuance for 
 their very existence, while others more favorably 
 situated, which could have maintained themselves 
 with moderate duties or perhaps with no duties at 
 all, were enabled to make extravagant profits for 
 their stockholders. All this accustomed people to 
 the idea that prosperity w^as dependent on Acts of 
 Congress, rather than on the operation of intelli- 
 gent self-interest, and paved the way for the 
 advocate of more energetic state control over 
 property holders as a body. 
 
 Nevertheless, the tendency to rely on competition 
 remained very strong. The American people had 
 seen so much good that came from competition that 
 it was inclined to trust it unduly, and to feel that 
 where competition failed to protect the consumer 
 or laborer special legislation to regulate industry 
 would probably make matters worse instead of 
 better. Where one corporation had a monopoly 
 and abused it, it was thought that such monopoly 
 and such abuse would be only temporary. It was 
 confidently believed that unfair and exorbitant 
 profits would invite a rival corporation into the 
 field, so that rates would go down and abuses 
 correct themselves. Even in matters like railway 
 transportation, where monopoly was requisite in 
 the interest both of public convenience and eco- 
 
60 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 nomical administration, people clung, in the face 
 of adverse experience, to the hope that competition 
 must somehow be made to act. 
 
 Some of this irrational belief in competition 
 existed in England;* but it was never quite so 
 strong as in the United States, There had always 
 been a great many lines of business in which Eng- 
 land did not tolerate the imposition of competitive 
 rates, while America accepted them as a matter of 
 course. Contrast the attitude of the two countries 
 in the matter of rentals for agricultural land. 
 The English landowner who deprived an old 
 tenant of possession because a new tenant was 
 ready and able to pay a higher rental, forfeited 
 social consideration. In America the landowner 
 was subject to no such restriction. If he rented his 
 land he was expected to get what he could. If he 
 
 * The history of English railway legislation furnishes 
 marked instances of this sort of opposition. From 1830 to 
 1850 Parliamentary committees were constantly trying to 
 arrange toll systems by which independent carriers could 
 have their trains hauled by the railway company, and 
 running powers under which different companies could 
 compete with one another upon the same line of rails. 
 The Eailway and Canal Traffic Act of 1854, though it was 
 based on careful study and was in many respects a well- 
 drawn measure, shows a most obstinate adherence to the 
 belief that the competition of different carriers on the same 
 line of rails must somehow be possible if the proper way 
 of enforcing it could be discovered. 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 61 
 
 sold it he was expected to sell it at the highest 
 price obtainable. As long as he did not rent his 
 property to people who would use it for immoral 
 purposes, or sell it to notoriously undesirable 
 citizens, the public would not condemn him for 
 seeking the best market he could get. 
 
 Again, contrast the conditions affecting the rate 
 of wages in the two countries. In England labor 
 was comparatively immobile. Migration from 
 district to district was the exception, rapid change 
 from one occupation to another a still rarer excep- 
 tion. The consequence was that wages in most 
 districts and in many occupations were to a large 
 measure fixed by custom. Even in those industries 
 where competitive wages might otherwise have been 
 paid, the effect of the trades unions was to limit 
 the output of the individual laborer, and therefore 
 to prevent him from competing with his fellows; 
 to substitute the principle of collective bargaining 
 for that of competition. In America the case was 
 wholly different. The mobility of the laborer was 
 very great. He went where he could get the 
 highest wages. If he was paid by the piece, as he 
 generally preferred to be, he worked as hard as he 
 could to increase his earnings. Other members of 
 the community looked on with satisfaction, because 
 he was doing all he could to increase productivity. 
 
62 UNDBRCUEEENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 They were glad to have him do as much as he could. 
 They wished to have him dispose of his labor in the 
 best market. Under these circumstances competi- 
 tive wages were not only paid and earned, but 
 approved by society as a standard. 
 
 This indicates the fundamental reason why 
 competition was viewed with so much favor in the 
 United States. It put a premium on economic 
 efficiency. It tended to give the direction of indus- 
 trial affairs to the men who could obtain the largest 
 product with the smallest labor. This was vitally 
 necessary for the United States in the first half 
 of its history — more necessary, I believe, than to 
 any European country. For the immediate prob- 
 lems that lay before the United States at that time 
 were predominantly industrial ones. We had a 
 new country to develop. We had to attract 
 capital by every possible means. We had to 
 employ a moderate amount of labor and a very 
 scanty amount of inherited wealth in industrial 
 competition with the nations of Europe. This was 
 for a long time the only line in which we could 
 compete with them ; it was on our efficiency in this 
 particular that we based our claim to national 
 importance. We had no army or navy comparable 
 with that of European states. Our public service, 
 except in one or two departments, was rudimen- 
 
POSITION OF PROPERTY OWNER 63 
 
 tary. Our work in literature and in science showed 
 promise rather than performance. But in the 
 intelligent conduct of industry and the develop- 
 ment of inventions connected therewith, we had no 
 rival but England. England had the advantage 
 of accumulated capital and sound business tradi- 
 tions ; America had the advantage of a competitive 
 system that brought progressive men and methods 
 to the front and thereby equalized the struggle. 
 Small wonder that the patriotic American looked 
 with favor on an institution that enabled him to 
 hold his own in the industrial race. Small wonder 
 that a republic predominantly composed of strong 
 men should overlook the abuses of a system under 
 which the weak members suffered, when it con- 
 tributed so much to the standing of the nation 
 as a whole. 
 
Ill 
 
 EECENT TENDENCIES IN ECONOMICS 
 AND IN LEGISLATION 
 
 "We saw in the last lecture why the adoption of 
 universal suffrage in the United States was not 
 followed by a movement in the direction of 
 socialism. Most of the voters expected to become 
 property owners; this made them regard any 
 restriction of the rights of property as undesirable. 
 Nearly all of them believed that free competition 
 would protect the community against extortion or 
 abuse by the property owner; this made them 
 regard such restriction as unnecessary. These 
 were the sentiments and ideals which prevailed 
 among the great body of the American people 
 until the time of the Civil "War in 1861. 
 
 The war did not weaken the belief in competition, 
 nor lessen the desire of the average American to 
 become a property owner; but it made people 
 more ready to see the functions of government 
 extended, and less conservatively tenacious of legal 
 tradition. Under stress of military necessity the 
 state and national authorities had indulged in a 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 65 
 
 good deal of arbitrary interference with personal 
 liberty and private property. People had become 
 so used to this sort of conduct on the part of 
 government officials that a great many things 
 which would have been resented as usurpations at 
 the beginning of the war were tolerated as ordinary 
 incidents of life at the end of it. The class that 
 would have been most inclined to resent such 
 usurpation — the large landowners of the South — 
 had been reduced from affluence to poverty. 
 While the conservative planters had been losing 
 their money, and with it a good deal of their 
 political power, enterprising and often reckless 
 speculators had fallen heir to their wealth and 
 influence. 
 
 When matters were in this condition a large 
 section of the community found its faith in com- 
 petition somewhat rudely shaken by what is known 
 as the Granger movement. 
 
 No states had done as much to attract outside 
 capital in the years preceding the Civil War as 
 those of the upper Mississippi valley. Land was 
 fertile, labor was efficient; opportunities for pro- 
 ductive industry of every kind were abundant. 
 The only disadvantages under which the region 
 suffered were lack of capital and remoteness from 
 market; and the people strove to overcome these 
 
66 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 disadvantages by borrowing money and building 
 railroads with the utmost rapidity. Grants of 
 public domain were offered on a large scale to any 
 group of capitalists that would build a new line. 
 ''Each community wanted railroads at any price. 
 Each railroad offered glowing inducements to 
 settlers. The result was that railroads and settlers 
 both moved too far west, and ran heavily in debt 
 to do it." 
 
 In England and in some of the older parts of 
 the United States railroads were built to accom- 
 modate traffic already existing. Cities were already 
 there. Markets were already there. The people 
 had had means of trading with one another before 
 the railroad came. The railroad merely facilitated 
 the process of exchange and increased the growth 
 and prosperity of the community. But in the 
 newer parts of America the railroads were built to 
 create traffic. Men went west to occupy land that 
 the railroads had made accessible. They had 
 frequently borrowed money to improve that land. 
 Unless they shipped their grain to market by rail 
 they had no power to sell their products or pay 
 interest on their loans. If the price of wheat in 
 the markets of Europe or the Atlantic seaboard 
 was high, the railroad could charge rates that 
 would pay interest on its bonded indebtedness and 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 67 
 
 leave the farmer enough to meet his obligations 
 also ; but if for any reason the price fell, one or the 
 other must go to the wall. If the railroad kept its 
 rates high the farmers suffered. If it reduced its 
 rates its own security holders suffered. 
 
 This was the dilemma which the communities in 
 the upper Mississippi valleys faced in 1869 and 
 1870. Up to that time the European demand for 
 grain had been so large that prices were well 
 maintained in spite of the increased American 
 wheat acreage. When prices fell railroad rates 
 were reduced to a very low figure at competitive 
 points; but they were kept at a high figure at 
 intermediate points, where the shipper had but a 
 single railroad to deal with and was forced to use 
 that or see his grain go to waste. Free competition 
 helped the city but not the country. 
 
 The railroads claimed that it was necessary for 
 them to make their local rates high; that if they 
 did not they would have to go out of business. 
 The farmer was by no means satisfied with this 
 answer. He thought that if the railroads could 
 afford to do business cheaply for the city they 
 could afford to do it cheaply for the country; and 
 in any event he needed to pay his interest as much 
 as they needed to pay theirs. In the years from 
 1869 to 1877 the farmers' organizations, or granges, 
 
68 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 insisted that their representatives in the legislature 
 should compel railroads to make cheap rates for 
 country districts.* 
 
 How could this result best be accomplished? 
 This was the question on which there was no con- 
 sensus of opinion. The radicals favored govern- 
 ment ownership of railroads as the best solution 
 of the problem. But the civil service of the United 
 States in 1870 was in such bad condition that very 
 few men, whatever their prepossessions in favor of 
 government ownership as a theory, believed that 
 the United States was in a position to put that 
 theory into effect. Public office was regarded as a 
 reward for partisan activity. Efficient men were 
 turned out of their places in order to make room for 
 less efficient candidates who had rendered political 
 
 * This organized attempt to control railroad rates by- 
 representatives of farmers' organizations is shown as the 
 Granger movement. It is noteworthy as having aroused 
 the attention of the American people to the fact that there 
 was a railroad problem which free competition would not 
 solve; and as having been the first considerable attempt to 
 use representative government as a means of limiting the 
 power of property owners to manage their business in their 
 own way. Strictly speaking, it was not an attempt to 
 attack the rights or interests of property owners as a class. 
 It was an attempt to limit the rights of one set of property 
 owners, the railroad security holders, in favor of another 
 set of property owners, the farmers of the Mississippi 
 valley. 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 69 
 
 services, sometimes of a very questionable charac- 
 ter, to help the dominant party to triumph at the 
 preceding election. It was proverbial that it cost 
 the government two or three times as much as it 
 cost a private individual to get any piece of 
 work done, and that when the work was done it 
 was not well cared for or efficiently managed. 
 To entrust an agency like the railroad, on which 
 the industrial life of the country depended, to 
 such unfit hands as those of the United States 
 officeholders in 1870, was to say the least a 
 dangerous experiment. 
 
 Reformers who were not quite so radical advo- 
 cated laws prescribing the rates which railroads 
 could charge — the tariff itself being usually ar- 
 ranged by a special commission appointed for the 
 purpose. Such laws were in fact passed and such 
 commissions appointed in a large number of states. 
 The most thoroughgoing experiments of this kind 
 were made in the upper Mississippi valley. The 
 commissions usually took the rates which railroads 
 charged at competitive points as a standard of 
 what the railroads could afford, and then reduced 
 the rates at intermediate points to a corresponding 
 figure per mile. The railroads protested that this 
 was confiscation ; that an equal mileage system was 
 wholly inapplicable to railroad business; that the 
 
70 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 rates at competitive points did not pay a fair 
 share of the fixed charges ; and that the application 
 of this standard to other parts of the system would 
 reduce them to bankruptcy. The courts, however, 
 upheld the right of the commissions to prescribe 
 railroad tariffs; quoting the words of Lord Hale 
 Be Portihus Maris to the effect that when any 
 business was in fact a monopoly the state had the 
 right and duty to fix prices, and holding that the 
 capitalists had invested their money subject to 
 this disability. 
 
 This was regarded as a heavy blow to the security 
 owners. It apparently deprived them of their one 
 safeguard against reckless legislation. But a more 
 powerful force than that of the courts was working 
 to protect the investor. As soon as the capitalists 
 found that certain states would not allow them 
 to earn interest on railroad investments they 
 refused to invest more money in those states. No 
 new roads were constructed; the equipment that 
 wore out was not replaced. The rates at which 
 wheat was carried to market remained low; but a 
 great deal of wheat did not get carried to market 
 at all, because the physical means to transport it 
 were lacking. The legislatures could prevent high 
 charges, but they could not prevent deficient ser- 
 vice; and deficient service was a worse evil than 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 71 
 
 high charges. Under these circumstances the 
 farmers found themselves compelled to allow the 
 railroads fair profits. The very men who had been 
 most active in passing rate laws from 1870 to 1874 
 were readiest to repeal them in 1878. 
 
 While these experiments were being tried in the 
 "West, another and more permanent solution was 
 devised in the East by far-sighted railroad men 
 like Albert Fink and publicists like Charles 
 Francis Adams. These men pointed out that 
 while the temporary interests of investors and 
 shippers were often different, the permanent 
 interests were very nearly or quite the same. 
 They believed that the American law should 
 be more nearly modeled on that of England; 
 providing for publicity of accounts and rates, 
 forbidding preferences of every kind, and directing 
 the railroads, in consultation with state railway 
 commissioners, to prepare tariffs by which the 
 permanent interests of the investors and of the 
 shippers should both be secured. On the whole, 
 the states that adopted this plan, which was known 
 as the Massachusetts system, got better railroad 
 service and dealt with railroad abuses more effect- 
 ively than those which tried to prescribe tariffs 
 of charges. When the first national measure of 
 railroad regulation, or interstate commerce law, 
 
72 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 was passed in 1887, it was inspired mainly by the 
 Massachusetts idea. Although the Act was the 
 result of a compromise, its general tenor was 
 conservative rather than radical. 
 
 But about this time people discovered that there 
 were other industries besides railroads in which 
 competition did not operate. The telegraph ser- 
 vices of the country were being consolidated and 
 monopolized as completely as the railroad service. 
 The same thing was true of the telephone, of 
 electric light and power, and of the gas and water 
 supply of various cities whenever these were 
 controlled by private corporations. Nor was this 
 condition confined to the so-called "public utili- 
 ties." The system of monopoly had extended 
 itself to productive enterprise of almost every 
 kind. The storage and refining of petroleum was 
 centralized in the hands of the Standard Oil 
 Company. Other industries were controlled and 
 monopolized by corporations less widely known to 
 the public but not less effective and often much 
 more arbitrary in their action. No longer could 
 we regard the railroad as an exception to a general 
 law, to be dealt with by exceptional means. The 
 very existence of the competitive system of industry 
 was threatened. The question seemed to be not 
 whether competition could be made to work uni- 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 73 
 
 versally, but whether it could be made to work 
 at all. 
 
 With regard to public services like gas or water 
 or telephone communication, people quickly ac- 
 cepted the idea that they must almost necessarily 
 be monopolies, and took measures accordingly. 
 The existence of two rival gas or water companies 
 obviously involved unnecessary expense on account 
 of the duplication of pipes. The maintenance of 
 two rival telephone companies caused less obvious 
 but more burdensome expense, because everybody 
 had to pay subscriptions to two different exchanges 
 and had the added inconvenience of looking up 
 addresses in two different books. 
 
 Having once squarely recognized the impossi- 
 bility of enforcing competition in these lines, the 
 problem of control was comparatively simple. The 
 various states frankly admitted that monopoly was 
 inevitable, and appointed public utilities commis- 
 sions with power to fix rates which should be fair 
 both to investor and to consumer. But it was 
 difficult to deal with the ordinary forms of pro- 
 ductive industry in this way. It would have been 
 impossible to select a commission sufficiently intel- 
 ligent in its judgment and encyclopaedic in its 
 knowledge to fix the prices of all sorts of market- 
 able commodities. Nor did the public wish to have 
 
74 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 things managed in this fashion. Whatever might 
 happen with railroads or telephones, people wanted 
 factories and stores to be competitive. 
 
 Contracts in restraint of trade and other arrange- 
 ments to prevent competition have always been 
 treated by the common law as against public policy 
 and therefore, unenforceable. But many of the 
 states of the Union went farther than this, and 
 made such combinations misdemeanors and pun- 
 ished them accordingly. In the year 1890 Congress 
 passed a federal law of this kind, commonly known 
 as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared 
 illegal and criminal, punishable by fine or impris- 
 onment or both, every contract or combination, in 
 the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in 
 restraint of trade and commerce among the several 
 states or with foreign nations, and any monopo- 
 lizing or attempt to monopolize any part of trade 
 or commerce among the states. 
 
 It is a little difficult to know just how the framers 
 of the Act of 1890 expected it to be carried out. 
 It was explicitly stated during the debates in 
 Congress which preceded its passage that it was 
 not intended to apply to railroads, for these were 
 already regulated by the Act of 1887 under the 
 reserved police power of the state. Probably half 
 of those who voted for the Sherman Act supposed 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 75 
 
 that it would remain a dead letter — like the man 
 who, when asked for his views on prohibition, said 
 that he was in favor of the law and against its 
 enforcement. The Republicans were in power at 
 the time, and the Republicans were friendly rather 
 than hostile to organized capital. But the Republi- 
 can party managers were frightened by the public 
 indignation against monopolies, and thought that 
 they could save the next presidential election by 
 the passage of a rather sweeping law which they 
 were confident that their friends could evade if 
 they wished to. 
 
 They did not succeed in carrying the election; 
 but when the Democrats came into power in 1893 
 the law still remained unenforced. Other issues 
 occupied the public mind — tariff reduction, the 
 currency, relation to European powers. Curiously 
 enough, the first important cases decided under 
 the Sherman Act dealt with railroads, to which 
 its framers had not intended it to apply. In spite 
 of the presence of the law upon the statute books, 
 the years from 1898 to 1901, which marked the 
 recovery of business after the long depression that 
 had preceded it, witnessed a development of 
 combinations of producers which for number, 
 variety, and over-capitalization far surpassed any- 
 thing which America had previously experienced. 
 
76 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 For a time it seemed as though nothing would 
 be done to restrict the power of these combinations. 
 The years named constituted a time of general 
 prosperity and of advancing wages. No one — 
 manufacturer, farmer, or workman — ^was inclined 
 to quarrel very seriously with a system which 
 appeared to contribute to his own prosperity. But 
 with the advent of a period of trade depression in 
 1903 people at once assumed a more critical atti- 
 tude toward combinations of capital; and they 
 have continued to maintain that attitude down to 
 the present time. During the last decade the 
 United States has witnessed a movement in the 
 direction of state socialism which, though less 
 thoroughgoing than the corresponding movements 
 in Germany or France or even England, is never- 
 theless very different in character from anything 
 which occurred in the century preceding. 
 
 The reasons why no such movement developed 
 in the nineteenth century were explained in the 
 previous lecture. They may be summed up in a 
 single sentence. Where every man of energy and 
 enterprise expected to become a property owner, 
 the community was not inclined to favor legislation 
 that restricted the rights of property. Of course 
 there were exceptions, and numerous ones. All 
 through the later years of the century there was 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 77 
 
 a strong humanitarian movement in favor of 
 protection to the weak. There was a growing 
 sentiment, which found expression in state laws, 
 that children must be kept out of factories until 
 a reasonable age; that hours of labor, particularly 
 for women and minors, must be duly regulated; 
 that unsanitary or unsafe modes of doing business 
 must be stopped; and that the crowding of popu- 
 lation in the tenements of our large cities must be 
 regulated as effectively as possible. Permanent 
 labor commissions, to devise and enforce such 
 legislation, were organized in a large number of 
 the states of the Union; and a national Depart- 
 ment of Labor with the same ends in view was 
 established in 1888. 
 
 Side by side with this humanitarian movement 
 among property holders there had been an increas- 
 ing amount of agitation for government control 
 of industry among the workmen themselves. With 
 the development of immigration from eastern 
 Europe there was a growing proportion of laborers 
 in the United States who did not understand or 
 appreciate the individualistic traditions of an 
 earlier generation and had neither the expectation 
 nor the ambition to become property owners and 
 take their places in the ranks of the capitalist 
 class. As the public land of the United States was 
 
78 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 used up, the opportunity of securing a freehold 
 grew less attractive. As manufacturing establish- 
 ments increased in size, the prospect of reaching 
 the headship of such an establishment and becom- 
 ing an independent employer of labor grew more 
 remote. Under these circumstances a kind of 
 antagonism of classes grew up in the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century which had not been 
 possible a generation or two earlier. Many active 
 and intelligent workmen preferred to take their 
 chances of becoming leaders of their own class in 
 a struggle against the capitalist, instead of trying 
 to pass from the ranks of the laborers to those of 
 the employers. 
 
 But this growth of class antagonisms, though it 
 increased the dangers of industrial conflict, did 
 not of itself produce any constructive changes in 
 the social order. The Knights of Labor were able 
 to organize strikes and boycotts on a large scale 
 in 1885, and again in 1893. They were able to 
 secure the passage of arbitration laws in various 
 states, culminating in the Federal Act of the year 
 1898. But they were not able, either alone or in 
 conjunction with the leaders of the humanitarian 
 movement, to carry the country with them in any 
 organized effort to overthrow the competitive 
 system or seriously impair its dominance. The 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 79 
 
 efforts of the laborers as a class to secure their 
 rights, or what they deemed to be their rights, 
 aroused antagonism in other equally important 
 classes of the community, particularly among the 
 small farmers. What modern sociologists call the 
 creation of class consciousness has done more harm 
 than good to the labor movement in the United 
 States. To accomplish their ends laboring classes 
 must work with other classes, not against them. 
 The attempt of the Knights of Labor to boycott 
 everybody that did not obey the dictates of their 
 organization resulted after two years in a virtual 
 boycott of the Knights of Labor by the community. 
 The employment of foreign socialistic literature to 
 excite workmen against the traditional laws and 
 institutions of America has on the whole done 
 much more harm to those who used it than to those 
 whom it was intended to injure. Affiliations 
 between the more radical wing of the American 
 labor leaders and the International "Workers of the 
 World have been a source of weakness to the labor 
 movement rather than of strength. 
 
 The most serious mistake of the American labor 
 leaders of the nineteenth century, from the stand- 
 point of practical politics, was that they ignored 
 and antagonized the farmers. 
 
 In the year 1879 Henry George published his 
 
80 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 remarkable book on Progress and Poverty, which 
 attracted wide attention not only in America but 
 throughout the whole civilized world. It was 
 brilliantly written; it had great loftiness of pur- 
 pose. It promised the country deliverance from 
 the worst economic evils under which it labored. 
 Its sales ran up into the hundreds of thousands. 
 While its conclusions were not accepted by the 
 thoroughgoing socialists, brought up in the school 
 of Marx, they were popular with nearly all Ameri- 
 can workmen who were actively engaged in labor 
 agitation. It was George's fundamental principle 
 that all necessary reforms could be secured by 
 taxing the unearned increment of land to its full 
 amount. This conclusion was for obvious reasons 
 exceedingly unpopular with landowners of every 
 kind; with the small farmer or the owner of a 
 little home no less than with the large proprietor. 
 The fact that the labor party committed itself so 
 generally to an endorsement of Henry George's 
 views made it impossible for that party to be 
 successful in a democracy where a great number 
 of the voters lived on land which they owned or 
 hoped to own. 
 
 A quarter of a century later all this had changed. 
 In 1903 the main attacks of the labor men were 
 no longer directed against land ownership, but 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 81 
 
 against organized capital. The alignment of 
 parties was therefore qnite different. The smaller 
 landed proprietors, in the city and in the country, 
 had changed sides. The owners of farms and 
 homes did not regard the attempts to control large 
 combinations of capital as attacks upon themselves, 
 but rather as measures conducive to their interest. 
 
 Two main causes had combined to produce this 
 attitude of hostility on the part of the farmers 
 toward the organizations of capital. In the first 
 place, the farmers believed that combinations of 
 capitalists, by suppressing competition, were en- 
 abled to charge more for their goods than they 
 otherwise would have received, and that the men 
 who bought goods from the manufacturers or 
 services from the transportation agencies were by 
 this means unfairly taxed ; and in the second place 
 they felt a strong and somewhat unreasoning 
 jealousy of the ''money power" which was behind 
 these organizations. 
 
 Prices of all goods and services had risen very 
 rapidly in the years from 1899 to 1903. The profits 
 of industrial monopolies during the same period 
 had also been very large. It was therefore natural 
 that the buyers should attribute the increase of 
 price to the existence of monopoly, and should 
 regard the profit as having been obtained mainly 
 
82 UNDERCUREENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 by unfair measures of extortion from the public 
 which competition would have prevented. As a 
 matter of fact, this view was only partly correct. 
 The period from 1899 to 1903 was one when prices 
 rose in nearly all industries, whether monopolized 
 or competitive. This was a necessary result of the 
 increase in gold production in the closing years 
 of the nineteenth century, followed by the sudden 
 expansion of banking credits at the beginning of 
 the twentieth. Every man who was engaged in 
 the production of goods or services which took 
 time — every one, in short, who had invested capital 
 at the beginning of this period to get returns at 
 the end of it — got more than a normal rate of 
 profit, because currency conditions enabled him to 
 sell his goods at higher prices than anybody 
 expected. The prosperity of the large corporations 
 was partly due to this cause; it was partly due to 
 economies of method and organization which they 
 were able to effect as a result of their combination ; 
 and it was partly also due to their power to fix 
 prices without fear of competition on a large scale. 
 But it was natural enough that this last element 
 had exaggerated importance in the public mind. 
 People saw that the cost of living had greatly 
 increased; they saw that many articles which had 
 been sold at low prices under competition in 1899 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 83 
 
 were sold at high prices under combination in 1903 ; 
 and they naturally thought that the difference was 
 due to the suppression of competition. 
 
 Even more potent than their dislike for high 
 prices was their jealousy of the money power 
 which was supposed to be behind these combina- 
 tions. The South and West have an inherent 
 distrust of New York. They believe that the 
 financial institutions in and around Wall Street 
 exercise a baleful influence upon the business of 
 the country as a whole.* I shall not try to discuss 
 how far there was any real antagonism of interests 
 between the West and the East in these matters. 
 There was at any rate a feeling of antagonism; 
 and many things happened to accentuate that 
 feeling in the opening years of the twentieth 
 century. 
 
 Chief among these was the development of inter- 
 locking directorates. In combining the manufac- 
 turing and transportation interests of the country 
 on a large scale, the banks of New York and other 
 eastern cities were extremely active. Sometimes 
 the bankers themselves took the initiative; some- 
 
 * ' ' If a man finds a discrepancy between the face value 
 of a share of stock and the amount actually paid in by the 
 subscriber," said a prominent and high-minded New York 
 banker, ''the West at once believes that the difference was 
 stolen, and probably in Wall Street ! ' ' 
 
84 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 times the manufacturers who wanted to make a 
 combination went to the bankers to secure their 
 help. But in either case the financiers of New 
 York and Boston and other eastern cities were 
 active agents in the work of combination and the 
 exchange of securities incident thereto. As a con- 
 sequence the banks had a large representation in 
 the directorates of the new concerns. The same 
 man might be a director of twenty, fifty, or even 
 a hundred large combinations; not because he was 
 familiar with their work from the operating side, 
 but because he could give them financial strength 
 and support. Under these circumstances the people 
 who were not included in such combinations — the 
 small farmer, the salaried official, the wage- 
 earner — assumed that all these great enterprises 
 were managed from one common center, and that 
 the purpose that controlled their management was 
 gain for the financial world at the expense of the 
 industrial one. 
 
 These views were reflected in the public press. 
 Journals of every kind — daily, weekly, and 
 monthly — published articles which stimulated this 
 suspicion by fair means and foul. Gradually the 
 people came to believe that there was an alliance 
 between the money power in Wall Street and the 
 conservative element in the halls of Congress. 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 85 
 
 There were plausible grounds for this belief. 
 There has always been a certain amount of unwise 
 congressional legislation in behalf of various indus- 
 trial enterprises, and a great deal of improper 
 employment of lobbyists to secure such ends. All 
 this was made the subject of attack; and it was a 
 kind of attack that was peculiarly effective. "When 
 President Cleveland in 1888 tried to show the 
 farmer that the high protective tariff injured the 
 economic interests of the country, the farmers did 
 not listen to his arguments. But when it was 
 suggested twenty years later that the tariff had 
 been devised in the interest of a money power 
 which the farmer hated, the suggestion at once 
 found ready credence. 
 
 Dislike of high prices and jealousy of the money 
 power thus combined to put the small property 
 owners on the side of those who had no property, 
 rather than on the side of those who had large 
 property. It was in this respect that the indus- 
 trial movements of 1903 differed from those of 
 1883 or 1873. In the year 1873 the farmers were 
 agitating for state control, but the laborers were 
 not. In the year 1883 the laborers were agitating 
 for state control, but the farmers were not. The 
 year 1903 for the first time saw these two large 
 elements ranged on the same side. 
 
86 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 The effect of this has been seen both in the law 
 and in the politics of the country. The decade 
 from 1903 to 1913 has witnessed the passage of a 
 number of measures which twenty years ago would 
 have been regarded as distinctly socialistic in tenor. 
 Where state control already existed it has been 
 made more strict. The Interstate Commerce Law 
 of 1887 was supplemented by the Elkins Act of 
 1903, the Hepburn Act of 1906, and the Mann 
 Act of 1910. These measures had the support of 
 conservatives who saw the necessity of bowing to 
 public opinion, as well as of progressives who had 
 helped to create that opinion. Nor was the atten- 
 tion of Congress confined to rate regulation. A 
 Department of Commerce and Labor was estab- 
 lished in 1903, with powers much wider than those 
 of the old Labor Bureau. A federal Employers' 
 Liability Act was passed in 1906. An Hours of 
 Service Act went into effect in 1907. And mean- 
 time the experiments of individual states in these 
 matters went far beyond what was done by 
 federal authority. 
 
 But of even more consequence than the passing 
 of new laws was the increased activity shown in 
 enforcing old laws. By the mere action of public 
 sentiment the Department of Commerce and Labor 
 in the Federal Government was given an impor- 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 87 
 
 tance which its sponsors hardly anticipated. By 
 the same force of public opinion, statutes which 
 at first had been little more than dead letters were 
 brought into active use as agencies of industrial 
 control. When the federal arbitration Act of 1898 
 was originally passed it was regarded both by its 
 advocates and by its opponents as a thing of slight 
 consequence — a piece of machinery which could be 
 invoked only in occasional instances. Today public 
 opinion virtually compels railroad corporations 
 doing interstate business to submit their disputes 
 to federal arbitration. Of still greater significance 
 is the history of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 
 1890. In the first twelve years during which this 
 law was on the statute books, only two or three 
 decisions adverse to industrial combinations were 
 rendered, and these were not of great importance. 
 But in the years following 1903 prosecutions and 
 decisions under the Sherman Act followed one 
 another in rapid succession. A climax, though 
 not an end, was reached in 1911, when the United 
 States Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of 
 two of the largest and strongest industrial 
 combinations in the country — the Standard Oil 
 Company and the American Tobacco Company. 
 Nor was this movement confined to industrial 
 combinations. Eailroad companies were made to 
 
88 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 feel the effect of the new policy and the disposition 
 of the Supreme Court to extend its application to 
 an increasing range of cases; a disposition which 
 reflected the progress of public opinion in the 
 country as a whole.*' 
 
 While all political parties in the United States 
 claimed credit for the principles of the Sherman 
 Act and professed a wish to enforce it, the Demo- 
 cratic party was most consistently active in this 
 direction; and the triumph of the Democrats at 
 the presidential election of 1912, whatever may 
 have been the other causes which contributed 
 thereto, represented a victory for those who 
 desired a rigid enforcement of the laws against 
 organized capital and a return to a system of 
 smaller industrial units. 
 
 But though the action of legislatures and courts 
 during recent years has been satisfactory to the 
 public from a political standpoint, it has not been 
 so from an economic one. The dissolution of large 
 companies has not been followed by a reduction 
 in charges. On the contrary, it has been attended 
 in many instances by an increase. This increase 
 is partly due to the general rise of wages through- 
 
 * The student of American constitutional history will find 
 this progress set forth in detail in F. N. Judson, The Law 
 of Interstate Commerce. 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 89 
 
 out tlie country ; partly to the increased cost of the 
 methods of doing business imposed by recent Acts 
 of Congress and of the several states; and partly 
 also to the fact that the work of separate concerns 
 is in many respects less economical than that of a 
 large combination. Manufacturers who have been 
 forced to dissolve their combinations have raised 
 their prices in order to cover this increased cost. 
 Whatever good enforced competition may have 
 done, it has not brought the expected reduction in 
 the expense of living. Dissolution appears to have 
 hurt the consumers more than the investors. 
 
 With railroads the case has been different. 
 When railroad expenses are increased either by 
 wage arbitrations or by new governmental require- 
 ments, the companies are not allowed to raise their 
 charges in order to meet the loss unless the Inter- 
 state Commerce Commission gives its consent ; and 
 this at best involves prolonged delay. The financial 
 results to the railroads arising from their inability 
 to raise rates have already been very grave, and 
 the results to the public are beginning to be 
 equally bad. Not only has there been loss of 
 dividends and interest, but there has been decided 
 reduction in quality of service, diminished demand 
 for iron and steel products, and widespread dis- 
 
90 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 tress among large numbers of men thrown out of 
 work in transportation and allied industries. 
 
 This state of things seems likely to grow worse 
 instead of better in the immediate future.* It has 
 become clear that the enforced reintroduction of 
 competition by authority of the government does 
 not do for the public in the way of service, economy, 
 and rapid investment of capital what the old- 
 fashioned automatic competition did for our 
 fathers. In order to get adequate service and low 
 rates, inducement must be afforded for added 
 investments of capital. This inducement does not 
 exist today, and the country is suffering from the 
 consequences. The immediate future will un- 
 doubtedly see a reaction. There will be a move- 
 ment either in the direction of greater freedom 
 to the capitalist or of more intelligent supervision 
 on the part of the government. The conservative 
 wing of the Republican party hopes for the former ; 
 the progressive wing desires the latter. 
 
 In a rather remarkable passage of the Politics 
 Aristotle says that the permanence of a common- 
 wealth or organized body of citizens requires the 
 reconciliation of two somewhat inconsistent aims. 
 The laws must correspond to the wishes and the 
 
 * I leave this sentence as it was uttered in May, 1914. 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 91 
 
 judgment of the great body of freemen; the con- 
 duct of the business of the nation must be in the 
 hands of men who are more skilled than the great 
 body of freemen can be, and who will probably 
 do things for the community as a whole which are 
 not understood or approved at the time. 
 
 During the first century of the American 
 republic the first of these results was secured, at 
 the sacrifice of the second. The means on which 
 the framers of the Constitution relied in order to 
 obtain expert conduct of public affairs — the system 
 of indirect election, for instance — proved futile for 
 the purpose. During the greater part of the nine- 
 teenth century the only way to secure skilful man- 
 agement of public business was to keep it out of 
 the hands of the government and put it into the 
 hands of the property holder. Many things which 
 European nations did through government agencies 
 were left undone in America. Many other things 
 were left to private capital. 
 
 As long as there was even a semblance of free 
 competition, the American nation as a whole was 
 well content to have most of its business done by 
 private capital because in that way it could be done 
 efficiently and progressively, while under the exist- 
 ing conditions of the American civil service 
 government management would have meant waste 
 
92 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 and stagnation. Now that competition is found 
 to be impossible in many of the important lines 
 of business, the public is not so well content to 
 leave things in private hands and is willing to 
 experiment with state control, even at some sacrifice 
 of efficiency. But our experiments in this line are 
 proving very costly; more costly than the general 
 public even yet appreciates. The solution of the 
 problem will not be reached until the public 
 demand for state control of industry and for 
 trained civil service go hand in hand. 
 
 America must learn the overwhelming cost to 
 the consumer and the public of inexpert control. 
 We have made some progress in that direction since 
 1870 ; but we are far from having reached the point 
 which a great nation needs to attain. Outside of 
 the army, the navy, and the judiciary, the standard 
 of administrative intelligence in America is lower 
 than it is in Europe, and the public appreciation 
 of the need of administrative intelligence a great 
 deal lower. High positions in the public service, in 
 spite of many honorable exceptions, are still given 
 as political rewards. High positions in private or 
 corporate business, with some dishonorable excep- 
 tions, are still given as rewards for efficiency. 
 Until these conditions are altered and the public 
 appreciates expert work in the offices of state, 
 
ECONOMICS AND LEGISLATION 93 
 
 industrial control in the United States is likely 
 to remain in the hands of the property owner, on 
 such terms as will give adequate inducement for 
 the saving of capital and adequate guarantees for 
 its intelligent use. 
 
POLITICAL METHODS OLD AND NEW 
 
IV 
 THE GEOWTH OF PARTY MACHINERY 
 
 It is the intent of every nation, whatever its 
 form of government, to have that government 
 administered in the public interest. It is the per- 
 petual danger of every governing body — monarchy, 
 aristocracy, or democracy — that its powers will be 
 used, not for the public interest but for the 
 interests of certain individuals or classes. 
 
 Each form of government is liable to its own 
 peculiar perversion. A true monarchy is a govern- 
 ment by a king for the benefit of the people. When 
 he governs for the benefit of himself and his friends, 
 he perverts monarchy into tyranny. A true 
 aristocracy is a government by the wealthy and 
 intelligent classes for the benefit of the people. 
 When they begin to govern for their own benefit 
 they pervert aristocracy into oligarchy. A true 
 democracy is a government by the whole body of 
 citizens for the benefit of the people. When for 
 any reason whatever they pursue some less complete 
 or more shortsighted end, they pervert democracy 
 into demagogy. These dangers are as serious today 
 
98 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 as they were when Aristotle called attention to 
 them two thousand years ago. 
 
 It was for the purpose of avoiding these dangers 
 that many publicists recommended a sharp sepa- 
 ration of the executive, legislative, and judicial 
 departments of the government. If one group of 
 men controlled public business, another made the 
 laws, and a third supervised their administration, 
 it seemed unlikely that any one of the three groups 
 could manage the affairs of state for its own selfish 
 purposes. This division of the powers of govern- 
 ment, with the resulting system of ''checks and 
 balances," was a favorite device of English states- 
 men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
 It was warmly commended by Montesquieu, It 
 found expression in American colonial charters. 
 It was carried out quite fully in the Constitution 
 of the United States. The framers of that instru- 
 ment hoped that these checks and balances would 
 prevent the use of the powers of government in 
 behalf of any single dominant politician or group 
 of politicians. 
 
 To a large extent they were successful. They 
 created a government, strong enough to do the 
 work required of it at home and abroad, which has 
 lasted for a century and a quarter without becom- 
 ing either a tyranny, an oligarchy, or a demagogy. 
 
PAETY MACHINERY 99 
 
 They enabled us to avoid the charted rocks and 
 shoals on which other ships of state have been 
 wrecked. But there was an uncharted shoal that 
 they did not avoid — a form of perversion of 
 popular government of which they knew nothing, 
 and which has been a serious and increasing 
 menace to our institutions. This is the perversion 
 of party. 
 
 The word "party" has two quite distinct 
 meanings. It may be an organization whose 
 primary object is to promote certain measures and 
 policies, and which seeks to place its members in 
 office as a means to that end; or it may be one 
 whose primary purpose is to secure office for its 
 leaders and rewards for their followers, valuing 
 measures and policies according to their utility 
 in promoting that result. The former represents 
 the legitimate function and use of party ; the latter, 
 its terribly frequent perversion. 
 
 Writers like Elihu Root or Abbott Lawrence 
 Lowell habitually think of parties in the first of 
 these two senses. According to Mr. Root, the 
 essential thing which the party system does is to 
 organize public opinion so that the important 
 issues can be squarely presented to the citizens at 
 successive elections. The casting of a vote is but 
 the last and often the least important part of the 
 
100 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 citizen's political activity. If each man went to 
 the polls on election day to vote for the candidates 
 he regarded as best or for the measures that he 
 deemed most important, the votes would be so 
 scattered that nothing could be done. Preliminary 
 organization is needed to make this vote effective; 
 to determine what measures interest a large part 
 of the citizens instead of a small part, and what 
 men will command confidence as advocates of those 
 measures. It is by their influence within such 
 parties in helping to make up the statements of 
 principle, even more than by their vote at elections 
 in determining which party is to prevail, that 
 intelligent men contribute to the work of demo- 
 cratic government. This view of Mr. Root has 
 been illustrated and in some respects supple- 
 mented by the pregnant phrase of President 
 Lowell in which he compares politicians with 
 brokers. "The process of forming public opinion 
 involves bringing men together in masses on some 
 middle ground where they can combine to carry 
 out a common policy. In short, it requires a species 
 of brokerage, and one of the functions of politicians 
 is that of brokers. Perhaps it is their most 
 universal function in a democracy." 
 
 But the actual party organizations as we see 
 them at the present day seldom conform fully 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 101 
 
 to the descriptions of Mr. Root or Mr. Lowell, and 
 often depart from them very widely. It frequently 
 happens that the chief purpose of parties is to 
 utilize the offices of the country as a means of 
 power and influence and livelihood for the party 
 leaders. They seize upon principles and embody 
 them in the party platform, not on account of the 
 public importance of these principles in securing 
 national prosperity, but on account of their private 
 importance in attracting votes to the organization. 
 The main object of such a party is the control of 
 the government for its own purposes, rather than 
 the use of the government for what it deems to 
 be the needs of the people. When a party has 
 taken this shape the politician is no longer a 
 broker in opinions; he is a broker in offices, in 
 appropriations, in privileges. 
 
 Any one who looks at the history of party 
 politics in the United States in recent years will 
 see to how great an extent this second meaning 
 of the term "party" has supplanted the first. I 
 propose in this lecture to trace the development 
 of this perverted conception of party and to show 
 the evils which have resulted from it. In the next 
 lecture I shall discuss some of the remedies for 
 this evil which have recently been introduced or 
 advocated. In the concluding lecture I shall try to 
 
102 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 show what changes in our political life are needed 
 for the successful operation of these remedies. 
 
 If the men who in September 1787 signed the 
 proposed constitution of the United States had 
 returned to the scene of their labors in September 
 1912, they would have been astonished to find that 
 only two alterations had been made in their 
 original work. By the Eleventh Article of Amend- 
 ment to the Constitution, jurisdiction over suits 
 brought against a state by citizens of other states 
 or of foreign countries had been taken out of the 
 federal courts. By the Twelfth Article the presi- 
 dential electors, in voting for two persons, were 
 compelled to specify on their ballots which they 
 named for president and which for vice-president. 
 This was all. The other so-called Amendments to 
 the Constitution were supplements rather than 
 amendments. They dealt with things outside of 
 the original scope of the instrument. Some of 
 them were trivial in their effects, some were of 
 far-reaching importance; but whether trivial or 
 important, they did not alter the machinery of 
 federal government which was provided in the 
 Constitution itself. 
 
 Since the date named there have been two 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 103 
 
 further changes in our constitutional machinery 
 which are of somewhat greater importance than 
 those that I have named ; one removing restrictions 
 upon the levy of direct taxes by federal authority, 
 and the other requiring that United States senators 
 be elected by the people of the several states 
 instead of by their legislatures. Yet even when 
 these changes are taken into account, the alteration 
 is small in comparison with the size and importance 
 of the body of the instrument. 
 
 To this permanence of constitutional machinery 
 I doubt whether the history of any other active 
 and growing state can offer a parallel. Certainly 
 no democracy of ancient or mediaeval times can 
 show anything like it, nor can any contemporary 
 state of Europe point to a similar experience. 
 During a period in which the Constitution of the 
 United States remained virtually unaltered, Eng- 
 land had by successive acts changed almost beyond 
 recognition the manner of election of one house 
 of Parliament and the range of powers of the 
 other; France had made at least seven radical 
 breaks in the continuity of her government, with 
 corresponding changes in her constitutional provi- 
 sions; the Holy Roman Empire had gone to 
 destruction, and had gradually been reconstructed 
 into a new Germany and a new Austria; Russia 
 
104 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 had made vigorous and partially successful at- 
 tempts to reorganize its political system. It has 
 been and is a matter of perpetual wonder that a 
 group of men with limited experience of public 
 affairs, chosen somewhat hurriedly and hampered 
 at every stage by the necessity of compromise in 
 order to get any constitution at all, should have 
 created so enduring a structure. 
 
 But while the machinery of the Constitution has 
 remained unaltered, the working of that machinery 
 has changed radically. If James Madison came 
 back today he would find President and Congress 
 and courts elected or appointed in the same ways 
 and clothed with substantially the same powers 
 that were contemplated in the debates of the 
 Constitutional Convention. But side by side with 
 the familiar names and authorities of these offices 
 he would find a number of unfamiliar names and 
 authorities of equal importance. He would hear 
 of platforms and primaries, of caucuses and 
 nominees, of conventions and bosses. He would 
 be confronted with a strange set of powers and 
 restrictions, nowhere mentioned in the Constitu- 
 tion, but coordinate or at times superior in prac- 
 tical importance to the powers and restrictions 
 which the Constitution itself provided. Most of 
 these new names would mean little or nothing to 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 105 
 
 his mind. The few that he did understand, like 
 ''nominee," would seem like appalling importa- 
 tions from the effete monarchies of Europe. He 
 would find himself in a country whose legal forms 
 of government were familiar but whose extra-legal 
 customs and habits of government were wholly 
 strange. 
 
 The anomaly itself is startling; but the reasons 
 for the anomaly are quite simple. The framers 
 of the Constitution had arranged with great care 
 and skill the mode of election of public officers and 
 the duties of those officers after they were chosen. 
 They had not attempted to arrange in any way 
 the mode in which these officers should be nomi- 
 nated or the pledges that might be exacted of 
 them before they were chosen. A remarkable 
 instance of this is seen in the provisions regarding 
 presidential electors. It was the obvious expecta- 
 tion of the Constitutional Convention that the 
 members of the electoral college would exercise 
 independent judgment in the selection of candi- 
 dates for president and vice-president, instead of 
 merely ratifying a nomination which had been 
 prepared for them in advance. It took but four, 
 or at most eight, years to show how futile was that 
 expectation. There may have been a few people 
 who were willing to give the electors discretionary 
 
106 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 power to use their best judgment in voting for a 
 president. The great majority wished to know in 
 advance the names of men for whom the several 
 electors were going to vote. They insisted that 
 this matter should be settled before the electors 
 were chosen instead of afterward. They wished 
 their representatives in the electoral college to be 
 pledged to vote for the candidate they liked best. 
 
 This change was gradually followed by another 
 of the same character. The old theory of repre- 
 sentative government was that the citizens in each 
 district would send to the legislature a man in 
 whose judgment they had confidence, in order that 
 he might discuss with other members the questions 
 that came before that body and then vote in the 
 way that he thought wisest. This was what the 
 framers of the Constitution expected. But the 
 people were not satisfied with this way of doing 
 things. They had ideas of their own on public 
 questions. They wanted to know which way a 
 candidate for Congress was going to vote on the 
 subjects that were likely to come up for discussion. 
 They often preferred to cast their ballots for a 
 second-rate man who would reflect his constituents' 
 opinions rather than for a first-rate man who 
 might look at things differently. Measures, not 
 men, was the cry. Not content with having their 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 107 
 
 electors instructed in advance as to their vote for 
 president, they insisted on having their congress- 
 men pledged in advance as to the legislative 
 measures which they would support. 
 
 This change took place more slowly than the 
 other, because it is relatively easy to determine 
 what names are coming before the presidential 
 elector for his choice, and relatively hard to 
 determine what measures are coming before the 
 congressman for his vote. Nor did it come with 
 equal rapidity in all parts of the country. The 
 change was slower where the old-fashioned aristo- 
 cratic traditions were stronger. It was slower in 
 the East than in the West, slower in the South 
 than in the North. It is only within the present 
 generation that it has become substantially com- 
 plete. In my undergraduate days it was still a 
 debated question whether a congressman should 
 vote according to his own judgment or that of his 
 constituents; and on a memorable occasion in 1878 
 Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, one of the last and best 
 of the political leaders of the old school, cour- 
 ageously defied both the caucus of his party and 
 the public opinion of his district by voting as he 
 thought best. But as a general rule of political 
 practice our congressmen as early as 1850 found 
 themselves deprived of the right of independent 
 
108 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 judgment on main issues almost as completely as 
 were the presidential electors. 
 
 But who should nominate the candidates or 
 define the issues to which congressmen should be 
 pledged ? 
 
 The actual work of nominating candidates for 
 president was at first done by the members of 
 Congress at the last session preceding the election. 
 The Federalists did this in 1796; the Democrats 
 followed their example in 1800. For twenty years 
 thereafter the members of the electoral college, 
 whatever their personal preference, found them- 
 selves pledged in advance by an obligation, which 
 had no constitutional sanction but which was too 
 strong for them to break, to vote for the man that 
 had been named by the members of their own 
 party in the previous Congress. 
 
 This way of doing things was not liked by the 
 people. It was felt to be against the spirit of the 
 Constitution. But as long as there was active 
 opposition between Federalists and Democrats, the 
 tactical advantages of having a strong party 
 organization were so great that no one ventured 
 to break away from the custom. When, however, 
 the old parties began to dissolve after the close of 
 the War of 1812 public sentiment against nomi- 
 nation by congressional caucus made itself increas- 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 109 
 
 ingly felt; and the year 1824 witnessed the death 
 of this extra-constitutional agency. 
 
 The downfall of the caucus was regarded as a 
 great triumph for constitutional principles. The 
 whole theory of the Constitution demanded that 
 the executive and legislative powers be kept 
 separate. The attempt of members of Congress 
 to name the men for whom people should vote 
 for president was a violation of this principle ; the 
 abandonment of that attempt was hailed as a 
 triumph of good government. The example that 
 was set in Congress was rapidly followed if not 
 actually anticipated in the legislatures of the 
 several states. Up to 1820 candidates for the 
 governorship were frequently and perhaps habitu- 
 ally nominated by a caucus of the representatives 
 of the party in the previous legislature. In the 
 decade that followed the caucus gave place to the 
 nominating convention. 
 
 All this movement was, outwardly at least, an 
 effort to conform to the principles of the Consti- 
 tution. It is, however, very doubtful whether it 
 contributed to good government. It had the effect 
 of transferring the power of presidential nomi- 
 nation from the congressmen to the men who 
 nominated the congressmen. It did not destroy 
 the connection between the two branches of the 
 
110 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 government. It simply substituted a subterranean 
 connection for an open and public one. Previously 
 men had ''pulled wires;" afterwards they "laid 
 pipe. ' ' The f ramers of the Constitution had tried 
 to prevent the executive and the legislative 
 departments of the government from influencing 
 one another unduly. They succeeded in preventing 
 the responsible officers of the government from 
 exercising that influence, but by the very act of 
 so doing they transferred it to less responsible 
 hands — to the hands that directed the machinery 
 of nomination.* 
 
 From the very first there had been astute 
 observers who saw how easy it was for a small and 
 unscrupulous group of men to control nominations 
 in either party and restrict the choice of the voters 
 to candidates of their own liking. In this, as in 
 other byways of American politics, Aaron Burr 
 was a pioneer. Burr worked in many states and 
 by many means ; but the most enduring monument 
 of his political sagacity was Tammany Hall. 
 When the Society of Saint Tammany was founded 
 in 1789 its purposes were chiefly social and 
 
 * This idea has been worked out with great care by H. J. 
 Ford in his Bise and Growth of American Politics. Much 
 valuable material on the subject is contained in Gustavus 
 Myers' History of Tammany Hall. 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 111 
 
 patriotic. Under Burr's tutelage it became a 
 dominant power in party politics. The leaders 
 understood the theory as well as the practice of 
 the means they used. "The nominating power," 
 said Teunis Wortman in 1809, "is an omnipotent 
 one. Though it approaches us in the humble 
 attitude of the recommendation, its influence is 
 irresistible. Every year's experience demonstrates 
 that its recommendations are commands; that 
 instead of presenting a choice it deprives us of 
 all option." 
 
 The lesson taught in New York had been learned 
 by politicians of other cities and states. The 
 dethronement of the congressional caucus in 1824 
 simply opened the way for the application of 
 Aaron Burr's methods to the affairs of the nation 
 as a whole. 
 
 In this widened application of the principles of 
 Tammany Hall, Martin Van Buren was the leader. 
 The effect of this change upon the character and 
 position of the presidential office was soon seen. 
 Down to the time of Andrew Jackson every 
 president had been a man with a policy of his 
 own. From the time of Van Buren until the Civil 
 War, every president was to a greater or less 
 extent a creature of the party organization. The 
 seven occupants of the White House who preceded 
 
112 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Van Buren were men of distinction. The seven 
 who followed him were not. So far was the con- 
 vention system from expressing the popular will 
 that it prevented a man like Henry Clay, idolized 
 by his party and admired by his opponents, from 
 realizing the object of his ambition. Bitterly did 
 Clay exclaim at last that he was made the candidate 
 of his party for president whenever it was going 
 to be defeated and was deprived by chicanery of 
 the nomination whenever the election of the Whig 
 candidate was certain. 
 
 But how was it possible for a few politicians to 
 control conventions and nominations, in defiance 
 of the wish of the majority of their party? I can 
 only reply as the pessimistic Scotchman replied to 
 the minister who assured him that God was 
 stronger than the devil. "The devil," said the 
 Scotchman, "makes up for his inferior strength 
 by his superior activity." Men who could not 
 themselves have been elected to high public office 
 could by activity and trickery control the machin- 
 ery which nominated men for office. Both state 
 and nation regarded nominating conventions as 
 something extra-constitutional. The result was 
 that the law had for many years very little control 
 over the election of delegates or the proceedings 
 of delegates after they were elected. In cities like 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 113 
 
 New York the professional politicians made use 
 of barefaced fraud and sometimes of actual force 
 to achieve their ends. In other places they were 
 content with trickery. In still others they found 
 a skilful use of the arts of persuasion sufficient. 
 But whether the contest was decided by force or 
 by fraud, by trickery or by persuasion, the pro- 
 fessional politician and his henchmen under him, 
 acting all the time and thoroughly organized, were 
 in these early days at least more than a match for 
 a much larger body of independent citizens who 
 had their own business to attend to and could 
 devote but moderate time to the devious ways of 
 politics. 
 
 What rewards were offered to the men who 
 engaged in this sort of subterranean political 
 activity ? 
 
 A few gained high office, but only a few; of the 
 men who have occupied the presidential chair since 
 the time of Van Buren, not more than two have 
 been active in the details of political management. 
 A somewhat larger number of our American poli- 
 ticians have been so constituted that they were 
 content to do the work for the mere enjoyment of 
 the power it gave them. It was reward enough 
 for them to be in control of the affairs of their 
 city or state, whether the public recognized their 
 
114 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 dominance or not. But to the majority of the 
 leaders and to an overwhelming majority of their 
 followers, some more tangible compensation was 
 necessary. If they gave their time to politics they 
 must be paid for it. If they were successful in 
 placing their candidates in office they expected to 
 be rewarded for their success ; — out of the public 
 treasury, if necessary. 
 
 At the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 almost the only chance for such reward was found 
 in municipal offices and municipal contracts. The 
 mayor, the board of aldermen, and even the judges, 
 of a city had it in their power to give valuable 
 favors. The fundamental principle on which 
 Tammany appealed for support all through the 
 nineteenth century was that membership in the 
 Society and work for its candidates was a means 
 to establish a claim for such favors. A municipal 
 official, said Tammany, owed his primary obliga- 
 tions and duties to the part of the community that 
 nominated and elected him. His duties to the rest 
 of the community were of little or no importance. 
 The same theory was applied to a greater or less 
 extent in almost every city. The possibility of 
 using state offices as political rewards developed 
 more slowly; but with the establishment and 
 development of public works on a large scale, the 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 115 
 
 patronage and contracts and franchises which were 
 at the disposal of New York or Pennsylvania 
 became pecuniary prizes; prizes of great value to 
 a politician who could nominate a governor or a 
 legislator that was weak enough to be dependent 
 upon him. By the year 1825 the prostitution of 
 state as well as municipal offices to party purposes 
 had become a familiar spectacle. 
 
 National politics were kept clean for a longer 
 period. Until the beginning of Andrew Jackson's 
 administration federal offices had not been regarded 
 as a field for the emolument of the professional 
 politician. There had been instances where corrupt 
 men had misused national offices, but they were 
 exceptions and were regarded as exceptions. Un- 
 fortunately, just at the very moment when the 
 overthrow of the caucus system left the field free 
 for the intervention of the professional politician 
 in national politics, two events occurred, one 
 chargeable to the Whigs and the other to the 
 Democrats, which distinctly lowered the character 
 of both legislative and executive branches of the 
 national government. In 1828, Congress passed a 
 tariff law — the tariff of abominations, as it was 
 popularly caUed — which was in many of its pro- 
 visions so clearly a sacrifice of the general interests 
 of the country to the special interests of individual 
 
116 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 districts that Congress seemed for the time being 
 to have made politics rather than statesmanship its 
 ideal. In the years immediately following, the 
 President removed a large number of federal office- 
 holders, although they had done their duty prop- 
 erly, in order to be able to give their offices to his 
 political supporters. In the forty years before 
 Jackson's election there had been but seventy-four 
 removals from office. In the first year after his 
 election there were two thousand. Jackson himself 
 was perfectly frank as to the character of this 
 transaction. He was ready to accept and act on 
 Marcy's phrase, ''To the victor belong the spoils." 
 Patriotic and public spirited though he was, he 
 failed to see the evils which would result from 
 the adoption of the principle that public office was 
 a reward for partisan service. 
 
 The control of the federal offices as a prize of 
 successful activity gave the party leaders a sub- 
 stantial addition to the rewards that they were 
 able to offer their followers. It was not merely 
 the immediate money value of the positions that 
 counted. The incumbent of a post office or a 
 coUectorship, no matter how it was obtained, had 
 a certain social standing which was more valuable 
 than the salary of the office. It was a visible result 
 of successful endeavor, and one of which he was 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 117 
 
 proud. Moreover, the control of offices was a 
 prize whose value was enhanced as the country- 
 expanded. Each decade has seen a growth in the 
 number and importance of our public functionaries. 
 The aggregate of salaries paid by the government 
 has increased much faster than the population. 
 The aggregate influence of the officeholders has 
 increased even faster than their salaries. For over 
 half a century the administrative offices of the 
 United States, outside of the army, the navy, and 
 the judiciary, continued to be treated as rewards 
 for party services; and even within these three 
 departments political influence made itself felt to 
 the advantage of the politicians and their friends 
 and to the detriment of the public. 
 
 Thus was established, in spite of the Constitution, 
 that connection between legislature and executive 
 which the framers of the Constitution had sought 
 to prevent. The administrative officers of the 
 government had received their places as rewards 
 for their services to the party organization. The 
 members of the legislative branch owed their 
 nomination and election to office to the same 
 consideration. The executive could not dictate to 
 the legislature, nor could the legislature dictate to 
 the executive; but each was bound to the nomi- 
 nating power which was behind them by ties of 
 
118 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 gratitude for the past and of apprehension for 
 the future. 
 
 And the list of men who were thus bound to the 
 party organization did not end with the office- 
 holders and legislators. Every one who had 
 benefited by a partisan measure was interested 
 to keep the men that had passed it in power. 
 Each valuable franchise or lucrative subsidy which 
 was granted enlisted the recipient in the service 
 of the party which gave it to him. The less the 
 grant could be justified on grounds of public 
 policy, the more abject was his dependence on the 
 politicians for its continuance. The gravity of 
 this danger in national politics did not become 
 fully apparent until after the Civil War. Prior 
 to that time there had been a good deal of unwise 
 special legislation by the states and some by 
 Congress; but it had seldom taken such a shape 
 that it could become a party issue. The years from 
 1850 to 1857 saw a great many wasteful grants 
 of public land in aid of railroads ; but this was an 
 abuse which Democrats and Republicans had vied 
 with one another in promoting, and for which 
 North and South were equally responsible. Neither 
 organization and neither section could point the 
 finger of scorn at the other. 
 
 But the course of tariff legislation after the 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 119 
 
 Civil War was such that large financial interests 
 became concerned to keep the Republican party in 
 power. During the war the North had imposed 
 heavy internal revenue taxes on all manufacturing 
 industries ; and it had at the same time laid duties 
 on imports considerably higher than the internal 
 revenue taxes. The amount of protection actually 
 given was not represented by the whole duty, but 
 by the difference between the duty on things 
 produced abroad and the internal revenue tax on 
 the same things produced at home. After the close 
 of the war nearly all the internal revenue taxes 
 were abolished. It was expected that duties on 
 imports would be correspondingly reduced at the 
 same time. Measures to this effect were introduced 
 in 1867. They failed of passage, not because there 
 was any difference of opinion on the general policy, 
 but because the Senate and House could not agree 
 on details. 
 
 With the internal revenue tax abolished and the 
 duty on imports maintained, many industries 
 enjoyed an amount of protection which had never 
 been intended. The immediate result was a great 
 apparent prosperity in those particular lines of 
 industry. The secondary result was in many 
 instances overproduction and disaster. Which- 
 ever way the law worked, the representatives of 
 
120 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 the business in question found themselves in pos- 
 session of plausible arguments against a change. 
 "Will you destroy an industry which employs so 
 many men at high wages?" said the prosperous 
 ones. ' ' Will you add to the burdens of an industry 
 which is already in trouble?" said the unpros- 
 perous ones. The fact was that the abnormal 
 degree of protection had created an artificial set 
 of industrial conditions, and that when those 
 conditions were removed some one was bound to 
 suffer. 
 
 The alignment on the question of tariff reduction 
 was not at first a strictly partisan one. The 
 Pennsylvania Democrats were for the most part 
 protectionists. The Western Republicans were in 
 many instances free traders. But as time went 
 on the Republican party became more and more 
 committed to the maintenance of the tariff in 
 substantially its existing shape; or, more accu- 
 rately, to the principle that duties should not be 
 reduced unless the representatives of the protected 
 industries themselves approved. Under such cir- 
 cumstances the Republican party organization 
 could count on the support, not merely of the 
 officeholders it had rewarded or the congressmen 
 it had nominated, but of the industries to which 
 
PARTY MACHINERY 121 
 
 it had given protective duties that were or appeared 
 to be exorbitant. 
 
 In a somewhat similar way the silver mining 
 interests became affiliated with those who controlled 
 the councils of the Democratic party, and more 
 than once brought the monetary system of the 
 country into grave financial peril as a means of 
 promoting their own particular industry. I do 
 not mean that all or a majority of those who 
 advocated free silver coinage were consciously 
 intending to sacrifice the interest of the whole to 
 that of the part. Most of the Democratic leaders 
 had persuaded themselves that free silver would 
 be good for the country as completely as the 
 Republican leaders had persuaded themselves that 
 a high protective tariff was good for the country. 
 It is extraordinarily easy for a man to become 
 convinced that a thing that will put him and his 
 friends in public office is good for every one else. 
 
 This was what constituted the most dangerous 
 feature of the whole situation. For under in- 
 fluences like these, good men as well as bad lent 
 themselves to that perversion of the party system 
 which made them brokers in privileges rather than 
 brokers in opinions and led them to govern in the 
 interest of special classes rather than in the 
 interest of the whole body politic. 
 
THE EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 
 CONTEOL 
 
 In the previous lecture I explained in some 
 detail the causes which led to an abnormal develop- 
 ment of party government in the United States. 
 All will admit that this development has been 
 attended with grave evils. Our cities have been 
 made the prey of political organizations with 
 rather notorious frequency. Our states have at 
 times fared no better. In the administration of 
 our national government there have been fewer 
 open scandals, but there has been much dangerous 
 partisanship. 
 
 Though people have recognized the evils, they 
 have not recognized how deeply they were rooted 
 in our system of government ; and when they have 
 tried to correct them they have usually been con- 
 tent with superficial or partial remedies which did 
 not go to the heart of the matter. There have been 
 frequent movements for reform in individual cities 
 and states. There has been a wave of agitation 
 against machine control of politics which has 
 
EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 123 
 
 spread over the country within the last few years. 
 But the great majority of the proposed reforms 
 deal with symptoms and manifestations of the evil 
 under which we suffer, rather than with the under- 
 lying causes that produce that evil. They offer 
 palliatives rather than remedies. 
 
 The first and simplest palliative for the misuse 
 of party government is to put the other party into 
 office. ' ' Turn the rascals out ! " is the popular cry 
 whenever any extraordinary breach of public trust 
 is discovered in city or state. This is undoubtedly 
 a good policy as far as it goes. If politicians think 
 that they are going to be turned out of office when 
 they are found to have abused public confidence, 
 it will make them more careful to avoid flagrant 
 or notorious misuse of their power. This penalty 
 therefore has great use as a deterrent. As a 
 remedy its value is less clear. When the repre- 
 sentatives of one party are turned out the repre- 
 sentatives of another party come in — sometimes 
 immediately, sometimes after a brief spasm of 
 nonpartisan government. The old political ma- 
 chinery is at hand for the use of the other party. 
 The old temptations are there, and the old oppor- 
 tunities are there. The public has simply sub- 
 stituted one political machine for another. It is 
 better off, in so far as the new incumbents are 
 
124 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 frightened by the fate of their predecessors; it is 
 worse off, in so far as the new incumbents are 
 hungrier than their predecessors. Whether the net 
 result will be good or bad depends upon the cir- 
 cumstances of each individual case. As a general 
 rule, however, the policy of turning the rascals out 
 while leaving the organization of the body politic 
 unchanged has an outcome which has been aptly 
 described in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of 
 St. Luke: 
 
 ''When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, 
 he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and 
 finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house 
 whence I came out. 
 
 "And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and 
 garnished. 
 
 ''Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other 
 spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter 
 in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man 
 is worse than the first. ' ' 
 
 Some who see the futility of substituting one 
 party machine for another try to go one step 
 further back, and strike at the sources of the 
 corruption by penalizing the men who have bene- 
 fited by bad government. "Punish predatory 
 wealth ! " is the cry of these reformers. It was 
 this that gave force to the Granger movement in 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 125 
 
 1870, when the farmers of the upper Mississippi 
 valley were aroused by the misuse of the powers 
 of the railroads to take the matter of legislation 
 into their own hands and pass drastic laws con- 
 cerning rates. It is this same cry which makes 
 itself heard in both Democratic and Progressive 
 parties today. 
 
 But the punishment of predatory wealth is an 
 easier thing to promise than to perform. The 
 wealthy depredators almost always manage to turn 
 their profits into hard cash months or perhaps years 
 before the public is aroused to any serious action. 
 By this time the only persons that can be reached 
 are the small investors, who have had no part in 
 the ill-gotten profits and whose only sin is that 
 they have been too easily deceived. Alas for these 
 small investors! ^'Better a wrong victim than 
 none at all," says the public; ''we do not know 
 who is to blame, but we know that somebody ought 
 to suffer;" and the politician takes his choice 
 between sacrificing the interests of the investor as 
 a means of securing his own popularity, or levying 
 blackmail upon the investor as a price for not 
 sacrificing him. 
 
 For predatory poverty is just as dangerous a 
 thing as predatory wealth — a little better, perhaps, 
 in that it has the interest of a larger section of the 
 
126 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 community in view; a good deal worse, in that its 
 acts are habitually blinder and the amount of aim- 
 less destruction larger. Over and over again it has 
 happened that the politicians, by destroying the 
 profits of capital in obedience to a wave of popular 
 feeling, have interfered with the development of 
 the whole community for many years to come. 
 This was the case in the upper Mississippi valley 
 at the time of the Granger movement. Laws passed 
 in 1873 and 1874 hurt the railroad investors by 
 depriving them of their profits; but they hurt the 
 shippers and the general business interests of the 
 states far more, by preventing for five years that 
 investment of capital in railroads which was needed 
 to furnish adequate transportation for farm 
 products. This experience seems likely to be 
 repeated at the present day, when arbitration 
 boards are constantly compelling railroads to raise 
 their wages and the Interstate Commerce Com- 
 mission is constantly refusing to allow them to raise 
 their rates. The effects on transportation indus- 
 tries in discharge of men and curtailment of 
 service are already deplorable, and seem likely to 
 grow worse in the immediate future.* 
 
 * The last two sentences are left as they were written in 
 the spring of 1914. Since that time the Interstate Commerce 
 Commission has taken action allowing the railroads certain 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 127 
 
 The policy of turning the rascals out means a 
 change of hands that hold the reins of party 
 government. The policy of punishing predatory 
 wealth means a change in the direction in which 
 those hands drive us. Neither of these changes 
 goes far enough to free us from the political evils 
 under which we suffer. Neither of them solves our 
 problem as a whole. They are emotional remedies 
 rather than practical ones. They serve to punish 
 an individual offender — sometimes the right one, 
 sometimes the wrong one; they do not serve to 
 reform the evil inherent in our political system. 
 
 There are, however, several measures which have 
 been tried in the past that modify the system itself 
 in certain essential particulars and are offered by 
 their advocates as practical remedies for the dis- 
 eases of the body politic. These measures may 
 be grouped under five heads: 1. The separation 
 of national from local issues. 2. A nonpartisan 
 civil service. 3. The substitution of direct for 
 indirect methods of legislation. 4. Direct nomi- 
 nation by the people. 5. Assurance of direct 
 responsibility to the people by a system which 
 allows the voters to recall an of&cial who for any 
 
 needed increases of rates; and the whole industrial outlook 
 has been thereby improved. 
 
128 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 reason ceases to carry out the views of those who 
 elected him. The first two of these have been fully- 
 tried; the third, measurably so. The fourth is 
 still in the experimental stage ; the fifth has hardly 
 passed beyond the status of a project. I propose 
 to give a brief analysis of each of these remedies, 
 to show what it has accomplished or is likely to 
 accomplish, and what indirect evils and dangers, 
 if any, it brings in its train. 
 
 First in order of historical development is the 
 separation of national from local issues. This has 
 been so generally accepted as a principle by think- 
 ing men of the present generation that it is hard 
 for some of us to realize how recently it originated, 
 or how radical a proposition it seemed fifty years 
 ago. 
 
 In my own boyhood it was assumed that every 
 practical man belonged either to one party or to 
 the other, and that under all ordinary circum- 
 stances he voted the whole party ticket, national, 
 state, and local. In aggravated cases he might 
 ''scratch" an objectionable candidate without 
 losing the right to consider himself a reputable 
 member of the party and to ask such favors of 
 the party manager as reputable members might 
 expect. But to vote for the candidate of the other 
 
EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 129 
 
 party was an extreme of independence which 
 relatively few ventured to practice. 
 
 When this feeling prevailed it was almost 
 impossible to prevent party managers from nomi- 
 nating bad men for local offices at any time when 
 national issues were important. The more funda- 
 mental the national questions involved, the surer 
 did the political managers feel of being able to cast 
 the full party vote for local candidates, whether 
 good or bad. "Matters of national policy," they 
 would say to the voters, "are of so much greater 
 moment than anything which a state official can 
 accomplish within his own limited sphere of good 
 or harm that you are bound by the strongest 
 considerations not to weaken the party as a whole 
 by the threat to bolt a part of the ticket." The 
 Constitution had attempted to separate as far as 
 possible the activity of the national government 
 from that of the separate states and cities. The 
 effect of the party organization was to bind them 
 together. 
 
 Loudest in their cry for the obligations of party 
 regularity were the politicians of New York City. 
 But it was in New York City first of all that the 
 reaction in favor of independent voting on munici- 
 pal issues developed. In the years from 1867 to 
 1871 the Tweed Ring had plundered the public 
 
130 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 on so gigantic a scale that all good citizens felt 
 compelled to unite to overthrow it. In spite of 
 this union of good citizens, the Ring felt so secure 
 in its position as a representative of democratic 
 regularity that it openly defied public opinion 
 inside its own party as well as outside. In 1871 
 the issue between party regularity and good 
 municipal government was clearly drawn; and the 
 side which stood for good government won 
 decisively. The defeat of the Ring was followed 
 by the indictment and imprisonment of its leaders. 
 It was an object lesson of the first importance in 
 the possibility and the necessity of independent 
 municipal voting. 
 
 The lesson was taken to heart in other cities 
 besides New York. The election of 1871 was the 
 beginning of a radical change of sentiment regard- 
 ing the obligations of party regularity in connec- 
 tion with municipal affairs. Slowly but surely 
 people came to the conclusion that the mayor of 
 a city was first and above all things else a man 
 engaged in conducting a number of important 
 lines of business for the public benefit; that the 
 primary question was whether he was likely to be 
 honest and efficient in doing the business in hand; 
 and that his attitude on the tariff or the currency, 
 however important in determining whether you 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 131 
 
 wished to send Mm to Congress, had little or no 
 importance in determining his fitness to be mayor. 
 Forty years ago these were novel arguments. The 
 man who advanced them was considered an idealist. 
 People admitted their force as theories, but only 
 acted upon these theories on rare occasions, when 
 the party leaders had been detected in some 
 peculiarly atrocious attempt to sacrifice the public 
 interest to that of their friends and associates. 
 Today they are accepted in most parts of the 
 country as practical foundations of good local 
 government. "While it is still true that the voters 
 in a large number of towns prefer to vote the 
 straight party ticket, local as well as national, the 
 manager who presumes too much on this preference 
 learns to his cost how slight is the hold of party 
 regularity in local issues. Many cities, by adopting 
 the commission form of government, have tried to 
 make municipal politics permanently independent 
 of party organization; and the advantage of 
 accomplishing this result has been so great as to 
 outweigh the serious disadvantages, both in theory 
 and in practice, which attend the operation of the 
 commission system. 
 
 This change in sentiment has been rendered 
 much more effective by two recent changes in 
 political practice. 
 
132 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 The first of these is the separation of the dates 
 of local and national elections. In the old times 
 it was customary in most parts of the country to 
 vote for national, state, and local candidates on the 
 same day, if not on the same ticket. This of itself 
 made the sentiment of party regularity stronger 
 than it is at an election where people vote for local 
 officers only. The importance of the national issue 
 made the local issues look relatively unimportant. 
 The politicians took full advantage of this; and 
 they also developed complex systems of trading 
 votes in which members of both organizations 
 worked hand in hand to sacrifice the independent 
 nominees of each party and elect those who were 
 subservient to their respective machines. Separa- 
 tion of the dates has made it practicable to 
 separate the issues and has limited the opportuni- 
 ties for trading votes. The old argument about 
 regularity is far less effective when local and 
 national elections come on different days. 
 
 Another change which is bound to work in the 
 same direction is the election of United States 
 senators by the people. 
 
 In the old days it was never possible to elect a 
 legislature on the basis of state issues in a year 
 when a United States senator was going to be 
 chosen. You might approve the position of the 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 133 
 
 Republican party in your state on canals or on 
 prohibition, or on economical management of the 
 state treasury, or any one of a dozen local issues. 
 But if you wanted to see a Democrat elected to the 
 United States senate you had to vote for a Demo- 
 cratic candidate for the state legislature, even if 
 he was bibulous, extravagant, unprogressive, and 
 averse to building the canals you wanted. His 
 chief business, after all, was to elect a United 
 States senator. A legislature has to elect a senator 
 twice in six years. In those states, therefore, which 
 elected their legislatures for two years at a time, 
 two out of every three legislatures were chosen on 
 national issues and only one of the three on local 
 ones. This gave the leaders in party politics a 
 stronger hold over nominations and elections to 
 the state legislature than they would otherwise 
 have possessed, and had an effect on the conduct 
 of state politics and state business far more serious 
 than has generally been recognized. Prior to the 
 last amendment to the Constitution, complete 
 separation of state and national issues in politics 
 was impossible. Today it rests with the voters 
 themselves whether they will make it possible or 
 not. 
 
 It may be said of the separation of local and 
 national politics that it is unqualifiedly good in 
 
134 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 principle. It, however, stops far short of being 
 a complete solution of our problem; because the 
 prizes of either national or local politics, taken 
 separately, are sufficiently large to furnish remu- 
 neration to those who can control the nominating 
 machinery in either field. The separation deprives 
 the politicians of one effective weapon in forcing 
 machine candidates on an unwilling electorate. 
 But they have other equally effective ones left at 
 their command. 
 
 The second means of preventing the perversion 
 of party government has been the series of meas- 
 ures known as civil service reform, imposing 
 certain rudimentary tests of fitness upon candi- 
 dates for office and preventing the removal of 
 officeholders for political reasons. 
 
 When Marcy and Jackson advanced the theory 
 that federal offices ought to be given as a reward 
 for political activity, they had no idea of the 
 damage that they were doing. The force of 
 federal officeholders in 1830 was small in number; 
 the problems with which they had to deal were 
 simpler than is the case today. There was some 
 plausibility in the arguments used by Jackson 
 and his followers as to the danger of allowing 
 these officeholders to form an official class of 
 permanent appointees, removed from the mutations 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 135 
 
 of politics. But the practical working of the spoils 
 system was far worse than any one could have 
 anticipated. If people received and held offices 
 as a reward for political activity, it meant that 
 they were encouraged to serve their party at the 
 expense of the government. This not only led to 
 the appointment of men to positions for which they 
 had no special training or fitness — an increasing 
 evil as the service became more complex — but it 
 encouraged many of them to neglect their duties 
 and to connive at the plunder of the public 
 treasury by men who were influential in the party. 
 The $75,000,000 of revenue frauds discovered in 
 the second administration of President Grant were 
 but the logical consequence of the Jacksonian 
 principle that the spoils belong to the victor. 
 
 Organized agitation for reform of the federal 
 civil service began in 1867. This movement was 
 at first made the object of ridicule. But it 
 gathered strength when people saw what glaring 
 frauds were being perpetrated under the old 
 system. The danger of regarding appointment to 
 office as a matter of party favor was strikingly 
 brought home to the people in 1881, when Guiteau 
 assassinated President Garfield as a matter of 
 private revenge for his failure to get the position 
 he wanted. Even then it is doubtful whether the 
 
136 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Republican politicians who were in control of 
 Congress would have allowed any serious change 
 in a system which contributed to their power and 
 to their friends' profit, except for the strong 
 indications that the Democrats were going to be 
 successful in the presidential election of 1884. 
 Fearing that they would lose control of the federal 
 offices in any event, the Republicans in 1883 made 
 a virtue of necessity and passed a bill establishing 
 a classified civil service with preliminary exami- 
 nations and permanence of tenure. At first only 
 fourteen thousand offices were included in this 
 classified service; but successive presidents have 
 made use of the authority given them to extend 
 the scope of the provisions of the Act of 1883, so 
 that about three fifths of the four hundred thou- 
 sand federal employees are now subject to its 
 provisions. In local administration the reform 
 has not made corresponding progress; but a few 
 states and a considerable number of municipalities 
 are now following the example of the federal 
 government. 
 
 Civil service reform, like independent municipal 
 voting, is thoroughly good as far as it goes. Its 
 direct effect in promoting good government is, 
 however, limited. It applies almost entirely to the 
 lower ranks of the service. It does not apply to 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 137 
 
 the positions that give a man power to dominate 
 the policy of the country. The really important 
 federal offices are included for the most part in 
 the forty per cent of unclassified places, not in the 
 sixty per cent of classified ones. Those who have 
 observed the working of the system most carefully 
 believe that the chief good that we have accom- 
 plished is an indirect one. We have broken down 
 the theory that offices are to be regarded as spoils. 
 The people who continue to view public office in 
 that light no longer venture to avow their heresies 
 
 openly. 
 
 The two measures thus far described restrict the 
 power of the politicians by limiting the patronage 
 at their disposal. The three others go more to the 
 heart of the matter, and strive directly to curb 
 the power of party organizations in the making of 
 laws, the nomination of candidates, or the action 
 of officials after they have been nominated and 
 
 elected. 
 
 The first of these means is the system of direct 
 legislation by the people; either through the 
 medium of state constitutions or by the agency 
 of the referendum and the initiative. 
 
 The popular distrust of legislation by representa- 
 tive assembly dates from about the middle of the 
 nineteenth century. Down to that time it had been 
 
138 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 supposed that this was the natural method, and 
 in fact the only good method, for making laws in 
 a large commonwealth. In a small city all the 
 citizens can attend an assembly or town meeting, 
 can hear measures discussed, and can vote upon 
 them after full deliberation. The vote will repre- 
 sent more or less adequately the public opinion of 
 the community. But in a large city this is 
 difficult; and in a state or nation it is obviously 
 impossible. The system of representative govern- 
 ment was devised to meet this difficulty. It allows 
 people in each district to select the man whom 
 they regard as best fitted to act as their proxy. 
 These representatives can meet with one another, 
 to discuss the proposed measures of common con- 
 cern and decide what is best for the community; 
 and their votes, taken after such discussion, ought 
 to represent the general sense of the state or nation 
 in the same way that the vote of the town meeting 
 represents the general sense of the borough or 
 village. Such was the theory of representative 
 government as it was held with little question until 
 about 1850. 
 
 Such also had been the practical working of the 
 system in England in the days when Parliament 
 was establishing its supremacy. Down to the 
 seventeenth century the English Parliament was 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 139 
 
 essentially a place where representatives of dif- 
 ferent districts and different interests met in order 
 to shape their opinion intelligently on the affairs 
 of the kingdom. It created a national public 
 opinion in the same way that a town meeting 
 creates a local public opinion. There was no other 
 adequate agency for this purpose. There were few 
 newspapers. There was little opportunity for 
 public information of any kind regarding the 
 conduct of national and international affairs. Had 
 it not been for the necessity of calling Parliaments 
 in order to levy taxes, the king might have taken 
 advantage of this public ignorance to undermine 
 the liberties of different parts of the kingdom 
 separately. The country gentlemen who went to 
 Parliament found out what was going on. They 
 deliberated with representatives from other parts 
 of the kingdom and made plans for common action. 
 "When they went home they told the people who 
 had sent them what new measures were being 
 proposed or enforced and what they ought to think 
 about them. 
 
 The system of public law which was framed by 
 the English Parliaments was an expression of the 
 public opinion thus formed, and derived its essen- 
 tial force from the fact that the sentiment of the 
 nation was behind it, rather than from the fact 
 
140 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 that it had been discussed by two houses, one of 
 which was a representative body. But it was 
 natural enough that people who compared the 
 public law of England with that of France or 
 Austria and saw how much better it was should 
 overvalue the machinery that produced it, and 
 seek the cause of the excellence of English law not 
 in the intelligence of English public opinion but 
 in the details of its method of legislation. Montes- 
 quieu himself fell into precisely this error. 
 
 The men who framed our state and federal 
 constitutions made the same mistake as Montes- 
 quieu, and were much concerned to follow in detail 
 all the forms of English Parliamentary organiza- 
 tion. We tried to establish two legislative chambers 
 in every important political unit. It is because 
 Parliament had a House of Lords as well as a 
 House of Commons that so many of our munici- 
 palities, scattered all over the nation, have a board 
 of aldermen as well as a court of common council. 
 
 But it gradually appeared that these assemblies 
 did not fulfil the function which the theory of 
 representative government assigned them. They 
 were not places where the best men from each 
 community went to make up their minds about 
 public questions. The representatives were sent 
 with more or less specific instructions. They were 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 141 
 
 chosen for the purpose of putting into effect cer- 
 tain ideas and principles already expressed in the 
 party platform. The telegraph and the printing 
 press have deprived parliaments and congresses of 
 their function as agencies for the making of public 
 opinion. It was almost always formed before they 
 assembled. 
 
 But while the deliberative power of such assem- 
 blies has been diminished, their law-making power 
 has very greatly increased. The authority of 
 Parliament in the sixteenth century was preca- 
 rious; even in the seventeenth it was by no means 
 unquestioned. A parliamentary statute or ordi- 
 nance which did not have the will of the people 
 behind it was a plaything for the king to toy with 
 as he liked. Today an Act of Parliament in Eng- 
 land or of Congress in America, even when 
 distasteful to the majority of the people, is a 
 thing which cannot easily be disobeyed or ignored. 
 
 This change of conditions, by which parliamen- 
 tary assemblies ceased to make public opinion and 
 began to make laws which were independent of 
 public opinion, has rendered modern representative 
 government, in its practical working, a very dif- 
 ferent thing from what the theorists have contem- 
 plated. It has made it worth while for the 
 professional politician who is pursuing selfish ends 
 
142 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 of his own to see that the men elected to positions 
 in such a body are those that he can influence, and 
 that the statement of principles which the public 
 has exacted of them is such as he can approve. 
 Both of these opportunities have been given him 
 by his control of the nominating convention. If 
 it is completely under his hands he can dictate 
 both the candidates and the platform. If it is 
 partially under his hands he can at least prevent 
 the nomination of candidates of outspoken inde- 
 pendence and the adoption of platforms with 
 inconveniently frank declaration of principles. In 
 fact, it matters very little what the platform says, 
 so long as the candidate is Mr. Pliable and not 
 Mr. Obstinate. There are numerous precedents in 
 American politics for ignoring the pledges of party 
 platforms. In fact, the whole situation reminds 
 one of the experience of an Ohio politician who 
 tried to view the scenery of the Alleghany moun- 
 tains from the platform of a Pennsylvania railroad 
 train, instead of staying inside the car, as the rules 
 required. "When the conductor called his attention 
 to the Company's rules, he asked sharply what a 
 platform was made for if not to stand on. The 
 conductor closed the discussion by saying, ''You 
 are a practical politician, Mr. Blank. You should 
 know that a platform is not made to stand on; a 
 
EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 143 
 
 platform is made to get in on ! " Of course it may 
 happen that the political leaders, in their anxiety 
 to make the candidate suit the organization, may 
 fail to suit the people and therefore be defeated 
 at the polls; but inasmuch as there is usually 
 another party organization on the opposite side 
 working for subservient candidates and machine- 
 made platforms, this danger is not always so great 
 as it appears. 
 
 That part of the work of legislative bodies which 
 first caused popular dissatisfaction was their 
 liberality — to use no harsher word — in granting 
 valuable franchises to the politicians and their 
 friends without adequate regard for the protection 
 of the public. Even in the decades preceding the 
 Civil "War this practice aroused much adverse 
 criticism; and in the years immediately following 
 the war the power was so abused that constitutional 
 provisions were adopted by many of the states 
 which were directed specifically against this evil. 
 It became customary to require corporations to be 
 organized under general laws and to restrict or 
 prohibit the grant of special charters and the 
 special privileges which usually attach thereto. 
 
 This was the first step in limiting legislative 
 powers. A second followed almost immediately 
 thereafter. A new form of state constitution 
 
144 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 became fashionable, much longer and more explicit 
 than the old, which included a great deal of matter 
 that was not in a strict sense constitutional law 
 at all. A constitution, in the old and accredited 
 meaning of the word, prescribes the powers and 
 functions of the different departments of the 
 government. These new-fashioned constitutions 
 included a great many general laws regarding the 
 conduct of corporations and individuals. When- 
 ever a law of this kind was incorporated in a state 
 constitution it had the effect of limiting the power 
 of the legislature. If a great body of public and 
 private law was thus made part of the constitution, 
 this meant that the legislature had no authority 
 to make any fundamental changes in the law 
 except by the slow process of constitutional amend- 
 ment, which required a submission of the proposed 
 changes to a vote of the people. 
 
 These long American constitutions were severely 
 criticised by European publicists, who said that 
 we did not know what the word ''constitution'* 
 really meant. This criticism was in some respects 
 wide of the mark. The reason why our constitu- 
 tions were made so encyclopaedic was not that the 
 people of the United States had wrong ideas as to 
 what should be put in a constitution, but that they 
 were unwilling to leave the legislatures free to vote 
 
EEACTION AGAINST MACHINE 145 
 
 on certain important subjects, and therefore incor- 
 porated their views on these subjects in the 
 constitution as the easiest way of tying the 
 legislature's hands. 
 
 Within recent years they have found a more 
 direct means of accomplishing the desired result 
 by the introduction of the referendum. Under this 
 system a legislature submits proposed changes in 
 law to popular vote to determine whether they 
 shall become effective or not. This mode of legis- 
 lation originated in Switzerland. After many 
 experiments in the different cantons it was incor- 
 porated into the Swiss federal constitution in 1874. 
 Two decades later Switzerland supplemented the 
 referendum by the adoption of the initiative, or 
 right of proposal of laws by popular petition. 
 Some of our states have for many years applied 
 the principle of the referendum in a limited way. 
 Certain classes of legislative acts, such as the 
 contraction of state debts, or the selection of sites 
 for public buildings, have in such states required 
 confirmation by popular vote before they went 
 into effect. In 1897 Iowa made this requirement 
 general in regard to all grants of franchises of 
 any kind whatever. But it was not until 1898 that 
 the referendum was first adopted in its complete 
 form by South Dakota. Since that time about 
 
146 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 one third of the states have introduced it to a 
 greater or less extent into their organic law. 
 
 With the adoption of the principle of the refer- 
 endum, and the initiative which is apt to go with it, 
 the abandonment of the old theory of representa- 
 tive government is complete. The legislature is 
 now no longer an agency for framing public 
 opinion and making the laws which public opinion 
 demands, but a conference committee on the affairs 
 of the state, one of whose duties is to submit drafts 
 of proposed legislation to the people in order to 
 see whether the majority of voters likes them. 
 The power of the leaders of nominating conventions 
 to secure the passage of such laws as they wish 
 and the profits and emoluments incident thereto 
 is by this means seriously impaired if not wholly 
 destroyed. 
 
 But there are two other changes which are 
 intended by their advocates to complete the over- 
 throw of old-fashioned political machinery more 
 fully than can be accomplished by the referendum 
 or initiative. The first of these is the direct 
 primary. Observing the evils which arise from 
 nominating conventions, many of our reformers 
 would give the people the opportunity to nominate 
 candidates themselves. They would do away with 
 representative assemblies for nomination as well 
 
REACTION AGAINST MACHINE 147 
 
 as representative assemblies for legislation, and 
 would have the name of the party candidate 
 decided by a majority of the popular vote within 
 the party. 
 
 The direct primary is no new thing. It was 
 tentatively introduced in Pennsylvania about 
 1870. Abandoned in the East except by a few 
 municipalities, it was for two decades occasionally 
 tried in the West and frequently in the South. 
 But during these early years it was applied only 
 to town or county nominations. The movement for 
 state-wide primaries is a much more recent one. 
 It has gained rapid headway in the past three or 
 four years. In 1912 fifteen states held primaries 
 to determine preferences for presidential candi- 
 dates; and a considerable number of others used 
 this agency to nominate candidates for governor, 
 senator, or congressman at large. 
 
 Still more novel, and in some respects more 
 radical, is the fifth and last proposal of the advo- 
 cates of direct popular government. They would 
 make it possible for a certain proportion of the 
 voters to petition for the recall of an obnoxious 
 or unpopular official, and compel the holding of 
 a new election to see whether he is to be permitted 
 to serve out his term of office. Many localities are 
 experimenting with the system of the recall; but 
 
148 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 it is too soon to say how far those that have tried 
 it are satisfied with it, or how widely their example 
 is likely to be followed. The plan is still in the 
 experimental stage. 
 
 Regarding the success of all these more thorough- 
 going plans for curbing the power of professional 
 politicians, we may say what Ostrogorski, that 
 acute and careful Russian student of American 
 politics, says concerning the direct primary: 
 ''Neither the sanguine hopes of the reformers nor 
 the fears of the bosses have been entirely justi- 
 fied. . . . Frauds are not prevented by the new 
 system. Many bad candidates are defeated who 
 would be nominated in convention, but the hap- 
 hazard vote of the multitude rejects good men 
 against whom a convention would not dare to come 
 out." And after an enumeration of minor evils, 
 all the more significant because of Ostrogorski 's 
 sympathy with progressive views and methods, he 
 adds: "These unsatisfactory results of the direct 
 primary cannot be considered as accidental." 
 
 "Why these means have failed to realize the hopes 
 of their advocates, and what more fundamental 
 reforms in practice and in thought are necessary 
 to make government by the people effective, are 
 questions which I shall discuss in the concluding 
 lecture. 
 
VI 
 
 THE SEAT OF POWER TODAY 
 
 When party government was at its height the 
 leaders of the organization had a decisive influence 
 on the nomination of candidates and the passage 
 of laws. Public opinion counted for comparatively 
 little, except as an indirect deterrent of mistakes 
 that might lose elections. The measures which I 
 have described in the last lecture — the initiative, 
 the referendum, the direct primary — were efforts 
 to make organization count for less and public 
 opinion for more. Why have they disappointed 
 the hopes of their advocates? 
 
 Chiefly because it is impossible, except in grave 
 emergencies, to make unorganized public opinion 
 effective in practical politics. If, as Mr. Root well 
 says in his book on The Citizen's Part in Govern- 
 ment, all the voters went to the polls without 
 previous discussion and cast their several votes for 
 the candidates that each man liked best, the great 
 majority of votes would be thrown away. ' ' Human 
 nature is such that long before an election could 
 be reached some men who wished for the offices 
 
150 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 would have taken steps to secure in advance the 
 support of voters; some men who had business or 
 property interests which they desired to have 
 protected or promoted through the operation of 
 government would have taken steps to secure 
 support for candidates in their interest; and some 
 men who were anxious to advance principles or 
 policies that they considered to be for the good 
 of the commonwealth would have taken steps to 
 secure support for candidates representing those 
 principles and policies. All of these would have 
 got their friends and supporters to help them, and 
 in each group a temporary organization would 
 have grown up for effective work in securing 
 support. Under these circumstances, when the 
 votes came to be cast, the candidates of some of 
 these extempore organizations would inevitably 
 have a plurality of votes, and the great mass of 
 voters who did not follow any organized leadership 
 would find that their ballots were practically 
 thrown away by reason of being scattered about 
 among a great number of candidates instead of 
 being concentrated so as to be effective. ' ' 
 
 We see this fact elucidated in the workings of 
 the direct primary. Occasionally it happens that 
 a man is so prominent or so conspicuously well 
 fitted for the duties of the office that he can secure 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 151 
 
 votes enough to nominate him by the spontaneous 
 impulse of his fellow citizens. But such cases are 
 rare. A preliminary campaign is usually neces- 
 sary. The man of ability who will not take the 
 trouble to make such a campaign gets fewer votes 
 than his less able opponent who has the time and 
 money to spend in organizing his followers and 
 creating a public sentiment in his behalf. It has 
 become a proverb in certain states that any man 
 who wishes to be chosen for office must incur the 
 trouble of making two campaigns, one for nomi- 
 nation and the other for election. Political chicane 
 has not been eliminated. It has simply been trans- 
 ferred from the hands of a party organization to 
 the hands of individuals or groups of individuals. 
 The managers of the old party machines tried 
 to find out what their followers wanted by personal 
 conversation between man and man. The ward 
 leader talked with the men whose votes he con- 
 trolled, and knew what they thought and felt. 
 The district leader talked with the ward leaders, 
 and on the basis of that conversation made up his 
 mind what he wished to do. The members of the 
 county committee talked with the leaders in the 
 several districts and obtained full knowledge of 
 the demands of party men in different sections. 
 The successful politician was the man who under- 
 
152 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 stood the art of mixing with men, of getting at 
 what they wanted and coming to an understanding 
 with them as to the degree in which their several 
 wants could be gratified. It was thus that the 
 sentiment was organized which could carry con- 
 ventions and determine nominations. It was on 
 these means, supplemented by the influence of 
 great orators and debaters who argued in defense 
 of the plans thus framed, that the older politicians 
 relied for securing acceptance of their projects. 
 
 The modern politician must go to work in a 
 different way. He must appeal to a wider public 
 sentiment — a sentiment which has been created, 
 not by a vast number of separate conversations but 
 by the influence of a few newspapers and maga- 
 zines upon their readers. It is through the press — 
 daily, weekly, or monthly — that the American 
 people forms its opinion as to men and measures. 
 The success or failure of a candidate in securing 
 the nomination depends largely upon the support 
 which he receives from this quarter. The man who 
 accomplishes most in modern politics is he who 
 recognizes this fact most fully. It is not by the 
 personal influence which was characteristic of the 
 old party system that nominations are now secured 
 and the way made clear for the passage of laws. 
 It is by the influence of the printed page, which 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 153 
 
 enables the man who controls it to determine 
 thousands of votes for good or for evil. 
 
 In 1824 we overthrew the legislative caucus as 
 a dominant power in politics, and left the field 
 open for the party machine. Today we are over- 
 throwing the party machine and are leaving the 
 field open to the press. In neither case have we 
 provided for the expression of a spontaneous or 
 unorganized public opinion. We have simply sub- 
 stituted one method of organization for another. 
 Under the old system the goodness or badness of 
 a party machine determined whether Congress 
 would make good laws or the administration good 
 appointments. Under the new system the good- 
 ness or badness of newspapers is likely to determine 
 whether the initiative and the referendum will be 
 used to promote intelligent legislation; whether 
 the direct primary will give us good candidates or 
 bad candidates; whether we shalf be able to sur- 
 mount the perils with which the experiment of the 
 recall is attended. 
 
 Among the many changed conditions of Ameri- 
 can politics, the growth of an independent press is 
 perhaps the most important. Prior to 1850 it was 
 regarded as almost indispensable for a newspaper 
 to belong to a party. Before the nominating 
 convention met the different sections of the party 
 
154 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 would have different newspapers supporting their 
 own particular candidates or measures. After the 
 nominating convention was over the newspapers 
 were expected to fall into line just as the different 
 sections of the party fell into line ; and they quite 
 generally did so. The papers that were really 
 independent were few in number, and might be 
 divided into two classes: the very good and the 
 very bad. Journals of each of these classes found 
 their advice neglected by astute politicians; the 
 very good, because their readers were supposed 
 to be cranks, and too frequently gave ground for 
 that supposition; the very bad, because they were 
 known to be for sale to the highest bidder, so that 
 their support carried no weight. 
 
 The growth of the free soil party in the North 
 and the consequent agitation in favor of secession 
 in the South gave the press a somewhat greater 
 importance and influence in party councils. The 
 slavery question was one which could not be dealt 
 with by the old political methods of discussion and 
 compromise. A kind of popular feeling was grow- 
 ing up in both North and South which the politi- 
 cians who framed the compromises of 1848 were 
 powerless to control. Under such circumstances 
 journals like the Springfield Republican, the New 
 York Tribune, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 155 
 
 the North, or like the Charleston Mercury and — to 
 take an instance of a different kind — De Bow's 
 Review in the South, were making the opinion 
 which the politicians had to be content to follow. 
 The press in 1860 was thus a far more potent factor 
 'in politics than it had been ten years earlier. But 
 it was not as yet a dominant factor. People still 
 liked better to listen to debates than to read 
 editorials; they still preferred to form their 
 opinion from the spoken word rather than from 
 the printed page. Nor were the newspapers and 
 reviews in any true sense independent of party. 
 They did more to make the party than they did 
 before, but when it was made they stood closely 
 by it as an organization. For the sake of mould- 
 ing the opinions of their fellow Republicans or 
 Democrats on some points, they were content to 
 forego the privilege of expressing their own 
 personal views upon others. 
 
 The real power of the press in politics — the 
 power possessed by a paper that tells people the 
 things they want to know, in the face of the 
 hostility of one party machine and the indiffer- 
 ence of another — was accidentally discovered by 
 the New York Times in the summer of 1871. 
 Tweed was at that time in complete control of the 
 city government. The efforts of political rivals 
 
156 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 to shake his dominance, within his own party or 
 outside of it, had proved futile. The attempts to 
 overthrow him by conventional methods were 
 abortive. The Democratic machine throughout the 
 state was his to direct. Even the Republican 
 leaders were unwilling to engage in active oppo- 
 sition to a system of plunder which, though 
 organized on a larger scale than their own, was 
 yet a natural development of political methods 
 with which they were familiar and by which many 
 of them profited. 
 
 While matters were in this shape, a bookkeeper 
 in one of the departments of the city government 
 had gradually collected evidence that the public 
 was being robbed on a large scale. He offered this 
 evidence to one New York paper after another. 
 Incredible as it may now seem, one paper after 
 another refused it. The newspapers of that day 
 were afraid to publish facts which the party 
 machine preferred to keep quiet. Finally the New 
 York Times undertook the campaign of publicity. 
 I am told that it did so with much reluctance and 
 grave apprehension of the possible consequences 
 to itself. But the Times was not being very 
 actively supported or highly valued by the Repub- 
 lican machine at the time; and it decided to take 
 the chance that the people might be interested to 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 157 
 
 read the detailed evidence as to the way in which 
 millions of dollars were being extracted from their 
 pockets every month. 
 
 The result astounded the proprietors of the 
 Times as much as it did anybody else. Men who 
 had listened apathetically when orators like 
 Beecher or Evarts described the way in which the 
 city was being plundered seized eagerly upon the 
 facts when they were put before them in cold type. 
 The printed page had come into its own heritage. 
 It could do things which the spoken word could 
 not do. People called for copies of the Times 
 faster than the press could furnish them. These 
 were days when the sale of other papers on trains 
 and on the streets had practically ceased, because 
 people wanted the Times and nothing else. I can 
 myself remember the distressed lament of some 
 of the Republican leaders that people would insist 
 on getting the Times, whose party regularity was 
 not above suspicion, merely because it gave them 
 the information they desired, when they could 
 have got the same information reprinted in other 
 papers one day later without sacrifice of their 
 party consciences. But it was in vain that they 
 protested. The Staats-Zeitung joined with the 
 Times by publishing the facts in the German 
 tongue. Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly drove 
 
158 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 the lesson home by his inimitable cartoons. In two 
 short months public opinion, formed under the 
 influence of these three newspapers, became over- 
 whelming in its force. The Cooper Union meeting 
 of April 6th, before the newspaper disclosures, had 
 accomplished nothing. The Cooper Union meeting 
 of September 4th, after the newspaper disclosures, 
 was a political upheaval. The indictment of 
 corrupt officials followed in October, a crushing 
 defeat for Tammany as an organization in the 
 elections of November; and before the close of the 
 calendar year the power of Tweed was at an end. 
 
 The experience of the New York Times in 1871 
 taught at least two distinct lessons : first, that facts 
 presented by a newspaper were more effective than 
 the same facts presented by orators of eminence; 
 second, that if a newspaper had such facts in its 
 possession it could commercially afford to print 
 them even if the party leaders did not wish them 
 printed. But the press of the country was rather 
 slow to learn these lessons. A few newspapers in 
 our larger cities assumed an attitude of political 
 independence in municipal affairs. A somewhat 
 larger number adopted the policy of giving an 
 unvarnished tale of facts in their news columns 
 as distinct from their editorial pages. It was not 
 until about ten years later that Joseph Pulitzer 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 159 
 
 familiarized the public with the theory that a 
 newspaper's first duty was to give its readers 
 information. It was Pulitzer's principle to decide 
 whether a thing should be published and in what 
 shape a thing should be published, solely on the 
 basis of its value as news; with relatively little 
 reference to political or moral considerations, 
 except so far as these considerations might affect 
 the readability of the article and the consequent 
 sale of the paper. 
 
 Of the good and the evil that was brought into 
 journalism by this new method, as introduced by 
 Pulitzer and carried out still further by some of 
 his followers, I shall not undertake to speak in 
 detail. We are concerned only with its great and 
 almost revolutionary consequences upon the rela- 
 tion between newspapers and parties. No longer 
 could the party leader hope that a view of the 
 facts which was accepted as profitable by him and 
 his associates in a convention would be presented 
 to the public by a devoted band of newspaper 
 followers and received as gospel truth by nine 
 tenths of the men who read those newspapers. 
 The statement had to be what the newspaper men 
 themselves regarded as profitable for them to 
 publish. The power of moulding public opinion 
 had passed out of the hands of the party leader 
 
160 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 and into those of the editor. And as if the poli- 
 tician's troubles with the daily press were not 
 enough, weekly and monthly papers rose in great 
 numbers which undertook with more or less success 
 to tell the people the facts which the editors 
 thought that they wanted; publications which did 
 for the members of the rural community what the 
 daily papers did for the people of our larger cities 
 in giving them data, sometimes right and some- 
 times wrong, for judging public questions inde- 
 pendently of party utterances. 
 
 Is this change in the method of organizing 
 public opinion a good one or a bad one? The old- 
 fashioned man of affairs, whether in politics or 
 out of it, is inclined to think it almost wholly bad. 
 The editor of the new school and the reader who 
 takes his opinion from the editor are apt to think 
 it wholly good. The truth, as usual, lies between 
 the two extremes. It is a change which is pre- 
 dominantly for the better, but one which has 
 possibilities of evil as well as of good. And 
 according £is the press uses its new power for evil 
 or for good will the results of the referendum and 
 the direct primary, and other similar agencies of 
 modern democracy, be also evil or good. 
 
 The organization of public opinion by the news- 
 papers instead of by the party managers has 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 161 
 
 certain distinct and obvious advantages. In the 
 first place, it involves a more direct appeal to 
 reason. A newspaper owes its power to the fact 
 that its readers think as its editor wishes them to 
 think. Their opinion may be right or wrong. The 
 evidence presented to them may be complete or 
 incomplete. But the opinion is in any case a real 
 opinion, based on an examination of important 
 statements. 
 
 In the next place, this opinion is formed in the 
 open instead of being shaped by secret conferences, 
 as was so often the case under old-fashioned party 
 leadership. The newspaper makes its appeal in 
 broad daylight. If the appeal is an unfair one, 
 those who are arguing on the other side have at 
 least a chance to see what is being said and done 
 by their opponents and to try to prove that it is 
 unfair. Government by newspapers is government 
 by discussion. It is perhaps the only form of 
 government by discussion which is practicable in 
 a large community. 
 
 In the third place, the appeal which the news- 
 paper makes to its readers almost necessarily takes 
 the form of an appeal to their judgment rather 
 than to their selfishness. A party manager work- 
 ing under the old system is constantly occupied in 
 pointing out to his followers how their personal 
 
162 UNDEECURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 interests would be advanced by some measure or 
 some candidate. A newspaper or magazine that 
 should adopt this policy would soon find its 
 influence confined within a limited circle. The 
 general public would suspect, and rightly suspect, 
 that a measure which one group of voters was 
 urged to support on purely selfish grounds would 
 be of doubtful benefit to the community as a whole. 
 A journalist may himself often be led to support 
 certain measures or certain candidates for reasons 
 of self-interest. But his appeal to his readers for 
 support must be placed on broader grounds than 
 this in order to be effective. 
 
 Such are the patent and obvious advantages of 
 having the organization of popular opinion left in 
 the hands of the public press. They are so funda- 
 mental in character that we are sometimes tempted 
 to overlook the disadvantages and dangers with 
 which this process is attended. The very fact that 
 makes the appeal of the press an almost ideal agency 
 in democratic government when rightly used, corre- 
 spondingly increases the perils when it is used 
 wrongly. The power of an editor is a power to 
 influence public thinking. If he confines himself 
 to legitimate methods of infiuence he realizes 
 Bagehot's ideal of government by discussion. If 
 he uses it wrongly and leads his readers to act on 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 163 
 
 imperfect information, lie not only turns the 
 action of tlie government into wrong channels, but 
 he effects the more permanent and disastrous harm 
 of poisoning public opinion at its source. 
 
 I do not mean that this last in its extreme form 
 is a very common thing. "While unscrupulous men 
 occasionally acquire power as journalists, they are 
 no more numerous in that profession than in any 
 other. But there is a good deal of danger of 
 unintentional poisoning of public opinion; danger 
 that the journalist, in his honest desire to promote 
 a particular measure, will encourage the public in 
 habits and methods of thought which are antago- 
 nistic to the success of democratic government. 
 
 The first and most frequent source of harm is 
 that while he is pretending to appeal to the 
 judgment of his readers he really appeals to their 
 emotion. 
 
 A man who desires to make his newspaper 
 popular is under a constant temptation to pander 
 to the prejudices of his public. Without actually 
 making grave misstatements, he can print the facts 
 which they like in large type and suppress or 
 relegate to obscure columns the facts which they 
 do not like. Under these circumstances their 
 judgment is distorted and their preconceived 
 impressions confirmed, until they become incapable 
 
164 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 of weighing the real evidence on which their 
 political action ought to be based. If another 
 paper tries to furnish them the true facts, they 
 disbelieve it. They are accessible only to the kind 
 of evidence that their own particular journal 
 prefers to furnish. 
 
 The editor, under such circumstances, often 
 makes the excuse that he gave his readers what 
 they wanted. Even if he were an ordinary private 
 citizen, this excuse would hardly pass current. 
 The man who puts aniline dyes into children's 
 candy is not excused by the fact that the children 
 like to have their candy bright colored. And the 
 newspaper man is not an ordinary private citizen. 
 \ He is by the course of recent events put into a 
 place of public responsibility. He has it in his 
 power more than any other man to see that the 
 country is governed well or ill. If he enables his 
 readers to base their votes on organized informa- 
 tion he does service. If he leads them to base those 
 votes on organized emotion he does irreparable 
 wrong. 
 
 I do not know whether it was President Lowell 
 or some one else who coined the phrase "organized 
 emotion." "Whoever may have been the inventor, 
 it is an accurate description of something which 
 gravely threatens the stability of American govern- 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 165 
 
 ment. Every student of history knows what 
 fearful mistakes democracies have made under the 
 influence of emotion evoked by popular orators; 
 how thousands of men, listening to an appeal to 
 prejudice veiled in the form of exposition of fact, 
 have taken leave of their judgment and brought 
 their commonwealths to the brink of ruin or even 
 beyond it. Our own people have not been wholly 
 exempt from this danger. ''The curse of the 
 country," said Daniel Webster in a moment of 
 bitterness, ' ' has been its orators. ' ' This dangerous 
 gift of the orator, of making emotion take the place 
 of information, is one to which the newspaper 
 has today fallen heir. 
 
 The danger which will result to the common- 
 wealth if our political action is based on organized 
 emotion rather than organized information is 
 peculiarly great in connection with the direct 
 primary. 
 
 Under the old-fashioned system of nomination 
 by party conventions, two questions were always 
 asked concerning a candidate: first, did the party 
 want him? and second, could he be elected? It 
 was not enough for the leaders to know whether 
 the candidate was popular with the majority of 
 their followers. It was an equally important 
 question — in fact, in a great many instances a much 
 
166 UNDERCUERENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 more important question — whether he could attract 
 a sufficient number of votes from the opposite 
 party, or hold a sufficient number of doubtful votes 
 within his own party, to make his election reason- 
 ably certain. The managers wanted to get the 
 strongest candidate they could; and the strongest 
 candidate was not always the man for whom his 
 party associates were most enthusiastic. He was 
 commonly a man of more moderate views than 
 they. Take a salient instance, which has now 
 become historical. In the presidential campaign 
 of 1860, if the Republican convention had consulted 
 the wishes of the majority of voters within the 
 party it would have nominated Seward. He had 
 taken strong ground against slavery; and northern 
 Republicans who were excited by the heat of our 
 slavery contest saw in him their natural champion. 
 But sagacious men knew that Seward could not 
 be elected, and convinced the convention of the 
 soundness of that view. It nominated Lincoln — a 
 man who spoke less of abstract principles than 
 Seward and more of constitutional law; less of the 
 abolition of slavery — however much he may have 
 had this at heart — and more of the preservation 
 of the Union. The nomination of Lincoln was a 
 distinct disappointment to extremists throughout 
 the North; but it appealed to moderate men in 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 167 
 
 states adjoining the Potomac and the Ohio, whose 
 votes were necessary and sufficient to elect him. 
 
 This instance is a tjrpical one. The convention 
 system has been distinctly favorable to the nomi- 
 nation of businesslike candidates for the principal 
 offices — of candidates who were unsatisfactory to 
 some of the extreme elements in their own party 
 and satisfactory to the moderate men in the 
 opposite party. It has tended to give us men who 
 appealed to the country instead of appealing to a 
 group. With the substitution of the direct primary 
 we are bound to lose something of this advantage. 
 We are almost certain to see a larger number of 
 candidates who represent extreme views on either 
 side. To prevent this danger from becoming fatal 
 the press of the country will have to recognize the 
 responsibility that is placed in its hands by the 
 new conditions, and strive to moderate rather than 
 to accelerate the tides of unreasoning emotion. 
 
 Closely akin to the appeal to prejudice is the 
 appeal to impatience; and there is great danger 
 that the modern editor will be tempted to make 
 use of this appeal to the detriment of good 
 government. 
 
 The work of governing a commonwealth — 
 nation, state, or city — is a complicated and difficult 
 piece of business. It never goes wholly right. The 
 
168 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 statesman must sacrifice some things which he 
 regards as highly desirable in order to secure other 
 things which he deems fundamentally essential. 
 He alone knows how necessary the sacrifice is and 
 how much he himself regrets it. The man who 
 looks on from outside thinks that the statesman is 
 doing it lightly. Such a man sees the loss to the 
 shipper from allowing an increased railroad rate. 
 He does not see that he must let the railroad charge 
 that rate in order to secure the necessary develop- 
 ment of the transportation system of the commu- 
 nity. He sees the loss from having American 
 vessels pay tolls in the Panama Canal. He does 
 not see the gain in foreign relations due to the 
 adoption of an honorable policy. A journalist is 
 tempted to make himself popular by voicing the 
 complaints of his readers. By advocating a short- 
 sighted policy which works for today only, he can 
 make a profit for himself; and few of those who 
 buy his paper foresee the loss that comes to the 
 country if his advice is followed, or put the blame 
 on his shoulders after it has come. 
 
 This sort of captious criticism is one of the 
 incidental evils which has attended government 
 by discussion in all ages and in every state. 
 "Armies," says Macaulay, "have won victories 
 under bad generals, but no army ever won a 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 169 
 
 victory under a debating society." Once let the 
 officials of a democracy be placed at the mercy of 
 a purely critical press, and the efficiency of 
 American democracy — not to say American democ- 
 racy itself — is at an end. It is this that makes 
 the proposed institution of the recall so perilous. 
 The recall is based on the theory that people should / 
 be encouraged to judge of a man's work when it 
 is half done. On terms like these efficient and far- 
 sighted administration is impossible. The recall 
 may seem to be justified in a few cases where an 
 official has palpably betrayed his trust without 
 quite rendering himself liable to impeachment; 
 but for one case of that kind where it does good, 
 there are likely to be a dozen cases where it will 
 prevent an official from assuming the sacrifices 
 and incurring the odium which any farsighted 
 plan of government is apt to involve before its 
 results are understood. 
 
 Most of the public discussion of the recall has 
 centered about the recall of judges. We are told 
 that the judicial office is something apart by itself, 
 and that there are special dangers which make the 
 recall inapplicable in this particular instance. I 
 believe that this distinction between the recall of 
 judges and the recall of other officials is an essen- 
 tially false one; that every official should be 
 
170 UNDEECURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 allowed to serve out his term, except in case of 
 misconduct or incapacity; and that the nation 
 which claims the right to change its mind as to 
 the fitness of an official during the middle of his 
 term is proving its incapacity for democratic 
 government. It is either unwilling to take the 
 proper care in the selection of officials or unable 
 to have patience until the allotted work is done 
 before passing judgment on its merits. 
 
 A third danger to which the press is subject is 
 the assumption of omniscience. In this respect, 
 as in the other two that I have just named, the 
 newspaper or magazine is simply falling in with 
 the prepossessions of its readers. We all rather 
 like to feel that we know everything that is worth 
 knowing. The present tendencies in our education, 
 which lead us to scatter our study over a large 
 range of subjects, tend to strengthen this feeling. 
 Small wonder, then, that the newspaper, bringing 
 a vast range of information within reach of the 
 people, should claim to inform them on many 
 details of business and politics, of science and art, 
 which must necessarily be left to the judgment of 
 the expert if they are to be effectually dealt with 
 in practice. The editor is constantly tempted to 
 flatter his readers into believing that they know 
 everything about government which is worth know- 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 171 
 
 ing, and that anybody who claims to know more 
 than the general public is either an aristocrat or 
 an impostor. 
 
 There is a theory that if you only find out what 
 the people want you will know what the govern- 
 ment ought to do. Like most political aphorisms, 
 this is a mixture of truth and falsehood, of prac- 
 tical good sense and unpractical idealism. If we 
 mean by this statement that the ideals of the people 
 and the policy of the government must be in 
 harmony, and that one cannot be a great deal 
 better or a great deal worse than the other without 
 strain and damage and threat of revolution, it is 
 right. But if we interpret it to mean that the 
 people as a whole are competent to decide how the 
 business of government should be managed in each 
 particular instance, it is wrong. This distinction 
 is as old as Aristotle's Politics itself. Aristotle 
 showed how the state which deserves the title of 
 "republic" is one where the laws conform to the 
 general wishes of the people, but where at the same 
 time people are content to elect, for the actual 
 conduct of a nation's affairs, men better trained 
 than themselves in the details of public business. 
 
 Among the qualities needed to make a democracy 
 successful I should agree with Aristotle in laying 
 great emphasis upon the readiness to value experts 
 
172 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 as they deserve to be valued. The larger and more 
 complex the affairs of the state, the less is it pos- 
 sible for each member of the people to inform 
 himself on all the details of public business. In a 
 small country town each intelligent citizen is 
 competent to fill almost any office at short notice. 
 In a city it requires training to be a successful head 
 of one of the departments. In a nation the need of 
 specialization for the proper command of the army 
 and navy and for the proper administration of 
 justice is even more conspicuously necessary. 
 Amid the keen competition that now exists between 
 different peoples, the permanent influence of the 
 United States depends on having its public service 
 carried on with a high degree of technical efficiency. 
 The more complex our development is, the more 
 urgent is the need of self-restraint and modesty 
 in our public opinion; such self-restraint and 
 modesty as will lead us to be content with judging 
 the expert by the results which he achieves instead 
 of trying to prescribe the methods that he shall 
 follow. 
 
 If we really value experts properly we must 
 show our faith by our works and be prepared to 
 pay them more in the future than we have been 
 willing to pay them in the past. The parsimony 
 of the American people in this respect has become 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 173 
 
 a. byword. The salaries of our officers in the army 
 and the navy are notoriously low as compared with 
 what men of equal ability could obtain in private 
 business. We refuse to give our judges more than 
 a fraction of the income which they could obtain 
 by the practice of their profession. We take the 
 ground that the honor of serving the country is so 
 great that a man should be content to do it at 
 great pecuniary sacrifice. Fortunately there are 
 many able men among us who are content to accept 
 public service on these niggardly terms. Some 
 have private fortunes of their own. Some are 
 willing to remain poor for the sake of doing their 
 duty to an ungrateful commonwealth. But the 
 general effect of our unwillingness to grant first- 
 rate salaries to first-rate men is deplorable. The 
 waste due to inefficient work and unnecessary red 
 tape is vastly in excess of the economy realized. 
 To save a few hundred thousand dollars in our 
 diplomatic service, we lose millions in our dealings 
 with other states. We are undertaking to hold our 
 place among the nations of the world in a competi- 
 tion which grows every year more keen. But the 
 United States is the one country which begrudges 
 the money necessary and the expert ability neces- 
 sary to give its citizens a high-grade public service 
 at home and abroad. 
 
174 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 Besides placing the proper value upon the ser- 
 vices of officials, we must also be prepared to give 
 them a proper degree of independence. We must 
 not keep nagging at them. 
 
 In a well-managed private business the man at 
 the head keeps careful control of the general policy 
 and takes great pains to select good men to attend 
 to the several parts. But he does not spend his 
 time interfering with their management of details. 
 If he did, it would interfere both with his efficiency 
 in his work and with their efficiency in theirs. 
 What is true of the individual head of a private 
 business is even more true of the directors of a 
 well-managed corporation. They determine the 
 policy, and choose the men to carry it out. In 
 order to have time and strength to do these things 
 wisely, they leave the details of engineering and 
 of accounting to the officials whom they have 
 selected for the purpose. 
 
 The position of a voter in a democracy is essen- 
 tially that of a director rather than that of an 
 official. It is his function to place the right men 
 at the head of certain departments of the govern- 
 ment and prescribe the ends which they should 
 try to attain. The means by which they are to 
 reach these ends should generally be left to the 
 judgment of the officials themselves. But this 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 175 
 
 principle, which is understood in every well- 
 conducted private business, is not understood in 
 public business. We lay more stress on the need 
 of watching our officers than we should, and less 
 stress on the need of choosing them carefully and 
 leaving them to themselves. Instead of rejoicing 
 when we can put a department of the government 
 in the hands of a man who knows more than we 
 do about the methods of conducting it, we are 
 jealous of superior knowledge and watch its 
 manifestations with suspicion. 
 
 There are certain points on which it is possible 
 for the citizens of the community as a body to 
 form an intelligent public opinion. There are cer- 
 tain other points on which opinion is valueless 
 without technical training behind it ; and the deci- 
 sion of these points must be left to the different 
 groups of men who have the expert knowledge 
 which is necessary. The whole town can decide 
 where a bridge ought to be built and how much 
 should be spent in building it. It requires knowl- 
 edge of mathematics to know how to design the 
 bridge, and knowledge of physics and chemistry 
 to know what sort of materials to use in its con- 
 struction. The whole community can know whether 
 it wants to have railroads owned by the govern- 
 ment or by private corporations. It requires 
 
176 UNDERCURRENTS IN POLITICS 
 
 knowledge of engineering to know how to locate 
 such railroads properly, and knowledge of political 
 economy to know what system of rates can be 
 adopted. Any attempt to settle scientific matters 
 by public opinion means rotten bridges and bank- 
 rupt railroads. 
 
 The American people has made some progress 
 toward learning this lesson. We no longer entrust 
 politicians with the command of armies, as was so 
 frequently done in Athens or Rome. A proposal 
 to take the conduct of the army in the field out 
 of the hands of army officers and put it into the 
 hands of members of Congress, which was seriously 
 urged in 1848, would seem quite laughable today. 
 But we need to carry the lesson further in the 
 next century than we have in the last. We are 
 in more immediate competition with Europe now 
 than we were fifty years ago. To keep our place 
 in this competitive struggle, we must prove that 
 a democracy can manage business as well as a 
 monarchy; that it can show the same care in the 
 selection of officials and the same self-restraint in 
 judging of their work before it is done. The people 
 as a whole must assume the double duty of voting 
 intelligently on matters which public opinion can 
 decide and leaving to the specialist matters which 
 can only be decided by the specialist; of holding 
 
SEAT OF POWER TODAY 177 
 
 the expert responsible for results and promoting 
 the man who has done business well rather 
 than the one who flatters the people that he is 
 going to do business in a way they will like and 
 understand. Thus, and thus only, can we com- 
 bine two things which are equally essential to 
 American democracy if it is to hold its place among 
 the nations: popular sovereignty and efficient 
 government. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Acts of Parliament, 141; 
 contrasted with Acts of 
 Congress, 42 
 
 Adams, Charles Francis, 71 
 
 Anti-Trust Act of 1890, 74, 
 75, 87-89 
 
 Arbitration Acts, 78, 87 
 
 Aristocracy, in American 
 colonies, 3-11, 36; perma- 
 nence of, in South, 56, 57 
 
 Aristotle, on democracy, 90, 
 91, 97, 98 ; ideal of repub- 
 lic, 171 
 
 Ashley, W. J., 35 
 
 Bagehot, Walter, 162 
 Banking laws, 50, 51 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 43, 44 
 Brokerage in politics, 100, 
 
 101, 121 
 Bryce, James, 23 
 Burr, Aaron, 13, 110, 111 
 
 Capital, legal position of, 
 
 27, 29; scarcity of, 49-51 
 Caucus system, 108, 109 
 Charleston Mercury, 155 
 Charters, as contracts, 55; 
 
 abuses connected with 
 
 grant, 143 
 Checks and balances, 98 
 Chevalier, Michel, 21 
 Church and state in New 
 
 England, 4, 5 
 
 Civil service, federal, 116, 
 117; present condition of, 
 91-93; reform of, 127, 
 134-137 
 
 Civil "War, industrial effects 
 of, 56-59, 64, 65, 118-120 
 
 Class consciousness, 79 
 
 Classified civil service, 137 
 
 Clay, Henry, 112 
 
 Colonial charters and state 
 constitutions, 10, 11 
 
 Colonies, aristocracy in, 3-11 
 
 Commerce and Labor, De- 
 partment of, 86 
 
 Company stores, 29 
 
 Competition in England and 
 in the United States, 59- 
 63 
 
 Congress and nominating 
 power, 108, 109 
 
 Congressional caucus, 108, 
 109 
 
 Constitution, Federal, and 
 democracy, 11, 12; condi- 
 tions affecting adoption 
 of, 37-42; permanence of, 
 102-104 
 
 Constitutional Convention of 
 1787, 38-40 
 
 Constitutions in Western 
 states, 143-145 
 
 Contract, obligation of, 39, 
 40 
 
182 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Convention, nomination hj, 
 
 109-111, 142, 143, 165- 
 
 168 
 Corporations, growth of, 51- 
 
 53; legal position of, 53- 
 
 56 
 Cost of living, increase of, 
 
 81-83 
 Courts, authority of, 42-47 
 
 Dartmouth College case, 53- 
 
 55 
 De Bow's Eeview, 155 
 Declaration of Independ- 
 ence, indirect effects of, 
 15, 16 
 Democracy in America, 
 
 actual beginnings of, 20 
 Democratic party, 24, 27, 
 108; relation to Sherman 
 Act, 88; to silver inter- 
 ests, 121 
 Department of Labor, 77 
 Direct primary, 146-151 
 Due process of law, 40 
 
 Educational tendencies, 170 
 Election of president, 105- 
 
 107 
 Employers ' liability, 28 ; 
 
 federal Act, 86 
 England, labor legislation 
 in, 28; limits to competi- 
 tion in, 59-63 
 Equality, sentiment of, 16 
 Experts, position of, in 
 America, 171-174 
 
 Extra-constitutional powers, 
 104 
 
 Factory Acts, 28, 77 
 
 Earrand, Max, 14, 23, 41 
 
 Federal Constitution, condi- 
 tions affecting adoption 
 of, 37-42; permanence of, 
 102-104 
 
 Federal offices as rewards 
 of party service, 116, 117 
 
 Federalist party, 12, 108 
 
 Feudal and industrial ten- 
 ures, 33-36 
 
 Fink, Albert, 71 
 
 Ford, H. J., 110 
 
 Fourteenth Amendment, 53- 
 56 
 
 Franchises, grant of, 118, 
 143 
 
 Freehold ownership, 48 
 
 Freehold suffrage, 3 
 
 George, Henry, 79, 80 
 Government, functions of, 
 
 62, 63, 68 
 Granger movement, 65-70, 
 
 124-126 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, 13, 
 
 49; land policy of, 17-20 
 Harper's Weekly, 157 
 Hildreth on colonial history, 
 
 8, 9 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 43, 44 
 Hours of labor, regulation 
 of, 28, 86 
 
INDEX 
 
 183 
 
 Immigrants, opportunities 
 for, 48, 49; change in 
 character of, 77, 78 
 
 Impatience, newspaper ap- 
 peal to, 167 
 
 Incorporation Acts of colo- 
 nies, 51 
 
 Interlocking directorates, 83, 
 84 
 
 International Workers of 
 the World, 79 
 
 Interstate Commerce Com- 
 mission, 89, 126 
 
 Interstate commerce law, 71, 
 72; supplemented by ad- 
 ditional Acts, 86 
 
 Iowa, referendum in, 145 
 
 Jackson, Andrew, 20, 21, 
 115, 116, 134, 135; atti- 
 tude toward corporations, 
 52, 53 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 12-14, 19 
 
 Joint stock companies, 51- 
 53 
 
 Judges, recall of, 169 
 
 Judson, F. N., 88 
 
 Knights of Labor, 78 
 
 Labor, Department of, 77 
 
 Lamar, L. Q. C, 107 
 
 Land laws, 16-20 
 
 Legislation by representa- 
 tive assembly, 137-144 
 
 Limited liability in the 
 United States, 51, 52 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, nomina- 
 tion of, 166, 167 
 Louisiana purchase, 19 
 Lowell, A. L., 164; on 
 party government, 99-101 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., 168 
 
 McMaster, J. B., 23 
 
 Marshall, John, 47 
 
 Massachusetts, early social 
 system, 4-6; labor legis- 
 lation, 28; corporation 
 laws, 52; railroad regula- 
 tion, 71, 72 
 
 Middle colonies, social sys- 
 tem of, 7 
 
 Military tenures, 34-36 
 
 Mississippi valley, develop- 
 ment of, 19, 65-69 
 
 Money power, jealousy of, 
 81, 83-85 
 
 Monopoly, 59, 60 ; legal posi- 
 tion of, 70; extension of, 
 72-75 
 
 Montesquieu, 98, 140 
 
 Myers, Gustavus, 110 
 
 National spirit, beginnings 
 
 of, 15 
 New England, early social 
 
 system of, 4-6 
 New York, land holding in, 
 
 7; state politics in, 115 
 New York Staats-Zeitung, 
 
 157 
 New York Times, 155-158 
 New York Tribune, 154 
 
184 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Newspapers, influence on 
 
 politics, 152-159 
 Nomination, by conventions, 
 
 165-168 ; of president, 
 
 105, 106, 108-110 
 Nullification, 45, 46 
 
 Organized emotion, 164 
 Ostrogorski, M. L., 23, 148 
 
 Paper money, effects of, 57, 
 
 58 
 Parliament, authority of, 42, 
 
 43; early history of, 138- 
 
 140 
 Party, perversion of, 99; 
 
 two meanings of, 99-102 
 Party regularity, 128-131 
 Passive resistance, 45-46 
 Patroon system, 7 
 Pennsylvania, state politics 
 
 in, 115 
 Plantation system, 8 
 Politicians, professional, 
 
 112-114, 122-124 
 Popular election of senators, 
 
 132-134 
 Predatory wealth, 124-126 
 Preemption Acts, 18 
 Presidential election, 105- 
 
 107 
 Prices, rise of, 81-83 
 Primary, direct, 146-151 
 Professional politicians, 151- 
 
 153 
 Progress and Poverty, 79, 80 
 Progressive taxation, 28, 29 
 
 Property owner, legal posi- 
 tion of, 27, 29, 32-42 
 
 Property qualifications of 
 ofl&ce holders, 11 
 
 Protection, 58, 59 
 
 Public land, 16-20 
 
 Public opinion, agencies for 
 forming, 141 ; unorgan- 
 ized, 149; sphere of, 175 
 
 Public utilities, 72-74 
 
 Publicity of railroad ac- 
 counts, 71 
 
 Pulitzer, Joseph, 158-160 
 
 Eailroad regulation, 30, 65- 
 72; in England, 60 
 
 Eailroads, present economic 
 condition of, 89 
 
 Eecall, 147, 148; theory of, 
 169 
 
 Eeferendum, 145, 146 
 
 Eegularity, party, 128-131 
 
 Eepresentative government, 
 theory of, 106-108, 137- 
 139 
 
 Eepublican form of govern- 
 ment, interpretation of, 
 12 
 
 Eepublican party, attitude 
 on tariff, 120, 121; on 
 civil service reform, 135, 
 136 
 
 Eestraint of trade, 74 
 
 Eoman parallels to New 
 England history, 5, 6 
 
 Eoot, Elihu, 149, 150; on 
 party government, 99-101 
 
INDEX 
 
 185 
 
 Saint Paul Pioneer Press, 
 
 154 
 Salaries of American offi- 
 cials, 173 
 Senators, popular election 
 
 of, 132-134 
 Separation of national and 
 local issues, 127, 128, 132- 
 134 
 Seward, W. H., 166 
 Sherman Act, 74, 75, 87-89 
 Silver coinage, 58, 121 
 Slavery, political effect of, 
 8, 24; extension of, 26; 
 influence on political 
 methods, 154, 155 
 Social contract, 43, 44 
 Socialistic movements in 
 
 America, 30, 31, 76-79 
 South Carolina, property 
 
 qualifications in, 11 
 South Dakota, referendum 
 
 in, 145 
 Southern colonies, social sys- 
 tem of, 7-10 
 Sovereignty, doctrine of, 43- 
 
 46 
 Spoils system, 134, 135 
 Springfield Eepubliean, 154 
 State constitutions, and colo- 
 nial charters, 10, 11; 
 modern form of, 143-145 
 State socialism, recent move- 
 ments toward, 76-79 
 Subsidies, 53, 65, 66, 118 
 
 Suffrage, colonial restric- 
 tions on, 3; universal, 21 
 
 Supreme Court of the 
 United States, 46, 47 
 
 Switzerland, referendum in, 
 145 
 
 Tammany Hall, 13, 110-114, 
 
 158 
 Tariff legislation, 115, 118- 
 
 121 
 Taxation, progressive, 28, 
 
 29 
 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 21- 
 
 23 
 Tweed Eing, 129, 130, 155- 
 
 158 
 
 Unconstitutionality, 42-47 
 Unearned increment, 80 
 
 Van Bur en, Martin, 111-113 
 Virginia, colonial organiza- 
 tion in, 8-10 
 
 Wages in England and 
 
 America, 61, 62 
 War of 1812, effects of, 16 
 Webster, Daniel, 54, 165 
 West, settlement of, 16-20; 
 
 social system of, 25, 26 j 
 
 financial legislation in, 
 
 50 
 Weyl, W. E., 33 
 Whig party, 24, 27 
 Wortman, Tennis, 111 
 
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